Kevin: Nicholas Carr has a very smart post looking at some of the economic theory behind the New York Times' paid content plans. The idea is based on Hal Varian's concept of "versioning" for digital goods. "One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction."

Kevin: A look at a hybrid pro-am hyperlocal project in the Czech Republic called Futuroom. Google, mobile phone company O2, Atex and investment and media group PPF. The project will work with internet cafes around the country. Journalists will work there, giving them a place to file stories but also interact with members of the public.

Kevin: Excellent piece on the BBC College of Journalism site. Michael Blastland writes: "Perhaps the biggest effect will be not on broadcasters or other media, but on the public, once used to thinking that data was served up by big media, now helped to see that it can be easily, colourfully obtained, with scope for interaction, at a high level of detail and relevance."

There is a phrase sometimes heard nowadays – data-driven journalism. Is it already out of date? My question is – I admit to mischievous provocation – if you have a data-driven public with endless goodies to choose from, will you need the journalist?

Kevin: The New York Times digital paid content plans could create a conflict between its subscription department and its advertising deparment.

Kevin: Jason Schwartz warns content companies looking for a lifeline from Apple. Steve Jobs is building a "closed digital neighbourhood where Apple controls who makes money and who doesn't".

Kevin: Simon Waldman looks at Kodak responded to the shift to digital. He concludes:
* There are rarely simple solutions to profound structural problems
* Short term competitive pressures can’t be ignored, but nor can they be allowed to obscure long term strategic challenges
* Redefining ‘what business your in’, only works if it is credible financially, as well as conceptually
* Beware hybrid solutions that reframe disruptive forces as growth opportunities – they are often too good to be true

Kevin: A dynamite post by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic looking at not only Google's struggles with Chinese cyber power but more broadly the US. The first line is a bombshell: "U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that December's mass cyber attack against 33 American companies was most likely the result of a coordinated espionage campaign endorsed by the Chinese government." Even further down in the post Ambinder talks about differences in US and China cyber security stances. He asks: "If China is so intent on stealing stuff from us, why haven't we (the US) responded?" Fascinating post. The Atlantic with Ambinder and James Fallows has been an excellent source on Google-China-US.

Kevin: An excellent analysis of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's address on internet freedom, coming on heels of Google's threat to quit China if it cannot operate an uncensored search engine in that country. Mark Lynch (long known for his Middle East blog Abu Aardvark) cautions of a moral hazard of suggesting that we might support internet activists. "It's great to support and encourage internet activists and protestors of all sorts. But such support can lead them to take some very risky, dangerous activities against their brutal governments, perhaps in the expectation that the United States will protect them from the consequences. Will it?"

Kevin: Nick Bilton of the New York Times Bits blog has an excellent look at what I've often called the "networked filter" of social media. He discusses the issue of curation and filtering. He write: Surfing the Web has become even more of a challenge as more content appears online. We are asked to navigate any number of new obstacles when finding new content: which site should I click through to read the latest earthquake news? How many blogs should I check on a daily basis? What if I miss something? Do I read the comments everywhere, too? Which social network should I update in the morning, noon or night? The list goes on.

But we are solving the problem, through our aggregation."

Kevin: Whether you're pro- or anti-paid content, FT Managing Director Rob Grimshaw's comments are well worth a read. One important point in terms of online advertising that he flags up is that it shouldn't be seen in monolithic terms. "Grimshaw’s firm belief, as he has said before, is that newspapers cannot live by advertising alone.

Citing IAB figures from last year (available at this link), he said it was paid-for search that took “by far” the bulk of the money: around 62 per cent; with 19 per cent to classified; and only 18 per cent to online advertising spend."

Kevin: While overall, Arnon Miskin is optimistic about Apple's upcoming media slate, he does have a word of warning for content companies. "But over the next few years, content creators and audience aggregators should be careful about how they deal with the e-readers or it could turn into primarily a bonanza for Apple, as the Kindle may be primarily a bonanza for Amazon."

Kevin: Kevin Rose talks about changes coming to Digg, the popular 'read-submit-vote-comment' site, as Stan Schroeder at Mashable puts it. The stories will now be displayed in a "more real-time nature". I wonder if some of these changes will mirror the Digg Labs type of visualisations that have been on the site for a while. I doubt it, but I expect it informed their thinking to some extent. Whatever the nature of the cases, it does sound like they are trying to jump on the 'real-time' web bandwagon.

How significant is The New York Times's decision to charge for its Web content? Very, says media gadfly Steven Brill.

