Quick Takes: 11/12/10

• Anne Thompson talks about The Way Back and how it’s indicative of the state of independent film right now, including how it’s going to run up against the issue of not having a huge marketing campaign behind it.
• Movie studios were the single biggest category of advertisers for the first episode of Conan O’Brien’s TBS show, hoping to catch the eyeballs of the young, hip crowd the show was expected to attract. There were a couple exceptions but just about all the studios got in on the game.
• MarketingVox rounds up some of the social media advertising that’s been done for movies in the last few months. There are other, older examples as well of studios that have advertised within virtual worlds and elsewhere but this catches you up on more recent news.

Voce Nation: Why Conan O’Brien won at the internet

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Technorati’s 2010 State of the Blogosphere report

The number that sticks out at me most from the latest Technorati State of the Blogosphere report is that 81 percent of those surveyed have been blogging for over two years. Many of those who consider themselves professionals – either because they work with a corporation or are their own media business – are writing more than they were in 2009 while those who are approach it as a hobby are doing a bit less.

What that first statistic says to me is that there are very few new people jumping on the blog bandwagon, most likely in favor status updates on Facebook and Twitter. That’s actually more than a little disturbing to me since, to some extent, it means we’re moving away from long-form critical thinking in favor of pithy one-liners.

The thing is, without blogs and news outlets, those pithy one-liners are empty. There’s no knowledge sharing. It becomes mere conversation, but a conversation about nothing since no one is putting more than a couple seconds of thought into what they’re saying. We need more people to not only continue but also newly take up long-form writing so that the next generation of thinking can take root.

The new report also shows a shift away from free hosted blogging platforms and toward those that are able to be more customized such as WordPress or TypePad across user categories.