David Black

"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."

"If monetising news websites is a war, it looks like the big publishers are about to send in the ground troops… what do other digital thought leaders think? Here’s a round-up…"

"While News Corp. execs have been a tad shy with actual details, using WSJ.com as a model suggests we’re not talking about the pay fortress so many people immediately started to visualize. WSJ.com is a hybrid model of subscription and ad-support, with more content available for “free” under News Corp. then when it was owned by Dow Jones. (Chris Anderson prefers to call it “freemium” but then his goal is to sell books by coining cool terms.)"

"Stung by a collapse in advertising revenue as the recession shredded Fleet Street's traditional business model, Murdoch declared that the era of a free-for-all in online news was over. 'Quality journalism is not cheap,' said Murdoch. 'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites'."

"FT.com executives are considering introducing a pay-as-you-read model loosely based on Apple’s iTunes to increase its digital revenues further."

"A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS). Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they're interested in is updated. "

"an even bigger battle is brewing over what chief executive Eric Schmidt has called “the next big one”: the $23bn a year market for online display ads. The immediate target is “remnant ads” – the space that online publishers cannot sell directly to premium advertisers. This at present accounts for 90 per cent of all display ads on the web, but only a fifth of sales."

"Global spending on Internet advertising declined for the second consecutive quarter, by 5 percent, to $13.9 billion from $14.7 billion in the same quarter a year ago, according to a new report from IDC."

"As you can see from the pie chart above the vast majority of the money we spent on moderation last year was spent on message boards and other communities with a very small slice spent on blogs."

"This week the Daily Mirror is to launch MirrorFootball.co.uk, a site that draws on the paper's vast and comprehensive photo library stretching back to the early 20th century."

"Mirror Group has launched a new site.. promising thousands of images of 'Britain's most iconic football moments'. Timed to coincide with the start of the new season, the new MirrorFootball.co.uk… will publish football news and comment, as well as 'newly-discovered' photographic material"

"The TV ad features iconic images relating to ten famous British football clubs, including Arsenal, Newcastle and West Ham, emerging from a set of filing cabinets. A print campaign supports the TV spot, driving people to visit the new online football archive."

"This is the future of journalism. A collaborative effort with professional journalists, local people and local authorities coming together to make the community more transparent and an altogether better place."

"White Paper by Acision and OgilvyOne looking at mobile advertising in 202o"

"This is the second in a three-part series on local online news video, summarizing the findings of a thesis study that examined the Minnesota media market and their use of online video. The second focuses on design and usability. "

The latest football news, opinion, gossip and match reports, and unique football images from the Mirror's football photo archive.

"The way we read the news is changing, so it only makes sense that the way we follow the news should change as well."

"Online copywriting can make all the difference between a website that engages and converts, and one that stagnates."

"Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it."

"Last year, the top 25 shows on blip.tv averaged under five minutes. This year, the number is up to 14 minutes, roughly three times longer – an increase accomplished in just 12 months"

"The explosion in popularity of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace was largely behind last year's decline in ad prices… Yet over the past year, a slew of advertising technology firms have emerged to more precisely connect advertisers to their ideal online audiences, adding value to ads and pushing up prices"

"So in case it's of use to others who are thinking of doing the same, I've turned BIS's Twitter strategy into a generic template Twitter strategy for government Departments."

"Guidelines suggest tweets should be frequent, timely and credible… Even its author admits that a 20-page strategy paper for government departments on how to use Twitter might be regarded as "a bit of over the top" for a microblogging tool with a limit of 140 characters a message."

"With that in mind, what can news journalism learn from I Can Has Cheezburger? There are probably many lessons, but one that stands out to me is a fundamental shift in the concept of reporting from “sourcing” toward “filtering"."

Good set of links from Andy Dickinson

"Attributor wants to take some of the ad money that would have been paid to the pirate site and give it to the copyright owner instead. To do that it needs the cooperation of big advertising networks like those run by Google and Yahoo. "

"News organisations frustrated by websites copying and pasting their articles on to their own pages may take heart from an innovative new site called Attributor. It seeks to recoup a portion of the advertising revenue enjoyed by sites that "borrow" copyrighted content from its originators."

"numbers alone (straight tallies, such as unique visitors or time spent on site) are not very useful for measuring engagement. Ratios can tell you much more. "

"There's a lot of discussion out there about how online content should be monetized. "

"At the end of June, ad rates among the 6,000 Web publishers working with ad-optimizing firm PubMatic were up 35% since a low point at the beginning of the year. Rates climbed 15% between May and June."

