matthewbuckland.com
	TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA & GADGET FREAK

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Have to say: Loving local SA music at the moment. Here’s another special piece by aKING, a relatively new band formed from the old Fokofpolisiekar. They’re going for a more mainstream sound, I guess. It’s not a bad music video either… set in Cape Town, Sea Point I think? The deep vocals from Laudo Liebenberg, together with a higher duet, give it a unique sound. Listen to the words too. Awesome.

Looks like the country’s biggest party is eyeing the social media scene as a campaign ground. The ANC has a Facebook profile called “Anc Campaign” that is rapidly attracting friends. From a cursory glance it appears to be legit, but there have been so many spoof Facebook profiles, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t. If I’m not mistaken this is the first major move by the ANC into this sphere. I guess we’ll see more of this, from other parties too, now that elections are around the corner. Interesting.

Politicians and social media do go together. US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama used social media heavily to campaign. In fact, many are asking if Obama’s internet presence had anything to do with his campaign success.

Obama was the most prominent candidate on You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Linked.in and a raft of other social media apps. In fact The Bivings Report noted that Obama was by far the most popular candidate online. It also went on to say that Obama was the most followed politician on Twitter. Clickz also writes that Obama spent about $3-million on online advertising, mostly via Google Adsense.

Which came first though? Was Obama popular in the real world, which then caused a swell of popularity online? Or was it the net that helped drive his popularity up and ultimately beat off Clinton …and who knows maybe go all the way to the White House?

Other political parties in other countries will no doubt try and emulate Obama’s online success.

Did this basic presentation at the “Advancing Web 2.0 for traditional media” conference at the Wanderers in Johannesburg (Seff Efrika), organised by Classic Events. They pulled in quite a crowd — in fact by far one of the largest I’ve been to on this subject matter in this country. That’s pretty good news for the industry.

My presentation was on how Web 2.0 can be integrated into online media models. My design for this presentation reminds me of a sushi bar for some reason. Have to be honest, getting really bored of the word “Web 2.0″ (Spitooey). Can’t someone invent a new one? Then we can all sound really clever all over again.

* Credit to Jarred Cinman

Now if my sources are correct — Primedia’s 702 is about to make a big web play, which will involve extending their authoritative news brand online. It will probably entail the creation of a new top level domain and news brand, linked to 702. My guess — and this is a guess — is that it will most likely be called eyewitnessnews.co.za, their radio news brand. A quick look at the whois confirms that Primedia in fact owns the domain and booked it a while ago.

If this is indeed the case — its the right strategy: Leave 702.co.za as the brand to promote and add interactivity to the radio offering, and then for a serious and successful online news site, create a new brand, division and culture that would move in its own direction, ie — it would not be diluted or burdened by the already-strong radio offering.

Primedia already own iafrica.com, a rather big portal with its own news offering — but attempts at synergy between the portal and the company’s radio assets have not been successful. It’s not really that surprising as I believe Primedia to be quite an entrepreneurial environment, promoting fairly hectic competition between the various brands and divisions internally… a structure that I believe produces a degree of excellence.

A post on Poynter’s e-media Tidbits by Paul Bradshaw caught my eye. It essentially captures something I’ve been mulling for a while: When is a blogger not a blogger anymore? A typical lifecycle of some successful bloggers is that they start off as small, independent, opinionated writers but then, as they get popular and their blogging activity goes from hobby to business, they tone it down somewhat. (And yes, I’m generalising).

The big bloggers then start to resemble corporates or traditional media companies rather than the gutsy, independent, grassroots startups they once were. (In fact some bloggers get bought out by media companies or corporates.)

Some of the bigger bloggers just aren’t the one-man-bands they used to be, but have hired crews to write under them. Perhaps some of the bigger bloggers would even go so far as to employ scribes to secretly ghost write under their bylines? The big blog then begins accepting advertising and starts watching the bottom line. Most critically however it may lead — consciously or subconsciously — to a change in content, tone and style.

So, as the blogger begins to feel the public glare, he or she begins adopt a tone of corporate civility more akin to that of a major media house or business. They lose that independence and outspokeness — arguably a key characteristic of blogs. If a blog loses that, is it still a blog?

Now that a popular blogger is bigger, richer and more popular, it makes him or her a worthy prospect for libel. The blogger now reckons that he or she has so much more to lose and has now just become a small — or in some cases sizable — media company. Perhaps the only thing now resembling what we know as a blog is the blogging software the blogger continues to use or that the site looks like a blog.

