Monthly Archives: February 2007

“Ning relaunches tonight with new functionality and an interface that allows even the most novice of web users to create their own highly customized social network in moments.”

Wonder how long it’ll be before a newspaper nings up its own mini social network using this…

Guardian at 15.7m uniques, Times at 10.8m.

CIOs ending up “keeping the real technology innovators–employees who want to use the tools increasingly available on the wide-open Web… –from taking matters into their own hands.”

Marjorie Scardino: “The trend now online seems to be some sort of mediation and we think we might have a role there.”

“This post illustrates ten name categories that account for all the names in the TechCrunch company/product index.”

“I’ve had a go at producing three different models or types of blogs that, I think, might be useful if one wanted to try to categorise all the blogs out there.”

“OpenID significantly lowers the effort needed in creating an account, to the point that people might sign up for accounts with services that they otherwise would not have used. “

“OpenID—fundamentally—is a solution to the problem of having a million user accounts all over the place.”

News & Media overall up 28% yoy. “Digg.com was the fastest growing website year on year in January among the top 100 News and Media websites, with its market share of UK internet visits up more than 5-fold.”

“This news-paper is called the Denver Post.” “Like the Web site?”

“Successful community-based news sites enable people who care enough about a topic to either be the first to report on it or be clued in before less speedy outlets pick up on something”

“a mashup where citizens post the location of street potholes.”

“They’ve built a platform that placebloggers can submit their content to. Their platform “tags” that content with a geocode – an address, zip code, or city – and that renders a new page for every location that has tagged content.”

“ABC has launched a new cross-platform system for publishers that could give a coherent picture of a brand’s performance with combined print and web data.”

“With less than half of the public regularly using newspapers, a large question looms: How will society function if the quality, quantity and public impact of meaningful journalism are not sustained?”

“It’s one of the most-hyped developments in marketing, yet online video still accounts for only a tiny fraction of the $280 billion ad market, and less than 5% — about $775 million — of the $20 billion online-ad industry in 2007… What gives?”

“Perhaps local television is fearful of cannibalizing its over-the-air revenue it gets from local advertisers, but newspapers have no such worry.”

Viideo profile of the Washington Post’s multimedia newsroom, from Apple.

“we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft… — blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever — will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them.”

Addictive.

“there are many lessons learned from the company’s success that can be applied to more general Internet businesses, particularly those with a marketplace component.”

Love the idea of a quick and easy way to create tumblelogs. Needs a few more themes and features, like comments. “Tumblelogs are like blogs with less fuss. Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs.”

“Both these Norwegian tabloids have found a way to make those ‘eyeballs linger’, and they have done so by making a number of different reader-driven communities part and parcel of their news sites.”

“In VG we don’t think about it as ‘Internet vs paper.’ This is not the big difference. We think it is going from ‘telling the readers’ to ‘creating arenas where people can come with their content, communities’.”

“Washington Post Set to Grow Online Business with ‘Hyperlocal’ Publishing, Community Generated Content and through Acquisitions “

English-language citizens’ journalism site based in India.

“All it takes to make an internet fortune these days is one brilliant idea. Technology Correspondent David Smith meets the young British entrepreneurs who are shaping the future of the web “

See how many times you’ve been bookmarked or linked to on Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Rojo, Shadows,Technorati and Yahoo My Web.

Wasahington Post niche site with weekly video interviews. “OnBeing is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better.”

Links and summary of Media Guardian’s Publishing 2.0 supplement.

NY Times: “One of the biggest things they are trying to do at the times is move away from being just a platform for new delivery, and more towards being a platform for news-centric interactivity.”

“It means that there are a lot of people who have OpenID, but they don’t have many places to use them yet, and they probably aren’t aware that they have one.”

Summary of the Future of Webapps conference.

“Even though podcast advertising spending was a mere $3.1 million in 2005, it rose to $80 million in 2006, and eMarketer forecasts that it will grow fivefold in the next five years.”

Map how companies’ boards are linked to each other. (Visualisation site using the Link Silicon Valley database.)

“Sales Chief Tim Armstrong: Advertise All Your Products, All the Time”

“Yahoo’s spending on acquisitions like those mentioned above and investments like its 10 percent of Gmarket and 20 percent of Right Media was the company’s lowest in three years.”

Suw Charman takes Six Apart apart for problems with Movable Type. 6A’s Anil Dash and WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg respond.

