A weekly round-up of digital and regional media news, comment and analysis from the blogosphere, with a few interesting links and technology thrown in.

Only 9% of viewers find overlay video ads intrusive, finds ITV

Only 9% of people find overlay video ads to be intrusive and detract from their overall viewing experience, according to a report by ITV. (via www.nma.co.uk on 1st Dec 2008)

‘We are punk to their stadium rock’: the independent news sites challenging regional papers

Michael Casey, former regional newspaper journalist and creator of video news site YourThurrock.com says ”There must be an alternative way to express the news and in 2008 for the news to be able to express itself”. While he acknowledges the staff shortages and budget pressures in local media that have resulted in many journalists being more office-bound, Casey has rejected his desk and is currently converting a van into a branded mobile journalism and video editing suite. (via www.journalism.co.uk on 1st Dec 2008)

Press Gazette’s guide to content management systems

Business publisher Centaur has just spent £1m on its new CMS provided by Abacus E-Media, Trinity Mirror has just spent £7.5m on its Midlands newsroom complete with new CMS technology (albeit with the associated cut of 65 jobs). This technology is seen as so important that some news organisations claim it means journalists can be done away with. (via www.pressgazette.co.uk on 1st Dec 2008)

Just f**king Do It (An ABC of guardian.co.uk’s R2 project)

JFDI… which stands for “just f**kling do it”,was the unofficial name of one of the development teams which sat alongside the R2 [new Guardian CMS project] teams. The JFDI team handled very short turnaround work. Mostly this consisted of bugfixes, but it also included minor enhancements. It worked in a traditional Agile manner, but due to the size of the individual tasks work was reprioritised every day rather than every fortnight. (via Inside guardian.co.uk blog by Nik Silver on 1st Dec 2008)

Trinity Mirror to cut 78 jobs in north-west restructure

Trinity Mirror has announced a restructuring of its titles in the north-west of England and north Wales, including the merger of the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post newsrooms, which will lead to the loss of 78 jobs. The proposals, outlined to staff today, will be introduced before the end of March next year, and will see journalists across the division grouped into four centralised multimedia “hubs”. (via www.pressgazette.co.uk on 1st Dec 2008)

Iliffe buys East Midlands free papers from Trinity

Independent regional publisher Iliffe News and Media has bought the Herald and Post series of free weekly newspapers from Trinity Mirror. The titles, which have a combined distribution of 113,000, are the Northampton Herald & Post, the East Northants Herald & Post Series, the Brackley & Towcester Herald & Post and the Market Harborough Herald & Post. (via www.pressgazette.co.uk on 1st Dec 2008)

Message for Obama – the best pictures?

The inspiring (and often hilarious) Message for Obama Flickr group, lovingly turrned into a book by The Guardian’s Head of Communities, Meg Pickard. Meanwhile, the Guardian picture desk have made a gallery of their favourites.  (via Inside guardian.co.uk blog by Sean Clarke on 28th Nov 2008)

Regionals fear £15m planning application ad revenue loss

The Newspaper Society is seeking an urgent meeting with the Government, arguing that new plans on planning applications could result in newspapers losing £15m a year in ad revenue. (via www.mediaweek.co.uk on 28th Nov 2008)

BBC claims local video strategy was misinterpreted

The BBC Trust’s rejection of the BBC’s local video strategy last week has led to the plans being misinterpreted, according to Pete Clifton, head of editorial development and multimedia journalism at the BBC.  (via www.nma.co.uk on 28th Nov 2008)

Yell.com adds more local content while BBC plans set back

Yell is rolling out a series of ultra-local sub-sites featuring town and city information as part of a move to ramp up content across its website. (via www.nma.co.uk on 28th Nov 2008)

How to Grow Your Twitter Followers to Over 10,000 in a Week

It’s never too late to build a large, loyal Twitter following-if you think outside the box. In this guest post, Matthew Magain from SitePoint shares some tips on how you can grow your Twitter following to more than 10,000 in less than a week. (via www.twitip.com on 27th Nov 2008)

Newsquest axes editors and publishers at northern titles

Newsquest has parted company with the editors, publishers and managing directors of several newspapers in the north of England as part of a management restructure. (via Press Gazette: Regional Newspapers on 27th Nov 2008)

Home page (An ABC of guardian.co.uk’s R2 project)

There are two major aspects to the home page’s flexibility. As part of the R2 [new CMS] project they created a variety of templates which could be switched in largely at will. Also, any one template has internal logic which changes the layout subtly according to where a production staffer marks a break or places an image or video. (via Inside guardian.co.uk blog by Nik Silver on 27th Nov 2008)

