David Black

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, CEO, WatchMojo: "Online video is where the Web was ten years ago: in investment mode as video companies that are generating high revenue are not necessarily the most profitable. Are those companies suffering low margins because they’re investing in the future or are they fundamentally lower-margin businesses?"

"In this article we’ll explore how user experience professionals and designers are using storytelling to create compelling experiences that build human connections."

Jeremy Allaire: "My first company (Allaire) was born during the advent of the Web, with the idea that a browser and HTML could form the basis for creating content-rich, interactive software applications, ones that didn’t require native code and could be platform and operating system independent."

"In the way of all love objects, apps do suggest that something satisfying lies on the horizon for news organisations. Readers may not be prepared to pay for content, but they do seem willing to pay for software and services that improve their lives."

"Foursquare's [success] depends on providing 'the most incentive for a user to check-in'."

'What’s variously called the “cognitive capitalism” model, or Paul Romer’s New Growth Theory, assumes that technological progress and increased efficiency will lead to “economic growth” in the sense of the total volume of monetized economic activity. But this presumes the use of “intellectual property” and other forms of artificial scarcity to capitalize efficiency improvements as a source of rents, rather than allowing market competition to pass reduced costs on to the consumer in the form of lower prices.'

"Most economists cleave to the notion that resources are scarce, and that economies develop as a means of dealing with this scarcity."

"Today, after starting three successful companies –  Gartner, Soundview, and Giga Research — Gartner brings to the industry an unparalleled perspective on the trends that are driving technology. And one trend that he thinks is likely to impact a wide array of clients and companies is the shift toward curation as a mechanism to manage the vast and overwhelming flow of information."

"Telling people at parties that you are an 'Information Architect' generally leads to blank looks all round. Here is a brief overview of 'the art and science of organising websites'."

"Forrester management has set a new policy that analysts with personally-branded research blogs must take the blog down or redirect readers to a Forrester-branded role-based blogs."

Database of social media policies.

"It was interesting to analyze the list of characteristics presented by different people for hyperlocal websites and find common terms, common ideas, a common ground, even in the choice of words. Here’s what i learned, organized around a few main concepts."

"The decision follows the successful use of CoveritLive's liveblogging software and Twitter since December to send minute-by-minute updates from full council meetings in Manchester, Trafford and Bury and from the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities and Manchester police meetings."

"16 Million UK Mobile Users Viewed Nearly 7 Billion Pages of Online Content via their Mobile Browser in Preliminary Data for December 2009"

"It turns out, that compared with Web search access, Google news access goes up during the day, down in the evening, and way, way down over the weekend… 'What that says to me  is that reading the news online is a worktime activity. … Most people aren't paid to sit at a computer and read newspapers. They're snatching things throughout the day'."

"Finally some clarity after months of mystery about possible affiliates and constant questions about whether Journalism Online is reality or vaporware. A private beta has been underway for weeks but JO founders Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz declined until now to identify any of the affiliates taking part."

"We're developing a new way to reveal and explore content on the Guardian site, according to 'social signals' from users. Meg Pickard and Dan Catt, who have been working on the project, explain what this means and why we're excited about it."

"See Also is a collection of the best of the web, including comment, newspaper editorials and analysis."

"Split testing is an integral part of pay-per-click marketing and if you want to succeed in this game you simply can’t go without it. If you don’t split test your ads, landing pages, sales pages and other elements of your marketing you will loose money and you won’t be able to survive in a competitive market."

"When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the "Starred" section of Google News."

"So Clark had another go, asking Murdoch to comment on the speech, in which his editor-in-chief last week warned that shutting journalism behind a wall risks suffocating the 'democracy of ideas' and 'sleepwalking in to oblivion'. 'I think that sounds like B.S. to me,' Murdoch replied, again curtly."

"Telegraph Media Group's digital editor has signalled a strategic change for the publisher's online business, moving away from chasing the maximum number of web users to focus on the 'three Cs' content, commerce and clubs."

"we've gone through all the latest and greatest Rails 3.0 related links and put together a ton of them to help you on your way with the recently released Rails 3.0 beta. Enjoy!"

"You thought we were never going to get to this day, didn’t you? Ye of little faith. Because here is the first real, public release of Rails 3.0 in the form of a beta package that we’ve toiled long and hard over."

"Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%."

