Kevin: Danny Sullivan looks at ACAP – the Automated Content Access Protocol – that news organisations have proposed as a replacement for robots.txt. It's an excellent and thorough overview of the differences between ACAP and the current Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Kevin: Malcolm Coles has an excellent review of how to make a better paywalls or pitches to get audiences to pay for content. My big take away is that sites need to clearly and positively state what premium content or added value audiences will get in paying for content.

Kevin: The male-female ration on 19 social network sites including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

Kevin: Dorian Benkoil runs the numbers based on as much intelligence as is available and comes up with a plausible target figure (or at least a floor) for what Murdoch should demand from Microsoft for delisting WSJ.com from Google and handing Microsoft's Bing an exclusive deal. "Should News Corp. drop out of Google? Based on what I know today, I wouldn't recommend it. Maybe some blocking of Google here or encouraging of Bing there might work to News Corp's advantage. While News Corp. has some of the world's leading news brands, including Fox News and the aforementioned news organizations, collectively they don't have the advantages of The Wall Street Journal, a paid publication considered a must-read for much of the well-to-do business community."

Kevin: John A Byrne, until recently of BusinessWeek has launched a new company called C-ChangeMedia, and he outlines his thinking about the new company and his vision. "It’s too early to tell everyone what our first products will be, but I do envision more than a single platform. It will be a network of niche products for the business audience with an emphasis on mobile applications."

Kevin: An interesting post looking at the sameness in blog design. The post isn't just about blogging but also about the sameness in web design. CSS is wonderful for making changes across sites, but it does lead to a lot of cookie cutter design. The other issue in blog design is that people use a few platforms with a number of standard templates. You can tell whether someone is using WordPress or Drupal just by these templates.
I think there is another issue here which is a certain stagnation in web design. This happens from time to time. I think in terms of Paddy Donnelly's call for web magazine style design and a generally higher level of design, it's a worthwhile goal, albeit a difficult one. Suw and I don't have the resources to pay a designer nor do we have a time to do much to tweak the design of individual posts. I think one solution might be templates for different kinds of blog posts in a standard blog design template.

Kevin: Channel 4 innovation fund 4iP announces its investment in "ScraperWiki, a platform to scrape, store, aggregate, and distribute unstructured public data in more useful, structured formats". I especially am interested in the geo-location libraries.

Kevin: Jim Barnett calls on ProPublica executive editor Paul Steiger to flesh out his goal for the high-profile non-profit news organisation. Steiger said one of the major goals is "to create 'nothing less than a new class of cultural institution in this country'". It's a good post looking at the challenge the concept of non-profit news organisations face and what Steiger could do to change perceptions about the non-profit concept.

Kevin: Steve Yelvington looks at traffic patterns at news sites, mostly newspaper sites that serve a specific area. He says that news sites need to look to their loyalists. "Compared with the overall population of visitors, they're far more likely to live in your market. They're keenly interested in your content, highly engaged in local life, and solid gold prospects for your advertisers." Steve has some great advice. You can give your loyaltists options to pay while not shutting out infrequent visitors, some who you need to convert to more frequent users. It's a great post, well worth reading.

Kevin: In Europe, governments are paying to retrain journalists and to provide newspapers to teens as newspapers struggle during the recession. Could such plans work in the US?

Kevin: Umair Haque writes: " As I point out in my recent IdeaCast, the challenge for newspapers is scarcity — real scarcity, not artificial. Can newspapers offer distinctive perspectives, rich with knowledge, expanded into topics, that make readers authentically better off? That's what scarce, distinctive news might look like."

Kevin: One to watch in terms of partnerships. GlobalPost, a network of approximately 70 country-based correspondents around the world, will be helping to supplement the international coverage of US public television broadcaster PBS NewsHour. "As part of the partnership, GlobalPost correspondents and videographers will jointly produce weekly video segments that will air on The PBS NewsHour broadcast and will also appear on the Online PBS NewsHour web site. GlobalPost and the PBS NewsHour staffs will work closely on story selection and on the various production aspects of each report." Sounds like a smart partnership, especially if it gives GlobalPost journalists a stable base to build on.

Kevin: An interesting report from Patrick Smith of PaidContent (owned by my employer The Guardian) of a panel discussion about digital investment. Possibly the most scatching comment came from Xing.com founder Lars Hinrichs who said that the difference between US and European investors was stark. The US investors understood the business model immediately, but European investors lacked understanding of even the basics of the internet (and I'm putting it more diplomatically than Hinrichs). It's an interesting read, and I'm sure will provoke some strong reactions.