MEN Media appoints Revenue Science

MEN Media, publishers of The Manchester Evening News and part of the Guardian Media Group, has appointed behavioural targeting specialist Revenue Science to provide targeting opportunities across its sites. (via www.nma.co.uk on 27th Nov 2008)

Build Your Own Slideshow with s3Slider jQuery Plugin

The s3Slider jQuery plugin is made by example of JonDesign’s smooth slideshow script. The author needed something like that for jQuery. Since he didnt find it after a small research, he decided to build it by himself. This script is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5. So you can use it in all you projects even commercial ones. This plugin has been tested and is known to work in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. (via WebAppers by Ray Cheung on 26th Nov 2008)

Flexible advertising (an ABC of guardian.co.uk’s R2 project)

All pages have been designed to display ads of various sizes, and reshape themselves accordingly. This is most obvious on some of the right hand ad slots — sometimes you’ll find them displaying an ad that’s a squareish rectangle, sometimes you’ll return to the same page and find another that’s markedly taller. Also, the guardian.co.uk home page sometimes has ads on it, and sometimes doesn’t. The ad sales team decided not to fill certain ad slots just because they could, thus ensuring there were periods when the guardian.co.uk home page was ad-free. Apart from any other advantages this means that when ads do appear they have more impact, and of course it increases the value of advertising on the home page. (via Inside guardian.co.uk blog by Nik Silver on 25th Nov 2008)

Leading regional publisher M.E.N. Media Takes Digital Ad Sales In House

Leading Regional Media Company M.E.N. Media, publisher of the Manchester Evening News, has announced that it is to bring its digital sales in-house.  The move will allow agencies to deal directly with the Company when developing online campaigns for its clients. (via www.prcompass.com on 25th Nov 2008)

Reuters creates role of comment editor

New agency Reuters has beefed up its comment team by appointing founder deputy editor of Breaking Views Jonathan Ford to the new job of commentary editor. It is the latest move in the London-based agency’s recent policy of broadening out its service to be about more than just breaking news. (via www.pressgazette.co.uk on 25th Nov 2008)

Twitter rejects $500m Facebook offerc

Talks have broken down in Facebook’s bid to acquire Twitter in exchange for $500m (£330m) worth of stock after the two companies failed to agree on the stock’s value. (via www.brandrepublic.com on 25th Nov 2008)

An unformed theory: newspaper business models

There’s a lot of talk about new business models, about the market not caring if we make money, about there being no right to a job in a newsroom. There’s a lot of talk about regional newspapers having less than five years. (via Subbed Out? by Sam Shepherd on 12th Nov 2008)

How many 25-year-olds you know buy a newspaper?

“I hate to admit it, but newspapers as they exist today have probably had their chips. Maybe not tomorrow, or next month, or even next year – but it’s coming”.  Why? Well as Ryan Sholin demonstrates, the newspaper buyers of the future don’t buy them. A weekly publication, maybe. A daily newspaper, when they can get the news that’s relevant to them online? Nope. (via Subbed Out? by Sam Shepherd on 3rd Nov 2008)

Regionals must abandon ‘one size fits all’ attitude to online

“Frustrating, aren’t they? Regional news websites, I mean. They all look the same. ThisisLincolnshire. ThisisGloucestershire. ThisisBORING. What’s wrong with LincolnshireEcho.co.uk? Absolutely nothing, that’s what. By giving seperate name and feel, you’re distancing it from the print product.” (via daveleejblog.com on 24th Nov 2008)

Local online news video – where do we go from here?

With the announcement of the BBC Trust decision not to allow the BBC to go into English ultra-local news journalism, a huge amount of attention has fallen on the existing regional press. Martin has picked a selection of 20 titles with websites – the twenty titles that had the highest circulation according to these August 2008 figures. This includes papers that were not just in English areas that would have been affected by the BBC’s plans, but also titles from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (via currybetdotnet by martin.belam@currybet.net on 23rd Nov 2008)

jQuery.popeye – An Inline Lightbox Alternative

There are a ton of Lightbox scripts used on an ever-increasing number of websites. However, Lightboxes are usually not consistent with the look & feel of the rest of the website, and they still feel like a kind of pop-up, since the image leaves the layer of the web page and opens up a new layer. The author of jQuery.popeye wanted something more integrated in the flow of the web page – a box with a small preview image with caption, the possibility to flip through an array of more thumbnails and, of course, to show an enlarged version, all in one place. Lightbox offers that. Moreover, he wanted the box to stay anchored to the page layout and not hovering above it disconnectedly. The way to achieve this was writing a script which would fix one corner of the enlarged image to the exact spot where the thumbnail had been. (via WebAppers by Ray Cheung on 23rd Nov 2008)

