Last year was the worst year since 1986 for newspaper ad revenues (unless you use inflation-adjusted numbers, in which case it was the worst since 1963). Some papers are looking to pay walls as a solution, while others are hoping the Apple iPad will save them. Read more »
In a blog post on its updated privacy policies, Facebook dropped some hints about what the social network has in mind in terms of future location features. But will they co-exist with Foursquare and Gowalla, or will Facebook become the one ring that rules them all? Read more »
While Demand Media and AOL’s Seed get all the press, Associated Content has been around longer and is larger than either one, with 250,000 contributors and two million pieces of content. But CEO Patrick Keane denies that it is running a “virtual sweatshop” or “content farm.” Read more »
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Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. Read more »
Wikipedia says it is close to rolling out a new design for the site that it hopes will make the encyclopedia easier to use for new visitors and will encourage more contributions. The new design, code-named Vector, will start to be rolled out in April. Read more »
The ongoing battle between Google and China sometimes reads like a spy novel, featuring a giant tech company clashing with totalitarian overlords and cyber attacks by shadowy forces. Here’s our take and what you really need to know about this epic confrontation. Read more »
Crowdcast, which offers what it calls “collective intelligence tools” for businesses that are based on crowdsourcing ideas from employees, has launched a new executive dashboard that allows a company to track the predictions that have been made by staff and compare those against official corporate targets. Read more »
A British public health official has blamed Facebook for a rise in cases of syphilis, in the latest example of a wave of stories blaming social networks such as Twitter and Craigslist for most of the evils of mankind, regardless of a lack of evidence. Read more »
Building a business that is largely based on user-generated content seems like a great idea, until those users decide to post what they want instead of what you want. Amazon and Yelp are two of the most recent companies to experience the downside of user-generated reviews. Read more »
Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre auditioned singers via YouTube video clips for a performance of a piece called Lux Aurumque, and then stitched together 185 of the clips that were submitted in order to create a virtual choir composed of individual singers from a dozen countries. Read more »
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Swiss and German privacy regulators say they are taking a close look at the practice by Facebook and other social networking sites of allowing users to upload photos, email addresses and other information without the consent of all the individuals who own or appear in them. Read more »
Technology blogger Amit Agarwal has launched a Twitter-based application called Sleeping Time, which interprets a user’s tweets in order to estimate when they are usually asleep. The service joins a growing number of similar “lifestream analysis” applications such as Please Rob Me and Hunch’s Twitter Predictor.TW Read more »
Mensa, the exclusive society aimed at the super-smart, has come out with a list of the top 50 web sites in different categories, as voted upon by the group’s members. The list includes some fairly prosaic choices, including I Can Has Cheezburger and How Stuff Works. Read more »
A European Union court decision says that Google can continue to sell trademarked terms as advertising keywords, but the EU’s highest court left the door open for future lawsuits against the search company — if it’s found to have encouraged trademark infringement through its AdWords service. Read more »
Twitter, which just celebrated its fourth anniversary, has grown to become a significant part of our lives online, with over 10 billion tweets posted and more than 50 million a day being added to that number. How did it get to this point? By being simple. Read more »
Thanks to World of Warcraft and social games on Facebook, gaming is becoming a bigger part of our culture than it has ever been. Web sites like Wikipedia and Slashdot use game-style principles to control behavior, and some see these principles moving into education and the workforce. Read more »
Craig Newmark talks about how he thinks the web needs to develop a “distributed trust network” to allow users to monitor and manage their own reputations and the reputations of others online. He says this is the next big problem that the Web has to solve. Read more »
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has launched a new startup called Jumo, which he says is creating “an online platform to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world.” In addition to co-founding Facebook, Hughes orchestrated the social-media efforts during Barack Obama’s presidential bid in 2008. Read more »
Hitwise research shows that less than 0.2 percent of Twitter users go to news and media sites after they visit the social network’s web site, which says more about the failure of media outlets to take advantage of Twitter than it does about Twitter users. Read more »
After weeks of speculation about what Twitter was going to launch at SXSW, the company unveiled @anywhere. But even after founder Evan Williams’ keynote, it’s not clear what the new service is exactly, apart from the fact that it provides popup windows on participating sites. Read more »
