links for 2010-02-02

"Mobile advertising will see growth of 38% in 2010. FirstPartner has forecast that UK mobile advertising will be worth £61 million in 2010, having grown from £44 million in 2009."

"Skillwalls help define the paywall debate for me in terms that are more tangiable. People will pay for stuff that they can’t do themselves. If you have the skills to do that ,they may pay you. Thinking about it as a skill issue works better for me than trying to assess a value proposition.

"

'Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall tells the FT: “It is not really the way the web works … It is the wrong thing to do right now because the jury is out about whether that is the way consumers are going to get information.” More intriguing, says FT: “GNM has looked at six different pay models including the ‘pay wall’, which she believes would ‘suffocate our journalism, stymie it, contain it’.” But McCall is keeping options open: “That is not to say there are not areas of specialist content that cannot be charged for.”'

"Charging, Rusbridger says, 'removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world'."

"The full text of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's Hugh Cudlipp lecture"

"The sacred fruit does not come for free"

"Newsday's owner sold just 35 online subscriptions to its website. But it also offered its pay-TV viewers the same thing – and now it has 1.5m users"

"I have nothing against charging for content, if you can. After all, I’m selling a book. But I believe building pay walls around online news is a bad business decision. The discussion about charging for content rises from a sense of entitlement—“we deserve to be paid,” which is an emotional argument—rather than from rational economics."

"Late last year, Guardian News & Media advertised three brand new 'beatblogger' positions as part of our experimental Guardian Local initiative. The Local project is a small-scale community approach to local newsgathering, and will focus on the three politically engaged cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds."

"This article – an overview of the local media scene in the UK – appears in the latest issue of Government Gazette."

"By now you've probably read more on Apple's iPad then you ever dreamed possible. Still, we felt that we hadn't given you clear hands-on impressions and collected the myriad details about the device in one, easy-to-reach place. So we've decided to bundle all of that info into a single feature, joining our first-hand encounters with the iPad together with all of the data and details you should be aware of — including specs, plans, release schedules, pics, and video."

"When Steve Jobs sank back into a comfy chair this week to demonstrate the joys of couch-surfing using Apple’s forthcoming iPad, the hopes of the media industry were riding on his back. Could the magician-geek whose iPod first persuaded consumers to pay for digital music come up with another ground-breaking gadget, this time to help print publishers and movie and TV producers over the digital chasm?

"

"A handful of publishers already have struck content deals with Apple for the handheld wireless device, which displays text, photos and graphics in high-res color. Apple will launch an online bookstore to sell titles for the iPad, much like iTunes sells music for iPods and other Apple devices."

"First, the news: Google told me today that they would consider giving more transparency about revenue splits in Adsense."

"If 2010 is the year of conversion rate optimization, then people are going to have to move beyond today’s simplistic tactical application (pushed mainly by tool vendors anxious to sell technology fixes) of basic landing page optimization and testing, to the strategic worldview that conversion optimization should play in an organization.

"

"I argue that we shouldn't lose too much time and effort on meticulously categorising and tagging information and knowledge across all the different systems we have. This is because I believe that it is almost a lost cause anyway: it doesn't scale and it's often not the quality you want."

"Want to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010"

"On a typical weekday, we'll see around 100,000 searches made on the site. This will involve about 32,000 different search terms being used, and 18,000 of them will be unique queries. Each of these 18,000 represents one person asking one question on just the one occasion. "