“Like all good stories there are often two sides. The story about the Semantic Web is no different. On the one side is the RDF community and on the other is the microformat community .”

“UK-based magazine publisher Haymarket Media is adding the New York-based weekly trade magazine and daily online site DMNews to its stable of business publications and websites. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.”

“Startupping is a one-of-a-kind community resource created for Internet entrepreneurs by Internet entrepreneurs. It is a place to share information, ask questions, and tap into the experience of others who have built and are building web businesses.”

“I have long been sceptical about PDF versions of newspapers, and there’s growing evidence from around the world that they are not catching on with the public.”

“PDF accounts for 0.07 percent of total newspaper circulation in Norway, according to the trade magazine Kampanje (in Norwegian). Combined, Norwegian newspapers sold 1850 PDF copies daily last year.”

On Scibsted: “Sixty percent of earnings from online is less spectacular than it sounds. It was maybe 50 percent in 2006 on an underlying basis. By underlying, we mean ex project costs.”

“So what will replace the page view and when will that happen?… I would bet on events to lead the pack.”

Newspaper site with tagtastic photo gallery section

“The ability of newer digital media to provide more precise data has also led traditional media like television, radio, magazines and newspapers to try upgrading the ways they count consumers.”

“As with organizing your files, choosing strategies to implement will depend on whether you prefer to find a place for each message or to rely primarily on searches to sift through your mail.”

“That’s not how newspapers work now. They try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets.”

“In particular, it offers features more commonly found on social media sites.”

“As part of the revamp, which has been a year in development, the site will also introduce more user- generated content and simplify its navigation after complaints it was too cluttered.”

“Tagging works well when people tag ‘their’ stuff, but it fails when they’re asked to do it to ‘someone else’s’ stuff. You can’t get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive.”

“Peerworks is an open source project that is building content classification tools to help online browsing, collaboration, and social discovery… Our first project: collaborative moderation and tagging.”

“[SEO] can lead to bone-dry literal headlines that, while they do well in search engines, actually turn off the regular readers to your site. After all, we still write for people and not for machines.”

“Bloggers and other citizen journalists have access to Avisen.dk’s homepage, where their stories are published alongside articles written by the newspaper’s editorial staff.”

“The internet can provide newspapers with regular, younger consumers and be a profitable source of additional advertising revenue – but only if they learn how to seize those opportunities by connecting with their readers.”

“Up until November 2006, Schibsted was a large shareholder in Norwegian commercial channel TV 2 and Swedish ditto TV 4. Then it withdrew from TV.” Now launching Snutter.no video-sharing site: “It’s like YouTube, but in Norwegian.”

“We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.”

Lucas Grindley corrects the figures in the Herald Tribune’s Schisted profile: “Online revenues for 2006 comprised 14 percent of the total Group revenues and 28 percent of our EBITA came from our online operations.”

Telegraph selling PPC contextual classifieds in its travel site, using Adprecision “so that contextual ads created by the in-house sales team were delivered alongside relevant content”.

“Digg, the San Francisco-based social news website is looking to jump on the bandwagon, and start supporting OpenID.”

If the value of a blog is in the conversation rather than just the Technorati Rank or Pagerank, look at a Conversational Index of the ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks.

“This free service allows anyone to create a listing board for whatever they want, is fully hosted by edgeio and offered with a risk-free offer. Make your board free for people to use and pay nothing, have it incur a fee and pay only 20% of what you make.

“The Mail eReader, launched today, is a downloadable digital version of the daily paper (and Mail on Sunday) which the company is pitching as a halfway point between website and newsprint.”

Its design encourages exaggeration, cult of personality, noise, trolls etc.

“America Online’s ‘My AOL’ feed reader recently added a similar feature called People Like Me Content. They monitor what links people click and then serve up additional content that might be of interest.”

AOL follows Microsoft in signing up to open source OpenID single sign-on system.

“We know that people will watch short video clips online, but the conventional TV news piece is no longer the way to hack it.”

“Lauren Rich Fine, Merrill Lynch & Co.’s top-ranked newspaper industry analyst and a voracious newspaper reader, is optimistic about the future of newspapers – even if her teenage children won’t pick up the print editions.”

“In a sudden reversal of fortune, newspapers have taken to online video and might just beat TV news at its own game.”

