Study Links TV Viewership and Twitter Conversations

A first-of-its-kind study by Nielsen has affirmed what nearly everyone in the television industry already suspected: Twitter conversations sometimes do cause people to turn on the TV.

The study, to be released on Tuesday, examined Twitter chatter and minute-by-minute Nielsen ratings of 221 episodes of prime-time shows on major networks. Most of the time, there was no statistically significant relationship between the two sets of data. But Twitter messages were shown to cause a “significant increase” in ratings 29 percent of the time, said Mike Hess, an executive vice president at Nielsen and the senior researcher involved in the study.

A causal connection was also shown in the other direction: that is, the ratings had an effect on the volume of related messages 48 percent of the time. Some genres of shows were much more likely to benefit from Twitter conversation than others.

“Over all, this does validate that additional research around this influence is worth pursuing,” Mr. Hess said.

Nielsen and Twitter are business partners — they are promoting a new metric called a Nielsen Twitter TV Rating that measures online conversations about shows — so the study may provoke some skepticism. Its findings, though, are likely to be cheered by networks and marketing firms that have invested heavily in social media. Anecdotes about spikes in the ratings credited to Twitter chatter have given producers and advertisers new hopes of assembling mass audiences.

Mitchell J. Lovett, a professor at the University of Rochester who has studied Twitter-television correlations, said that demonstrating causality had proved difficult in the past.

“It is hard to distinguish whether Twitter (or other social media) activity simply reflects existing interest (the person talks about the show because of an interest in watching or plans to watch) rather than causes it,” he wrote via e-mail. For that reason, the Nielsen study “could be groundbreaking,” he said, though he cautioned that he had not examined its methodology yet.

Bits Blog: Sharing a Potluck of Links, Not Food

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NewSchools Venture Fund Links with Rethink Education

NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit that started out channeling philanthropic donations to charter schools and that now invests in a range of education groups and businesses, is entering into a partnership with a new venture capital fund that could result in millions more in financing.

At a time when venture capital interest in education technology companies is growing rapidly, Rethink Education Fund, founded last year to focus on education start-ups, has agreed to give part of its profits to NewSchools, based in Oakland, Calif., so the fund can invest the money in various projects.

NewSchools is well known for its financing of charter management organizations, including Aspire Public Schools, KIPP and Rocketship Education, as well as groups like the New Teacher Project, which recruits midcareer professionals into teaching, and Khan Academy, which creates online video lessons.

The fund, which has invested about $260 million over 15 years, receives financing from high-profile education donors like the Broad Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation. On its board are Silicon Valley leaders including John Doerr, partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and Dave Goldberg, chief executive of Survey Monkey (and husband of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer).

In linking with Rethink Education, founded by Richard Segal, a prominent fund-raiser for President Obama and chief executive of Seavest Investment Group, and Matt Greenfield, an angel investor in education technology companies, NewSchools hopes to generate further financing for its projects. Rethink has committed to giving an undisclosed portion of the profits it generates on its investments to NewSchools.

“There may not be a need for another venture firm to fund e-commerce businesses that sell high-fashion clothing,” Mr. Greenfield said. “But in education there is a real shortage of capital for the things we think matters.” Rethink has raised $40 million and invested in nine companies.

Interest in education investments has exploded recently. According to the MoneyTree Report, an analysis of Thomson Reuters data by PriceWaterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Alliance, venture capital investment in education businesses has grown 80 percent since 2005 to more than $632 million last year.

NewSchools has itself begun investing in for-profit ventures, including Engrade, which develops online grading programs for teachers, and Grockit, a social media test-preparation business.

Critics worry that businesses have motives other than the best interests of students. “I don’t think the public is paying taxes for education on the assumption that investors are going to make money,” said Diane Ravitch, the education historian and co-founder of the Network for Public Education, which advocates against high-stakes testing, charter schools and tenure changes.

Ted Mitchell, chief executive of NewSchools, said there was a role for companies in public education. “We are attempting to direct philanthropic dollars at innovations that are going to do the most for poor kids and for the system as a whole,” he said. “We believe for-profit entities have just as much capacity to do that as not-for-profits, and they ought to take a run at it.”

