Thought for the day

"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others."

Cyril Connolly

Rich still giving (bless em)

Image via Wikipedia

On the day that saw Goldman Sach reported bumper earnings despite the recession another story caught my eye and warmed my heart.

THE global recession has failed to dampen philanthropic spirit, with many rich people increasing their charitable giving, according to a new report from Barclays Wealth. Among the 500 British and American individuals with at least $1m of investable assets, only education was considered a more important expense than charitable commitments. Some 28% of Americans say they are giving less money compared with 18 months ago, though 26% are giving more. A similar pattern is seen among those givers from both countries who inherited their fortune. But entrepreneurs are more likely to give their cash away—31% say they have increased their giving and only 17% have reduced it.

(Source: The Economist )

Lets hope some of the GS record bonuses will make its way to charitable causes

ShortList gets a sister

It seems that the highly popular and (we believe successful) ShortList is going to joined by a sister.

The free upmarket women's weekly will be called Stylist and launch in late September/early October.

Former IPC executive Glenda Marchant has been appointed publisher and it will be edited by the editor of Bauer's More!, Lisa Smosarski.

The title will be handed out every Wednesday via a network of street vendors, initially in six cities including London, Manchester, Glasgow and Birming­ham, with a distribution of 400,000. (source: Brand Republic)

Good Luck to them. Ballsy in this market, but it goes to show get the product and the distribution right and the audience and then the ads will follow

Old Media lead the blogsphere

A new study by Cornell researchers shows that traditional (old-media) news outlets lead the blogosphere by 2.5 hours when it comes to breaking news. It's a sign that the old guard should chill out about blogs and how they're destroying the news world.

The Cornell research took an innovative new approach to studying the news cycle. Instead of examining a few case-study pieces of news and extrapolating the behavior of the different media outlets from these limited cases, it used a powerful algorithmic search. 1.6 million mainstream media and blog websites were analyzed in real-time, and to see how news propagated through them all specific phrases were sampled from each site and compared to see how they appeared elsewhere--kind of a text-based fingerprint.

By comparing where these fingerprint phrases, or memes, first surfaced, and then watching for them to pop up elsewhere online, the Cornell team has uncovered how news propagates online. To see how this works, check out Barack Obama's "lipstick on a pig" soundbite's rise to newsworthiness -it was the most prominent fingerprint phrase, or meme, found during the study.

The main result of all this is the it's still the traditional news portals who tend to break the news. Blogs followed up the stories an average of 2.5 hours later.

That's actually no surprise--blogs don't have hundreds of journalists embedded in hotspots around the globe, and don't get special invites to government press interviews. That's just the professional blogs--the millions of amateur blogs tend to be just run by a single person, and these blogs often follow the major ones in a kind of "me too!" information propagation wave.

(Source: Fast Company)

How the telephony world has changed

There are only four outdoor phone booths left in Manhattan, New York - and they’re all on West End Avenue. .

Google parks tanks on Microsoft's lawn

Google has sensed a window of opportunity: The company is taking aim at Microsoft's Windows operating system by releasing an operating system of its own. "The system, based on Google's Chrome Web browser, is designed for all classes of PCs, 'from small netbooks to full-sized desktop systems', and will be available in machines from 'multiple' PC makers in the second half of next year," according to the Financial Times.

Google promised its OS would resolve many of the frustrations of Windows users, from slow start-up times to viruses. The Chrome OS will first appear on notebooks in the second half of 2010.

And this on the day Google announced the closure of its charitable Foundation. Oh what irony!

Capitalist Fact

The largest McDonald's is in Beijing, China - measuring 28,000 square feet. It has twenty nine cash registers.

Sent from my handheld

Making money online - Murdoch's latest view

Thanks to Roy Greenslade's reporting of Rupert Murdoch's phone interview with thestreet.com on the subject of all things digital.

We work with a number of clients who are struggling with the challenge of making up declining offline revenues by growing new revenues online. It's a challenge to say the least, increasing X does not equal declining Y in this case.

A good, and very valid quote from the media mogul: "On Twitter: "It's an amazing phenomenon but I have no idea how they can monetize it. No one monetises the web today to any extent other than search.""

No one monetises the web today to any extent other than search - let's just think that one through for a moment. Rupert Murdoch is acknowledging that the hundreds of millions of pounds his global media brands have invested in digital media "solutions" is probably not going to pay back in a "non-search" way. Yes, he's looking at subscription and micro-payment models, but this is a very blunt admission from a man who has been investing in digital for a while now.

Subscription models can work, but only if the content is niche, specialist and unique enough to attract and hold onto the audience. Is this then a view from on high that mass media will not make money online? Interesting if it is.