Victor Wong, CEO, PaperG: "Most companies working on solving 'local' have so far focused on ways to provide more and better-targeted local news. But by defining “news” in such a narrow and traditional way, they all face two big problems: the high cost of content production and the lack of contextually relevant advertisers."

"With its Q4 earnings less worse than expected, AOL (NYSE: AOL) chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong led off the company’s first earnings call in a decade highlighting the strategy since the Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) spinoff, including launching the freelance marketplace Seed.com and the $36.5 million acquisition of StudioNow. "

"Time spent on Facebook soared to 27.6 billion minutes in December, up from 17.8 billion minutes in October, according to data from comScore. (In December 2008, it was just 9.3 billion minutes.) Google, where users spent 36 billion minutes in December, managed consistent slow growth in the second half of the year. Meanwhile, online rivals like Yahoo, Microsoft, and MySpace are all down."

"Mobile advertising will see growth of 38% in 2010. FirstPartner has forecast that UK mobile advertising will be worth £61 million in 2010, having grown from £44 million in 2009."

"Skillwalls help define the paywall debate for me in terms that are more tangiable. People will pay for stuff that they can’t do themselves. If you have the skills to do that ,they may pay you. Thinking about it as a skill issue works better for me than trying to assess a value proposition.

"

'Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall tells the FT: “It is not really the way the web works … It is the wrong thing to do right now because the jury is out about whether that is the way consumers are going to get information.” More intriguing, says FT: “GNM has looked at six different pay models including the ‘pay wall’, which she believes would ‘suffocate our journalism, stymie it, contain it’.” But McCall is keeping options open: “That is not to say there are not areas of specialist content that cannot be charged for.”'

"Charging, Rusbridger says, 'removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world'."

"The full text of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's Hugh Cudlipp lecture"

"The sacred fruit does not come for free"

"Newsday's owner sold just 35 online subscriptions to its website. But it also offered its pay-TV viewers the same thing – and now it has 1.5m users"

"I have nothing against charging for content, if you can. After all, I’m selling a book. But I believe building pay walls around online news is a bad business decision. The discussion about charging for content rises from a sense of entitlement—“we deserve to be paid,” which is an emotional argument—rather than from rational economics."

"Late last year, Guardian News & Media advertised three brand new 'beatblogger' positions as part of our experimental Guardian Local initiative. The Local project is a small-scale community approach to local newsgathering, and will focus on the three politically engaged cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds."

"This article – an overview of the local media scene in the UK – appears in the latest issue of Government Gazette."

"By now you've probably read more on Apple's iPad then you ever dreamed possible. Still, we felt that we hadn't given you clear hands-on impressions and collected the myriad details about the device in one, easy-to-reach place. So we've decided to bundle all of that info into a single feature, joining our first-hand encounters with the iPad together with all of the data and details you should be aware of — including specs, plans, release schedules, pics, and video."

"When Steve Jobs sank back into a comfy chair this week to demonstrate the joys of couch-surfing using Apple’s forthcoming iPad, the hopes of the media industry were riding on his back. Could the magician-geek whose iPod first persuaded consumers to pay for digital music come up with another ground-breaking gadget, this time to help print publishers and movie and TV producers over the digital chasm?

"

"A handful of publishers already have struck content deals with Apple for the handheld wireless device, which displays text, photos and graphics in high-res color. Apple will launch an online bookstore to sell titles for the iPad, much like iTunes sells music for iPods and other Apple devices."

"First, the news: Google told me today that they would consider giving more transparency about revenue splits in Adsense."

"If 2010 is the year of conversion rate optimization, then people are going to have to move beyond today’s simplistic tactical application (pushed mainly by tool vendors anxious to sell technology fixes) of basic landing page optimization and testing, to the strategic worldview that conversion optimization should play in an organization.

"

"I argue that we shouldn't lose too much time and effort on meticulously categorising and tagging information and knowledge across all the different systems we have. This is because I believe that it is almost a lost cause anyway: it doesn't scale and it's often not the quality you want."

"Want to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010"

"On a typical weekday, we'll see around 100,000 searches made on the site. This will involve about 32,000 different search terms being used, and 18,000 of them will be unique queries. Each of these 18,000 represents one person asking one question on just the one occasion. "

"Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site without extra charge."

"We are doing so because we believe that a second revenue stream will be an important part of our future. While digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web, we expect that online subscription revenue will improve our ability to grow an important part of this business."

