The Web Week in Review
It was an interesting week. As news of the debate over the possible bailout of the United States' struggling automakers captured the headlines and largely dictated the mood in the major financial markets around the world, newspaper titan Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy and the Pulitzer Prize Board decided to fully embrace online journalism.
Social media's metrics problem
Last week, I discussed the success story of Stephanie Meyer and her Twilight series of vampire romance novels. Meyer's use of social media played a role in the successful promotion of books that have sold over 25 million copies and that led to the blockbuster adaptation of her first book as a motion picture.
Experimenting with social media
There's a lot of talk these days about using social media to engage with your customers (and prospective customers). A huge amount of debate has taken place between those who argue that social media is crucially important to businesses today and those who say the emperor has no clothes.
Mary Meeker and the blogosphere's identity crisis
One might make the argument that of all the Wall Street personalities who made names for themselves in the internet boom of the late 1990s and in the bust that soon followed, Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker was the most important.
The BBC is still not sure how to link out
The BBC has released the results of its experiment with in-text links, and it seems the corporation is still not sure how to deal with the issue of linking out from its articles.
The BBC Internet Blog reports on the results of the experiment, which used the Apture service to add links to the text of articles. 90% of the feedback received during the two week trial.
The Independent launches readers' blogs
The Independent launched Independent Minds last week, a blogging platform for the newspaper's journalists and readers.
While most newspapers have blog sections now, only a couple of nationals (The Sun and Telegraph) have tried the reader's blogs idea so far, so I've been having a look at Independent Minds...
A case study in 'social media' success
I'm a professed 'social media' skeptic. I believe that much of the hype around social media is unjustified.
I believe anyone arguing that every corporation should be seeking out 'conversations' and becoming 'friends' with customers on social networks largely reflects a misguided and naive marketing philosophy.
The information overload threat and opportunity
According to a study recently released by Yahoo, UK internet users are suffering from information overload.
As reported by the Association of Online Publishers UK, the study, which is entitled "Return on Attention," found that 70% of users "admitted to spending hours sifting through unwanted or irrelevant information."
Could online ad spending drop by 40%?
Nick Denton, the owner of the blog "empire" Gawker Media, has some advice for ad-supported online businesses: prepare for the market to get much, much worse.
Six WordPress ad-related plugins
Monetizing a blog can be hard. If you're using WordPress, eliminate some of the time you're probably spending managing your ads so that you can focus on producing great content and finding ways to better monetize that content.
Here are 6 WordPress plugins to help you do just that.
