links for 2010-02-08

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, CEO, WatchMojo: "Online video is where the Web was ten years ago: in investment mode as video companies that are generating high revenue are not necessarily the most profitable. Are those companies suffering low margins because they’re investing in the future or are they fundamentally lower-margin businesses?"

"In this article we’ll explore how user experience professionals and designers are using storytelling to create compelling experiences that build human connections."

Jeremy Allaire: "My first company (Allaire) was born during the advent of the Web, with the idea that a browser and HTML could form the basis for creating content-rich, interactive software applications, ones that didn’t require native code and could be platform and operating system independent."

"In the way of all love objects, apps do suggest that something satisfying lies on the horizon for news organisations. Readers may not be prepared to pay for content, but they do seem willing to pay for software and services that improve their lives."

"Foursquare's [success] depends on providing 'the most incentive for a user to check-in'."

'What’s variously called the “cognitive capitalism” model, or Paul Romer’s New Growth Theory, assumes that technological progress and increased efficiency will lead to “economic growth” in the sense of the total volume of monetized economic activity. But this presumes the use of “intellectual property” and other forms of artificial scarcity to capitalize efficiency improvements as a source of rents, rather than allowing market competition to pass reduced costs on to the consumer in the form of lower prices.'

"Most economists cleave to the notion that resources are scarce, and that economies develop as a means of dealing with this scarcity."

"Today, after starting three successful companies –  Gartner, Soundview, and Giga Research — Gartner brings to the industry an unparalleled perspective on the trends that are driving technology. And one trend that he thinks is likely to impact a wide array of clients and companies is the shift toward curation as a mechanism to manage the vast and overwhelming flow of information."

"Telling people at parties that you are an 'Information Architect' generally leads to blank looks all round. Here is a brief overview of 'the art and science of organising websites'."

"Forrester management has set a new policy that analysts with personally-branded research blogs must take the blog down or redirect readers to a Forrester-branded role-based blogs."

Database of social media policies.

"It was interesting to analyze the list of characteristics presented by different people for hyperlocal websites and find common terms, common ideas, a common ground, even in the choice of words. Here’s what i learned, organized around a few main concepts."

"The decision follows the successful use of CoveritLive's liveblogging software and Twitter since December to send minute-by-minute updates from full council meetings in Manchester, Trafford and Bury and from the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities and Manchester police meetings."

"16 Million UK Mobile Users Viewed Nearly 7 Billion Pages of Online Content via their Mobile Browser in Preliminary Data for December 2009"

"It turns out, that compared with Web search access, Google news access goes up during the day, down in the evening, and way, way down over the weekend… 'What that says to me  is that reading the news online is a worktime activity. … Most people aren't paid to sit at a computer and read newspapers. They're snatching things throughout the day'."

"Finally some clarity after months of mystery about possible affiliates and constant questions about whether Journalism Online is reality or vaporware. A private beta has been underway for weeks but JO founders Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz declined until now to identify any of the affiliates taking part."

"We're developing a new way to reveal and explore content on the Guardian site, according to 'social signals' from users. Meg Pickard and Dan Catt, who have been working on the project, explain what this means and why we're excited about it."

"See Also is a collection of the best of the web, including comment, newspaper editorials and analysis."

"Split testing is an integral part of pay-per-click marketing and if you want to succeed in this game you simply can’t go without it. If you don’t split test your ads, landing pages, sales pages and other elements of your marketing you will loose money and you won’t be able to survive in a competitive market."

"When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the "Starred" section of Google News."

"So Clark had another go, asking Murdoch to comment on the speech, in which his editor-in-chief last week warned that shutting journalism behind a wall risks suffocating the 'democracy of ideas' and 'sleepwalking in to oblivion'. 'I think that sounds like B.S. to me,' Murdoch replied, again curtly."

"Telegraph Media Group's digital editor has signalled a strategic change for the publisher's online business, moving away from chasing the maximum number of web users to focus on the 'three Cs' content, commerce and clubs."

"we've gone through all the latest and greatest Rails 3.0 related links and put together a ton of them to help you on your way with the recently released Rails 3.0 beta. Enjoy!"

"You thought we were never going to get to this day, didn’t you? Ye of little faith. Because here is the first real, public release of Rails 3.0 in the form of a beta package that we’ve toiled long and hard over."

"Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%."

Victor Wong, CEO, PaperG: "Most companies working on solving 'local' have so far focused on ways to provide more and better-targeted local news. But by defining “news” in such a narrow and traditional way, they all face two big problems: the high cost of content production and the lack of contextually relevant advertisers."

"With its Q4 earnings less worse than expected, AOL (NYSE: AOL) chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong led off the company’s first earnings call in a decade highlighting the strategy since the Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) spinoff, including launching the freelance marketplace Seed.com and the $36.5 million acquisition of StudioNow. "

"Time spent on Facebook soared to 27.6 billion minutes in December, up from 17.8 billion minutes in October, according to data from comScore. (In December 2008, it was just 9.3 billion minutes.) Google, where users spent 36 billion minutes in December, managed consistent slow growth in the second half of the year. Meanwhile, online rivals like Yahoo, Microsoft, and MySpace are all down."