David Black

“On the web, it’s a mistake, I think, to rely on brand. Brand, in fact, may be absolutely meaningless. What is more important is A) utility; B) an easy to remember and type domain name. Get those things right and success is much easier to obtain.”

“Learn the lesson from Times Select — the right lesson. No — not that people won’t pay you anything. The lesson is that you have to rethink your brand and what it means to meet the online audience on their terms. “

“It’s not that ‘content wants to be free’ – it’s that Internet access ISN’T free, and now that distribution and content have been unbundled, people are reluctant to pay TWICE – once for distribution (i.e. internet access) and again for content (paid

“AOL’s social news site relaunched today under the new name Propeller. No longer ‘the new Netscape’, Propeller seems on face like a clone of a clone. There may, though, be much more going on underneath the surface.”

‘New Netscape’ relaunches as Propeller.

“With its audience expanding and interests diversifying, the popular site is launching new features to help users find like-minded friends”

“Perhaps it’s not about figuring out when print publications will become obsolete, but more about figuring out how our media habits are changing, how we are mixing in the digital with the analog, what place print publications will have in our future med

“DMS is a new category… in which companies pull in data from 3rd parties, normalize (clean) it, and then leverage it… These services are creating a layer on top of existing services in order to do something that those services typically don’t want don

“Radiohead is choosing not to sell their latest album on iTunes… because iTunes is forcing them to break up their album into songs that can be sold separately.”

“The award-winning success of the Teesside Evening Gazette website has enabled the title to invest in more staff, according to its editor, Darren Thwaites.”

“Trinity Mirror Regionals is this month launching a course with the University of Central Lancashire to help senior editorial staff at the group understand the challenges of multimedia.”

“Keepvid allows you to grab a source FLV file from most video sharing sites (YouTube, Blip.tv, etc.) simply by copying the URL of the video you want into the site. Keepvid then spits back a link to the source file, you right click and save as and you are

“Single Person / Group Blog (Use WordPress), Blog Community (Use Drupal), Blog Driven Website (Use WordPress), Full Featured Website (Use Drupal)”

“Having identified a group of influential US political bloggers, the media company gives content to these individuals in order to begin circulation, Mike Seery, chief information officer of The Economist Group, told delegates at an AOP forum, in London ye

“The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth… This model can also be represented as an alternative to the inverted pyramid: a ‘news diamond’, if you like.”

“Congratulations to Mike Arrington on hiring Erick Schonfeld as co-editor of TechCrunch — extending his hand to the Business 2.0 writer and editor as he stepped from the wreckage of Time Warner-owned magazine, which has gone down in flames.”

“How to be wrong: measure the mean when you really should measure the median. Consider a website that reports a mean (average) of 2.1 pages per visitor… That’s because there’s a large number of people visiting 1 page and a large number visiting 10 or 20

‘I see two distinct types of motivation. One is, “I want to communicate better with the people that I already know and trust”. The other is, “I want to increase my visibility so that I can connect with more people”.’

“For instance, the Washington Post created a widget for Facebook called “The Compass”which helps Facebookers to compare their political views with those of their friends.”

“Widgets, small bits of software that users can add to personalize their Web space, are slowly making what could be a significant impact on online marketing, although many advertisers have yet to catch on.”

“Google announced the limited release of their new Gadget Ads program, which they tout as ‘mini versions of your website in any AdSense ad size’.”

“Here’s the rundown on Google Gadget Ads: The ads are interactive, Google Gadget Ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, Different targeting options – contextual, site, geographic, and demographic, Built on an open platform”

“In light of Google’s launch of Ad Widgets, Kevin Kelly riffs on my 2004 Cost Per Influence, Sell Side Advertising and transitive advertising concepts, and then discovers this new corner. Perhaps the future is automagically subliminal?”

“The cool idea is that ads can now be packaged as little widgets that you can drag and drop onto your blog or website, as easy as it is to embed a YouTube video… John Battelle calls it sell side advertising.”

“The near-total reliance on ad revenue means redoubling and re-tripling efforts to get the online ad business right, maximizing traffic and yields.”