"The New York Times plans to introduce a metered billing system on its Website sometime next year. The newspaper will begin to charge frequent visitors to its Website along the lines of what the Financial Times does on FT.com, which starts charging people who visit the site more than 10 times a month. But the new model is unlikely to move the needle on the New York Times’ digital revenues.

"

"If a visitor to nytimes.com normally reads N articles per month, then the key number in their mind will be N-n. If reading that number of articles is worth more to them than F, they’ll pay the fee. If on the other hand N-n is small, or perceived value-per-article is small, then they won’t pay. Specifically, if the average value to the reader of any given article is v, then they’ll pay the fee when v(N-n)>F."

"Relying on advertising alone to finance that has not worked, as The New York Times has acknowledged. If your business model is that scary, you should try another.

"

"The irony of the report that The New York Times is going to start metering readers and charging those who come back more often is this: They would would end up charging – and, they should fear, sending away – the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least."

"Consumers will spend $6.2 billion this year on mobile apps, downloading 4.5 billion times from app stores. Yet eight out of 10 app downloads won't be sold at all, but rather be free to end users. Advertising and marketing will close the revenue gap."

"Caroline Little, chief executive of Guardian America, told Press Gazette the company did not have any specific plans but was exploring possibilities for New York-based PaidContent.

"

"Guardian News & Media’s digital director had already called charging for online newspapers 'a stupid idea' back in August. Now editor Alan Rusbridger has chimed in with scepticism, too… 'It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things,' he told an audience at Coventry University’s journalism department"

"One of the biggest early decisions a hyperlocal site entrepreneur makes is what Content Management System [CMS] they will use. One can think about this similar to picking a spouse. You are going to live with the decision day and night for a long, long time. "

"For the past 15 months, we've been working hard to improve Linkscape, our index of the WWW. Today, we're releasing an entirely new platform for Linkscape's index with more accessible data than ever before. And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free"

"Good news for the big search companies with earnings season just ahead. Search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier has upped its estimates for search ad spending this year. The company now expects spending to increase between 15 and 20 percent, up from its earlier estimates of 10 to 15 percent growth, in part due to the economic recovery. By contrast, Efficient Frontier says search ad spending increased six percent in 2009."

"Okay, that may be getting ahead of ourselves a little… Guardian.co.uk says it’s sold 68,979 copies of its premium iPhone app since launching in December. At £2.39 a pop in the UK (and $3.99 in U.S.), that’s £164.859 in income over the month, or, at that rate, £1.97 million (about $3.2 million) a year."

"Find hyperlocal sites closest to…"

"Single-function, black-and-white e-readers like Kindle may be building a business right now but it’s likely to remain niche and short-term"

"Aol’s answer to Wikipedia is Owl, a new site described as 'a living, breathing library where useful knowledge, opinions and images are posted from experts the world over.' Owl seems more of a testbed for Seed than anything else. Seed, of course, is Aol’s new low-cost content management system for soliciting articles and photographs for its network of existing Websites."

"HarperCollins Publishers is negotiating with Apple Inc. to make electronic books available for the introduction of a new tablet device from Apple, according to people familiar with the situation, posing a challenge to Amazon.com Inc.

"

"The current chaos, Contreras told me, tilts the balance of power in rate negotiations to advertisers, who reasonably balk at paying any sort of premium rate when measures of whom they are reaching are unreliable and sometimes self-contradictory."

"For me hyperlocal is now best defined by outfits like the Lichfield blog, represented at the session by Philip John. It’s content built on social capital. People are involved because it means something to them other than just a job or brand. Money is second to social status or altruistic motivation.In contrast we could say that (in the context of the future of journalism) community is a strategy employed by media organisations and the journalists within them to engage with audience. "

“Shall we go back to letting the printers carry swords so that we can succeed by killing off the competition”

"But even if you aren't reading I have to carry on writing until the space is full. It's an uncontroversial model, an inevitable consequence of newspaper layout rules. But in a digital world, and one where the cost of journalism is not falling as quickly as the revenues that support it, the opportunity arises to rethink what is "enough" in terms of good reporting, or commentary."

"Over 100 million requests were recorded by the BBC iPlayer in December, approaching record levels of usage towards the end of 2009, according to new figures."

"Marketing budgets at UK companies were cut for the ninth quarter running at the end of 2009, but the rate of decline was the slowest for two years as marketers switched their budgets to the web, according to a new report."

