News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch said on Thursday that newspapers must find a way to charge for online content to make up for declining ad revenue.
"People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that’s going to have to change," Murdoch told attendees at the annual Cable Show event in Washington, D.C.
Murdoch cited The New York Times as an example, saying it has a "very, very good Web site." He said he did not believe the paper would make any money online unless it changes its current business model.
Frugality Is Bad For You
What you need to know as a marketer and businessperson is that people generally aren’t rational creatures, and because of that it’s relatively simple to get them to give you their money. What you need to know as a rational, responsible human is that people are always scheming to get your money and you should make it harder for them to do it.
Ah, conundrums.
Google Helps Promote Indian Elections
India’s 15th general election is fast approaching, and Google’s determined to help anyone wanting to either participate in or monitor the event. The search giant launched the Google India Elections Centre in both English and Hindi to facilitate the spread of information.
Internationalizing Without Duplicate Content Worries
The SMX Confernece was in Sydney Australia last week, and one topic discussed by representatives of both Google and Yahoo was that of duplicate content filtering across international domains. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz notes that while the subject has been discussed in the past, many people including experts in the field have been in the dark.
Heavy Twitters Chat Up 248 People Weekly
A couple centuries ago, especially for the rural diasporas, communicating with somebody outside of your immediate family may have been a rare treat. Today about seven million people communicate with an average of 248 people per week via social media’s one-to-many communication capabilities.
Is Cable Purposefully Delaying Super Fast Web?
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a much different answer to this question: If Japan can have 160 megabits-per-second over cable for $60 per month, why can’t we have that in the US?
Currently, the best one can do in the States is 50 Mbps for $140.
Google/Twitter Concept Inspires Imaginations
There’s been an unbelievable amount of buzz circulating around an acquisition that everyone likes to fantasize about, but may or may not ever actually occur. I’m talking of course about Google buying Twitter.
Credit Crunch Driving Small Town Industrial Espionage?
It’s a bit of a vicious cycle: Greedy, bad actors taking advantage of the good times until good times end in bad times and a different set of greedy, bad actors start taking advantage of the bad times—and there goes a little more faith in humanity.
When the press and the security industry weren’t obsessed with the non-event of the Conficker.C worm, warnings went out about laid-off employee sabotage and theft, spam targeting the financially concerned and technological clueless. Today’s stern warning is about industrial espionage.
AP Launches News Content Protection Initiative
The Associated Press has announced its plan to launch an initiative to protect news content from "misappropriation" online.
"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," says AP Chairman Dean Singleton.
Google Car Harassed By British Villagers/Cops
Google Street View cars are hitting roadblocks in England, quite literally. If it’s not the cops in one town, it’s human shields in another.
I’ve never been England, and all I know about British roads is from movies, and from what I gather they are often clogged with sheep. In one village, called Broughton, people shooed off the sheep to block the road personally. They heard they Google car was coming.