German Copyright Law Takes Aim at Google Links

As originally proposed by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel last year, the law was seen as a clear attempt by a European government to force big Internet companies like Google to share some of the billions of euros they earn from the sale of advertising placed alongside the news that Google links to.

But a last-minute change, proposed last week by the Free Democratic Party, the junior partner in Ms. Merkel’s government, allowed for the use of “individual words or the smallest excerpts of text” free, meaning that only those companies who reproduce full texts for commercial use will be required to compensate the news publishers.

The weakened bill passed Germany’s lower house, the Bundestag, 293 to 243. But it will require approval by Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat, which is controlled by the Social Democrats and the Greens, in the opposition, which have sought to have the bill scrapped altogether.

“No one except for a few big publishers wants this law,” said Tabea Rössner, a member of the Greens and a media expert, in the debate before the vote on Friday. “Certainly no one in the online world.”

Google welcomed the fact that only a weakened version had passed but made clear its opposition to any form of legislation.

The company had bitterly opposed the original proposal and waged a campaign called “Defend Your Net,” both online and through full-page ads in the same publications that would profit from the proposed law, known as an ancillary copyright law because it extends copyright to new areas.

Google argued that the law would impinge on the free flow of information and innovation online.

“As a result of today’s vote, ancillary copyright in its most damaging form has been stopped,” said Ralf Bremer, a spokesman for Google in Germany, who argued that the law was “not necessary because publishers and Internet companies can innovate together, just as Google has done in many other countries.”

Google does not sell advertising on its German news aggregation service, which displays snippets of articles and links to the originating sites. But the company earns billions of euros from advertising on its search engine and other services.

Most German newspaper publishers, on the other hand, generate only minuscule revenue online from advertising or other sources, like so-called pay walls around their content.

Consequently, they welcomed the law, even in its weakened form, as an instrument that would allow them to determine the conditions under which material produced by their journalists and writers could be used by search engines and other third-party aggregators that reproduce their material online.

“With the ancillary copyright law, publishing houses now have a right that other intermediaries have long had,” the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers said.

Members of the European Publishers Council, a lobbying group in Brussels that has been pushing for a fundamental change in the relationship between publishers and Google, also hailed the law as an important step toward recognizing “clearly in copyright law both the value and the cost of investment in professional journalistic content.”

“The E.P.C. believes that this law will help establish a market for aggregator content,” said Angela Mills Wade, the council’s executive director. “New innovative business models can now be built based on legally licensed content.”

But critics contend that a watering-down law not only fails to grant full legal clarity to either of the two sides but also opens the door to long legal disputes over the exact definition of a snippet and how much text can be legally reproduced by the search engines without incurring charges.

“The Bundestag passed a law today that will make neither the publishers, nor the critics nor the general public happy,” the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote in an opinion piece. “Who is helped by a law that does not have any winners, only both sides somehow lose?”

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Mailing Web Links with Mac Mail

When I use the little arrow menu to send an e-mail a link from the Safari browser in OS X Mountain Lion, it pastes a copy of the whole page within the body of a Mail message. Is there a way to just send a link to the page?

Apple has included several ways to share Web pages in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and you can still send just a link in a message. When you use the “Share” menu — the small button with an arrow on it located just to the left of the Safari address box — and choose the “Email This Page” option, the Mac should open up a new message from its Mail program. If you see a copy of the entire page in the message body instead of just a link, look up in the lower part of the message’s header area.

Right below the Subject line, on the right side of the message you should see a small drop-down menu next to “Send Web Content As.” Click on the menu to see a list of options: Reader, Web Page, PDF and Link Only. Select the “Link Only” item to change the content in the message body from “Web Page” to just a link. (Of the other two options, “Reader” sends the page content in a stripped-down, easy-to-read text format and “PDF” converts the page to a PDF attachment to the message.

If you want a quicker way to mail a link to a Web page you are currently browsing in Safari, press Command-Shift-I on the keyboard. (Pressing Command-I while the page is open in Safari creates a new Mail message with the Web Page in the message body.) For a more menu-oriented approach to sending a link from Safari, hold down the Shift key go to the File menu, to Share and select “Email Link to This Page.” If you do not press the Shift key, the Share menu item reverts to “Email This Page.”