Bradshaw sums it up nicely via this quote from the book “Making Online news” by Wilson Lowrey and John Latta:

More than one blogger said a key turning point in the way they practice blogging was the moment they felt the gaze of the public eye. Realising that people are paying attention… has led these bloggers to adopt a more careful, dispassionate approach and tone [ Read: BORING ].

Arguably you could even point a finger at me. Although this blog is independent and non-commerical, I work for corporate media. Would that affect what I write? I think there are cases of big, popular bloggers keeping their independence. Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch comes to mind. However, there are probably plenty of examples of blogs that have “sold out”. Perhaps it’s not entirely a bad thing and just part of a blog’s natural “progression”. However that assumes that all bloggers would want to “progress” to be bigger corporates — and many would find that insulting. Let’s debate!

Ruben Goldberg, former 5fm presenter, is a classic guy. He’s always been a classic guy, but he’s now hosting a new internet show on Classic FM, called “The internet economy”. It’s worth a listen, online via the podcast or the classic way, on your wireless.

Former 5FM Station Manager Nick Grubb is now the head of new media at Classic FM — and it looks like both he and Ruben are doing great things at the station, which includes a new web strategy and strong internet push to extend the station’s brand presence. Keep an eye on them over the next few months…

During the interview, a few bloggers and social media commentators, including Gino Cosme and Mario Olckers were interviewed. Mario was interviewed about his rather fatalistic post “Why Social Media Will Fail in South Africa“. I hear what Mario is saying, but I’m not sure I share his pessimism.

Ruben also interviewed myself and Jeff Fletcher about the SA internet in general and Internet Solutions’ new incubator, “IS Labs“, which Jeff heads up. IS Labs is a positive development for local internet entrepreneurs looking to take their ideas and online businesses to the next level. It’s also a positive development for Internet Solutions as it positions the company quite nicely in the realm of innovation and at the same time allows them to grow the web — good news for an ISP. It’s great to see this renewed energy and profile by Internet Solutions — long regarded as an early innovator, since it was launched years back by Ronnie Apteker.

During the show I pitched my own idea for a new online business: a niche social/business network for golfers. Jeff seemed to like it. I’m going to be rich! I’m going to be famous!

Give “The internet economy” a listen here.

So, yes, I’m off to 24.com and moving southwards, down to Cape Town.

I’ll be officially joining in September as the “GM of Publishing and Social Media” for the operation. It’s something I’m really looking forward to. The numerous 24.com sites rake in a combined local and international readership of around 3,5-million monthly users and 65-million page impressions (Nielsen//Netratings). It’s the mac daddy of local internet and it’s hard to argue with the impressive numbers, which also stack up to some big international online operations.

I’ve known Russell Hanly (CEO), JP Farinha (CE) and Tim Spira (former Finweek publisher, now Bus Dev at 24.com) for a while via the OPA and the Mail & Guardian Online relationship, but also stretching as far back to our days at iafrica.com and Metropolis during the late 1990s. It’s going to be great to work with them again.

I already know a few of the 24.com people I’ll be working with quite well — and I’ve have been amazed at the emails and messages of support I’ve received from 24.com’ers when the announcement was made/rumours were swirling about.

New chapter. New city. New company. New challenge!

Much has been written about the power of blogging. We know that the beauty of the blog is that just about anyone can be a publisher. It’s cheap and easy to publish and distribute content on the net.

However, the point many commentators often miss: Not everyone is born to write.

Writing a piece for a blog or an article takes time. It also takes a reasonable amount of skill. You need to be able to construct a fairly decent piece of writing if you’re going to engage your readers. Not everyone has something interesting to say or the ability to craft it into prose, let alone the time to do it.

Enter the world of micro-blogging, the most famous of which is Twitter. The service allows you to write or “tweet” bite-sized posts of about 140 characters that are published to a network of people who have opted to follow you. It’s built for brevity, spontaneity and ease. It’s short, sharp, fast blogging. If you don’t have the time to construct award-winning prose, but want to get your point across then Twitter is the thing for you. In fact the service is so hot right now that it’s buckling under its own popularity.

Some dismiss the service as irreverent. But for those who believe in networks and the importance of being privy to information that eminate from them, Twitter is worthwhile. We live in the information economy and knowing things and knowing people translate into business. It’s a horrible feeling when everyone is talking around you like they know something you don’t. Maybe it’s because you missed the buzz this morning on Twitter? As they say, ignorance is bliss.

