This week's "Classic Mysteries" podcast is a review of Norbert Davis's "Sally's in the Alley," a book which manages to combine the hard-boiled Private Eye school with screwball humor. It features Doan and his Great Dane sidekick, Carstairs - or, to be more accurate, Carstairs and his somewhat inept human partner, Doan. If they are new to you - listen to the podcast for details. Carstairs in particular is worth meeting.
The Pew Research Center asks that question fairly regularly. According to MediaPost, the latest indication is that TV still leads the list of news sources for most people - but the Internet is coming up fast, and apparently at the expense of newspapers.
The total number of respondents who said they had looked at a newspaper the day before slipped from 40% to 34% from 2006-2008, according to Pew. Meanwhile, the number of people who say the visit an Internet news sites at least three times a week increased from 18% in 2006 to 25% in 2008.
I think the most significant point, though, is that there is a subset of users who rely entirely on the Internet for news - and their median age is 35, making it the lowest-aged set found in the study.
There's a lot more - check out the article.
John Dickson Carr was the undisputed master of the locked room/impossible crime puzzle, and "The Crooked Hinge" is one of his best. It's the subject of this week's Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can listen to here.
More details on this marvelous story of intrigue, questionable identity, the sinking of the Titanic, and an impossible murder may be found on the Classic Mysteries blog. Please visit!
The keynote at the New Media Expo today was George Wright, VP of Marketing and Sales for Blendtec - the company behind www.willitblend.com . The videos are hysterical, but there's a pretty good business story here as well.
Before Will It Blend, Wright says, they had major problems. The brand was unknown. Weak brand = weak sales.
Wright says he was new at the company. He walked in one day and found company founder and engineer Tom Dickson had been testing strange things, such as a 2x4 board, and testing to see if it would brak the blender. That's how it started.
Wright reminded the audience that the next runaway hit could be under their noses - and nobody was noticing because it was taken for granted, a kind of in-house oddity.
Blogging may be a bit light for the next couple of days - getting ready to head out to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas, which starts Thursday. I'll be there from Thursday afternoon through Saturday morning - if any of you will be there, please let me know!
That's "Appleby" as in Detective Inspector John Appleby, the creation of author Michael Innes. Appleby's End is a very funny book - in a very dry, sophisticated, witty fashion. Sir John finds himself on a train journey with a group of very strange people. He - and they - wind up getting off the train at a station called "Appleby's End." Sound prophetic? In a way, I suppose, it is - but it takes a great deal of insight on Appleby's part to figure out exactly what is going on, in the midst of an increasingly bizarre adventure.
A full review is on this week's podcast, available here. It's great fun - and the unravelling of this complicated mystery is truly delightful.
As always, more information may be had at the Classic Mysteries blog and podcast site.
The review on this week's "Classic Mysteries" podcast is of a classic indeed - Edgar Wallace's "The Four Just Men." It's a thriller written more than a century ago which still packs a surprising amount of punch into its story about a group seeking to impose its own standards of justice on a government they view as corrupt.
More details, as always, over at the Classic Mysteries blog and podcast. Please come visit!
eMarketer has a report today on what I would call a fairly surprising trend in online video. It has long been a truism that viewers of online video prefer short clips - the kind you generally find on sites like YouTube. While some people do view longer clips, the advice usually given to people trying to get advertising or PR messages out online, for example, has been: keep it short, preferably under 4 minutes.
Maybe not so much. According to eMarketer, a couple of recent surveys indicate that viewers are anxious to watch longer videos - particularly TV shows - online, if/when they are available. Nearly half of all users told Harris Interactive that they felt the same way about movies.
eMarketer says that's good news for producers, fearful that their audiences might dwindle overall if more online viewing starts cutting into TV and movie watching. That doesn't seem to have happened.
eMarketer also says that a surprisingly large percentage of viewers realize "the money for longer programming has to come from somewhere." They seem willing to watch ads for long form videos - more so than they are for the short videos that make up such a large percentage of today's viewing. That's a new trend, to me - and I think an interesting one showing good possibilities as online video continues to mature.
This week's podcast is a review of the anthology "Detection by Gaslight," edited by Douglas G. Greene. Subtitled "14 Victorian Detective Stories," it's an anthology of short stories, featuring both well-known detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and The Man in the Corner and far more obscure ones.
Full details about the book and the podcast may be found over at the Classic Mysteries blog.
As a podcaster myself, I am always trying to do whatever I can to spread the word about podcasting in general. You know, "a rising tide floats all ships," and so forth. And - possibly because of the circles in which I travel - I do seem to be encountering more people who don't just stare at me and ask, "a pod-WHAT?"
It's encouraging to find that I'm not alone. Steve Smith, writing in MediaPost's Mobile Insider blog, says podcasting remains a niche - but a big one, with perhaps 10 million people - but it is beginning to attract serious amounts of audio and video advertising. A lot of it, he says, appears to be created especially for web use, rather than just repurposed TV ads.
That's good news - and the dollars will be welcome. Smith quotes industry people who say they think podcasting is set to break out of its niche and become mainstream. As a podcaster, I'd say it can't happen soon enough.
