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?