Over the weekend and yesterday there was much Tweeting about how porn had already reached Twitter’s Vine video app. Twitter is taking action against pornography on Vine and banning searches for explicit content and deleting X-rated users. It has also apologised for a “human error” that highlighted a graphic NSFW clip on the Vine homepage on Monday. That was maybe not the kind of showcase we had been expecting.

Now some more positive experiments are taking place as brands begin to look at how they can use it for mini ads. Or if not ads then amusing pieces of bite sized content. Is that the same thing? I think it is. Read More »

We’ve read so much about how the US 2012 Presidential election is going to be the Twitter election, as both sides ramp up their  use of social media although still  fail to engage as I wrote recently, and it has been interesting to watch it emerge and work its way deeper into the heart of mainstream media.

We got a taste of the kind of thing we might see with Twitter’s recent Olypmics deal with NBC. That proved a real learning curve for Twitter, which got into a bit of a muddle when it blocked one journalist’s account before quickly restoring it again

Now we are seeing Al Gore’s Current TV turnover half of its screen to Twitter for the US elections in an effort to help it compete and differentiate itself from its much bigger and better funded rivals such as ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN et cetera. Read More »

Time magazine editor Mark Halperin called President Barack Obama a “dick” on Thursday’s live Morning Joe show on MSNBC.

Why would you do that? As you can see in the video below he quickly apologised, but the damage was done. Read More »

I’d been meaning to write this post for a while or at least every time I skip to the homepage of The Times and skip away just as quickly. I don’t understand why it pushes news so much on its homepage when it is all available to read elsewhere for free. It makes no sense. Read More »

There is a lot of this going around. Reporters sacked for making comments on blogs and social networks. The latest is CNN, following The Washington Post and The Age, which has parted company with Middle Eastern affairs editor, Octavia Nasr, after she tweeted a controversial message of support for Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. Read More »

Ratings at CNN are down. Way down, as prominent news hosts Larry King and Anderson Cooper saw their viewership figures nearly halved from the same time last year, according the New York Times.

First quarter television ratings found that CNN was trumped by its right-wing rivals at Fox News, which is actually boasting its best quarter ever (building on its best year ever in 2009), as viewers and advertising dollars flow towards political pundits Glenn Beck, which doubled it’s viewers from last year, and Bill O’Reilly, who remains Fox News’ biggest draw with 3.65m tuning in during prime time.

CNN finished 2009 behind MSNBC in prime-time ratings as well, the first time CNN has ever trailed a competitor other than the Fox News over a full calendar year.

But do the numbers tell the whole story? CNN remains the out and out leader online as the 18^th most trafficked website in the US, compared to Fox News at 38. CNN has nearly 3m followers on Twitter, while Fox News has just 150,000.

MSNBC, whose website ranks far behind both CNN and Fox News at number 722 in the US has more than 1.6m followers on it’s @breakingnews Twitter feed.

The online numbers show an opportunity for both CNN and MSNBC to expand their audiences through non-traditional means, but the question remains, as always, whether advertisers will follow or not.