David Black

US: “Online ad revenues are estimated to have grown 25 percent in 2007, coming in at $21.1 billion from 2006’s $16.9 billion, the Interactive Advertising Bureau reported at its annual meeting in Phoenix.”

“So while reaching the $21 billion plateau for the first time sounds great, the growth of internet ad revenues is also slowing down.”

“All this springs from a deceptively simple idea and tool. And that is what never ceases to amaze me about the internet: create a platform, make it open, and people will do things with it that you never could have imagined.”

“One thing I am seeing more and more of on newspaper websites are interactive features that provide rich ways to look at otherwise flat data.”

“While the online team has flourished, and developed a number of innovations, the profile notes that this arrangement has led to tension between the old newsroom in the city and the dot-com operation.”

‘I never realised before that it was possible to summarise all search options under the four headings “using this page”, “football gossip”, “giant reptiles” and “hello and welcome”. (I am, needless to say, talking about the new BBC homepage.)’

“We feel that running the beta page in tandem with the old homepage has been a great success and we feel that the new homepage is much stronger and more refined, thanks to your input over the last few months. “

“‘NASHUA: Just saw Bill O’reily misbehaving at Obama rallly. Shoving Obama staffer.’ With these sloppily spelled words, sent Jan. 5 by text message by John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for the online magazine Slate, did microjournalism…”

“On a message board, a student asked me why I said I was hooked on Twitter. I replied off the top of my head. Sometimes, that’s better than taking longer to compose something more elaborately thought out…”

“The official guide to house style for The Daily Telegraph, its supplements and magazines; The Sunday Telegraph, its supplements and magazines; and Telegraph.co.uk.”

“In the first part of a five-part series, I explore how and why a talent for brevity is one of the basic skills an online journalist needs – whether writing an article or employing multimedia.”

“In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too”

“In this in-depth study, Thurman found that ‘popular’ debates on the BBC News website’s ‘Have Your Say’ attracted contributions from just 0.05 per cent of the site’s daily unique audience, and one fifth the page views of ‘popular’ news stories.”

“in this post we look at two issues that make this new economic model rather worrisome: monopolistic markets and complex transactions.”

“It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter.”

Didn’t get a chance to blog Seamus’s report on Google’s 10k last week: “The search giant generated UK revenues of $2,530m ($2.5 billion) or £1,265m (£1.3 billion) during the whole of 2007, 15% of their global total $16.6 billion. “

“Google (NSDQ: GOOG) filed its annual 10-K report with SEC this Friday, and not much in it that we don’t know already, but good to get a yearly perspective on umbers, rather than the quarter-to-quarter we all chase. “

“As you can see from the chart below, UK Internet traffic to a Hitwise custom category consisting of the top 100 Polish language and community websites increased nine-fold between January 2006 and January 2008.”

“The Newcastle Evening Chronicle has launched a multilingual blog. Poles to Newcastle is a dual Polish/English blog on ChronicleLive.co.uk aimed at the Polish community living in North East England.”

“researchers from the Office of Communications (Ofcom) found that just 16% of mobile users polled had accessed the Internet via mobile phone in the third quarter of 2007, while 10% had used their mobile phones to send or receive e-mail. “

“By looking at what the NYTimes interactive team has done, often with very small time frames, we can see examples of what is possible. From their work, we can learn new ways of presenting complex information in fun and engaging ways.”

“Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand.”

“To me, the quote below, is the perefect illustration that this is not new media – to my my mind, new media is just digitalised old media – but social media. And essentially, the latter is not so much about the tools as about the mindset.”

“For my talk on multiplatform science reporting for the Knight science journalism symposium, I prepared a cheatsheet on how to successfully produce a multimedia story.”

“A recently released comScore Video Metrix service report, revealed that U.S. Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online during the month of December 2007″

“I’m currently working on a project to investigate how the BBC might use one-click social bookmarking and recommendation service links across our content.”

“Have a look at your sites. They probably follow the pretty standard UK model…. But hold on a minute. “

“Journalists developing newspaper web projects need to beware of falling into the trap of received wisdom, according to a digital media consultant who is working to train regional newspaper online editors at the University of Central Lancashire.”

