George Hopkin › Comments

The Lebedev affair has had loads of coverage over the weekend. But have people looked at it hard enough from the Murdochian point of view? - George Hopkin

They can use it as a marketing tool. But many execs don't even know the micro-blogging service exists. - George Hopkin

"Responding to various recent postings about journalism, including Ethan Zuckerman, Seth Godin, Dan Gillmor, Amy Gahran and Lisa Williams. I think the economics of journalism and ethics are deeply related and we tend to talk about them separately, emphasizing the dying channels for distribution at the expense of understanding the net loss of reporting." - George Hopkin

Most of the PR sections of sites we've studied fail to support journalists in their quest for the facts, information, and contacts they can use to write stories about companies and their products. - George Hopkin

Posting by US journalism academic Carrie Lisa Brown on the difficulties faced by print journalists as the industry moves online. - George Hopkin

From start-ups to big media, it's all about sharing - content, costs and platforms. - George Hopkin

With bosses focused on commerce and ratings, papers are falling behind where it really matters, says Roy Greenslade - creating online material and innovations people are prepared to pay for. - George Hopkin

Consulting firm faberNovel have picked apart Google's strategy and its business model in this 34-page slideshow. It asks, and answers, why Google won't be affected by the economic crisis,how it plans to compete with Facebook and why it is expanding into projects as diverse as voice recognition and satellites. - George Hopkin

The rule that Internet veterans have sworn by for years, that a website should be designed so that a user finds their content within three clicks is not a valid principle, Hoa Loranger told the audience at the NNG usability workshop in Amsterdam. - George Hopkin

Here are ten things every newspaper (magazine or other) website can do to build their business by building their community. - George Hopkin

OneRiot - a social search engine that finds the pulse of the web. - George Hopkin

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?" We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing. - George Hopkin

The BBC is to introduce social networking across its websites, having dropped out of the top five most popular sites in the UK last month. October's Comscore UK figures showed that Facebook had climbed to fifth in the rankings, edging out BBC sites, including BBC iPlayer. - George Hopkin

Following his comments to the Society of Editors (SoE) conference on the meaningless of monthly unique users stats for newspaper website advertisers, Martin Clarke, editorial director of Mail Online, spoke with Journalism.co.uk about what improvements are needed for web metrics. - George Hopkin

Magazine publishing, an industry that outpaced U.S. economic growth by 30 percent last year, is now in freefall. - George Hopkin

"People turn to Twitter during shared, real-time events—these debates and this election was so massively shared that Twitter benefited from huge increases in both activity and exposure," Stone wrote in an e-mail. - George Hopkin

Video games are predicted to become the UK's most popular form of entertainment this year, it was reported today. UK consumers are expected to spend £4.64bn on video games in 2008 - an increase of 42% - with music and video sales accounting for a total of £4.46bn, analysts from Verdict Research told the BBC. - George Hopkin

The most popular blogs are rightwing, ranging from the considered Tory views of Iain Dale, to the vicious nihilism of Guido Fawkes. Perhaps this is simply anti-establishment. Blogs have only existed under a Labour government. Perhaps if there was a Tory government, all the leading blogs would be left-of-centre? - George Hopkin

According to CNN, the fortnightly newspaper could not wait until its next edition - three days after the election - to declare the result, so it took a leap of faith and called it for Barack Obama on 26 October. - George Hopkin

Broadcaster CNN has pulled out all the stops in its coverage of the US election by using Star Wars-style holograms to interview journalists. On the program The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, journalist Jessica Yellin appeared to be projected onto the floor as she was interviewed by the show's host. - George Hopkin

In a bleak prognosis of the industry's future, Guardian Media Group chief executive Carolyn McCall said the provision of local news was becoming "increasingly uneconomic." - George Hopkin

Low-cost entry-level mini laptop due next year - George Hopkin

comScore Releases Top U.K. Web Rankings for September 2008; Financial Tsunami Sends Flood of Traffic to Business & Finance Sites; Facebook Displaces BBC Sites as the U.K.’s Fifth Largest Property - George Hopkin

Every now and again someone brings up the idea that newspapers should have charged for their content online while they had the chance. The idea is regularly shot down but new people keep bringing it back. - George Hopkin

According to the latest data from Comscore, 6.5 million Americans watched videos on their cell phones in August. YouTube-style amateur videos ranked as the most popular type of content, followed closely by music and comedy videos. - George Hopkin

Kodak's second foray into video is way more satisfying than the MC3, its first. A fraction bigger but more accomplished than its diminutive Flip Mino competitor, the handheld Zi6 captures HD 720p video at 30 and 60 fps, YouTube-ready VGA and still shots. - George Hopkin

The founder of not-for-profit reference site Wikipedia has predicted the downfall of "some major household name websites" and a drop in online advertising revenue. - George Hopkin

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do? "Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future." - George Hopkin

At VentureBeat’s Downturn Roundtable event this morning, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr came prepared with a list of the top things that start-up CEOs should do. He surveyed 18 of Kleiner’s companies, and here’s what they suggest. - George Hopkin