Reevoo’s iphone app comes into its own in the Crunch

With over 20,000 reviews on under the company’s belt, Reevoo is a service that may be influencing what you buy, and what you don’t buy. Founded in 2005 (previous coverage here) the British based startup recently released an iPhone web app. A native application is yet to shows its face, so we’ll be taking a look at the iPhone web-app. Search for a product you may be interested in and you’re given a list of related products. You’re given a clearly displayed rating on every listed item. It’s convenient and saves time. If you’d like to go deeper when researching, or if you wish read those staple reviews the company is built upon. You simply select a result and you’re presented with a clear list of reviews, a guide price and a product image. The format is clean and the information is plentiful. (via TechCrunch UK by Guest Author on 24th Nov 2008)

SearchWiki: make search your own

SearchWiki is a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future.  The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link. (via The Official Google Blog by A Googler on 20th Nov 2008)

Archant and Telegraph in geotagged search launches

Archant’s EDP24 site has released a new local business directory complete with search results plotted on a Google map, which can be refined by distance . (via blogs.journalism.co.uk on 24th Nov 2008)

BBC’s local web video plans derailed by Trust, North West faces ‘repercussions’

The BBC’s controversial plans to launch a £68m web-based local video service hit the buffers on Friday, as the corporation’s governing body, the BBC Trust, rejected the proposals.  (via How-Do on 23rd Nov 2008)

To quote Theophrastus, “time is the most valuable thing a man can spend” – and I don’t have a lot to spare on blogging. I like to carefully consider and edit my blog posts, backing everything up with research and links. It’s very time consuming.

I had supplemented the blog feed with the ma.gnolia daily summaries of my bookmarks, which some may have found useful, but frankly they look a bit crap – so that’s gone now.

But now Tumblr 3.0 is out, and it suits my needs perfectly – you’ll find my Tumblr blog at paullomax.tumblr.com. For those who aren’t familiar with Tumblr, it lets you post a whole range of media to a mini-blog (photos, quotes, links, comments, audio, video etc) – but the real killer bit is that you can import content from other feeds such as flickr, wordpress, twitter, etc – anything with RSS.

So please subscribe to paullomax.tumblr.com if you’d like to keep up with the following:

• TwoPointOh Blog – more in-depth posts and articles on Web 2.0 (via WordPress)
• Paul Lomax’s Links - useful links if you’re working in the web world, and a few fairly early glimpses at Web 2.0 start-ups (via Ma.gnolia)
• Paul Lomax’s Shared Posts – Web 2.0 highlights from the blogosphere – I track 100’s of blogs so you don’t have to! (via Google Reader)
• Paul Lomax’s Photography – a small and sporadic selection of my best photography (via Flickr - see also DeviantArt)
• Paul Lomax’s News – find out what i’m up to – not too much detail, promise! (via Twitter)
• Paul Lomax’s Quotes, Comments, and Media - other interesting bits and bobs (via Tumblr)

My ten guiding principals for a Web 2.0 strategy are now available as a slideshow!

These tactics for success will help ensure your site grows its audience and revenue and maximising profitability by harnessing the power of the Web 2.0 state-of-mind.

Pod1, the creative digital agency whose recent clients include Kurt Geiger, Reiss and Uniqlo, has appointed Paul Lomax to the new role of technical director. Paul will oversee all technology at Pod1 including web development, production and infrastructure. He will report directly to founders Fadi Shuman and Marc Cauldron, and will work closely with recently appointed creative director Serge Manoukian to ensure that clients receive the highest standards of technical delivery as well as the already award-winning design solutions.

Paul joins Pod1 from consumer magazine publishers IPC Media, where he was responsible for digital strategy and new product development centred on mass-market female titles. Prior to this, Paul worked across a series of roles in IPC, latterly heading up their internal digital department which he formed in 2002. Over the next four years, Paul was responsible for launching over 30 new websites at IPC including Marie Claire, Ideal Home and most recently the re-launch of countrylife.co.uk and initial product development on Good To Know. Before joining IPC, Paul was managing director for a digital design, development and hosting company he founded in south Manchester in 1998.

In late 2005/early 2006, the web industry got exciting as it went through this whole ‘2.0′ thing – a revolution of sorts. At it’s height so many fantastically unique applications and websites were emerging, based on truly new techniques and technologies.

Then earlier this year, frankly, it got boring.

More sites than ever were being launched, but they were all so samey – nothing new, nothing interesting – just variations on a theme: local stuff, event planning, a social network for yet another niche, digg clones, sharing opinions, map mashups, and more bloody widgets than you could shake a stick at.