Kevin: Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridget says: “It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things,” he told an audience at Coventry University’s journalism department, according to Journalism.co.uk: “He conceded that, whilst pay walls are unlikely to be erected around Guardian.co.uk, it was good that journalism was ‘trying different things’.

Kevin: Brilliant analysis by Ken Doctor of not only MediaNews and its post-bankruptcy position but also of the US newspaper industry: "Given the harrowing last year publishers experienced – a fifth of their business has disappeared in a single year, with little likelihood of much of it coming back – 2010 feels a bit better than 2009. Yes, it’s hard to know how accurate the feeling is.

Yes, this could be a plateau. Knocked down a couple of notches, but standing tall on solid ground, dailies could move forward. Or it could feel like a safe plateau and really be a ledge, a landing place offering temporary comfort."

Kevin: A good post from Martin Langeveld who spent 13 years as a publisher at MediaNews and he looks at Dean Singleton and MediaNews after its recent announcement that it would seek bankruptcy protection. It's a good overview of the recent past for MediaNews and some of the key players. Can Singleton steer MediaNews to a digital future? Based on what Martin has written, I doubt it. The group suffers from outdated systems, a view of digital as peripheral and Singleton is "not an active computer user". Not a recipe for digital success.

Kevin: Peter Kafa at All Things D writes: "Here’s someone else you won’t see onstage with Steve Jobs next week: Anyone from Time Inc. With good reason–the magazine company doesn’t have any tablet-ready stuff to show off yet." Good post looking at Time Inc's strategy for tablets including a nice video of the what they see as their tablet future.

Kevin: Alan Mutter goes deep into the numbers at MediaNews and shows how it will affect Hearst. "After plowing well over $1 billion into a decade-long effort to salvage its ill-starred purchase of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Hearst Corp. now stands to lose another $317 million in the upcoming bankruptcy of MediaNews Group."

Kevin: Ken Doctor has an excellent post in which he takes a deep look at the issues surrounding the New York Times paid content strategy. He pulls out a great bit of detail in the announcement that I haven't seen highlighted elsewhere. "What does "frictionless experience across multiple platforms," in the Times release this morning, mean? I think this is one major move, if the Times can pull it off well and quickly. In the age of the smartphone, the coming tablet, and (coming a bit after that) the Internet-mediated livingroom TV monitor, readers are already coming to expect easy, and smart, access to the their content wherever, whenever."
I've seen a demonstration of how the New York Times envisions this future, and it is one in which their content follows you seamlessly throughout your day from platform to platform. At the time, some pieces of the technology weren't widely available. However, the vision is compelling if the Times is your only source of information.

Kevin: Amazon has announced a new programme for its Kindle e-reader that will allow publishers to keep more revenue for some of content they release on the platform. For publishersm and authors, the Kindle hasn't been a good deal for them. They only get 7-15% of the list price for digital books. Under the new programme, they will get to keep 70%, but the deal comes with strings attacheed. "The list price for your title must be both between $2.99 to $9.99 and be 20 percent below the lowest physical book price; title also must be “offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices”. The title also needs to be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, e.g. text-to-speech. Finally, the title must be made available for sale “in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights”.

Kevin: Steve Outing writes: "A big theme for 2010 in media will be mobile smart-phones and portable digital tablets; newspaper companies better have that figured out soon. (Perhaps NY Times Digital, with its large technology development staff, is well on its way.) But the Times is still mucking around with the details of its website metered-paywall decision and needs another year? Oy!" Newspapers have to move faster he says.

Kevin: Fred Wilson with Union Square Ventures explains the paid content strategy for Boxee, alternate set-top box software. It's open-source software based on XBMC, and Wilson likens it to "Android for TVs", referring to Google's mobile phone OS. "content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it “on air”…. Boxee will charge a small fee (i.e. lower than the 30% charged by many app stores) for transactions which we enable"

Kevin: Laura Oliver at Journalism.co.uk writes: "Guardian News & Media is considering paid-for access to its paidContent websites.

GNM, which bought paidContent's parent company ContentNext in 2008, is surveying readers to ascertain what price they might may for a subscription to its websites, which include digital media news sites paidContent.org, paidContent:UK and MocoNews."

It is just a survey of users at this point.

Kevin: Thoughtful post from C.W. Anderson about paywalls in the wake of The New York Times announcement that they would go to a metered system. He writes: "The questions about newspaper paywalls, then, are more than simply economic questions. They are more than simply questions about “will the model work?” and “can we balance the ratio between clicks and advertising dollars that maximizes our paywall’s effectiveness?” There are also questions about how journalists see themselves, and whether they can live with the answers that a paywall provides."

