The Evolving Newsroom

From John Drinnan's piece in the Herald today about BusinessDay moving under the Stuff umbrella, here's the latest NeilsonOnline uniques for NZ's business sites:

"Over the past 15 weeks Nielsen Online Market Intelligence counted the average weekly unique browsers to business sites. They were:

* nzherald.co.nz/business: 187,000
* Stuff Business: 136,000
* National Business Review: 37,000
* NZX (with some Fairfax Business content): 33,000
* Yahoo!Xtra Business: 30,000
* Scoop Business: 18,000
* Interest.co.nz: 17,000
* TVNZ/business: 16,000
* BusinessDay: 12,000

"Comparing the average audience over the last four weeks to the average audience for the four weeks ended August 31, NBR grew its audience by 102 per cent compared with 17 per cent for BusinessDay.

"NBR's average for the last four weeks was 44,000 unique browsers, in March it was averaging 12,000. BusinessDay averaged 12,000 over the last four weeks.

"Both nzherald.co.nz and Stuff have continued to grow their business audiences over the same period, peaking in the financial meltdown."

I've forgotten more TV shows and movies than I remember, which is what makes the new website NZ On Screen so good.

In the past 20 minutes I've stumbled across McPhail and Gadsby, the first episode of Spot On and It's In The Bag, none of which I'd thought about in years. Lots of years. (My, Selwyn Toogood had lovely enunciation.)

This is my first look around since the site launched late last week, and I'm sure I'll be back. Funded by NZ on Air, NZ On Screen serves as a repository for all manner of New Zealand movies, TV shows and short films over the years.

Or, in some cases, a repository of parts of NZ movies, TV shows and short films.

Often you can't see the whole movie, rather the movie trailer; and with TV programmes you get parts of episodes rather than shows in their entirety. Others, however, are there in full, and there are links to parent websites which hold more information on the content in question or offer it for sale.

The site strikes me more as a first port of call than a final destination for movie and TV buffs, but a useful one nonetheless.

I can easily imagine NZ On Screen becoming the first place I look for vintage TV footage, say, to use in a lecture or blog post. Especially since it's nicely laid out and commendably usable. Hats off to the creators.

It hurts that you can't embed any of the clips, a la YouTube, which is generally my first instinct whenever I come across something I want to share. (At least, I couldn't see a way to embed.)

But it's a fine start and with luck we'll see ever more content added and more of it available for embedding before long. My thanks to all concerned.

Facebook was the number one social network in NZ in May, according to Hitwise.

Facebook accounted for 39.87 per cent of visits in "a custom category of 40 leading social networks in May 2008, tightly followed by Bebo with 39.15 percent of visits". MySpace had 7.81 percent market share, Orkut 2.86 percent and Windows Live Spaces 2.44 percent.

Facebook has attracted explosive growth in the past year amongst New Zealand Internet users, increasing 536 percent comparing May 2007 and May 2008. Facebook ranked as the sixth most visited website amongst all websites in May 2008.

Engagement with Social Networks remains high with New Zealand Internet users spending an average of 24 minutes and 45 seconds on the custom category. This is compared to an average session of 10 minutes and 53 seconds on All Categories of websites during the week ending 31 May 2008.

Top 10 websites in Hitwise custom category of Social Networks
by New Zealand Internet users, May 2008


1. Facebook www.facebook.com 39.87%
2. Bebo www.bebo.com 39.15%
3. MySpace www.myspace.com 7.81%
4. Orkut www.orkut.com 2.86%
5. Windows Live Spaces spaces.live.com 2.44%
6. Friendster www.friendster.com 2.05%
7. hi5 www.hi5.com 1.01%
8. Yahoo! 360 360.yahoo.com 0.84%
9. Yahoo! Groups groups.yahoo.com 0.68%
10. Tagged www.tagged.com 0.55%


Meanwhile, with the launch of Apple's third-generation iPhone set for 11/07/2008, Hitwise said "visits to Apple iPhone by New Zealand Internet users increased by 348% and the website moved 1062 places to rank 300 amongst all websites during the week ending 14/06/2008".

Also of note: "New Zealand searches for 'plenty of fish' increased by over 250% between 10/05/2008 and 14/06/2008, with the dating website Plentyoffish.com receiving the greatest volume of traffic from the term 'plenty of fish' (24 weeks ending 14/06/2008). Email Services (29.61%) and Search Engines (18.32%) were among the industries to refer the greatest share of traffic to Plentyoffish.com during May 2008. Now you know."

Here's an interesting case study of a neighbourhood blog gaining some early success - in part because it's printed and delivered to local letterboxes.

It's a NZ site called Flying Pickle (but thanks to UK blogger Seamus McCauley for the link) and it serves three suberbs outside Wellington - Korokoro, Maungaraki and Normandale - with an approximate population of 6,500 people: "peaceful, sleepy, middle class suburbs with a handful of local shops, 3 schools, 3 kindys, reasonable broadband penetration, a good deal of home-based businesses."

"At first, the website was advertised on community noticeboards and in several shop windows. It scored several hundred hits from curious locals. The first print edition resulted in a surge of traffic, posts and comments from the residents."

They say lessons to date include: it pays to automate the ad booking and print-preparation process; keep an open editorial policy; gaining local recognition and trust is key to winning over advertisers.

This is a really interesting idea and one to watch.

From Hitwise New Zealand come the latest rankings for who's using which social networks in New Zealand:

Rank Name Domain Market Share
1. Bebo www.bebo.com 17.53%
2. Facebook www.facebook.com 15.78%
3. YouTube www.youtube.com 12.56%
4. MySpace www.myspace.com 3.62%
5. SkyKiwi www.skykiwi.com 1.84%
6. 6park.com www.6park.com 1.50%
7. Windows Live Spaces spaces.live.com 1.20%
8. Yeeyi www.yeeyi.com 1.17%
9. Stumble Upon www.stumbleupon.com 1.13%
10. Orkut www.orkut.com 1.12%

The trouble with this highly connected high-speed wired world we live in, is that it isn't.

It's hard work staying connected on the road. I have two wi-fi enabled devices - a little lightweight laptop and a hunking great HTC Tytn pda. Which is all well and good but for the utter paucity of wifi in New Zealand and the nonsense of having to pay for it when you find it.

To add insult to injury, when you do happen upon wifi, you have to sit down, turn on your kit, wait for it to fire up, find the signal, go to the Telco web page, figure out how much blood they want, enter credit card details, wait for it to compute and connect.

Or find the url of your home Telco supplier's wifi site, load it and remember your username and password, and wait to connect. Or sally over to the coffee shop counter and buy a card and find something to scratch off the sticky black coating and type in the great long code hidden underneath, and wait to connect.

By which time your coffee's cold and the small window you had between meeting one and meeting two has closed so your emails and research and blog post have to wait until tonight.

You can check for a signal on your pda and fire off a typo-strewn missive tapped out on a tiny keyboard, but not without handing over your life savings to Vodafone for the privilege.

So you go to the hotel at the end of the day and plug in the ethernet cable, if you can find it, swear as you watch every single tab in your browser switch to the ethernet login page (surely one tab would do?), read the outrageous charges ($33 a night or $10 for two hours), weep, get over it, type in accept, wait, and then reload all your browser tabs.

By which time you're so knackered after the long day of meetings, lugging computer kit around and repeated logging ins and outs that you dispatch urgent emails quickly and try not to feel guilty about the rest as you power off and collapse into your overpriced bed. It's a wonder they don't charge extra for that and make you assemble it.

I don't mind paying a bit for wifi but for goodness sake build it into the cost structure and make it as easy as turning on a tap.