David Black

"Online advertising spend has outpaced advertising on mainstream TV in 2007, surging 40 percent to £2.8 billion, Ofcom reported today in its hefty annual survey of the British communications market. In comparison, ad revenue at ITV1, Channel 4, S4C and Five came in at £2.4 billion. "

"Om Malik posted recently on something I’ve been thinking about a lot: namely, the tension between one-size-fits-all social networks such as Facebook and a more personalized approach using blogs and tools such as Moveable Type and WordPress, both of which have been adding more social features"

"our digital life is spreading out across the web… We have two choices in order to consolidate these — either opt for all-purpose services such as Facebook (as tens of millions have done) or use our blogs as the aggregation point or hub for all these various services."

"eMarketer predicts that advertisers in the US will spend $24.9 billion online this year. That estimate is slightly lower than the one eMarketer released in March 2008, which said that US online advertising spending would reach $25.9 billion in 2008."

"Moving to Mobile is a growth and development guide from the Newspaper Association of America that covers the many aspects of mobile for newspapers. This includes information on advertising and local search, setting up and running mobile programs, reaching youth and the state of e-readers. It also includes case studies from newspapers finding success in this area."

"The report is based on detailed interviews and observations of young (20ish) readers in the U.S., Britain and India. Not surprisingly, it finds out that kids don't read newspapers. No news there. But it does show that they've got real interest in news, and are going to all sorts of sources besides print to find out what's going on in the world."

"Digital Disruption is a blog kept by Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Strategy and Development at the Guardian Media Group."

"When Google Ad Planner came out back in June, I immediately thought of Comscore – and I was not alone."

"Essentially now any Twitter client can now associate another post as a reply to another existing post."

"Share ideas with other bloggers and leave comments on their site. If someone else has the scoop, link to them. If you write a post inspired by another blogger, give them a shout out and thanks."

"In the quiet flats of University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus, bloggers, thinkers, journalists, developers, and inventors melt together for a full day of lectures and learning. The goal of Wordcamp 2008 is to figure out the future of publishing on the web."

"We are rolling out our first local version of The Huffington Post today. We've decided to start with Chicago because it's always been a great news town — offering a vibrant mix of politics, sports, business, music, food, and urban life."

"We believe that linking to useful websites doesn’t 'leak' traffic – quite the opposite in fact. Offering useful links actually makes visitors more likely to return to see what other interesting websites they might find in the future, a model that sites such as Digg and Fark are built around… We spent some time researching the issue to see if there was a correlation between the frequency a site links out and the number of links it gets in return."

"The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked."

"After a look at the way the tabloids and the broadsheets use video I’m looking at the UK regional evening market and next on my list is the Liverpool Echo."

"UK users will still be able to update Twitter accounts from mobiles, co-founder Biz Stone said in an email announcement, but charges from mobile operators had made free outbound alerts unsustainable."

"The Newspaper Society, which represents the publishers of more than 1,000 newspaper websites, accused the BBC of spending millions of pounds replicating video services already provided by local papers."

"This year’s Communications Market Report builds on the structure we adopted in the 2007 edition to capture developments in the communications landscape through a blend of converged and sector analysis."

"The theme Ofcom choses to highlight, at a time of galloping inflation, is that the average household spend on communications services, from television to broadband, is on the decline. We're getting more media for our bucks, apparently."