US: "Total revenues in 2009 were down 5.2 percent to $7.5 billion, estimates JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan in a new Internet industry report. But he forecasts that in 2010 U.S. display advertising will rebound 10.5 percent to $8.3 billion, buoyed by a rising economy and actions to reduce the glut of display ad inventory for higher quality sites and content."

"Here’s our picks of the best products or services from the Consumer Electronics Show, which ended Sunday after a five-day run in Las Vegas."

"We've added a new category of information to each EveryBlock city: school reviews. Using data from GreatSchools, we now point you to recent reviews about schools in your neighborhood."

"How important is the tail? As with most pieces of the paid search game the answer is 'it depends'.”

"So, if ever there was an example of both the power of crowdsourcing via social media and the ease-of-use of ready made digital tools, it was the establishment of The Harborne Mile. Within minutes of mooting the idea, I had a handful of people volunteering to contribute content, others advising me on the best platforms to use, and examples of good local blogs to learn from."

"A map of hyperlocal websites from independent publishers across the UK."

"What were your experiences on online journalism training? Are courses unfairly maligned, having come to so far in recent years? Let us know in the comments…"

Ashley Friedlein: "There has been a lot of talk about publishing business models related to paid content. We understand this space pretty well, given that Econsultancy has been operating a ‘freemium’ model successfully for over 10 years now. But rather than talk about our business model, I wanted to give five tips from my own experience on what I believe is important, and what works, in order to be successful at selling content online."

"BBC director general Mark Thompson revealed in the latest edition of BBC in-house magazine, Ariel, that bbc.co.uk receives 27 million users each month."

"This article frames the problem of news dissemination as a problem of market lemons, analogous to the issue raised by George Akerlof in 1970."

"Mobile will drive local search growth… Local search providers will vie for social… Local print advertising will decline but won’t disappear… A hybrid marketing approach will win"

"Ever-increasing choice was supposed to mean the end of the blockbuster. It has had the opposite effect"

"Conservative Lord Lucas is proposing a specific new clause so that: Every provider of a publicly accessible website shall be presumed to give a standing and non-exclusive license to providers of search engine services to make a copy of some or all of the content of that website, for the purpose only of providing said search engine services"

"The website of the nation’s biggest selling regional newspaper, Wolverhampton’s Express & Star, has relaunched introducing new business directories to its readers. The site, which primarily serves readers in the Black Country and the broader West Midlands, has partnered with Trinity Mirror to use its Local Mole business directory."

"According to a new study from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Online advertising can be much better at targeting certain demographics than its traditional media counterparts, but as more competition enters the space, these advantages do not automatically translate into greater profits."

"We decided to create The Mobile Internet Report largely in PowerPoint and publish it on the web, expecting that bits and pieces of it will be cut / pasted / redistributed and debated / dismissed / lauded. Our goal is to get our thoughts and data into the conversation about what may be the biggest technology trend ever, one that may help make us all more informed in ways that are unique to the web circa 2009, and beyond."

"Here's the 92-slide version of Mary Meeker's amazing mobile Internet tome."

"Morgan Stanley's global technology and telecom analysts set out to do a deep dive into the rapidly changing mobile Internet market. We wanted to create a data-rich, theme-based framework for thinking about how the market may develop. We intend to expand and edit the framework as the market evolves. A lot has changed since we published “The Internet Report” in 1995 on the web."

"Beyond joining the compressed URL bandwagon, the question is what are the direct and indirect benefits to Google and Facebook in creating these tools?"

"So, onwards and upward: we’re now into double-digits in the 21st century and although we’re not yet dressed in tin-foil and driving hover cars, we are going to see the relative equivalent of this in digital marketing, with developments in technology and user-behaviour meaning that I’m expecting to see the following during the course of the next twelve months."

"In this age of information overload, a new solution is emerging that could help us cope with the oceans of data surrounding and swamping us. It's called information visualisation.
The approach is simple: apply the rules of visual design to information – make information into images, rather than text."

"I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). Note again that Bit.ly alone causes as many clicks a month—one billion—as Google News. Human power rises again."

"New application allows users to browse news stories and multimedia content – online or offline"

"Our latest analysis is an end-of-year review of the search advertising landscape"

"The 2009 AOP Ad Effectiveness Study demonstrates how brand display advertising performs in different online environments and has confirmed the strengths of quality original content rich web sites in this field versus portals or social media sites."

"Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well. For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave."

