Anyone from outside the UK may never have heard of The Daily Mail newspaper, nor one of its columnists, Keith Waterhouse.

Back in the days when print was King, and email was but a rich man’s plaything, we Brits only had to concern ourselves with reading this man’s ramblings if we physically picked up a copy of the sensationalist newspaper and read his column for ourselves.

Now he’s loose on the Internet, and he’s not keen on bloggers. read more

Two thousand six saw the explosion of video blogging and a mammoth reorganization in its pantheon of stars, with Robert Scoble heading to PodTech to do his own video blog covering the Silicon Valley tech scene and Amanda Congdon ditching Rocketboom to do her own sponsored video blog and pursue big-network deals.
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Citizen journalism, also known as “participatory journalism,” is the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information”

Or that’s what Wikipedia says. But can I really trust Wikipedia? In yet another blow to the accuracy of the free online encyclopedia, it was confirmed today that an entry that was deemed to be in the top 0.2% to 0.3% of all Wikipedia articles, was in fact a complete fabrication.

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Now when it comes to making money online I’m no naysayer on every new idea that comes to the surface. I’m not one of those “Oh, man … the blogosphere should be free of the evil money.” Bah! Let’s get over it: You want to make money, I want to make money … heck, we all want to make money.

Fine. So we got that out of the way. We’re here to write and blog AND make money. The problem is that we’re still trying to figure out a way to make it all work.

But there’s one exception to my “lets all make money” rule: PayPerPost.

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Sorry friends, foes, cronies and inmates of the b’sphere asylum – I have a vicious hangover today, right now and last night. You can read my excuse here…

So instead I’ll do a quick scribble of what caught my attention this week …

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Steve Rubel gripes about feeds:

“So when are the newspapers going to step up to the plate and experiment with their golden geese? When will we see more ad-subsidized print edition summary feeds or, dare I say, full-text feeds for paid subscribers [from the MSM]? I sure hope it’s in my lifetime because if the newspapers don’t give the masses what they want soon, an army of bloggers and citizen journalism networks will surround them to happily fill the gaps”

How bout then RSS advertising actually pays out Steve? The reality is RSS advertising sucks (sorry to my friends at Pheedo who are trying very hard to make it work, and continue to get better at it). I’m yet to find anyone who is making decent money from RSS advertising, particularly compared to traditional on site advertising (both CPC and CPM). Firms like Weblogs Inc can offer full feeds with RSS advertising only because they’ve got enough revenue coming of the main blogs themselves. Somebody should ask J-Cal what his returns are on his RSS ads vs the sites ads. If he gets 10% of the revenue from his RSS feeds compared to that of the blogs (averaged over similar user numbers…apples and oranges after all) I’d be greatly surprised.

On another note Steve, I’m starting to worry about you, you are starting to sound more like Scoble every day…please don’t join the everything for free and damn the money crowd… some of us are trying to blog for a living.

PBS has announced the launch on Jan 18 of a a new blog called MediaShift, which will explore how new forms of digital media are dramatically changing American society and culture.

In a particularly good signing, and the main reason we are even mentioning this blog at all, the new blog will be written by Mark Glaser, probably best know more recently in the blogosphere for his excellent writing for the USC Annenberg School for Communication’s Online Journalism Review.

MediaShift will offer a continuing look at how digital media such as blogs, RSS, podcasts, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and video repositories are altering the way we live, play and work. The site is said to provide a window into this world for the average user while offering enough details to satisfy the more technically savvy, and will offer ongoing opportunities for active public participation and feedback.

“I’m thrilled to be working with pbs.org, one of the most trusted names in media, to cover the topical subject of how technology and the Net are transforming the media,” said Glaser. “After writing about blogs and new media as an observer for so many years, I’m finally walking my talk by writing a blog, and actually practicing what I’ve preached for so long. I’m looking forward to writing about new forms of journalism and media while also submerging myself in this world even more — and letting my audience participate in new ways.”

The Creative Weblogging Network has launched the ‘Creative Reporter Network‘ and is offering to pay bloggers for submitting high-value content.

With this extension to the Creative Weblogging network, every reader can now become an active contributor to one of the Internet’s fastest-growing blog networks.
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Blog and RSS search engine Blogdigger has announced the beta release of Blogdigger Local, an online service for discovering, retrieving, and aggregating local content. Blogdigger Local categorizes blogs and news feeds by geographic location, allowing users to find, view, and subscribe to blog and news content published in and around their location of choice.

“It is well known that Weblogs have created a global conversation, on a global scale,” said Greg Gershman, President of Blogdigger. “But conversations are happening at a local level as well, and Blogdigger Local does the job of identifying those conversations and in order to bring people together on a community level. Whether it’s citizens journalism, grass-roots media, or just personal opinion, Blogdigger Local connects participants in new and useful ways.”

Blogdigger has also partnered with Whizspark Corporation, an online event marketing service, to provide location-based advertisements for events in location-targeted search results.

The initial launch supports locations in the United States, with over 50,000 unique cities/states and zip codes available. An advanced search form is available for latitude/longitude coordinates world-wide. Additional locations, features and advertisers will be added during the beta period.

Main Stream Media (MSM) now competes with other models of news, such as Blogs, according to a new study, “The State of the American News Media, 2005″, produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

As MSM continues to lose audience, the report suggests news organizations will be tempted cut back on news gathering and change standards to compete with the new models.

“In effect, Americans are shifting from being consumers of news to pro-active partners in creating their own personalized news account each day, and traditional journalism is only part of that mix,” said Project Director Tom Rosenstiel. “This amounts to a new kind American citizenship with more responsibilities for the consumer.”

The study offers an overview on the state of the news media landscape and then provides detailed chapters on nine different sectors of the press – newspapers, magazines, network television, cable television, local television, the Internet, radio, the ethnic press and alternative media.
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