"So we’ve been a bit surprised at how few are experimenting with e-commerce, which is frequently held up as a strong potential revenue stream for online news. Sure, we’ve heard from a few sites making good money from t-shirt sales and affiliate programs. But American publishers should heed the experience of the Telegraph in the UK, which started launching a series of e-commerce efforts in 2008. "

"This Interim Management Statement (‘IMS’) covers the third quarter of DMGT’s financial year to 30th June 2009 and describes the Group’s financial position and performance during the period, updated to the latest practicable date."

"This list is derived directly from the responses I received via Twitter, Facebook, IM and email from 13 different developers. With that, here's a list of ways developers can optimize their site for highest impact, with the lowest amount of effort, from their perspectives."

"I agree that simply adding a comment thread at the end of a news story is a recipe for trouble. But it is only a recipe for trouble if that is as far as you go. An unattended comment thread will be full of garbage and many are. But if the author of the news story, or opinion piece, or blog post, tends to the comments, replies to the good ones, signals the bad ones, chastises the loudmouth bullies, and generally runs the comment threads like a serious discussion group, a serious discussion will result."

"Basically the new API is designed to give developers full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications which include the ability to accept and distribute payments."

'The “microformat” puts content in content in a “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework “that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage". The registry will provide metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support.'

"But watch out, Facebook. As a means of sharing content, Twitter is already about half as popular with only about one-tenth as many users. This matters because content-sharers are the human crawlers that power both Facebook and Twitter's real-time search engines–which could turn out to be the way both startups end up making big money."

"Today we proudly announce the availability of self-service advertising on The Local. Our easy-to-use (we hope!) system lets you design an ad — or upload one you’ve already designed — tell us how much you want to spend reaching The Local’s incredibly desirable audience (you’re here, right?), give us your credit card and, poof! see your ad in that nice big square position near the top of our right-hand column."

"The NYTimes.com has opened up a self-serve ad system for businesses who want to advertise on its hyperlocal sites. The Local, which consists of citizen-j blogs focusing on five neighborhoods in New Jersey and Brooklyn, will charge $5 CPMs for the ads. In a post on The Local (via Nieman Lab), Jim Schachter, the NYT’s editor for digital initiatives, writes 'that’s just this side of free'."

"If the Times and/or Post were to erect a pay wall, I see things playing out as follows: they lose most of their readers; ad revenue declines accordingly; the revenue they make from readers who do pay won’t even make up for the lost ad revenue; and so by switching from free to paid access they’d actually sink further into the red."

"Most readers won’t pay for news, but if we move quickly, maybe enough of them will. One man’s bold blueprint."

"Needless to say, traditional news organizations continue to play a critical part in keeping the public informed. But can they adapt to the rapidly changing news environment? And who is going to pay for quality news and information in the future?"

"Modern copyright has been influenced by an array of older legal rights that have been recognised throughout history, whose legacy development may be harming our future."

"Mirror Group Digital jumped ahead of independent.co.uk in June with an 8.6% month-on-month increase in unique users to 9,442,900. This was aa year-on-year increase of 74%. UK unique users, at 4,907,540, accounted for 52% of the total – the highest percentage of UK users."

"new browsers like Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 de-emphasize the entire home-page concept in favor of dynamic new-window or new-tab pages that present shortcuts to the sites you visit most often or have visited most recently. By default, Chrome and Safari's toolbars don't even feature a home-page button."

“The front page is still a front page; there’s still six stories there, and they are what they are,” Mr. Landman told The Observer. “They occupy the same positions that they always have. If they are influential or not influential, it’s for the same reasons, right?”

"Details about the New York Times' plans to charge readers of its Web site for access are trickling out. In a conference call to discuss earnings today, CEO Janet Robinson described two possible payment scenarios — a 'meter model' or a 'Times club membership'."

"This combines the technical skills the new journalist will need (plus the old ones), new ways of collaborating with audiences and journalists across the globe; and most importantly an entrepreneurial edge to create an army of “creative entrepreneurs”."

"Google has unveiled its highly anticipated ad exchange to agencies and publishers as it readies to become a dominant player in the nascent market."

"This week we saw the release of Chris Anderson's book Free and reviews from the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell) and the Financial Times. I'd like to talk a bit about the firestorm that freeconomics (fed by Chris' book) has unleashed but first we need to clarify something."

"The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests… Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction – because your location becomes most important thing about you."

"Almost four out of five European media planners expect to increase their online spending this year, but the internet will attract less than a quarter of all ad spend, according to figures from 14 countries compiled by Neo@Ogvily/Planetactive and SKOPOS (via WARC.com)."