"Relaunch of Times expected in early 2010 – along with standalone Sunday Times site and introduction of paywall"

"when it comes to online news, Britons are shamelessly promiscuous… fans of the Daily Telegraph, for example, the most popular quality daily paper, got just 8% of their online news from its website (see chart). They spent twice as much time visiting the BBC’s news website and more than twice as much reading other quality papers."

"Offering an olive branch to critics who have accused it of trying to hoard its own web traffic, the BBC's director of future media and technology, Erik Huggers, said the corporation might do more to open up its site." (!)

"Click on that graphic to see a slightly larger version. Basically, we see about 50% of our traffic come from the 3% of our readership representing our two most loyal cohorts: ‘daily’ and ‘loyal’ visitors. Those readers come to the site at least 5 times per week. There are not many of them, but they are persistent.

"

" A lot of people who have been thinking about paid content are discovering this curve. And those who do are coming to favor a completely different paid-content model, one that would leave the left side of the graph unmolested, and concentrate on persuading the people on the right side of the graph to pitch in some cash."

"So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines."

"Being something of an agency purist, I believe that strategy — not technology — is what should drive the relationship between client and agency"

Peter Preston: "Whether or not Murdoch builds a pay wall, newspapers are in trouble if they can't utilise unique users who come through search engines"

"At the heart of the new plan is a project called "Seed," through which freelancers will be able to register and get hired without the HR processing that today can take up to two weeks, said Bill Wilson, president of AOL Media, who heads content initiatives. "

"The first major Web trend we're looking at is Structured Data. In prior presentations, this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of 'Semantic Web'. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it's become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we'll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, Wolfram Alpha."

"Online viewing of programmes in the UK will more than triple in the next few years, according to the latest forecasts, boosted by new video on demand websites offering the best British and US shows to internet users for free."

"In a world where buying media space in ‘real-time’ is becoming increasingly standard, controlling quality can become more challenging. Ad network optimisation provider Improve Digital offers 10 tips for publishers looking to get the most out of their brand image on networks."

"This document shows how RSS 2.0's <cloud> element can be used to connect a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140-character status messages."

"heraldscotland.com will feature content from Newsquest's Glasgow-based Sunday Herald and The Herald on one website. The new platform replaces the out-going sundayherald.com and theherald.co.uk"

"The site, which was today rebranded EnvironmentGuardian.co.uk as part of a redesign, will carry new features such as videos fronted by the Observer's Lucy Siegle, an environment data store and an environment research directory."

"NewsCore system will make content from all company's TV stations, papers and sites instantly available to the rest"

"Browse thousands of words and phrases, add your own comments to those of the Financial Times editors and suggest new terms for the glossary."

"Can this be true? A recent study revealed that media buyers will be increasing their budgets for online video advertising. According to a biannual report from the video advertising network Web TV Enterprise, which surveyed 101 media buyers booking pre-roll advertising campaigns, 97 percent were planning on maintaining or increasing video advertising spend."

"mashable is more influential than CNN"

"RSS is way more than the readers it spawned. It is a fundamental part of the Internet architecture and is used for all sorts of things. It's the subscribe system of the internet and a 'default function' in the Internet operating system. "

"Interestingly, rather than Twitter absorbing RSS, it may go the other way. Perhaps RSS will absorb Twitter. That's the idea behind rssCloud."

Jeff Jarvis: "Right now, news organizations should be trying to reach more people and engage with them more deeply. They should seek hyperdistribution."

US: "Of those 7.9 billion hours spent online, time spent at newspaper Web sites was 45,022,485 hours."

"after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that's a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph."

"It’s great that among all of the RSS feeds, Google News arrays and e-mail alerts, we all can reside at the white hot nexus of news, but every once in a while when you are looking for diversions or informational enhancement, it would be nice to jack into something a little less of-the-moment and a little more nutritious."

"Here's a basic point to register. The average New York Times print reader spends roughly as long with his paper a day as the average NYT net user spends online in a month. And the revenue side is similarly unbalanced."

"Google has released a 15-minute video with background information for publishers and journalists on its Google Webmaster Central Channel. In the well-animated introduction, Maile Ohye, its developer programs tech lead, explains how its news search works. She illustrates the ranking system, answers some FAQs and offers tips on the best practice in publishing articles."

A part of the fun of discovering something new on the Web is sharing it with friends. We’ve made it easier to share your bookmarks on Delicious when you use our Firefox extension or bookmarklets. Instead of copying and pasting an URL, you can now email or tweet your bookmark directly from Delicious.