Some businesses and media companies are playing on Twitter. Standard Bank provided commentary via the service with mixed success during Pro20 cricket, but their effort was admirable. Accenture has a handful of followers on its Twitter stream. Some media companies are experimenting with delivering their headlines through Twitter, although the content can tend to come in floods and can be quite overwhelming.

If corporates want to penetrate these Twitter networks they have to do so subtly, offering something of interest to users. Social media is largely a private space, and crude advertising can be seen as intrusive. Relevance is key, and so too is a businesses’ or advertisers’ ability to enhance the user’s life.

Reporters could use micro-blogging sites like Twitter for reporting and news gathering. The service made headlines recently for purportedly breaking the news of the Chinese Earthquake: People were Tweeting it, as it happened. The other day I attended a talk by Jacob Maroga, CEO of local power utility ESKOM, and I decided to Tweet his salient points via my phone. I delivered about 20 tweets. Here are some of them:

matthewbuckland: maroga: eskom will ensure we never get there (black out situation) by managing power 04:53 AM May 29, 2008 from web

matthewbuckland: in new york in past…took 72 hours to recover from blackout 04:52 AM May 29, 2008 from web

matthewbuckland: maroga: if SA has a blackout…could take 2 weeks to recover… 04:51 AM May 29,
eskom to need R1.3 TRILLION in long term 04:51 AM May 29, 2008 from web

matthewbuckland: jacob maroga: load shedding and interruptions will be with us for a while 04:46 AM May 29, 2008 from web

matthewbuckland: jacob maroga: by 2025 eskom to double current capacity… all countries going through this 04:44 AM May 29, 2008 from web

matthewbuckland: jacob maroga speaking @ m&g bus breakfast….should be interesting! 04:39 AM May 29, 2008 from web

I wouldn’t have blogged what he had to say. I wouldn’t have written a story as my reporting days are long behind me. But I tweeted it because it was easy to do. I’ll bet this non-reporter was the first to get the news out, even though there were quite a few reporters at the event.

So, could this be a tool in every reporters armory? Should news hounds monitor Twitter and be part of Twitter networks? I think so.

So proud of my mom, Janet Buckland, who scooped Woman of the Year in Cape Town last night. She received the award for her work in developing the arts and uplifting communities in the Eastern Cape via her drama company UBOM! and the dance projects she runs in the local township. UBOM! brings together actors from the local community in Grahamstown and Rhodes University for performances across the Eastern Cape . Proud of ya gogo!! :-)

The semantic web is often referred to as the “next phase” of the world wide web. It’s also sometimes referred to — perhaps pretentiously — as “Web 3.0″. Wrapped up in this semantic web is an appearance of artificial intelligence as it involves computers “understanding” content (eg: teaching a machine that “Africa” is a continent and that “Barack Obama” is person and politician).

Semantic tagging for dummies
Adding semantic power to your website content essentially involves adding machine-readable metadata to your articles or posts that denote relationships and meaning. This could involve tagging your content according to various categories, such as certain words in an article referring to people, places, companies and/or types of technologies. This metadata could appear as a database field or XML RSS attached to the content.

Why do it?
It’s important to add semantic power to your content because it allows your servers to find, extract, share, and re-use the information. Tagging your content in the semantic sense will allow a computer to “know” that Tony Blair or George Bush in your article or post are in fact people, or that the United States of America is a country, and Africa a continent. It gives context to the tags in your articles — and allows you to automatically do more with your content, such as build up an index of people mentioned on your site or call up a map with the locations referred to in an article. In a search sense, it helps search engines deliver more relevant and accurate results.

What’s a practical example?
Here’s an example: When redesigning the M&G Online we decided to semantically tag our articles. As a start we chose just four simple categories: people, cities, countries and companies. We created fields in our Content Management System (CMS) with each article where our journalists would pick out these tags. To save them time we used an automatic semantic tagging service called Open Calais (Read the blog here) which suggested tags to the journalists as they inputted them. For our historical archive of hundreds of thousands of articles, we also used Calais to automatically sift through and tag the content.