US: "Right now we’re pegging local online advertising at $14.03 billion, up from our estimate of $13.3 billion issued back in January. As I said, this full-year estimate is likely to inch even higher when we get our midyear data."

"Now, quick, find the first 20 tweets or FriendFeed items about the Chinese Earthquake. It’s impossible. I’m an advanced searcher and I can’t find them, even using the cool Twitter Search engine."

"And lo another 4iP investment to unveil. Newspaper Club is a tool to help people make their own newspapers using online content. The brainchild of Russell Davies, Ben Terrett and Tom Taylor, it allows users tag online content, collect and curate the stuff they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. "

"OK, newspapers shouldn't turn off RSS feeds like I said here. And here. And here. I was wrong. I feel better now…"

"ITV 'needs some kind of payment system' on the web, says its strategy director. It will also need users prepared to pay…"

"we would like you to help us explore and weigh this debate using the interactive map below. " [via buzzmachine]

"Trinity Mirror is preparing a new standalone football site, MirrorFootball.co.uk, which will go live when the new season kicks off in August"

"I decided to analyze some of the 2008 data for my former community during the period of active management and the period of passive management."

"The computer code behind EveryBlock was released this week, and it was — for programming journalists, at least — a much-anticipated event."

US: "The research firm now expects the market to grow by 11 percent, up from its initial projection of 8 percent in January."

"If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything… I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them"

"For consumers exposed to brand display ad campaigns, the research found that: One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites, Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages, Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands, Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites"

"Here are some did-you-knows to drop about Twitter: the average user has 126 followers; only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers."

"Evan Weaver, Lead Engineer in the Services Team at Twitter, who’s primarily job is optimization and scalability, talked about Twitter’s architecture and especially the optimizations performed over the last year to improve the web site during QCon London 2009."

"Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper… But as we’ve seen with other news sites, the huge spike didn’t produce much advertising revenue… the Times could only serve cheap, remnant ads to its unanticipated visitors."

"In the heady days of early 2000, the megamerger of AOL and Time Warner heralded the web-based future of publishing. It would create a digital platform for Time Inc., the biggest, most-prestigious magazine group in the world. Needless to say, that didn't pan out, and here's where it gets ironic. Just as Time Warner is unwinding that mistake, AOL is figuring out the future of magazine publishing on the web. And it's doing so without Time Warner's content assets."

"Don't try to chew more than you can swallow. Start operations in smaller geographic footprints or niches"

"here’s what must happen to finally create a viable DIY local news ecosystem…"

"This past weekend, Google News announced a new feature to enhance its search engine capabilities. The new feature allows online readers to search for articles and headlines specific to the author that they are interested in by simply clicking on the hyper-linked text of the journalist's name. "

"Mirror Group Digital traffic has grown 80% year-on-year and in May the site had another record month. The Trinity Mirror website attracted 8,693,581 unique users last month, a rise of 1% on April. It had the highest percentage of UK users, 51.62% or 4,487,510 unique users."

"By reading these blogs, you can keep an ear to the ground on the latest developments that matter the most to journalism students."

"Today we are inviting any professional news outlet that is already included as one of the 25,000+ sources in Google News to become an official partner on YouTube and more easily share your news videos on both YouTube and Google News."

"I went to Activate 09 today… Here’s a taste of what I saw:"

"On Wednesday I spent a brilliant day at Kings Place at The Guardian's Activate 09 event."

"Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "microlocal" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose."

"The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader."

“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay,” Chris Anderson writes, “but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”

"Tuesday's blog explosion about the arguments for and against free web content were caused in part by Malcom Gladwell's (author of 'Outliers' and 'Blink') review of a new book on the subject of free content by WIRED magazine's Chris Anderson in The New Yorker."

"Two years after introducing a feature that allowed people quoted in news articles to comment on those stories in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News, Google has dropped the option."

"The idea is that any group of people with a shared interest can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet."

"The NYT is taking its citizen journalism project seriously. 'The Local', its online section dedicated to all things community based, is delegating reporting roles to eager citizens, asking them to cover local body meetings. The 'missions' are posted on the website, alongside instructions and relevant information."

"Northcliffe Media has launched Local People, an ad-funded local community publishing platform that mixes area-specific business directories and social networking elements. Still in its pilot stage, 20 sites are live now and 30 more will be online by the end of the month—all are based in the south-west of England and focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 people. "

"Associated Northcliffe Digital has begun a pilot scheme into ultra-local online media with the launch of 23 community websites in the south-west of England."