Jay Rosen: “Listening to some of the speakers at the J-Lab’s workshop, absorbing the talk at last week’s Networked Journalism Summit, and adding what I’ve learned from doing PressThink, the model I see emerging would combine…”

“The rise of ‘freeconomics’ is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster.”

“Links are influential. Links set the agenda. Links direct public attention. Links connect ideas and people. Everything journalism has always aspired to do.”

“I’m looking for online news sites and projects that stray from the traditional definition of news.”

“Bryan Murley and Angela Grant touch on the idea that innovation is incremental, not driven by sudden flashes on insight.”

“Our plan is to give users tools that will help them ignore these characters but, in my experience, it’s impossible to eradicate trolls completely. The best advice is that old standby: do not feed the troll.”

“I’ve thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem of trolls. It’s an old one, as old as forums, but we’re still just learning what the causes are and how to address them.”

“Hooray! From tomorrow newspaper publishers in the UK will be able to report both their print circulations and online unique users in one monthly report. This is a significant and welcome move by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.”

“Online shoppers taking advantage of the January sales led to internet sales for the month jumping 75% compared to the same period a year earlier, according to research by industry retail body IMRG.”

“Following a pilot program that began last May, Google has announced the beta launch of its Adsense for video offering… [Ad] types include video-based blocks sold on a CPM basis, and CPC text overlays.”

“The Telegraph Media Group has [set] up an in-house technology lab dedicated to creative editorial projects. Aashish Chandarana, former innovations and production executive for BBC Sport, has been hired to head up the lab…”

Latest Nielsen US newspaper site audience figures from E&P.

Marc Reeves on the new Birmingham Post site’s launch next week. Looking good so far – good luck!

“Local news is changing. Video, podcasts and blogging have been added to the scribbles of shorthand and the nib; searching YouTube and browsing the blogosphere have been added to photocalls and council meetings as part of the daily routine…”

“Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?”

“The time for getting the Web was 10 years ago. Now you need to get the Web and the mobile Web. People want to consume content on the go.”

“According to Hansell, Google began testing video ads in search results today.”

“A copyright period that extends beyond the life of the author is clearly not an incentive to create. John Lennon is not going to write any more songs whatever incentives you give him.”

“Are you a zombie without your morning cup of coffee? Instead of using caffeine to stay awake, you can tweak the food you eat to get more energy.”

“Long ago, I disavowed my former praise of TimesCast. As I dove deeper into web casts, I found a number that were stunningly good, and realized the bar was much higher for episodic video than daily news video.”

“Don’t just rely on your content management system to make decisions for you. Decide how and where you will reward readers who want more information.”

“Not too shabby for a free CMS.”

“A hip version of cablese jazzes up campaign coverage”

Amy Gahran: “Requiring journalism students to use Dreamweaver is about as useful as requiring them to learn calligraphy. It makes your content looks really pretty — and it generally won’t be worth a damn on a real journo job or project.”

“All we, as print journalists, need to know about the printing presses is that they exist and they work. It would be a waste of time to think otherwise. So why don’t we take the same approach to learning online journalism?”

“It seemed to me at the time that journalists need either a lot more or a lot less knowledge of web design and development than a one-year (or even a three-year) Dreamweaver module on a journalism course can provide.”

“What we all to often do is teach our students how to use a particular piece of software – which red button to press. They then go out into the real world to discover that the company they have come to has a blue button. Unhappy student.”

I enjoyed Andy’s videos on the quality and point-and-shoot approaches to newspapers’ video strategy…

“Given that cellphones were the focus, it proved a suitable event to try out using mobiles as newsgathering tools. The phone was a Nokia N95 which Reuters has also been testing.”

“You may have noticed the video clips embedded in this blog over the past few days from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They marked the beginning of an experiment which will see us try out various ways of video blogging from mobile phones.”

“On Tuesday this week, Politiken.dk, the news site of one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, started using Twingly to show blog links to the sites’ articles”

“online, journalism is not just writing a webpage or filming a video; it is commenting on a blog, or bookmarking a webpage. That there are no walls in cyberspace, only links; and that journalism lies in every act that you commit online…”

“employ Twitter as a way of keeping journalists in touch with other members of their team, and their editors, via their mobile phones.”

