Time tackles technology with Techland
It's a blogger's world and print publications just live in it. Thanks to the power of internet self-publishing, mini media empires have been built by small companies and passionate individuals working from their homes. Increasingly, these online mini media empires have complicated the picture for print publications whose online presences have been forced to compete on less favorable terms for a more fragmented online audience.
In an effort to stay relevant, print publications are trying to sup up their internet efforts. The latest example of that: Time's new tech/geek blog, Techland.
The market for paid news: does size really matter?
How much is the news worth? It's a question that's weighing on the minds of many news media execs these days as they grapple with the challenge of figuring out new business models.
Paid content looks to be a big part of those new business models, but there's one question that still dogs execs: just how big is the market for paid news?
Why newspapers need brand managers
It's a subject that turns the stomachs of most journalists. After all in journalism, "marketing" and "branding" are dirty words. But given the media fall out as a backdrop for the global recession, it's time that newspapers, and the journalists who write for them, realise that the masthead of their paper is a brand.
Knowing what people think and feel when they see your newspaper's brand is more important than ever.
What customers want: a benevolent Big Brother?
In the movie What Women Want, Nick Marshall (played by Mel Gibson) has an accident and finds himself able to hear what the women around him are really thinking. At first he uses it to his advantage selfishly before he falls in love.
Chances are you're not going to suffer from an accident that gives you Nick Marshall-like abilities, but fortunately when it comes to finding out what customers want, market research can tackle the challenge.
Sh*t My Dad Says: from Twitter to television in less than five months
Want to break into Hollywood? Try breaking into Twitter first. Just ask 28 year-old Justin Halpern and he'll tell you: Twitter can be your golden ticket.
On August 3, Halpern set up an account, @shitmydadsays. The purpose: share some of his 73 year-old dad's wisdom with the world. You see, Halpern had just moved back in with the folks and figured that some of the things his dad told him might be worth rebroadcasting on Twitter. Turns out he was right: @shitmydadsays now has over 700,000 followers.
Did CoTweet just take Twitter's business model, and future customers?
When it comes to launching a business model, Twitter has been as slow as molasses. Co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone are always quick to point out that their focus right now is on the product, not on making money.
One of the potential business models that has been discussed: brand management tools and data access for brands. But what happens if Twitter takes too long and third parties take over the market?
Murdoch: Google? We don't need no stinkin' Google
Rupert Murdoch is a media mogul who hasn't shied away from revealing his true feelings towards Google. The best way to sum them up? If Google didn't exist, he would be all the happier.
Earlier this year, Murdoch asked cable industry execs "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" His response: media execs should be saying "Thanks, but no thanks" to Google.
Bloomberg gets to work on BusinessWeek
Bloomberg is wasting no time in getting to work on BusinessWeek, which it agreed to acquire last month. Although the deal is not expected to close until next month, Bloomberg is already plotting out the future for the weekly business magazine.
According to MediaWeek, Bloomberg's initial plans are to make BusinessWeek "bigger, glossier and more international". Talking Biz News, whose sources were at a meeting conducted by Bloomberg exec and future BusinessWeek chairman Norm Pearlstine, is reporting that the overhaul would "focus on making it more competitive with The Economist and less like Fortune and Forbes".
Got traffic? Yahoo has a gift for you
If your website gets massive traffic, or you are building a new website and can't sleep at night because you're worried that you will, Yahoo wants to help. And it doesn't want anything in return, except maybe your love.
On Tuesday, Yahoo will announce that it has open sourced Traffic Server, the HTTP web proxy cache it uses internally to serve up millions upon millions of requests to its users on a daily basis in an efficient manner.
Is Google really capable of detecting paid links and webspam?
Paid links are something I've written about lately as the possibility of Twitter data being incorporated into the Google and Bing search indexes has raised the spectre of a much more complicated situation vis-à-vis paid links.
In the case of Google, the rules are clear: paid links are bad. If you get caught buying or selling them, you could find yourself in a world of hurt. But just how good is Google at detecting paid links? If the example I'm about to give is any indication, it's not good at all.
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