Kevin: Thomson Reuters is building itself into a data powerhouse. Not only are they buying data companies such as this acquistion, but they have also made some smart buys in terms of companies to make sense of all of that date. (Think Calais.) This purchase seems very smart considering ASSET4's speciality in environmental, social responsibility and governance data.

Kevin: This is a good look at the Boston Globe's local search project with some very rare candor. It's also worth reading in terms of the clarity between a search product and a search platform. A search product is built around user intent. A search platform serves up related content within a web page.

Kevin: It's about mindset not age. James Gaines is 61. He has worked at some of the biggest titles in US magazine publishing. This piece is a great read of working together to bring the experience of the publishing business and marry it with the digital skills of the internet.
He says: "MEDIA will change as radically as technology allows, and right now the Internet is moving over the media landscape like a tsunami. But the job I learned to love when young was to tell stories, and the story has lost nothing in this transition. It is as elemental and as riveting as ever."

Kevin: A look at two different models – one profit and one non-profit. Demand Media is getting a lot of attention these days for setting up an SEO and trend-driven content creation model that pushes down margins for writers and content creators. It's network of sites is making money by pushing down costs and following internet buzz.
I think that Bruce Watson misses some important elements of the Texas Tribune's business model. Even before it launched, it bought a lucrative paid political e-newsletter. That's an entirely different business than general news, and it's the kind of niche content that people will pay for.

Kevin: "AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on what Web-search and other data tell it is most likely to attract audiences and sponsors." Seeing as Demand Media has already built a successful media business on this model, there is some sense in this. (AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong owns 20% of Demand.) The blurring of editorial and commercial will offend some journalists, and as the story says, AOL will need to disclose marketing involvement in the content. We're seeing audience data drive editorial, and this will increase as companies look for a way to make content pay.

Kevin: This a bad news/good news analysis of the US newpaper industry. Banks and other financial firms have taken a controlling interest in dozens of newspapers including some major tltles. The bad news is that newspaper ad revenue is set to bring in $27bn this year, which is $22bn less than three years ago. Circulation is falling. The report says that banks may bring in 'new blood', although there is little detail in this story about what that might be.

Kevin: A compilation of visualisation methods with brief examples of each. It's a good starting point when you've got data that you want to visualise.

Kevin: "From this month the News International-owned title’s MySun community gives users the ability to make friends with each other, add comments to friends’ profile pages and send private messages. And, in a similar vein to Facebook, users can upload pictures and add comments to articles and upload videos."

Kevin: Kristine has a great roundup of some of the views in Norway of whether news organisations should create rules for their staff about social media use. Great quote to kick it all off: "'The home alone party is over, now the adults are back and they want rules,' said Jan Omdahl, internet and technology commentator for Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet. He said Dagbladet’s journalists had been playing around with social media from an early stage, but now the media executives had entered the arena, demanding rules."
This discussion is happening in news organisations across Europe and United States. Kristine has done a great job of reporting the state of the disussion in Norway.

Kevin: Mike Butcher adds more detail on Microsoft's discussion with Rupert Murdoch's News International about 'de-indexing' their content from Google and being paid by Microsoft as an exclusive search provider on Bing. The most interesting tidbit: "Money talks, obviously, and we understand that the payments could be a) part in revenue share from advertising on Bing b) the inclusion of news partners in adverts for Bing. In other words, you’d start to see ads with “You’ll only find The Wall Street Journal on Bing.com” etc."

Kevin: Brian Stelter reports: "A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast plan to jointly build an online newsstand for publications in multiple digital formats, according to people with knowledge of the plans." It's a so-called iTunes of news. I wonder if this will follow the eMag model that Axel Springer is following in Germany with additional digital content beyond

Kevin: "William Lewis, Telegraph Media Group editor-in-chief and now MD of digital, has outlined the strategy behind the newly created division."

Kevin: Jay Rosen is compiling a list of sources of subsidy in the production of news. It's a brilliant list that looks in great and growing detail at revenue sources for news production. It is well work bookmarking and checking as Jay and others add to it.

Kevin: Investor and tech watcher Fred Wilson points a new technology from the developer of audioscrobbler, the technology underpinning last.fm. Richard Jones has now released a technology called Playdar. "Playdar is a "music content resolver" platform. You put the Playdar software on all the machines you have with music on them. And then Playdar makes it so that you can play your music via the web whenever and wherever you want."
Open platforms and ecosystems are powerful and the music web needs more of them. I am excited to see where Playdar goes. I'll be following it closely and if you are into web music, you should too."

