Apr 20, 2009

MMMM* # 37 - Purposeful Clicks

I like to think of myself as a journalist first, and a consumer of news second. Yet when I went online to the Chicago Sun-Times on Saturday I found myself clicking on the link to a video of a lemur at a zoo saved by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from a visitor. There. I feel better having at least confessed. What I did next though may be even more telling. I quickly and purposefully clicked on several more items with journalistic purity items offered on the paper's website. I didn't actually read the stories...but I did click on them, announcing my journalistic good intentions to the servers that host the newspaper's web content. "There!", I was in effect saying, "I consumed your main product...keep making it!" As if my pitiful clicks could somehow help save newspapering. TiVo is another area where the aggregated information about what shows you TiVo tells producers a lot about viewership. Want to support a show even if you don't watch it? Put in a Season Pass. Then delete the shows as they show up on your Now Playing list. Meanwhile, back online...it is true, clicks do mean something. Each one is a vote of sorts, tallied at some level of the site's programming. I subscribe to Google Analytics, and it provides me with a wealth of information about the thousands of people who come by for a visit. I know what countries, states and cities they are from, how long they stay, what kind of browser they use and what language they speak. This graphic shows the distribution of Alabama visitors (they don't make it easy to copy the graphic from the site, so it appears squashed and in B&W only, but you get the idea). Another example: I know there have been thirteen visitors from nine places in Tennessee in recent days. I have a long-time friend who lives in West Virginia who lost his Internet connection. I'll probably know through Analytics the moment he has service restored and visits this blog since there are only a few visitors from that state, and he's the only one I know from that particular town. Most visitors stay only a short time, though one remained for almost half-an hour. I presume he or she fell asleep. (-:

So anyway, use your clicks judiciously. They say a lot about your likes or dislikes.

[Addendum: NY Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal in an interview on Sunday: "Frankly, I think it is the task of bloggers to catch up to us, not the other way around." And I'm not sure I don't agree with him! And there's also a David Carr column about the cable-TV wars and a loss of objectivity.]

[*The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog]

1 comment:

  1. Hey, Tim I am a careful, but slow reader...I could have been here 30 minutes easily. (chuckling)

    ReplyDelete