Kevin: The New York Times explains its decision to move from free website to a metered system similar to the Financial Times that allows people to read a number of articles before being asked to pay. The system will be rolled out by 2011.
Also key in the announcement, they say: "Our strategy is to build the metered model while we remain focused on making NYTimes.com more compelling, interactive and entertaining, providing many more reasons for online audiences to visit our site and stay longer." They will be working hard this year to build their own solution.

Kevin: Caterina Fake, one of the co-founder's of Flickr writes a loving defence of participatory culture. It's a great post in which she points out that "people do things for reasons other than bolstering their egos and making money". It's a wonderful explanation of why people create things for non-economic motivations.

Kevin: Mark Briggs explain how to use the power of open-source CMS Drupal to aggregate content. He also explains some of the ethics behind aggregation, saying: "It’s always best when users submit this content voluntarily, rather than if you as a site admin just go out and scrape it." I really like the example of a Drupal administrator in Dalian China on how he aggregated photos tagged with the name of his site. He also describes how bloggers using WordPress can use Drupal to easily cross-post. Powerful stuff.

Kevin: "Readbility is a simple tool that makes reading on the web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you are reading." The site gives you the choice of styles, font size and margin. It's an interesting experiment.

Kevin: Fascinating piece by Peter Kirwan about internal thinking at News Corp about paid content options. The real interesting bits are estimates for the "premium" online display ad market in the UK by the Guardian Media Group. A few other things to flag up.
Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International and now the chief executive of Dow Jones, was widely quoted saying beware of geeks bearing gifts and rattling off a list of dot.com era mantras such as "clicks and cash". He says that he's learned a lot since then. Well, most of us learned back in 2000 that dot.com business mantras were bullshit. Quoting these mantras to heap scorn on current digital business thinking is pretty feeble. It reflects how News Corp has failed to develop credible digital businesses, not that digital businesses are without merit.
Kirwan raises some good points. Sadly, it's probably too late for many news orgs.

Kevin: Anyone watching the mobile industry knows that Nokia is facing renewed competition. The comparison's with Apple slightly overlook the computer giant's diversified portfolio. However, it's worth noting that Apple went from zero to 17% in just a few years, and that's after many in the mobile strongholds of Europe dismissed the American upstart out of hand. But the figures are illustrative, even if they need some caveats. "Nokia beats Apple in annual sales ($57 billion versus $37 billion) and market share in smart-phones (39% versus 17%), but it is much less profitable. In fact, Nokia’s share of industry profits fell from 64% in 2007 to 32% in 2009—not much more than Apple’s and less than RIM’s, according to Brian Modoff, an analyst with Deutsche Bank. Small wonder that Nokia’s market capitalisation is barely a quarter of Apple’s."

Suw: Nice, evenhanded piece about why and how Twitter is useful/important.

Kevin: "France could start taxing Internet advertising revenues from online giants such as Google, using the funds to support creative industries that have been hit by the digital revolution, a newspaper reported on Thursday."
Sigh. Will 2010 be the year the analogue world declares war on the internet? It would appear so.

Kevin: The New York Times announces: "NYTimes.com announced today an expanded collaboration with the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism for The Local Brooklyn site. CUNY will assume day-to-day editorial leadership of The Local, The Times's community Web site serving residents of the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill neighborhoods of Brooklyn, N.Y.
CUNY students and faculty have collaborated with editors and reporters of The New York Times in the development of the site – at www.nytimes.com/fortgreene and www.nytimes.com/clintonhill – since its launch in March 2009. Now, CUNY J-School faculty will serve as editors of the site and work with students to enlist residents to cover the news of everyday life in the two Brooklyn communities."

Kevin: "With this first issue of the year, Cell launches a new format for online presentation of all research articles." I'm interested in new formats, and Elsevier is working on a new format for science articles.

Kevin: Google's claims that its Nexus One is a 'superphone' have been dismissed by executives in the mobile phone industry. It's another Android phone with the latest OS on it.

Kevin: A good list of some of the lesser known (and some pretty well known – Chromium) open-source projects from Google. A few that caught my eye are Neatx (open-source NX server, a more robust desktop sharing solution than VNC) and the Tesserect OCR engine. You can OCR documents into Google Docs with a few hacks of the URL. Lots of very interesting tools here.

Kevin: A nice tutorial on how to use Twitter with good examples of the API calls. Basic API calls are really nothing more than hackable URLs, which is something that even non-developers like myself can understand. The only thing I'd caution about this tutorial is that Twitter search API has been flakey for most of 2009. Not something I'd rely on.