Kevin: An excellent post with some great data and analysis from Alison Gow, Executive Editor, digital, for the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post. She takes newspaper to task for claims that 'nobody else scrutinises our public bodies'. She says that the average local newspaper isn't a regular visitor to magistrates courts in the UK. She is working with the Press Association to look at new models of producing local accountability journalism, and she has the numbers to prove it. She also answers the charge from a commenter that newspapers local council and courts coverage is dominated by recycled press releases. Not so. It's great to see this kind of blogging and research going on from within journalism. It's inspired me to do more of it.

Kevin: My colleague Patrick Smith, writing for PaidContent, has a brilliant post on economic models that work online. Offline models transfer imperfectly to the internet. It makes sense because geographical isolation and the natural monopolies they grant aren't in operation. Content is both plentiful and searchable, and the high capital distribution economics of broadcast and print media aren't in play.
Patrick offers alternatives and makes a succinct but compelling case. Engagement, not just marketing to drive page views, and rewards for loyalty could address inadequacies in the existing digital models for news organisations.

Kevin: Consumer electronics and television is starting to look a like the computer-driven home media centres that have been around for a few years. Roku and XBMC port Boxee are going head-to-head, but we're also starting to see connected televisions with their own applications. The battle for the living room is going to get interesting.

Kevin: A Knight News Challenge 2010 proposal to develop business services and a collaborative newsroom for hyperlocal news sites in Philadelphia. Some very interesting ideas here.

Kevin: I have to say that I'm still struggling with Wave. I find the interface inscrutable, and apart from group working on a project or story, I'm still looking for useful applications that are better than what I have now.
However, Leah Betancourt at Mashable looks at ways that news organisations are already using Wave, including a virtual 'town hall' or 'town square' by the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman and as a content planning tool. I can see how the latter works. As I said, I can see how it might be good for collaboration, especially with either staff outside the newsroom.

Kevin: Kara Swisher at All Things D (a Wall Street Journal Joint) is throwing cold water that Microsoft might pay publishers for content exclusive to Bing. "While it might be a dream of publishers–hard hit by the digital tsunami and blaming Google for the crisis–Microsoft is not likely to fork over the big bucks they’d need for exclusive indexing of their content." She quotes a source saying: "…it's not going to be bank for publishers".

Kevin: A thorough rundown of changes coming up at Facebook. This is especially useful for developers creating applications for Facebook and any publisher who is using Facebook to help promote their content and engage with their audiences.

Kevin: Pete Cashmore says that Rupert Murdoch is scoring an own goal on his attacks on Google. "News Corp is merrily making itself irrelevant to web consumers, while continuing to use Google as its punch bag rather than addressing the radical transition of media into the online world."

Kevin: This is an introduction for a video interview with Michael Rosenblum about local television news in the US. "Michael Rosenblum believes local television news as we've known it for decades is dead. News directors, station managers and broadcast group owners "just don't know it yet."

Rosenblum believes the only way to make the video storytelling model work–profitably–is to cut costs far closer to the bone than any old media company's going to be willing or able to do."

Kevin: Fascinating post by Steve Buttry and interesting comments about the need for 'mobile-first' news strategies. Steve writes: "News organizations are belatedly, reluctantly and often awkwardly pursuing “web-first” strategies. As we fight these web battles, I am increasingly coming to believe that “web first” is what the military would call fighting the last war. News organizations need a mobile-first strategy."

Kevin: Ben Metcalfe (a friend of ours) has launched a new venture called Plato's Forms. Ben lays out the problem: "Well, the problem space we are addressing is the perpetuation of of miss-information and inaccurate information within the online news environment. " This is coming from a PR/product perspective rather than a news and information perspective.

I think about this from a slightly different perspective. It's pretty easy for inaccurate information to perpetuate through the news system (there is increasingly less distance between online and print). We often quote other sources (according to the AP, BBC, Reuters.) At any rate, interesting project with concepts that have other application.

Kevin: "The 3am gossip site – a spin off from the Daily Mirror – has been accused (by me, that is, over at the econsultancy blog) of stuffing their pages with keywords to rank better in Google."

3amhomepage This is despite claiming that they aren't interested in search engine optimisation and would rather build a loyal audience.