"There are two relatively new efforts to curate the best links from twitter. They’re both very simple tools, and their simplicity is powerful."

Neil Walker, Chief Technical Officer at Just Search: "More than 83 per cent of internet users are likely to leave a website if they feel there are too many clicks to find what they are looking for. Recent studies have shown that the typical user will take four seconds to decide if they will stay at a site or move on."

"This morning I came across a wonderful speech (from the Edinburgh International Television Festival) by Robert Peston, one of the best blogging journalists at the BBC where I headed up the Blogs Network during the trial and immediate post-trial phase."

"Which SEO features should you be shopping for in a CMS? Glad you asked. Here’s my wish list of features, broken down into critical, important, desirable and optional…"

"The heaviest users of Web 2.0 applications are also enjoying benefits such as increased knowledge sharing and more effective marketing. These benefits often have a measurable effect on the business."

"The number UK advertisers running online display campaigns has risen, as companies capitalise on lower ad prices during the recession. The research, from Nielsen Online, indicates that the number of online display ad campaigns grew 11% in the second quarter compared to the same 2008 period. Nielsen put the number of display campaigns at 22,794, up from 20,360 the second quarter of 2008."

"Social networking sites accounted for more than 20% of all display ads viewed online, with MySpace and Facebook combining to deliver more than 80% of ads for the social networking category, according to a June 2009 comScore study of US online display advertising on social networking sites."

"Google News has quietly added a new section that steps back from the ever-quickening news cycle to highlight “in-depth pieces of lasting value.” It’s called Spotlight, and like the rest of Google News, the stories are selected by an undisclosed algorithm."

"Digg has started adding nofollow to some of its links – the idea it to stop people spamming the service to get links back."

"About the same time that 4.3 development started in the US, our Japanese team began a 6-month major undertaking to overhaul the app interface and add many other features that have been requested worldwide."

"Last week PR industry reps and news aggregators accused the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) of a ‘blatant and unjustified attempt to tax the internet’, over plans to charge them for redistributing hyperlinks."

"For what seems like many years I was a lonely voice in the wilderness, whispering at first 'River of News' then speaking more loudly and finally shouting from the rooftops, but people wouldn't listen. Developers patterned their 'news readers' after email programs. Each feed was a box, and like a mail program it would tell you how many unread messages there were. 'This is wrong!' I would say — RSS is not mail."

"As more newspapers kick around the idea of charging for content, much of the attention has been focused on the pay models employed by the bigger players like the WSJ and the Financial Times. But quietly, some small- and medium-circulation papers are coming up with their own formulas to get readers to pony up for access to their websites."

"Last week Twitter received more UK Internet visits than MySpace for the first time. As the chart below illustrates, for the week ending 29/08/09 Twitter.com picked up 1 in every 400 UK Internet visits and ranked as the 27th most visited website in the UK, one position above MySpace."

"UK content owners could have a working national micropayment network by next summer. A testbed network is already being planned out, after Digital Britain allocated the government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) £30 million in June."

"National UK newspapers have 1,471,936 Twitter followers at the start of September – up 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers)."

"In newspapers’ game of revenue roulette, there’s a lot of talk lately about their trying to create membership plans. The New York Times and the Guardian, to name two, reportedly have visions of tote bags, mugs, and events in their heads. "

"there is no standard for how you define engagement because engagement depends on the objectives of the marketer. But I do think there are three unifying themes necessary to define engagement — and they are recency, resonance and relevance. "

"After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News"

"According to new study by Gartner, mobile ad spending worldwide will grow 74% this year to $913.5 million but not really accelerate until 2011, when advertisers are expected to commit to mobile as part of the digital shift in the ad market."

"How much does an online lead cost?"

"But I do welcome the opportunity to talk to you all about the media in the UK – and a slight distancing might help. You can be the judges of that."

"Twenty years after his father Rupert Murdoch delivered the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, chip-off-the-old-block James Murdoch took the stage tonight to lambaste the BBC, decry Ofcom and call for an end to what he calls the “creationist” approach to managing media—the end of 'analogue attitudes in a digital age'."

"I am proud to announce today that Headshift has joined Dachis Group to create the leading global social business design consulting firm."

"How did Holovaty, who lived in Chicago when he worked for washingtonpost.com, define “microlocal”? “Micro implies intense focus, incredibly small scale and rich depth — all of which describe EveryBlock’s general take on things."