Kevin: An interesting chart based on Forrester Research that looks at online behaviours across age groups in the US. One thing that is very interesting is the relatively small group of "Collectors", those who use RSS and tag content to gather information. Even amongst the very active Gen Y group (22-26), the highest group of collectors is 18%.
Kevin: Wired's iPad app will see a price cut for its second issue, from $4.99 to $3.99. The first issue was seen as a huge success, selling 95,000 copies, despite a lot of criticism about how it looks, works and how large it is (weighing in at 500MB) Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and the author of Free, said that he prefers a freemium model where some parts of the magazine would be free with premium elements that people could buy. However, as Peter Kafka takes pains to highlight, Anderson has no control over pricing.
Kevin: Good piece looking at location and social networking. I've started using FourSquare recently, and as a Nokia smartphone owner, I suffer from lack of a native app. I know that I'm just starting to scratch the surface of it, but for me, FourSquare is too narrowly pitched. I find the game element artificial. FourSquare has a lot of mindshare at the moment, but for me Twitter has more utility. (Having said that I didn't quite see the utility of Twitter when I first started using it.) I do agree that the promoted tweets based on your location has great potential as a revenue stream for Twitter.
Kevin: In a move that echoes the FutuRoom in Prague and its network of news cafés across the Czech Republic, "Freehold InJersey, a community news blog run by the Asbury Park Press and Gannett, has launched a coffeeshop newsroom in conjunction with Zebu Forno Cafe in Freehold, New Jersey". "We hope that having a 'newsroom' in the center of town will encourage folks to drop by, talk to me and the other writers, and participate in a community conversation," said Colleen Curry, the editor of the website and creator of the partnership. It's smart, but the thing that sets the FutuRoom's cafés apart is that they also derive revenue from the cafés so that what was previously a cost centre, a newsroom, becomes a revenue stream.
Kevin: Stunning move by Hulu. $10 a month buys you access (in the US) to every espisode of every show that its affiliated networks provide. That's on your computer, your iPhone, your iPad, some internet-connected TVs and soon the XBox and PS3. Woah. It will still have ads, but who cares? This is possibly the most clueful move by big content yet. Quincy Smith, a former chief executive of CBS Interactive and a founding partner of Code Advisors, said: " And it certainly concedes that the future of TV is video, not just on-air or on-demand, but also online and on mobile.”
Kevin: Dominic Ponsford with Press Gazette reports on a novel new scheme by the Economist that sends a text message to readers in the UK to see summaries of the stories in the next issue and order a copy directly from their mobile phone. The copy is delivered overnight. The Economist boosted their sales 1.2% in the UK, even thought they consider the market "mature".
Kevin: An interesting article on Advertising Age about click through rates. One thing that's important beyond the narrow focus on this article is that sometimes the easiest to measure statistics aren't necessarily the most important statistics. Indeed, it might say something just about that ease of measurement rather than its relevance. The take-away from this research: "While click-through rates showed a strong positive correlation with interaction rates and brand favorability, only a minor positive correlation could be demonstrated between CTR and purchase intent. "
Kevin: J.D. Lasica looks at an event at Google to look for ways to pay for journalism. It's a good post without a real conclusion other than "What's clear is that there's no single solution to the how-do-we-pay-for-journalism problem".
Kevin: A good list of the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. "Among the winning ideas are two easy-to-use tool sets for journalists and bloggers to illustrate raw data visually; tools to create “real time ads” that display a business’ latest Twitter or Facebook update; a place for the public to pitch and pay for stories on public radio; a mobile application that enables residents to geo-tag ideas for improving their neighborhood."
Kevin: John Naughton has an excellent meditation about the internet and the pervasive search for easy answers. We're living through a revolution. Get used to it. As he writes, disruption is a feature not a bug. "By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises." It's an excellent piece that looks at a number of the disruptive trends online such as how to deal with information abundance, which upends traditional economics that attempts to deal with the allocation of scrace resources.