links for 2007-02-28
Posted on February 28, 2007
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A list of the ten fastest growing News and Media websites (among the top 100 in January) is included below. Digg.com was the fastest growing website year on year in January among the top 100 News and Media websites, with its market share of UK internet vi
links for 2007-02-27
Posted on February 27, 2007
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“Google, Yahoo and most other blind networks sit in the middle and own the advertiser relationships,” said Henry Vogel, the chief revenue officer of Quigo, which was founded in Israel in 2001. “By outsourcing their performance marketing programs to them,
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Last year the Financial Times newspaper and website saw profits jump by £9m to £11m due to rising advertising and a raft of cost cuts - including axing 50 journalists and the creation of an integrated web and newspaper newsroom. Sales were up 8% to £23
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The Guardian’s website was visited by 15.7 million people internationally in January for the first time, with the ABCe-audited figures certifying UK unique-user numbers for the first time. The site had 5.3 million UK unique users in January.
Tagging and The Scotsman Digital Archive
Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Archive, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Tools and Services, User Generated, del.icio.us | Leave a Comment
Following on from some of the issues raised in “When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing“.
The team behind the Scotsman Digital Archive - a searchable archive of The Scotsman newspaper from 1817-1950 developed during 2005 - http://archive.scotsman.com/ - developed functionality that allows users to “clip” and “tag” articles of interest that they might want to get back to later.
This is important in the context of a relatively large repository - and especially important when searching across text extracted via OCR from historical material.
The tagging functionality allows users to organise, group and locate articles easily and was quickly adopted by the user community as the benefits were substantial and obvious.
Clearly this tagging adds a great deal of value to the archive, providing some structure and pathways to difficult to find or significant material that could ultimately benefit the wider community of users.
The next obvious stage of development would have been to develop the social/community side of this by allowing users to share their tags with other users, make them public and connect with each other. This reinforces the principle that the best way to get users to add value to data is to do it in such a way that they don’t realise they are doing so - I guess this is the same as saying provide a clear incentive (see Amazon, Google Maps, Listal.com etc). It also goes without saying that it should be as pain-free as possible.
The other point to note here is that in certain circumstances you can get users to tag for the greater good - and not just as a by-product of some personal benefit. You can see this in del.icio.us where individuals can develop into experts through their consistent and regular tagging of material on specific subject areas. These experts can eventually develop a “network” of like minded indivuduals and attract “fans” who track what they are tagging via RSS. This network effect is one of the most powerful aspects of del.icio.us. The profile that the experts receive from their peers within the community is a great incentive to continue tagging.
[Disclosure: Please note author is former General Manager of scotsman.com.]
Concierge.com goes mobile - including guides to over 200 destinations
Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Entertainment, Mobile, Sites I Use, Tools and Services, Travel | Leave a Comment
Spotted a brief reference to that fact that concierge.com was going mobile in the Wall Street Journal.
“Go to Concierge.com on your mobile device to get free access to nearly 200 destination guides, plus weather updates, stunning travel images to wallpaper your screen, and Condé Nast Traveler’s Gold List of the top hotels in the world”.
The guides are very good - for example see Amalfi Coast. From my Nokia E61 it looked like it was just the standard web page - rather than being optimised for this particular device - although it functioned quite well the scrolling made it unworkable. I think the idea is that you find the destination guide or whatever you want and then get it sent to your phone - you can do this from your desktop machine or mobile although I couldn’t get it work for my UK phone on the T-Mobile network.
Quigo challenges Google and Yahoo in contextual search market
Posted on February 27, 2007
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The International Herald Tribune reports on how Quigo Technologies is challenging Google and Yahoo in the contextual advertising space as they claim to give publishers more control and provide greater transparency.
This and the ability to target specific sites is good but the big benefit as far as I can see is that Quigo allows publishers to manage the relationship with the advertiser - it means that they are not handing existing relationships from their own sales teams to Google or Yahoo.
“Google, Yahoo and most other blind networks sit in the middle and own the advertiser relationships,” said Henry Vogel, the chief revenue officer of Quigo, which was founded in Israel in 2001. “By outsourcing their performance marketing programs to them, publishers get a check but little else. They don’t really build any longer-lasting strategic assets.”
I spoke to Quigo last year after they had signed up ESPN but at the time they were not ready to operate in Europe.
links for 2007-02-26
Posted on February 26, 2007
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List & rate get recommendations, connect with friends, meet new people.
List the stuff you love : Movies, music, games and books + more! Get recommendations
Get recommendations based on your item ratings. Connect with friends
See what your friend
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Good overview of the media market in south Africa - online financial services and the impact on newspaper circulation.
