There's a really interesting project from Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity which aims to allow users to build simple personal mash-ups for themselves. It's hard to explain but the video below does a really good job.
The Times Educational Supplement site has relaunched as TES Connect, focussing on jobs (as ever), community and resource sharing. It's a great looking site with some nice functionality. Well worth a browse.
Paul Bradshaw on the Online Journalism Blog posts some interesting advice to newspaper publishers about how to increase the traction in online advertising.
He lists 10 ways publishers can improve the offering, working from the basic premise that the web is different from print.
Among the more thought-provoking are:
It is interesting that it is a journalist posting these thoughts about advertising. It's well worth a read.
Technorati Tags: puppy
Technorati Tags: browser, innovation, future
Just reading an Outsell report on B2B media (subscription required - though highlights are available). The report charts the now familiar march from print to online and points to the continued rise of online advertising as an opportunity. The recommendations were:
This last one deserves a pull-quote:
The good news is that publishers can reach much larger and more dispersed audiences than were ever practical and profitable to reach in the print era. The bad news is that (a) reaching them requires new outlooks, new tools, and new skills; and (b) doing all this is a critically urgent prerequisite to success in the electronic era. Most publishers have changed the names and titles in their circulation departments to Audience Development, but not many have done the re-tooling required. Reaching qualified users worldwide, dynamically, on an ad-hoc basis, as their need arises, is very different from building a controlled circulation list. It is critical to know users’ demographics, workflows, and day-of-week and time-of-day behaviors, including what sites and pages users have come from and where they are going next. Advertisers pay premiums for highly receptive, opt-in users. This all requires tools, services, and analytical staff to follow users’ content consumption, response to ads and sponsors, and content purchases. To compound the difficulty, these are still new skills and experienced staff are hard to find, with some early success coming from hiring out of e-retailing, e-mail, and specialized SEO (search engine optimization) firms, supplemented with much on the job training.
Phew! Still some way to go....
The Online Journalism Blog has a post which collects together some examples of the things that the Guardian bloggers are doing on their own with the help of excellent free tools available elsewhere. It should be an inspiration to bloggers everywhere...
Google has released an updated version of Trends called Insights for Search. It allows for comparisons over time of competing search terms as well as suggesting upcoming related terms.
