Selected items of interest to the media community

• Can Yahoo Become a Modern Media Company?

May 15, 2012: 

Now that Yahoo! (YHOO) has managed to make its way through yet another CEO shuffle—its sixth in five years—the former portal must figure out what its future looks like. By replacing Chief Executive Officer Scott Thompson with Ross Levinsohn, who currently runs Yahoo’s global media business and who used to be a senior executive at News Corp. (NWS), the company seems to be indicating that it wants to focus (again) on being a media player. But does Yahoo even have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, and the company’s knowledge gaps are not going to be easy to fill.

Read the full story from Bloomberg here.

• Moving Away from Apps toward HTML5

May 14, 2012: 

Brian O'Leary of Magellan Media Partners comments on app content development on his company's blog.  He says that  although he generally thinks moving towards HTML4 and away from apps is generally correct, he sees good uses for content-driven apps:

• When the underlying content is variable, subject to change or useful to analyze in structured ways over time; and
• When analysis is user-driven, based in available content and not necessarily something a publisher can predict.

To read the entire post, go here.
 

• Facebook Addiction: New Scale Gauges Social Media Dependency

May 08, 2012: 

Some people can't stop friending, tagging, poking, and posting. Psychologists say Facebook addiction is real--and now it can be measured.

Researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway have developed a new tool, the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, to measure obsession with the social media site.

For a new study published in the April 12, 2012 issue of the journal Psychological Reports, the researchers tested the scale with more than 400 university students.

The scale gauges Facebook addiction on the basis of six criteria:

• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
• You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.
• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

Read the full story on Huff Post here.