links for 2009-03-30

"The Huffington Post today announced the the launch of a non-profit investigative fund to 'produce a wide range of investigative journalism,' according to a release. Funded by HuffPost and The Atlantic Philanthropies, the new venture will be led by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project. NYU professor Jay Rosen will serve as a senior advisor."

"Social asymmetry addresses the scaling problem. At Twitter, the people you follow are not necessarily the people who are following you."

"Alistair Hill, analyst, comScore noted, “the penetration of e-mail usage on the iPhone is more than double that of the smartphone category as a whole. Over the past several quarters, the UK smartphone market has been dominated by the [Nokia] N95, which lacks a QWERTY keyboard."

"Is O2 about to enable MMS for iPhones well before the next release of the handset, rumoured to be in June? Word reaches us from a reader that, having made “several phone calls to different sections of the company” O2 will “officially” switch on MMS services for the iPhone within the next few weeks."

"Make your site structure as simple and clear as possible, and make good use of specialised site maps, advised Google Sales Engineer Jean-Laurent Wotton at AOP's SEO Forum yesterday. This was just the first of many useful SEO tips on offer, as we heard from Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online and UltraKnowledge."

"For Telegraph.co.uk, which recorded 113.04 per cent year-on-year growth, and Times Online with a 51.93 per cent rise year-on-year, different SEO strategies have brought benefits to users and in terms of traffic growth, their heads of search told an Association of Online Publishers (AOP) forum yesterday."

"Bigger, faster and more personalised – that’s the direction the BBC news website is travelling in according to head of editorial development and multimedia journalism Pete Clifton… A project called Identity will open up the possibility of a passport-type registration which allows users to travel into different services and another called Spaces, which will give users their own pages."

"Sun Online grew its unique user base by an impressive 25% in February, reaching more than 27m, up from just under 22m in January… The Mirror and Telegraph sites also saw growth in February, of 5% and 1% respectively."

"Imagine a new Digg-like site where marketers submitted ads. The ones that moved to the top would of course get more views. That would encourage advertisers to learn what viewers liked, if getting more views was one of their goals. At first there would be no cost to placing an ad. But after a time advertisers would pay a flat fee to place their ads on the service, say the cost of running an ad on a non-post-season football game."

"Eric Clemons caused a stir earlier this week with his assertion that advertising will fail on the internet, that 'it is going to be smaller, not larger, than it is today.' I disagree. In particular, I disagree with his position that search advertising is 'misdirection' where companies like Google are 'diverting' customers to places other than where they wish to go unless advertisers pay them."

"Last week we revealed that Twitter had overtaken Google News in the UK. However, although everyone’s favourite micro-blogging service receives more UK Internet visits, Google News remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. As the chart below illustrates, in February Google News UK sent five times more traffic to News and Media websites than Twitter."

"After displaying Twitterfall, which can be set up to aggregate tweets containing multiple terms, on its big news screens, a stream of relevant Twitter updates are displayed in a widget on the right-hand side of the site’s live Premiership football match report pages."

"“We spent a few hours going through the Webware 100 Top Web Apps for 2008, analysing the business model(s) used by each. The chart below shows the results of this survey: 34% use Advertising, 12% a Variable Subscription model, and 8% each for Virtual Products (typically digital downloads), Related Products (typically a large software company offering a free product to attract you to their platform) and Pay-Per-Use."