But in the last couple of days two things have really grabbed my attention.

They’re technologies really, but ones with really clear applications that I think will have a profound effect on the way web companies conduct their business, probably on a par with AJAX. I’m serious – this is really exciting stuff.

1. Google Gears - take your application offline (in a good way).
2. Facebook Platform - reach the social masses – the network is now a commodity.

I’ll post a some more in depth information soon, but in the meantime take a look and have a think about they could apply to your business. If you’re not a techie yourself but you have developers working for you, then get them to have a nosey for you.

If you’re not interested, then you’ve probably only just woken up to social networking – sorry, you missed the boat!

For help on web technology and business strategy, or just for somebody to bounce ideas off, do give me a call.

PS: Fairly unrelated to the web, but Microsoft Surface got me quite excited too…

Google have announced the launch of their latest beta product, the oddly named Google Gears (what happened to clear beats clever?), which seems to be a direct competitor to Adobe’s Apollo and to the recently announced plans for Firefox 3.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript APIs.  These will allow web-based applications to store data locally using a fully-searchable relational database (powered by SQLite), with full use of AJAX.

The first Google app to get the offline treatment will be their RSS feed reader.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Facebook is the new Google.

BrandRepublic have some good coverage of the new Facebook Platform launch. Their API has been around a while and lets third parties develop applications that interact with facebook data and functions, but the Platform goes beyond this. Facebook Platform lets you build applications that live within facebook. Facebook is the platform. And with the site growing very fast now, it will be the platform if you want to build an application that lets people interact with the friends. Otherwise you’re just re-inventing the wheel and forcing users to re-create their friend networks all over again.

On second thoughts, forget Facebook being the new Google. Perhaps it’s the new Internet? (Albeit a privately owned Internet…)

Mashable have very kindly created a list of 30+ Facebook Platform applications available now, which include some of the usual web 2.0 suspects such as iLike and Magnolia, but some old schoolers are playing too, such as Forbes.com.

Dpreview.com (Digital Photography Review) has announced today that they have been acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed amount. The site will continue to be run independently from London. Dpreview’s in-depth camera reviews attract seven million unique visitors a month and generates 120 million page views, but founder Phil Askey, who started the site as a hobby in 1999, says he was struggling to keep up:

“One of the difficulties of operating dpreview.com independently has been the balance between producing content and delivering new site features. Now, with the support of Amazon, I’ll be able to devote more of my time to expanding and improving our features – such as product reviews and discussion forums while still delivering the high-quality content that our readers have come to expect.”

Dpreview.com offers in-depth reviews of the latest digital cameras and accessories, active discussion forums, digital photography and imaging news, sample images, a dynamic digital camera buyers’ guide, side-by-side comparisons of the most popular models, and the web’s most comprehensive database of digital camera features and specifications.

As if the classifieds industry needed another nail in it’s coffin, Facebook have launched a new free classifieds service called Facebook Marketplace. It was rumoured to be powered by Oodle, but now it’s thought to be have been developed in-house.

Could Facebook be the new Google? Can they take decent share of any market they chose to dip into, just from having such a large reach? Their photo sharing service is a very popular feature of the site and could cause Flickr to suffer despite it having a fraction of their functionality. If all your friends are on Facebook, why bother with Flickr? The same goes for their event system competing with sites like Upcoming (now part of Yahoo) and Eventful.

Last week IPC unveiled the new Instyle UK website which has been in development from the start of this year and is IPC‘s first new website launch of 2007. Earlier in the year, Country Life’s website was relaunched.

The website was developed in partnership with Instyle US, and unlike all other IPC sites it uses Time Inc’s 6 year-old Vignette based CMS and tools. However it also uses IPC’s Symfony-based “CMS2″ technologies that were developed for Country Life.

I’ve not seen any comment or analysis in the press yet – they’re just reporting the launch as per the release.

This is the first IPC site to come out of my old department that I’ve not been heavily involved in, and I think they’ve done an excellent job – I believe it’s pretty much on budget and on time, and from a quick click around has well tested.
The site has much more of a celebrity focus than I’d have thought, with fashion constantly in the background – but that’s the way the US site has been moving recently as well. Previously it was much more product based. However the US site does still cover more products than the UK site, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until they build up the archive over here.

The launch is being supported by a paid-search campaign – which makes sense since they chose to launch with a brand new domain which would get sandboxed.  I noticed that one of the keywords they’re bidding on is [celebrity news], which I’d imagine is pretty competitive – and somewhere we’re going to want to push Now and Look as well.

If anybody spots any critics of the site, I’d be interested to see them. In the meantime, have a look yourself and feel free to comment below.