Because we were pulling out these fields it allowed us to do the following things:

1. Build an index of topics A-Z
2. Automatically pull in related articles or pictures, based on the tags
3. Automatically pull in related content for each article from external (competitor) news media and the blogosphere
4. Create news alerts on companies or people (useful for PR companies?)
5. Pull out map images corresponding to the countries mentioned in articles
6. Predict readers’ interests and suggest articles to read, based on their previous browsing habits (based on the tags)
7. Create basic tag clouds, showing popular subjects, people and places.
8. Via intelligent semantic tagging — we’ve performed a basic SEO function by making the site more search-engine friendly
9. …and many more applications…

How could it work in a blogging context?
Recently I downloaded two plugins to add semantic power to my posts. The first was a plugin called Tagaroo, also by Open Calais. Based on the tags it pulls from my posts, it also recommends relevant pictures from Flickr I can use. The second was a plugin called Simple Tags, which allowed me to do things like pull up related articles for each post automatically — however its not as semantically “aware” as Calais.

How could this apply to a social media context?
Via Wired magazine, I came across Twine, which says it is powered by “semantic understanding”. Twine automatically organises information, learns about your interests and makes connections and recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it understands your interests and the more useful it becomes. It’s in beta still, but the idea is a good one. One of the hallmarks of the digital age of cheap content production and distribution is too much information. Filters, like Twine, are needed to deliver relevant, quality content.

More
thefigtrees.net
www.w3.org
semanticweb.org

It’s a locally-produced song and music video by the band “Zebra & Giraffe”. I think the production and execution is world-class — and it’s a catchy song. The sole member of the band is Greg Carlin. I find it particularly amazing that Carlin plays all the instruments. (For the live performances he hires people to play the other instruments). This guy has a great future. I’m sure we’ll be seeing lots more of him.

Webmonkey by Wired has a special place in my heart. It was my one-stop dev resource when I used to be a coder, working in London at beeb.com in the late 90s.

It’s a site that’s been around for ages. In fact, if it was entirely possible for a website to be older than the internet itself, then this would be it.

And I’m pleased to see it’s still going, strong. Here is a pretty cool piece from the Webmonkey blog that I picked up today on what works, and what doesn’t, on the mobile web.

Where the mobile web wins: Quick Reference, E-mail, Voicemail, Address Book, Geography, Access.

Where the mobile web loses: Getting work done, Magazines and Newspapers, Photos.

More here.

From the O’Reilly radar.

Have some great breaking news. Simon Barber from the International Marketing Council (IMC) and Brand South Africa is putting together an event, where some big-name international (but mostly US-based) bloggers will be doing a roadshow in the country.

Planning is at an advanced stage. Budgets have been approved and the trip is being arranged by Renee Blodgett (of Blodgett Communications) in San Francisco, who helped put together a similar bloggers’ tour to Israel earlier this year. (Robert Scoble, JD Lasica, Craig Newmark — among others — part of that tour).

Simon, who is based in Washington DC and is the US IMC Country Manager, also blogs on his own blog IZWI and Thought Leader. Simon has put together previous such events which involved a tour here of well-known US journalists. This initiative is Simon’s brainchild, conducted under the auspices of the IMC. It is being planned by local journalist Graeme Addison and is anticipated that it will take place around about the beginning of December/end of November.

I’ve been assisting Simon with a few ideas, names and contacts, but I thought I’d also solicit a few suggestions here. Also, if you’re interested in getting involved in this in any way, then please also let us know here too.

My suggestions, in no particular order, were: Technorati founder Dave Sifry, Richard MacManus of Read Write Web, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, the peeps from Mashable, Ryan Block of endgadget, Brian Lam from Gizmodo, Jeff Jarvis, Om Malik, Matt Drudge, Guy Kawasaki, Mr Wordpress — Matt Mullenweg, Steve Rubel, Joi Ito, Arianna Huffington from the Huffington Post, Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing, Nicholas Carr from Rough Type and Anil Dash from Six Apart.

The list has a tech bias (my sphere of interest) and a US-bias (as Simon is based in the States and is the IMC US Country Manager). What do you think of the above suggestions? Are there any glaring ommissions? Are there other bloggers you can suggest from the US, or outside the US, that you would like to see come here?

Simon will be checking here to review all comments and suggestions. So please let’s have your suggestions right here, right now!

I did a presentation, below, at a Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) forum event on the business of social media. I spoke with Vincent Maher, Andy Hadfield and Ananzi boss Mark Buwalda.

These days, social media is a big part of online media strategy — or rather, website strategy in general. Media see the obvious advantages — but it’s not so widespread in a corporate business context. Some businesses are embracing social media and web 2.0 opportunities with varying success. For example, there are a few Fortune 500 Companies that have embraced blogging as a marketing and CRM tool.