As Google continues to try and adapt Buzz to the changing needs of users, debate continues over whether the service should be its own separate publishing platform, like a blog, or whether it should be used to aggregate content from other social networks such as Twitter. Read more »
Reuters has issued new social-media policies, but the wire service has made the same mistakes other mainstream media have: assuming the worst, and trying to control something that can’t be controlled, instead of trusting their staff and focusing on the benefits of using social media. Read more »
Google’s chief economist Hal Varian told the Federal Trade Commission in a presentation on the future of journalism that newspapers have been in decline since before the Internet, and that one of the ways they can improve their web operations is to engage more with readers. Read more »
In the wake of the plagiarism case involving New York Times writer Zachary Kouwe, blame has been placed on the high-speed nature of blogging. But the real issue lies with the paper’s failure to understand the culture of the web and the value of the link. Read more »
Four out of five adults surveyed in more than 26 countries around the world said they believe that Internet access as “a fundamental right,” according to a new survey sponsored by the BBC. The survey asked more than 27,000 people about their attitudes towards the Internet. Read more »
Mark Josephson, CEO of hyper-local news aggregator Outside.in, isn’t concerned about AOL pouring $50 million into its Patch.com hyper-local news operation. He says that while they are both going after local advertising, the two services are very different and there’s plenty of room for everyone. Read more »
One in four Facebook users now come from Asia or the Middle East, according to O’Reilly Media research analyst and blogger Ben Lorica — about 100 million people. And the number of users from Asia is growing much faster than any other major geographic region. Read more »
Researchers at IBM found many bloggers run out of ideas, so they came up with a recommendation system they called Blog Muse that allowed users to suggest topics they wanted to read about. Posts written through the system got more views, more comments and more “likes.” Read more »
A recent survey of social media use by Liberty Mutual shows that men are more positive towards and use social networks more frequently than women, but this conclusion is the exact opposite of the gender breakdown that several other surveys based on user-profile data have reported. Read more »
Zoompass, a mobile payment service offered by a group of Canadian telecom companies, is offering a sticker that attaches to any cellphone or handheld device and turns it into a “tap-and-pay” system. It could have better luck than some earlier ventures aimed at the same market. Read more »
Zynga, maker of the popular Facebook social game Farmville, has been hit with criticism on Twitter and elsewhere over allegations that it only sent half the money it raised for Haiti to that country. Zynga says this is based on a misunderstanding about its Farmville campaign. Read more »
After a long period of decline, there are signs that Canada’s VC market may be heating up: a new $20 million fund to invest in early-stage companies has launched, and three new funds will be financed with a total of C$100 million from the Quebec government. Read more »
GetGlue, a social network that offers a toolbar with related content to users browsing the web, along with recommendations from their friends on the network, has launched a new feature that provides the same kinds of content and recommendations through popup widgets on any web site. Read more »
Twitter engineer Alex Payne says he is putting his personal blog on hiatus, in part because of comments he made about additions to the service were misinterpreted. Payne says he will continue to use Twitter, but will be more careful about what he says there. Read more »
A senior Google executive has said that if the European Union continues to push the search engine to modify the length of time it keeps Street View images of European cities, it may decide not to produce any further photos for the service in Europe. Read more »
John Sargent, CEO of book publisher Macmillan, has written a blog post defending his company’s new “agency model” approach to e-book sales through retailers such as Amazon and Apple, but all the post really shows is how desperate Macmillan is to protect its existing business model. Read more »
Books now outnumber games in the iTunes app store for the first time since the iPhone was launched, according to a recent survey by mobile advertising firm Mobclix. The popularity of the iPhone as an e-book reader could help pave the way for the Apple iPad. Read more »
In another sign of how Twitter and other social media tools are becoming intertwined with the world of traditional marketing and CRM, email marketer ExactTarget has acquired Twitter account management service CoTweet for an undisclosed sum. The two plan to create a “social media lab.” Read more »
As Twitter prepares to launch its own advertising platform for the social network, other companies are also rushing to take advantage of that opportunity. 140proof just launched a targeted advertising service that is built around the iPhone and Android apps of Twitter management tool HootSuite. Read more »
As in so many other cities that aren’t located in or near Silicon Valley, the startup scene in Toronto is a fairly small and close-knit community. Now, a VC-backed school/competition called Extreme University will look for startups to “audition,” American Idol-style. Read more »
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