David Black

“It’s so nice to be proved right. I’ve been arguing for as long as anyone would listen that the future of media is less about products – that is, controlling content and distribution – and more about networks.”

“It seems like at least a few major news sites have launched redesigns over the last several weeks. Here are five that I’ve noticed.”

“Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads… This raises a critical question: Who are the people that click on ads?”

“Local news is a vertical. To succeed going forward, local newspapers need to treat local news as a vertical product. Newspapers, traditionally, are horizontal, serving many interests and needs with a single product. Web sites need to be more singularly f

Lively debate in the comments between Howard Owens and Topix CEO Chris Tolles.

Paul Bradshaw photoblogs the NUJ’s Multimedia Commission report: “The NUJ has published its findings. My first reactions via the medium of highlighter pen…”

“I laughed when I saw m’fellow j-blogger Paul Bradshaw had also been annotating a print-out of the NUJ’s Shaping the Future report – the product of their commission on multi-media working.”

“The long-awaited report of the NUJ commission on multimedia working was published today on the union’s freshly-redesigned website.”

“I’m not going to dredge right through the stuff but here are a few of my initial thoughts/observations”

“It’s a good thing working in the media business is fun, because the forthcoming ad-spending forecast from ZenithOptimedia offers many reminders that it’s also plenty difficult. “

“It really vexed me that it appeared to have been designed by an external agency purely to look good pulsing on television next to the standard logos for BBC channels and radio stations, rather than for the practical application of actually putting it on

“But how about asking city editors (or whatever you call your front-line editors) to feed a breaking-news Twitter flow throughout the day? For people who want to know what’s going on as quickly as possible, this could be a valuable service (and, I bet,

“Flash is not a magic elixir. Flash will not make your Web site better if it’s generally bad, and it won’t make your stories better if you’re not already telling stories well with sound and pictures.”

“TheThunderbird.ca showcases the work of the students on the core Multiplatform Journalism course that I lead at the J-school. The site is run on an installation of WordPress MU…”

“It needs some tweaking and I got a little more equated with WordPress template tags than I would have liked (oh, okay, I got a perverse geeky pleasure from making it work)… So, overall its a success.”

“Serial relauncher Technorati has revamped its website yet again, adding a blog/news aggregator to the homepage.”

“I think the emphasis on posting of short bits of information instead of longer content pieces makes tumblelogging a really attractive option for lots of people who have tried and failed at personal blogging.”

“I wanted to check Gmail and my news feeds in Google Reader without having to load a new page every time. I also wanted Google Suggest to save me time typing queries on the virtual keyboard.”

“Newspaper publishers, entering 2008 with some of the worst economic conditions in many years, said Wednesday they hope to bring even more readers — and ad spending — to their Web sites with expanded offerings of news, advertising and video.”

“Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” [via Strange Attractor]

“The San Francisco, Calif.-based tech and lifestyle publisher has launched what it calls the Open Content Platform, an automated feature through which publishers large and small can select content from five different CNET channels to post on their sites v

“News International titles expected to focus on online journalism as former head of BSkyB takes over”

“Rupert Murdoch on Thursday set in motion the biggest management shake-up at News Corp in years, giving his son, James, control over the media group’s European and Asian operations and dispatching two trusted executives to lead Dow Jones and the Wall St

“Why is the US behind? Is it that the national media markets in those countries are more competitive and thus, perhaps, innovative? “

“In effect, geotagging is much like naming the street address of people and places mentioned in a story. If you would be comfortable providing a street address in a story, it is difficult to see how embedding machine-readable geographical coordinates is s

“Internet advertising sales at newspapers this year have grown at slower rates than those of competing media, shrinking the industry’s share of online revenues in the third quarter to the second-lowest level since 2004.”

“Throughout Acap’s documents I found no examples of clear benefits for readers of the websites or increased flexibility of uses for the content or help with making web searches more relevant.”

“Last week a consortium of online publishers announced ACAP – Automated Content Access Protocol – a new ’standard’ for instructing search engines how to index content. For me there were three immediate major flaws apparent.”

BBC staff blogging policy.

“National newspaper circulation November 2007″

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt: “Selling online-only ads has become a major focus for us.”

New York Times: “Online revenues up 24%… Display accounts for 46 percent of online revs, while classified makes up 23 percent, followed by search (15 percent) and “other (16 percent), which includes online archives. “

And the procrastination porcupine?

“Papers like The Seattle Times are in a tough spot: Online advertising revenue is a long way from covering expenses. Meanwhile, print advertising is vanishing. So why not ditch the presses and trucks and go electronic? It just might pencil out.”

“I don’t think e-readers are cheap enough yet to convince people to buy them in sufficient quantities.”

