Recently in Media Category

News Ltd excelled itself this weekend with a piece of journalistic sleight-of-hand designed to deceive readers in the quest for more website clicks. The story - Erotic dancers at charity launch for sick kids - first appeared on the front page of the NT News and their website. It wasn't long before other websites in the News Ltd group picked up on the story's "click potential", resulting in the piece appearing at The Australian and becoming the featured story on the home page of News.com.au.

In their efforts to avoid accusations of bias, the modern news media has become more biased and more distorted than ever before. A perfect example of this 'biased impartiality' occurred this morning on Channel Seven's revamped Sunrise program. In a segment on the climate change debate, Kochie interviewed Dr Ben McNeil - Senior Research Fellow for the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales - and Lord Christopher Monckton. Who isn't.

Probably the most overused cliche in digital marketing today is referencing Minority Report when discussing augmented reality (AR). AR is on many marketing prediction lists for 2010 as the proliferation of 3G smartphones and the convergence of GPS, cameras and applications means location-specific informatin can appear on your phone.

I'm a parent. Therefore, according to the news reports, I should be scared about the prospect of extremely violent video games - or ones that portray sexual imagery or drug use - being made available in this country. The argument I continue hearing from parents in these news items is that - even with an R18+ classification system for video games - their children may still be exposed to these unsavoury pixilated adventures.

Sure, okay, I can see there is a risk that R18+ games can still find their way into a school bag. We all know what little tykes our kids are. So here's what I propose.

In an age where the audience has an overwhelming number of choices, channels and media, getting people to switch on or subscribe to your channel is increasingly difficult. Therefore, advertising television channels with flashy idents and major marketing campaigns is now more common. Well, everywhere in the world except Australia it seems.

Could it be that Wikipedia indirectly encouraged the state of affairs that led to the credit crunch and the recent crash in the US economy? Could it be that the fears of internet misinformation and manipulation I've previously discussed have been shown to be very true indeed with ramifications for us all? Could the interests of a few unscrupulous individuals with social media accounts distort market behaviour resulting in billions of dollars in economic damage?