A new era

That’s right — Gossip Girl just announced their new spin-off series.  Battlestar Galactica is in its final season, again.  And we have a new president. 

For those of you glued to your television sets for the Inauguration, you may be interested to know that the online world is encroaching on not just the print but also on the broadcast world.  Today, the New York Times reports record online viewership of the inauguration.  Of course, traffic was so high that viewing live video footage on sites like CNN and MSNBC was difficult (or for yours truly, impossible), although the Timessays that might be the fault of individual offices’ Internet services rather than the bandwidths of the media companies.  (At any rate, having decided to boycott my office viewing of the Inauguration — which utilized the Civil War technology known as the “teevee” — I was stuck listening to it live streamed on NPR and then catching the video on YouTube later in the afternoon.)

I find it encouraging that a lot of people in the publishing business are coming around and realizing the influence of online media (helped by posts like this one at Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists about the increasing influence of online media.  Phenix & Phenix notes that online coverage means not just online book reviews, but also commenting, links, blogs and more).

For many, now, the question is not “Is online promotion worthwhile?”  but rather, “Which site(s) are important?” given that there are now dozens of social networks and hundreds (or thousands, more likely) of publishing blogs and websites.  Which makes the social networking numbers GalleyCat posted last week particularly handy.  Also of note: according to TechCrunch, Twitter surpassed Digg in traffic last week.  (Twitter is a micro-blogging site that allows a user to tell followers what they’re doing 24/7.  Because you really want to know what I had for dinner last night.  Digg is an aggregator that posts the most popular online stories according to readers in various categories.)

If you are pretty handy with social networking sites, you might consider heading over to Booksquare’s social media survey if you haven’t already done so.  You could win a free pass to the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference (sort of the BEA of the social media world).  Deadline is tomorrow, January 22, so step on it if you’re interested.

The moral of the story is that we need to view the online world with a new appreciation.  Although most of us do indeed have at least some understanding of online and social media, we all need to take the next step and follow through on that with acceptance if we are indeed going to usher in a new era.