If you think about it companies are “walled gardens”, which is the antithesis of a more collaborative and open social media culture. It’s a tension that companies need to manage, because realistically speaking it would be naive to think that you could have complete openess in a company. My advice was embrace the best that social media has to offer, but don’t compromise your core business principles. It’s pretty much the same for us in the media: Embrace social media but don’t compromise your core editorial principles.

Networking comes naturally to human beings. Add the internet to it and we can do it more efficiently, and on a massive scale. I suggested GIBS should take their forum events and build a social or business network around them. In fact there is a big business opportunity for GIBS to build and be at the centre of an online business network. Go on.

Came across this site while putting a presentation on networking and social media together. It’s great retina candy that will get the neurons in your grey matter firing. Visualisations are something I’ve always been particularly interested in due to the insights they often give you. We’ve done a few simple visualisations around M&G Online’s swarm, by Jaxon Rice, here and Vincent Maher, here.

Visualcomplexity.com is the brainchild of Manuel Lima, an interaction designer, information architect and design researcher. The site says that it “intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks”. It covers quite a few topics from the internet, art, biology, political and social networks. It’s worth checking out.

What makes blogging so powerful is how it harnesses the “network effect” of the internet. You don’t just publish a piece and leave it at that. Your piece is a collection of links that refer people to other blogs and sites, thereby creating audience for other bloggers and also building audience for yourself.

So, to demonstrate: I link to mikestopforth.com or nicharalambous.com, they get the ping, which prompts them to pop over to this post to see what I’m saying about them. They will then possibly comment on this post. (Comment guys! Prove I’m right!). I’ve networked with my bloggers and created audience. That’s the “social” part of why blogs are regarded as “social media”.

So here’s the thing. Podcasts and vodcasts are a form of multi-media blogging. They are, however, missing that vital ingredient that makes text blogging powerful: they can’t link. You can spell a link out, but it’s not the same — is it?

I know Google have been looking into making Videos and podcasts searchable — ie an automatic and accurate way of transmuting audio and perhaps visuals into text somehow. We’re venturing into the semantic domain and a world of artificial intelligence, but perhaps this would solve the linking issue? Perhaps podcast RSS should come with specific link categories, which would perform the same function as a link in a blog. Perhaps You Tube should show a clickable link with the video as it’s mentioned on the clip.

File away. File #13.

It’s probably been the worst kept secret in the industry, but now that it is out on Bizcommunity there is no point in not going public.

I can confirm that after 8 years I am leaving the Mail & Guardian Online to pursue another opportunity. I feel that I’m leaving on a high note, with the business in excellent shape and the new website and CMS developed and launched. It’s been an emotional process for me as I am entertwined with the brand and have quite a bit of loyalty to it and respect for the M&G Exco (Trevor Ncube, Ferial Haffajee, Hoosain Karjieker, Anastacia Martin, Mendo Letlape), who I consider to be some of the leading media minds in the country.

Eight years is a long time for any online person, who are accustomed to job hopping every two years (!) , but the Mail & Guardian has been such a great place to work in that it has been difficult for me to think about going anywhere else. There is an entrepreneurial, innovative flair here that you do not see in many other businesses.

In recent years we have launched 11 new websites and online businesses (including Thought Leader, Tech Leader, Sports Leader, amatomu, jobconnection.co.za, theguide.co.za, newsinphotos), 7 new mobile sites, and redesigned and relaunched the M&G Online with a brand-new CMS. The site’s traffic has grown 9-fold in the last 6 years and online revenues have grown 21-fold. We grew the online department from 2 people to 17 people, keeping it at break even or profitable most of the time, which is no easy task.

It’s been the best 8 years of my life and the online business will continue to grow and thrive, especially with the strong managers in the department which include our online sales manager Bryan Khumalo and online editor Riaan Wolmarans and the new talent we have brought onboard, including the young Nic Haralambous. It also means the company is advertising for a new GM — if you think you have what it takes, then get hold of me.

Coincidentally my partner in crime, Vincent Maher, is also departing for another opportunity — and I can’t begin to express how great is has been to work with a person who I consider to be one of the most brilliant minds in the online industry.

So, this then, is an excuse for a piss up — and if you are up for a party — please join us @ Capitol, in Rosebank on Friday (cnr Keyes ave & Tyrwhitt ave, ph: 011 880 0033) from 5pm onwards. You’re invited.

