David Black

"Brits are happy to watch advertising on the internet or their mobile phones if this means they will get videos, music or other content for free, a survey has found. About 60 per cent of people polled by KPMG, the professional services group, said they would rather watch advertising on the internet in return for free content, rather than pay for it. Only 16 per cent of consumers said they would rather pay for content and avoid ads."

"Here’s a good clue as to why Google should be interested in Twitter. It’s not just search. It’s currency."

"It has been said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million computers, you would eventually produce an accurate economic forecast. Let's see how well that theory works…"

"URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day?"

"There are a wide variety of web applications, Twitter accounts, and even iPhone apps that can help people do everything from track popular hashtags to graph out recent Twitter trends."

"Google is distribution. It is the newsstand. If Rupert or any other newspaper owner chooses to take its content out of the Google index, there will be plenty of content left that can take its place."

"Would you want to see which stories we are publishing, in chronological order, as soon as they are published, but without any prioritisation of the most urgent or important?"

"With all the resources of the Internet at their fingertips, editors should be able to use their expertise on a subject or geography to sift through multiple sources of news and information and use links and other tools to assemble a comprehensive, edited collection of information for their readers."

"There is a trend evolving at media companies both big and small that promises to have a remarkably positive impact on what you read, watch, and share on the web: Curation."

"Ever notice how the most interesting articles online seem to command too much of your time? Have you ever stopped reading a long article online because you saw that it was paginated into 8 clicks?"

"I did a workshop about Twitter yesterday for some of the journalists I work with at the Globe and Mail, and uploaded it to our internal wiki — and then I figured I might as well upload it to Slideshare so others could see it as well."

"Rupert Murdoch, whose media company News Corp owns one of the few U.S. newspapers that makes people pay to read its news on the Web, said more papers will have to start doing the same to survive."

"In a letter to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport last month Guardian Media Group urged the Government to examine the role of news aggregators."

"I'd like to welcome the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to the world of pureplay, online-only local Internet sites. They have a heckuva a jumpstart with their level of web traffic which any local site would be thrilled to have. Unfortunately, there are many other items that they must put in place to succeed. To their credit, they have taken some good first steps."

"Today we relaunched the BBC Mobile homepage. Devices that store cookies will get a homepage with the customisation options that we have been beta trialling for the last month, and devices that don't store cookies will get a redesigned non-customisable version."

"DiggBar, the new shortURL and toolbar service from Digg, is certainly useful. I expect it to become my default short URL service on Twitter since it is so easy to create a short URL by simply adding Digg.com/ in front of any URL"

"Last month we wrote about the new Digg toolbar product called DiggBar. It launched today. If you want to try it out immediately, just add “digg.com/” before any URL at all (the image above is using the techcrunch domain)."

"Starting today, we’ll begin rolling out a new product we are calling the DiggBar."

"if you want to attract an audience in the competitive online information market, I think you need to choose some values to believe in, and to express them, defend them, and practice them before your audience. Readers, now that they have more choices, want to know whose side you are on."

"In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service."

"I spent some time this morning putting together the first draft of my talk on Tuesday at the Ad Age Digital conference. It builds on what I laid out in my post yesterday under the same title."

"Earned media is media you don't buy but earn the hard way. PR is an example of earned media. Word of mouth is another. Earned media has been around forever. But it has now gotten a lot easier, thanks to the Internet and social media, to earn media for your brand, product, or self."