Kevin: The Guardian's Andrew Sparrow writes: "Britain's 5.5 million Twitter users are younger than average members of the public, slightly more likely to vote Labour, and distinctly more liberal, according to a survey published today.

They are also more likely to live in London, less likely to live in the north of England, and marginally more likely to belong to a lower social class.

The YouGov poll may help to explain why libertarian campaigns appear to flourish on Twitter."

Kevin: An incredibly useful piece of journalism by Danny Sullivan speaking with Josh Cohen of Google News about a range of issues including paywalls, ACAP (a possible replacement for Robots Text Protocol) and existing agreements with news organisations. It's fascinating reading that news professionals and manangers should read. With all of the news about Google and news organisations, it's good to hear some details from the search giant itself.

Kevin: I met Jonathan Gosier at TEDGlobal, and he has posted an amazing infographic about the internet and cost in Africa. As he writes: "People often only see Africa from one perspective, here’s another. The above infographic details some of the happenings over the past few years in regards to infrastructure improvement and capacity building in Africa, particularly in the area of the internet and cost. The sources are various reports from the International Monetary Fund, InternetWorldStats, the Millennium Development Goals, research papers, various websites, executive market research and more; compiling some fascinating facts about the continent’s ‘infostate’ (trends in information technology and communication)."

Kevin: An interesting discussion between Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of German media giant Axel Springer, and Arianna Huffington. Although some of his arguments echo Rupert Murdoch's accusations that news aggregators are 'stealing', it's difficult to dismiss entirely what he's saying when he backs up his point of view with performance figures and Huffington refuses to disclose the revenues of her site. I also agree with Dopfner when he says: "Readers had to be 'seduced' with new offerings, not re-educated." I also tend to agree with him that mixed models of premium paid information services will exist alongside free. His argument came across as more nuanced than Huffiington's in this debate.

Kevin: Very interesting comments from Jim Chisholm at the Society of Editors 2009 meeting. Apart from 2) “Journalism is omnipotent and UK journalism is better than its competitors.” I'll leave the other four myths for you to read at Journalism.co.uk. However, these are two very important points:
# Regional newspapers currently have a 11.3 per cent profit margin in the UK; nationals 8.2 per cent. Tesco’s profit margin is 8.2 per cent, but no one is predicting Tesco’s death, said Chisholm.
# “This business doesn’t have a profit problem it has a debt problem.”
# “UK newspapers are behind other markets in attracting digital revenues.”
It's not just UK newspapers that are behind in attracting digital revenues. Most newspapers with a few notable exceptions in Denmark and Norway have built digital offerings without digital businesses. They have built audiences but done little apart from selling ads against eyeballs to generate digital revenue.

Kevin: Richard Perez-Pena reports: "Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group." Only 48% of Americans would pay to read news as opposed to almost 60% in many western European countries. I'd like to see the figures for the UK where the BBC provides an excellent free service.
One point to highlight "Americans were much more likely than people in the other countries to say they might pay for admission to sites that offered Internet access to multiple papers." Very interesting.

Kevin: A nice succinct view of what opportunities to keep and what opportunities newspapers should stop putting effort in to. Disagreement on whether video is an opportunity or a money pit. (My two pence: It can be both. It depends on how it's done. Web video is not TV.) I strongly agree with Francois Nel, who I count as a friend, when he says that newspapers need to give up on the what he calls DIY, what I call vertical ownership obsession. Francois says: “We need to let go of the idea that we have to do it all ourselves and we need to look at new partnerships.” Smart partnering will separate the winners from the dead pool.

Kevin: An interesting look at how News Corp removing the Wall Street Journal from indexing by Google might affect revenue. Murdoch says: "The fact is there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. And we’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web site, but paying.” There is truth in that, which is why I believe that news organisations need to develop new premium information services to support basic newsgathering.

Kevin: A good, short list of free tools including image, audio and video editing software, and read the comments. People are offering up other alternatives.

Kevin: Brian Solis writes: "Forrester recognizes that the past five years of Social Media evolution have focused on growth and adoption, but anticipates that the next stage of advancement is dedicated to improving social functionality. I would also add personalization and portability. The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience."

Kevin: I interviewed Playfish CEO Kristian Segerstrale earlier this summer for a feature for the Guardian. He understands the social aspects and economics of the gaming business more than most people I've met. He not only built a successful company in two years, but with the sale to gaming powerhouse EA for $400m, the company is a textbook case in how to quickly build a company. From a social standpoint, he says: "It's all about audience engagement. You create a product, and you nurture it and you nurture it and nurture it."