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Welcome to the Births Deaths and Marriages Exchange for Scotland ~ a free resource for Scotland genealogy and Scottish family history. For anyone researching their family history in Scotland, the aim of the Exchange is to provide a free resource for shari
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“I’ve always thought record companies believed they financed the music industry, manufactured and distributed pieces of plastic and did the marketing. The reality, in my view, is that I don’t see them doing any marketing. And if manufacturing and distribu
ABC launch report to measure print and online audience
Posted on February 26, 2007
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ABC has announced the launch of a new system that will allow publishers to measure audience across print and online.
The Group Product Report, which launches today, is billed as a tool for media owners to publicise their ABC-audited and verified figures across media platforms, all on the same report.
The Guardian and News International have already agreed to provide Group Product Reports.
U.S. traffic to UK Newspaper Web Sites - Quantcast v Compete
Posted on February 26, 2007
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Following on from the recent article by Matt Marshall on VentureBeat - “Traffic measuring continued: Why Compete doesn’t work, and why Quantcast does“. I take on board the comments Mark makes but it turns out compete.com and quantcast.com are remarkably consistent in terms of measuring the volume of U.S. Unique Users to UK newspaper web sites. I guess that they might not be accurate in terms of actual numbers but they should be in terms of overall rank (unless one or more of them have the tracking pixel from quantcast.com).
| Unique Visitors from U.S. | |||
| Rank | News Site | www.compete.com | www.quantcast.com |
| 1 | guardian.co.uk | 1,781,531 | 1,800,000 |
| 2 | dailymail.co.uk | 1,314,027 | 1,400,000 |
| 3 | timesonline.co.uk | 1,310,784 | 1,300,000 |
| 4 | telegraph.co.uk | 840,806 | 843,709 |
| 5 | independent.co.uk | 671,007 | 709,228 |
| 6 | Thesun.co.uk | 656,315 | 592,674 |
| 7 | ft.com | 575,770 | 634,923 |
| 8 | scotsman.com | 490,604 | 549,443 |
| 9 | Themirror.co.uk | 154,987 | 120,994 |
| 10 | Theherald.co.uk | 25,889 | 19,446 |
Interesting that Quantcast seems to round the Unique User numbers when it gets into the millions. Need to do some more work on rank, visit duration, pages per visit etc. Also need to get stats from alexaholic.com.
New top level domain for mobile surfing
Posted on February 26, 2007
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The International Herald Tribune reports on DotMobi - a new top level domain for sites that have been configured especially for mobile devices/cell phones.
Though still relatively unknown, dotMobi, which is based in Dublin, is backed by a powerful group of investors including Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica, Telecom Italia Mobile, Google, Microsoft and the GSM Association, which represents 700 cellphone operators around the world.
Sounds like a bad idea on many levels. The article goes on to states that:
The World Wide Web Consortium, know as W3C, an organization that defines standards for the Web, and other proponents of “device neutrality” have argued that the technology already exists to send tailored content from existing Internet sites to specific devices with different screen sizes. The situation is further muddled, W3C argues, by the question of whether dot-mobi Web pages will link only to other dot-mobi pages.
More than one million unique, historical newspaper pages online …
Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Good Things, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment
Announced on the 15th February via press release, Small Town Papers Inc. have partnered with World Vital Records, Inc., to make over one million newspaper pages from small towns across America available and searchable online.
The press release states that:
“We selected World Vital Records to distribute our collection of small-town newspapers because of their commitment to the millions of people who want to research their family history,” said Paul Jeffko, president and founder of SmallTownPapers, Inc. “World Vital Records is delivering on their mission to help people discover their ancestors with an incredible collection of exclusive materials, including SmallTownPapers.”
Current editions are available from over 250 small town newspapers and users can also search the archive. Users have to register to access added benefits such as the “Scrap Book” and “Notifiers”. The revenue model appears to be advertising rather than subscription based and the site looks to be reasonably well monetised via display and contextual (Google AdSense) advertising deals. Geo-targeting of ads also appears to be pretty good - while looking at an edition of the Mifflinburg Telegraph from November 10th 2005 I was getting sky and banner ads from The Sun (UK national) and Talk Talk (UK Broadband service).
There is a “order a digital reprint” link but it doesn’t work so I guess there are plans to offer this service online eventually.
They are looking to extend the service. On the ”For Publishers” page it states:
“Would you like your newspaper to be included in the SmallTownPapers web site? We can convert your paper or film archives to a fully-searchable image archive. Small community newspapers can participate with little or no cost.”
As far as I could tell boolean operators are not available in search and pages are not segemented into individual articles for search or display purposes - meaning you can’t search for “apples AND pears” within the same article. If you search for ”Edinburgh garden” you get “Edinburgh” from one article and “garden” from another which makes it harder to find things.
Saying that - not bad for a free service.
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