“Semantic Web will start the long, slow decline of relational database technology. Web 3.0 enables the transition from ’structure upfront’ to ’structure on the fly’.”

“It’s another thought exercise in trying to figure out how to discover what journalism should be to better serve today’s society.”

“The issues facing journalism today are not a technology problem, but an audience problem. Declining readership did not begin in 1994, when the web began to take hold.”

“2007 was another boom year for the Internet in the United Kingdom. Almost 37 million people went online in an average month—that’s over 60% of the population.”

“New York Times Co, USA Today publisher Gannett Co, Los Angeles Times publisher Tribune Co and San Francisco Chronicle publisher Hearst Corp have set up a stand-alone company called quadrantOne to oversee the aggregation of audiences.”

“Johnston Press has hired former AOL UK strategy vice president Lori Cunningham as its digital strategy director.”

“Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset — a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data.”

“For me, it works because: 1) News is posted in real-time 2) News is localised (and relevant)
3) News can be consumed (or not) on the go 4) It uses nothing more than Twitter’s @ prefix and combines common identifiers for locations.”

“Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.”

Paul Bradshaw: “Local news in the UK could undergo seismic change in 2008: the technology exists for leading regional newspaper groups to radically overhaul their sites.”

“The volume of Twitter posts during the debates and the voting was incredible, and it was like a front-row seat to the action. “

“More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news.”

“Over the last week or two, I’ve been noodling on the idea that 2008 could be the year of Twitter in the way that 2007 was the Year of Facebook and 2006 was the Year of YouTube.”

“Recounting the last year and a half, Stengle noted the magazine’s redesign, ratebase reduction, the new publication date and the Web site’s expansion into a product that stands out as a separate, 24/7 news site.”

“These changes are evident in Drupal 6’s major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework.”

“One of them is core support for user-configurable workflow through an interesting system of triggers and actions. For example, I quickly created a set that sends me an email any time anyone posts a comment on my website so that I can review it.”

“6% of people online are contributing 50% of the clicks to display advertisements… Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda and comScore performed the study.”

“newspapers need to reconsider what they do, not from the stance of taking what was a print newspaper into an online format, but… how they can create and distribute content and make money from it, in a world that is… dominated by digital distribution”

“Since Facebook opened up to third-party applications in May 2007, nearly 15,000 applications have been developed. Overall, some 100,000 developers are working on widgets and applications worldwide.”

“CNN, owned by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), is preparing to unveil a news site made up entirely of news gathered by users”

“No doubt to the frustration of my fellow organizers, I’m still thinking through the format and agenda for the New Business Models for News conference we’re holding at CUNY in May and want your advice.”

“display ads will still account for about one-fifth of all online ad spending in 2011 according to eMarketer.”

“Never before have I seen a newspaper.com get trounced in its own market by any competitor — not even a TV station.”

“The secret is that the weekend’s work was only the final step after a great many before it, all of which were safely out of the way before the weekend…”

“The Temple News has moved its Web site to its own independent WordPress server from College Publisher”

“US Internet ad spending rose 27 percent last year to 25.5 billion dollars, research firm IDC said Monday”

“the effect on reading habits of unbundling hard news from the newspaper package seems likely, from this understanding of how decisions are made, to have a disastrous impact on the propensity to read that news”

“Back when you were a kid spending the afternoon at the community pool, remember how you used to hesitate when you glanced at those signs bearing the pool rules — just as you were about to dive head first into the shallow end?”

“Northcliffe Media is to introduce technology to allow the addition of geographical information to online news stories.”

Graph how often words and phrases are used in Twitter

“Being cute won’t get you anywhere on the Web. Headlines with keywords, people and places matter. Headlines have to have substance on the Web; style isn’t very important.”

Emily Bell: “Our web address – guardian.co.uk – will become the title piece on the front page and replaces Guardian Unlimited.”

“In the war of the websites, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ is plotting a new skirmish. A redesign is afoot, taking the website of the ‘New York Post’ as its model”

“If web 2.0 could be summarised as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalisation.”

