Eubie's notes

Lifehacker: How To: Digitize old records and tapes. Includes tips on using Audacity to clean up recordings from vinyl albums and tapes.

Typical supply/demand issue. Paidcontent.org hosts a seminar on the economics of blogging as a paying job and finds that falling ad rates and more competitors are driving down the income a blogger could expect to earn. The seminar also said blogging is like to grow because advertisers are becoming more comfortable with ads on blog sites.

But the advertising market is very results focused in onlne advertising. Says Jeff Burkett, director of sales ddevelopment at Washingtonpost’s Newsweek site:

We have solid double-digit CPMs. But aside from that, brand advertisers are not interested in how many clicks do they get. What they care about is ‘Am I reaching my target audience?’

Financial Times is opening it’s content up for 30 days before putting it back behind the pay wall, paidcontent.org reports. Looks like the headline should have been First NY Times, then FT, then WSJ …

Researchers studying handedness found data in a group of early 20th-century films of everyday English life.

The researchers concluded left-handedness declined in Victorian England because of social and school pressures and the rise of industrial tools, among other factors, reaching bottom around the turn of the 20th century.

read more

If it were a movie, it would have been a blockbuster. It it were a book, it would have passed “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Los Angeles Business from bizjournals: First-day sales for ‘Halo 3’ top summer blockbusters, last ‘Potter’ book

Steady growth in earnings is a touchstone of value investing, but Mark Hulbert, editor of The Hulbert Financial Digest, writes in NY Times piece: Posted in Uncategorized /

WSJ: For Facebook, GeoCities Offers a Cautionary Tale: Can Rise and Fall of Once-Hot Site Sway Decisions on Funding, IPO?

Geocities was one of the hottest properties of the internet in the mid-1990s. Lots of folks built their first sites and posted their first photos on Geocities. It also led to several clones, Angelcities, Tripod and others. Geocities was purchased by Yahoo, Tripod was purchased by Lycos. It was the early days when search engines were expanding to portals.

And now there’s Facebook, Del.icio.us, digg and mySpace. From WSJ: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was 10 years old when David Bohnett, then a 37-year-old mainframe programmer, hatched an idea: Set up a Web-based “community” where young people could divulge their most intimate feelings.

Good story on how fleeting hot on the internet can be, how companies often spend billions to buy stuff and then not know what do with it and how hard it is to build a sustainable long-term business

“It’s not that easy to monetize social media,” says Eric Hippeau, a managing partner of Softbank Capital that made more than 20 times its investment in GeoCities. He also sits on Yahoo’s board. “Once Microsoft’s deal with Facebook expires, as does Google’s deal with MySpace, they’re going to have to sell advertising for themselves and it’s going to be a challenge.” So far, he says, “it’s not that easy to match the right advertising with the right audience.”

Facebook is still a hot property. The day before WSJ’s article, Microfsoft was eyeing an investing up to $500 million for a 5 percent stake in Facebook. WSJ has some of the history of Geocities, as does Wikepedia’s history of Geocities.

The NY Times drops Times Select. Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman: Times Select has been the great experiment in premium newspaper content (the WSJ is a different animal). So does this put a nail in the coffin of the premium online news model?.

NY Times’ action leads to speculation that Rubert Murdoch will open even more of the Wall Street Journal. Will Murdoch be putting money in my pocket?

Also: Lost Remote: Learning the right lesson from the Times Select experiment, which includes the end of CNN’s Pipeline:

Times Select believed that people would pay for its writers because it is “The Times.” CNN believed people would subscribe to its video service because it’s “CNN.” This is no different from stations and newspapers believing that people will visit their sites because they are “the news channel” or they have “the brand” for trust. The fact is that the information rules.

On the Web, you can’t assume your offline brand means anything. That’s especially true when there is so much information that is so similar to your own. (Admit it.) Learn the lesson from Times Select — the right lesson. No — not that people won’t pay you anything. The lesson is that you have to rethink your brand and what it means to meet the online audience on their terms.

Lost Remote: Will wsj.com go free? Should it?

NY Times: At 25, ‘McPaper’ Is All Grown Up. Most journalists criticized its glibness, its charts and its style of coverage. Now more papers have adopted the look and USA Today has also turned more serious growing in respect. It’s now the largest-circulated daily newspaper in the U.S. with 2.3 million surbscribers (a large chunk still from hotel subscriptions) and it’s been making money for about 15 years, though not at the profit margin of other papers. One industry-wide impact from USA Today — most daily papers now have large weather maps.

One month does not make a year, but I was surprised to read in PaidContent.org that while most newspapers and other news media saw in increase in online advertising in August, McClatchy reported a 3 percent drop in online advertising. Peer papers such as Lee and Journal Communications reported gains as did most other online new organizations. Given that, it’s not surprising McClatchy also reported a drop in print advertising — mostly from a drop in residential advertising.