“Sales are in decline and journalists’ standards have also fallen, says Derek Jameson . If newspapers are to survive, they must shape up”

“The online search business is about to be upended by a revolution in technology that represents the last, best chance for newspapers and other traditional local media to preserve their franchises.”

“Perl on Rails is a project by the smart chaps over in BBC Audio and Music Interactive… Whilst I applaud the technical achievement of the individual developers, I deplore the situation that has forced them to do this.”

“Newspaper people need to stop chasing the rainbow of ‘technology is going to save us’ and get busy trying to help us succeed online, because that is the more immediate challenge and opportunity before us.”

“danah boyd looks at who clicks on online ads. Since click-through rates are miniscule (and falling), and since geeks block ads anyway, it’s an interesting and important question – who is actually clicking the things?”

ZenithOptimedia: “Global online ad spending will rise 24 percent to $44.6 billion from $36 billion. Online’s share of the world’s ad market will increase to 9.4 percent from 8.1 percent.”

“Monthly unique users have increased on average by 39% year on year, reaching 2.6 million in September 2007… Electronic advertising revenue has increased 15% year on year and is now worth 17% of total Economist group revenue.”

“Jeremy Allaire, founder/CEO of Brightcove… wrote in his predictions for 2008 that nothing about the Internet changes the fundamentals of media, adding that “value is created by controlling the content or controlling access to the audience.”

“In this first piece of a three part-series investigating non-integrated newsrooms, the Figaro.fr managers explain to the Weblog how online fits in the group’s strategy.”

“Le Monde’s print and online teams are non-integrated, and it’s only this year that the paper began mapping out a concrete plan to further collaboration – not integration.”

“Last year I made some predictions about the consumer internet in 2007 and they were at least directionally correct. So let me take a crack at 2008.”

“I learned — the hard way — some truths about grassroots content and online community. This is my attempt at preventing you from going through similar business heartache. “

“To put it bluntly, if you need information on a subject, would you rather rely on the edited and proofread opinion of an expert, or the misspelled musings from some guy sitting in his basement?” Depends on who it is and what they have to say…

“I don’t agree with the premise at all — citizens’ media has never been more robust or reliable — but here is a new meme beginning to make the rounds.”

“Facebook is viewed as ‘real identity’, whereas MySpace is ‘fantasized identity’.”

“The critique of convergence is placed within the context of rising local online ad revs, projecting growth of 47 percent this year to $8.5 billion and 44 percent to $12.5 billion in 2008. The implication being that on its own, local online advertising wi

“This is a very dangerous position, because it keeps local television in a continued state of denial and ignorance. As long as stations believe that convergence advertising is the holy grail of Internet revenue, there is no incentive to learn of the new w

“One in four internet users read consumer-generated reviews online, which then have a big impact – affecting not only what they purchase offline but also how much they are willing to pay for it, according to a new study conducted by comScore with The Kels

“Las Ultimas Noticas has been using Web metrics tools to get a better understanding of their readers and have really tried to engage their readers in many innovative ways. “

“This is a paraphrased collection of feedback provided on the blog www.joannageary.wordpress.com to the post “Anyone want to help design the Birmingham Post website?” I have tried to give a flavour of what was on the site (and elsewhere) in ten points

“We are spending more and more time consuming information online. Logically, since time is finite online advertising spend should follow a similar trajectory with marketers allocating their ad budgets in proportion to where people are spending their time.

“This prompted me to take a look at a typical weekday’s composite daily usage curve for Morris websites, which I hadn’t done in awhile. It looks like this…”

“Absolutist declarations of the form ‘______ is dead’ are a cheap way to get links, and universally they are nonsense. Steve Boriss’ declaration that ‘citizen journalism is dead’ and ‘expert journalism is the future’ is an example.”

“For Geotagging functionality to be anything more than a cool widget, it must also: Let users to define and save multiple areas of interest, Support physically defined regions, Account for more than just the hyper-local or the global scope…”

“My question: why wait? What’s to stop us from doing cool things with geotagged news with Drupal or other existing free software tools?”

“We’ve long wanted our team aggregator and media analyzer Managing News to automatically geotag the news that it tracks. But getting this to happen presented some interesting questions and challenges.”

“This is a simple webservice that helps you in tagging textual content on and off the web.”

“My Location is a new beta technology from Google that uses cell tower identification to provide you with approximate location information, so it will work on phones without GPS.” Just tried it. Right area but it thinks I am a few streets away, so not bad

“we decided to follow the same design patterns and coding conventions used in Rails when we built our MVC framework. Yes that’s right we’ve built Perl on Rails. This isn’t quite as insane as it might appear.”

“BBC Worldwide Chief Executive John Smith said he was initially hoping to make at least 10 percent of its total revenues from the Internet, but has now realized this target is too low.”

“Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance… As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases.”