“Redesigns aren’t my favorite thing. Iterative sounds more attractive to me. Fits with a general theory I have that realignments are less taxing and more effective than redesigns.”

Benefits: fail fast, more experimentation, learn quickly, provide continuing interest, reduced risk…

“Yahoo!’s new Pipes service… generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.”

“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.”

“One of the easy things you can do with it is to create a single RSS feed made up of multiple RSS feeds and filter the results based on keywords.”

Federated Media profile: “Last year, it sold more than $10 million in advertising for about 90 Web sites. This year, Battelle says it is on track to turn a profit and increase sales fivefold.”

“But citizen journalism is a supplement, not a panacea. Citizen journalism itself isn’t going to reverse the declines in news readership, listernership, and viewership.”

“I finally came up with the right metaphor for a phenomenon we all experience: that our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us… I call this the Vanishing Point theory of news.”

“Local and hyper-local content is the key to future… Career Builder is a cornerstone of the digital strategy… Online advertising is the holy grail”

“When it comes to user generated content (and social networks), it turns out that the younger the consumer the better! There’s a reason Myspace is filled with teenagers: younger people feel more comfortable contributing and sharing online…”

“Where things get really interesting, and where Gannett leapfrogs others’ efforts, is in its pro-am blend. ‘The pros do the heavy lifting and build the framework and structure,’ says Maness. ‘And the audience can come in and fill in’ around it.”

“Google has made a foray into in-game advertising for video games with an agreement to acquire Adscape Media for $23 million, sources familiar with the matter said Thursday.”

“Lifelock got a blipvert (the 3 second pre-roll ala YouTube) and then branding throughout the show. And then a post-roll which could have and should have been way more informative than it was.”

“After dodging months of rumors, Dennis Publishing has officially announced its plan to sell off its ‘laddie empire’ – the triumvirate of Maxim, Stuff and Blender. “

“A user interface that will allow readers to access archive material as far back as 1785 is in development, and is likely to feature graphical representations of archive content.”

“This is a tiny market and estimated to grow to $371 million this year. But in five years, Borrell predicts, local online video advertising will surpass $5 billion, representing more than one-third of all local online advertising.”

“There is actually a media revolution in the works. So what’s going on here? By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not ‘we’ anymore.”

On We Media: “What Rich is leaving out, I think, is the network model: working together both journalistically and commercially. I believe that’s possible and I don’t believe we’ve even begun to scratch the surface of possibilities.”

Scoble defining how social media differs from traditional media.

“The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators who believe that the phenomena of democratic participation will change the face of media creation, distribution and consumption.”

“According to the Magazine Publishers of America, magazine advertising pages climbed to nearly 250,000 pages last year. While they’re down from their 2000 high of 286,000 pages, the trend line has been going up.”

“NatMags is to become the second magazine publisher to produce a stand-alone digital magazine with the launch of a weekly fashion and entertainment e-zine for teenage girls, developed under the name Project Celia.”

Digital accounts for ‘over 10 per cent’ of FHM’s revenues and growing, but the problem is that advertising yields are lower

“At vg.no, occupying the prime banner advertising space for 24 hours costs an advertiser 210,000 kroner, or $34,000 — more than a full-page, full-color ad in the paper”

Anyone going to this? It’s on Tuesday evening at Bush House. From the blurb: “What can we learn from best practice in research, design, technology, journalism, editorial and business strategy about how to address these major developments…”

“Yahoo is taking some criticism for launching a site that includes a Digg-like voting feature earlier today.”

“The events theme will be ‘What comes next?’ and we’ll be discussing the emerging ‘Semantic Web 3.0’ and the impact this will have on the internet, communications, media, marketing and services industry.”

“Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview…. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically — and in machine-readable format.”

“it has prevented the world’s largest and most respected search engine from showing links to that content to people who want that content — and doing so for free.”

“First… it will also let employers post jobs at its site – and for free. It now becomes a direct competitor to Monster and CareerBuilder… Second, it has signed a deal with Facebook to exclusively host the popular networking site’s career center.”

BBC News on Twitter.

“Who will be next?”

“Web analytics company Omniture is planning to buy Touch Clarity, a site personalization firm, for up to $51.5 million.”

“MyClaySun.com launched today in Clay County, Florida, just west of Jacksonville. The blogs-for-all website is coupled with a four-day newspaper, around 30,000 distribution.”

Community and blog site for Clay County, Florida.