Monthly Archives: December 2006

“
To me it’s like the players in the minor leagues and the major leagues. All of them are professional ballplayers. Some just make more money than the others. Minor leaguers also make more mistakes. Same thing here.”

“Amateurs working as journalists are giving rise to a new wave of ‘citizen newspapers.’ Results are mixed.”

“I asked a metrics company about how they count AJAX and the metrics person got a deer-in-the-headlights look on their face… Your traffic doesn’t change and you may have happier and more users, but your metrics will plummet.”

“CNET is reporting on a recent court judgement preventing deep linking to webcasts.”

“Right Media: “Immediately, you get to watch nearly real-time reporting on your ads…. As a publisher, I can request permission to post ads on my page inventory from any ad network in the system.”

“Venture capital still plays an important role in financing web entrepreneurs. But the need for capital comes later in the company formation process…. VCs can scale their capital (ie risk) exposure as the risk is mitigated from the opportunity. “

“By the end of 2006, Borrell says, recruiters were spending more for online media than for any other medium, including newspapers: $5.9 billion for online, compared with $5.4 billion for newspaper ads.”

“Should a newspaper-hosted site be the social networking spot for your geographical area?”

Fife Herald uses Myspace for news tip-offs. “In just a couple of weeks the site has recruited 400 friends and it is being used, says Morris, as ‘a tool to get younger folk to give us story tip offs’.”

YouTube by Google, Massive by Microsoft, Atom Films by Viacom, DMarc by Google, Xfire by Viacom, Platform by Comcast, Grouper by Sony, JotSpot by Google, Petfinder by Animal Planet, and Wired.com by Conde Nast

“We review the highlights and horrors from the wonderful world of the internet and e-commerce over the past 12 months…”

Predictions for trends in technology for 2007.

Predictions for digital media trends in 2007 from Seamus McCauley.

Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher, ex-Techcrunch UK, return with a new blog covering web 2.0 and mobile start-ups across Europe

Meg Pickard, who works with community at AOL Europe, on creating and managing communities.

“A newspaper Web site has invited reader participation and then been shocked—shocked!—at the vitriolic and coarse level and quality of discourse… There are well-established ways to enable user comments and put some safeguards in place to keep them c

“MySpace is to make its first move into print publishing through a deal to turn an edition of UK style magazine Marmalade over to user generated content.”

“Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani is forecasting a bleak 2007 at least with print advertising revenue. “The print malaise will likely continue, leading to declines in revenue growth again in ’07,” she wrote in a note released on Friday.”

“The bottom line is that the page view has outgrown its usefulness. The industry needs to embrace change and develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately.”

Digg moves beyond news, launching new video and podcasting features.

“The Peterborough Evening Telegraph’s www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk and the Halifax Courier’s www.halifaxcourier.co.uk have gone live as test sites, and websites for the rest of the dailies will follow in the new year with the weeklies after that.”

Another piece of the deportalization/long tail puzzle: the top 10 sites account for a growing share of page views (40%, up from 31% five years ago). But the growth is powered by the long tail of user content on social networking sites like Myspace.

“The Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) estimates that £3,260,000,000 was spent online during the month, at an average rate of £4.57 million per hour, approximately 45% (44.7%) more than in the same period last year.”

“Although video-download sales made through iTunes and other online sources will total just $298 million this year, Strategy Analytics predicts that by the end of 2007 the online video market will grow to $1.5 billion.”

“Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner on Chris Anderson’s radical transparency manifesto for Wired: “I bet the PAPER product that rolls off the printing press months later would have a much smaller audience than it does now—and would be creamed by the comp

Five things that make this bubble different from the last: build-to-flip not IPO, profitable businesses, Google to drive traffic and revenue, fewer free dinners and low burn rates.

“Far from being different from the prior dot-com boom, this boom is achingly similar, with the main difference being that it is cheaper this time to get yourself in just as deep — and this time there is no IPO market to bail you out.”

“It’s about connecting your phone through Wi-Fi networks to browse the latest innovative, mobile accessible web 2.0 services. For example downloading your favourite podcasts, reading your RSS feeds, doing a one-click image upload to Flickr…”

Examples of newspapers creating rolling takeaway PDF editions: the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph

Tom Glocer, the chief executive officer of Reuters, on “trust in media today, taking into account the growing popularity of blogging and all other types of citizen journalism.”

Ten trends identified by Dow Jones chairman Peter R. Kann in his essay, “The Media Is in the Need of Some Mending”

“Dutch and Flemish media execs sharing projects on innovation in news”

How social media sites are paying content creators and aggregators.

Free audience measurement tool – like Alexa but with the ability to tag your site to improve accuracy.

“British Sky Broadcasting seized a commanding share of the UK’s online sports audience today by buying 365 Media for £96m. The betting and sports news websites operator brings 2.2m unique monthly users to the satellite group’s customer base.”

GateHouse Media is rolling out Creative Commons non-commercial use licenses across the 121 dailies and weeklies they own in Massachusets

“thousands of mini ‘newspapers’ will form around different geographies and topics. Aggregation sites will emerge to sift through and organize the reports and conversations going on in these small communities.”

McClatchy acquires citizen media sites FresnoFamous.com and ModestoFamous.com, founded by Jarah Euston, which operates in cities where McClatchy publishes daily newspapers.

“Media as conversation. Media is atomised and microchunked. Editors catalyze and curate conversations that happen as much ‘out there’ as on our own site.”

“Show who we are; show what we are working on; process as content; privilege the crowd; let readers decide what’s best; wikifiy everything”

“joining The Sun newspaper to become their Communities Editor, principally, I understand it, to look after their MySun area”

“The Daily Telegraph is to bring its births, deaths and marriages announcements online in the form of a social networking site.”

“blunt strategies that rely on merely generating vast ad inventory – especially low-value page farm impressions – will be dominated by more thoughtful, value-focused strategies”

“Good examples of the webification of print editions increase everyday. Unfortunately, so do bad. “

“The technique of using pop-ups to gain readers underscores just how important sheer numbers have become in the online media business.”

Much better.

“Wikia gives away the tools and the revenue to its users. It requires only that sites built with the company’s resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising.”