We’ve added related articles with a twist at the M&G Online. We’re relating articles from external news sites, including our competitors. We are also including related posts from blogs with our articles. The feeds still need a bit of tweaking, but the idea is there.

Just did this interview with a publication. Thought I’d publish it here.

Does a newspaper’s online platform cannabalise the print advertising at all? And what about print readers- will the online platform steal readers away from the print title?

It’s time to move on from using words like “cannabalise” and “steal” with reference to the print-online relationship. We should stop using these words. A media company’s objective is to secure readership and advertising revenue from across a variety of platforms, whether print, online or mobile. It’s really about what the readers want and the format they want it in. Readers will use the platforms they want to use, and it’s rather difficult for any media company to disagree. A media owner needs to ensure his or her content is on a variety of platforms to capture as many readers as possible.

Are you finding that newspaper ad revenues are moving online increasingly?

Personally, I’ve witnessed ad revenue growth in both print and online. If a print publication can offer a certain niched readership that an advertiser wants to access, then the advertiser will look at that print publication. It’s not all doom and gloom for print, as this is happening now. While online advertising is growing rapidly, I don’t see advertisers abandoning magazines and newspapers in any hurry. If I were running a big newspaper with strong online and mobile sister brands, I would be a very happy media owner.

And how does the profile of the online advertiser differ from that of print advertisers? What about the profile of readers, generally speaking?

It’s difficult to generalise as brands vary. At the Mail & Guardian, the online version attracts a bigger, broader readership than the newspaper, which is weekly and niched. Then of course any online brand is not confined by geographic boundaries like many print publication and attracts a world-wide readership. I think online publications should use Google Adsense and other contextual advertising models to monetise their international traffic as well as their archived content. Content never dies online. It keeps being accessed again and again and you can sell advertising revenue off it till the world ends.

Does the online advertisement offer more value, or measurability or better results or more cost saving, compared with traditional newspaper advertising?
Online advertising is both measureable, flexible and — if the online publication knows what they are doing — can be highly targeted. On a broader, philosophical level however I think the online advertising model could be optimised more: to some extent we, as an industry, have taken a traditional advertising model and applied it to an online environment with some tweaks here and there. I think it could work better. Personally I think media owners locally and internationally should come together to create a big online advertising network that works across brands and that is contextually relevant.

Why did M&G decide to launch a new website?

Our old site had become outdated and inflexible. We needed a new site with a contemporary design, better features, optimised advertising and all built on an infrastructure that would allow us to grow. We feel we have that now.

And, has the economic downturn had an impact on your ad revenues, online? Any strategies in place, moving forward, to deal with the economic crunch?

I don’t think the economic downturn will impact significantly on the growth of online advertising. If anything, in times of economic slowdown companies will use the internet to optimise their business and transact even more because doing business online is cheaper and more efficient. This will lead to more online advertising business, not less. I think the online advertising community will be saying: “What economic downturn?”

And what new applications are there on this site? Any new and exciting tools that marketers and advertisers should know about? Any advertising innovations? (Social networking, or cool news tools, for example, where brands and advertisers can get involved)

Some key features include registration of users which allows us to profile users and serve targeted content and advertising. Each user now gets a dashboard which allows them to save article clippings and view their browsing history. We’re also building a “story predictor” which will suggest stories to users that we think they will like, based on their surfing history. There are many other things we can do with the dashboard on a social networking level, which I can speak about closer to when we launch them.

We’re also one of the few websites in the world to introduce semantic tagging of our articles, which allows us to extract data from our articles, including place names, people names and company names. This allows us to do quite a bit of powerful cross-referencing on the site. Simply put — this gives computers the ability to “understand” what the articles are about, which then allows us to do powerful things with them.

When advertisers look to placing ads on newspaper websites, what should they consider, both in terms of format of the ad, and in terms of the measurement (eg pay per click) models? What works and what doesn’t?
There are many sites and models out there that you can choose from. The basics apply equally to online advertising as any other format of advertising. Ensure the campaign is a good fit. If you don’t want a branding campaign and don’t have a big budget then use Google Adsense. If you want a branding campaign as well as the leads, then use an online publisher. I’d recommend you use both.

How do advertisers to the website drive traffic to their ads, and then, to their websites?
Like any other ad — it’s about the message, the design and how targeted the placement is. The message should be compelling and relevant. You can really stand out by looking at new formats such as video and audio.