“The team at WordPress itself have now released a new theme dubbed Prologue, which they liken to a group Twitter… This is the ideal format for a breaking news site, with reporters adding the latest details as they come in.”

“UK Internet traffic to newspaper websites reached its highest level in over two years last week off the back of a number of big news stories.”

Independent redesign redesign: “Each feature is demarcated with the same device, additional stories are marked with the same icon, main stories use the same font for their headlines, and there is a single color palette that is stuck to religiously.”

“This document represents a compilation of fundamental principles for designing user interfaces, which have been drawn from various books on interface design, as well as my own experience.”

US Department of Health and Human Sciences.

“Today we’re releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code. “

“However, — *Tap* *Tap* Is this thing on? — we must start geocoding stories…”

“If in the first eight years of the 21st century contextual text advertising has proven to be the magic potion, then it is safe to say that the next decade or so is going to be about location-relevant advertising and marketing messages.”

“The service, an intelligent news aggregator, uses A.I.-like technology to determine your interests and then adapts to show you the news stories you will find most interesting.”

“xFruits appears to do all sorts of clever things with RSS feeds including not just aggregation but also taking email and turning it into RSS, outputting RSS in mobile friendly and other formats, etc. I decided to give it a go.”

Bubblegen’s Umair Haque is now also blogging at the Harvard Business site.

Should be useful for surveys: “We’re really excited to bring you forms! Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address.”

“In a Google search for AP’s top stories of 2007, blogs beat the New York Times by 4-1.”

“That’s design over expectation and habit. The mouse over drop downs get short shrift because people learn how to use a site by using it.”

“Your audience is also sharing what they know, either informally, or via special-interest sources. The big question is, when your audience wants more and trusted information, are they going to find it on your web site as soon as they want it?”

“Widgets are a way to distribute content, via embeddable chunks of code. Widgets can live on any website, and include a variety of content types, including interactive content.”

“The easiest way to keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city — like restaurant inspections in Chinatown, crimes in the Loop or everything around 475 Kent Ave.”

“We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a “news feed” for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your bl

“I’ve always believed that the hyperlocal nut will be cracked with a technology solution, not a content solution. Why try to convince people to submit content when there’s already a ton of it out there that just needs organizing?”

Interview with Adrian Holovaty on EveryBlock.com

“In the spirit of aggregators, I’ve compiled the most important reactions to Adrian Holovaty’s new neighborhood site, EveryBlock.com. My thoughts are saved for last.”

“Yesterday outside.in launched a preview of our new discussion boards, where visitors can talk with people around them, ask questions, give answers, rant, weigh in, and so forth.”

“We’re fans of Twitter around here… while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more, like a way for each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages…”

US: “The Newspaper Association of America reported the number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites last year rose more than 6 percent to a monthly average of 60 million. Monthly visits climbed 9 percent in the fourth quarter from a year ago.”

Great post from Paul Bradshaw: “In the final part of the Model for the 21st Century Newsroom I look at how new media has compounded problems in news organisations’ core business models – and the new business models which it could begin to explore.”

“The latest Nielsen Global Online Survey found that books account for 41% of all items bought on the web over the last three months, although clothes, shoes and accessories (36%) was the fastest growing vertical.”

“According to Hitwise, last week newspaper websites – “which includes the websites of national, local and international newspapers, as well as print magazines and trade publications” – captured 1.48% of all UK web visits, a new record.”

“we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages.”

“I believe the killer social graph app will be the one that sniffs and understands our relationships without our having to take explicit action or by exploiting the actions we take for different reasons.”

“We wanted a CMS with the dual purpose of making online publishing faster, but also to rethink the horrible workflow of our print edition.”

“a study conducted by Ipsos Mori for Rajar – its first attempt to understand just what is going on in online – shows 8.1 million people listen to either streamed or catch-up radio in any given week, while only 1.87 million listen to a podcast.”

“Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site.”

How done is done?

“Instead of sinking literally millions of dollars/pounds/euros into content management systems… why not take one of the open-source systems and become part of the development community?”

“There is simply no substitute for real, sustained, dedicated participation in the conversation by editors and reporters. Without it, newspaper sites will continue to struggle to grow and retain audience.”