Nielsen: Facebook's Ads Work Pretty Well

Advertising Age: "The study of more than 800,000 Facebook users and ads from 14 brands in a variety of categories shows a marked increase in ad recall, awareness and purchase intent when home-page ads on the social network mention friends of users who've become fans of the brand in the ad."

Newspaper ad revenue plummets to 1986 level

Yahoo! News: "The picture is even more grim after adjusting for inflation. The $27 billion in revenue that newspapers received in 1986 would equal nearly $53 billion in today's dollars."

Why Is Every App A Game? The Badgeification Of The Internet

The Next Web: "What the heck is going on here? It’s actually pretty obvious. Every web company wants to be “sticky.” They want people coming back again, and again, and again. Everyday, if they can finagle it. What is a dead simple way to get people to come back? Make the product into a game."

What Are the Legal Implications of PleaseRobMe?

MediaShift: "The site aggregates Twitter posts sent when a person uses Foursquare to check in at a location -- meaning they're basically telling the world that they're not at home at the moment.

According to the folks at PleaseRobMe, if a would-be burglar knows you're out with friends, that 'leaves one place you're definitely not...home.'"

Angels vs. Venture Capitalists

blog.pmarca.com: "In a nutshell, entrepreneurs and the businesses they are starting have evolved. Start ups today don’t need to build a manufacturing plant (as DEC, the very first high-tech VC investment, did in 1957) to start a business. They need less money to build a product and prove that it works before scaling the business. Yet, the paperwork involved in funding entrepreneurs hasn’t changed to meet these needs."

Understanding the participatory news consumer

Pew Internet & American Life Project: "The internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV."

How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

Wired Magazine: "Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one."

Spotify now makes record labels money

Telegraph: "Spotify has already taken over iTunes, in terms of revenue levels, in its native Sweden. Per Sundin, head of Universal Music Group in Sweden, told The Swedish Wire last year: “In five months from the launch Spotify became our largest digital source of income and so passed by iTunes.”

The service is expected to make its US debut in the first half of this year."

L.E.K. Consulting's Media Survey Shows 'E-reader Republic' Comprises Hungriest Consumers of New Media

PRNewswire:
* The 'E-reader Republic' is driving growth in the book and magazine market and has a voracious appetite for new media. While iPod owners consumed about nine hours per week of new media, e-reader owners consumed more than 18 hours a week.
* Consumers are willing to pay cable providers for access to online video content. Up to 38% of consumers reported they would definitely or probably pay a $19 fee on top of their cable bill to gain access to their cable content online and on their mobile phones.
* Consumers are rampantly multi-tasking while online. One out of every three consumers spending time online is simultaneously watching television, and one in five is simultaneously listening to music.
* Internet radio is finally becoming relevant. 32% of respondents used Internet radio services, logging an average of 5.8 hours weekly per user -- eclipsing satellite radio in popularity.
* If they are online, older people (ages 50 to 64) spend significantly more time there than younger people (ages 25 and 39). Online activities among these age groups differ, with older people spending more time e-mailing whereas younger people spend a higher percentage of their online time on social networking sites."

Google Is to Introduce Nexus One, a Rival to the iPhone

NYTimes.com: "In recent decades, the power of industry giants like I.B.M. and Microsoft, which once seemed unassailable, waned as computing shifted from big mainframes to PCs, and from PCs to the Internet. Many analysts say it is now Google that is faced with a less certain future in the face of another shift."

New Survey Shows Android OS Roiling the Smart Phone Market

Change Wave Research: "21% of those planning to buy a smart phone in the next 90 days say they'd prefer to have the Android OS on their new phone – a monstrous 15-pt jump in just three months."

How Alike Are Android and iPhone Users?

eMarketer: "Usage patterns for Android and iPhone owners were very similar, and tended to differ from those of other smartphone users as well as from those of feature phone owners. There was a notable gap in e-mail usage, with Android users far behind iPhone owners, but mobile media consumption and browser and app usage tracked very closely."

NYC Lost Nearly 60,000 Jobs In Communications

wcbstv.com: "The report says San Francisco lost a third of its information industry jobs. Phoenix, Atlanta and Dallas lost more than one quarter."

Cashing In on Interactive TV Advertising

WSJ.com: "As Comcast gets close to a deal for control of General Electric's NBC Universal, the big cable operator and Madison Avenue think the merger could lead to some major changes in the $65 billion U.S. television advertising market."

Trouble At Twitter: U.S. Visitors Down 8 Percent In October

TechCrunch: "Twitter is obviously committed to making its service better on its own Website (these numbers do not measure usage on mobile or desktop clients, which is easily half of all Twitter usage). But while it fiddles, rival Facebook keeps moving further and further ahead."

Interview with Ken Auletta, author of Googled - the end of the world as we know it

I Want Media: "Google is not composed of cold businessmen; they are cold engineers. The difference is that Google is not obsessed with killing competitors; they're obsessed with eliminating inefficiencies. They're not trying to harm the New York Times with Google News or NBC with YouTube. In some ways, they help them. A reason NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' is reaching a younger audience is because it winks as YouTube downloads its skits.

But Google and the Internet do disrupt traditional media business models. More than a few traditional media executives fervently believe Google aims to conquer the world. By obsessing about Google's 'evil' intentions they spend too much time playing defense and not enough time figuring out their own digital offense."

Is Facebook a Paradise for Scammers?

Newsweek.com: "This week, Silicon Valley blogger Michael Arrington caused a ruckus by suggesting that Facebook itself has been turning a blind eye to the scams because it is sharing in the spoils. Arrington, who runs the influential TechCrunch blog, is on a crusade to pressure Facebook to clean up its act.

“Ultimately this is Facebook’s fault,” Arrington says. He says the social-networking site isn’t enforcing its own rules against scam ads. “It’s like with Major League Baseball and steroids. If the rules aren’t enforced, which is what’s happening on Facebook, then people are going to break the rules. Facebook needs to stop this.”"

Google Declares War on Facebook

The Daily Beast: "Google announced this week that it is putting a few new bells and whistles on its Friend Connect software. Users visiting sites that have the application installed will be able to fill out little profiles of themselves and see the profiles of others who have been there. Presumably, regular visitors of the same sites will seek each other out based on shared opinions and preferences. And make friends. Think of it as Facebook functionality without the Facebook."

Study: Internet use leads to more diverse networks

Yahoo! Tech: "Online activities such as e-mail, blogging and frequenting Internet hangouts can even lead to larger, more diverse social networks, according to the study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The study refutes research earlier in the decade suggesting that people's growing embrace of technology has come at the expense of close human connections.

'Social isolation has not changed that much since 1985,' said Keith Hampton, the main author of the study professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. This means that very few adults — 6 percent of the population — say they have no one to talk to about important matters in their lives."

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter

ReadWriteWeb: "Over the course of the year, there have been countless reports - some more substantial than others - but all with the same message: Generation Y is just not interested in Twitter. The reports generally cited members of this demographic as saying Twitter was 'pointless' and 'narcissistic.'

Apparently, that's beginning to change. Well, maybe not their perception of Twitter, but certainly their use of it. Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33."