David Black

"This week we saw the release of Chris Anderson's book Free and reviews from the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell) and the Financial Times. I'd like to talk a bit about the firestorm that freeconomics (fed by Chris' book) has unleashed but first we need to clarify something." - David Black

US: "Right now we’re pegging local online advertising at $14.03 billion, up from our estimate of $13.3 billion issued back in January. As I said, this full-year estimate is likely to inch even higher when we get our midyear data." - David Black

"Almost four out of five European media planners expect to increase their online spending this year, but the internet will attract less than a quarter of all ad spend, according to figures from 14 countries compiled by Neo@Ogvily/Planetactive and SKOPOS (via WARC.com)." - David Black

"The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests... Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction - because your location becomes most important thing about you." - David Black

"Now, quick, find the first 20 tweets or FriendFeed items about the Chinese Earthquake. It’s impossible. I’m an advanced searcher and I can’t find them, even using the cool Twitter Search engine." - David Black

"And lo another 4iP investment to unveil. Newspaper Club is a tool to help people make their own newspapers using online content. The brainchild of Russell Davies, Ben Terrett and Tom Taylor, it allows users tag online content, collect and curate the stuff they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. " - David Black

"OK, newspapers shouldn't turn off RSS feeds like I said here. And here. And here. I was wrong. I feel better now..." - David Black

"ITV 'needs some kind of payment system' on the web, says its strategy director. It will also need users prepared to pay..." - David Black

"as one dies, another is born: Trinity Mirror is preparing a new standalone football site, MirrorFootball.co.uk, which will go live when the new season kicks off in August" - David Black

"we would like you to help us explore and weigh this debate using the interactive map below. " [via buzzmachine] - David Black

"I decided to analyze some of the 2008 data for my former community during the period of active management and the period of passive management." - David Black

"The computer code behind EveryBlock was released this week, and it was -- for programming journalists, at least -- a much-anticipated event." - David Black

US: "The research firm now expects the market to grow by 11 percent, up from its initial projection of 8 percent in January." - David Black

"If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything... I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them" - David Black

"For consumers exposed to brand display ad campaigns, the research found that: One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites, Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages, Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands, Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites" - David Black

"Here are some did-you-knows to drop about Twitter: the average user has 126 followers; only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers." - David Black

"Evan Weaver, Lead Engineer in the Services Team at Twitter, who’s primarily job is optimization and scalability, talked about Twitter’s architecture and especially the optimizations performed over the last year to improve the web site during QCon London 2009." - David Black

"Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper... But as we’ve seen with other news sites, the huge spike didn’t produce much advertising revenue... the Times could only serve cheap, remnant ads to its unanticipated visitors." - David Black

"In the heady days of early 2000, the megamerger of AOL and Time Warner heralded the web-based future of publishing. It would create a digital platform for Time Inc., the biggest, most-prestigious magazine group in the world. Needless to say, that didn't pan out, and here's where it gets ironic. Just as Time Warner is unwinding that mistake, AOL is figuring out the future of magazine publishing on the web. And it's doing so without Time Warner's content assets." - David Black

"Don't try to chew more than you can swallow. Start operations in smaller geographic footprints or niches" - David Black

"This past weekend, Google News announced a new feature to enhance its search engine capabilities. The new feature allows online readers to search for articles and headlines specific to the author that they are interested in by simply clicking on the hyper-linked text of the journalist's name. " - David Black

"here’s what must happen to finally create a viable DIY local news ecosystem…" - David Black

"Mirror Group Digital traffic has grown 80% year-on-year and in May the site had another record month. The Trinity Mirror website attracted 8,693,581 unique users last month, a rise of 1% on April. It had the highest percentage of UK users, 51.62% or 4,487,510 unique users." - David Black