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Thursday, November 5, 2009

Does Your Mom Edit Your Blog? Google Wants to Know.

mom Why did Google start labeling blogs as “blogs” in its search results? Eric Schmidt thinks it may have to do with your mother.

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Friday, July 24, 2009

What Happened to the New York Times’s Web Ads?

newspaperlessThe paper’s Internet operations used to be a bright spot. But last quarter Web advertising dropped more than 15 percent. What gives?

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Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Analyst: Bing’s Nice, but Google Still Works Better–Unless You’re Booking a Trip or Have a Rash

bingAn endless ad barrage may be enough to get you to sample Bing. But it can’t ensure you’ll like the results once you try it.

That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s and Yahoo’s. The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009

CNN: We Don’t Need YouTube and Twitter to Tell Us What’s Going on in Iran–We’ve Got iReport

iran-ireport-cnnThe “Iran is Twitter’s defining moment” meme is losing momentum to the “Iran is YouTube’s defining moment” meme. But CNN has a different spin. Time Warner’s cable news channel wants us to know that it isn’t dependent on either the micromessaging service or Google’s video site to report on what’s happening in Iran–it has iReport.

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Monday, April 13, 2009

Gannett’s Good News Comes And Goes, Very Quickly

newspaperlessThis is what passes for good news in the newspaper business these days: Someone bought some shares of one of the industry’s biggest companies. Alas, even that story is old news. And the headlines coming out of Gannett later this week won’t be pleasant either.

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Friday, April 10, 2009

AP Exec: “To the Untrained Eye It Looks Like We’re Stupid”

newsiesIt’s been a bad week for the venerable news service aggregator, which seemed hell-bent on confusing everyone about its Internet strategy. Time to sit down with VP Jim Kennedy, who explains that the AP does indeed have a strategy.

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Monday, April 6, 2009

AP Shakes Fist at Google, Tells Internet to Get Off Its Damn Lawn

beale

The Associated Press is fed up with… the Internet, apparently. And it’s going to do… something about it. At the news-gathering co-op’s annual meeting today, AP chairman Dean Singleton let rip a sort of hellfire-and-brimstone speech in which he announced the AP’s vague plans to stop unnamed scoundrels from making money from their work.

Unstated but obvious public enemy number one: Google.

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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Who’s Still Using AOL? Your Mom.

momNo one you know visits AOL, but 109 million people go there every month. Who are they? Primarily 45 to 65-year-old women, says the ad agency working for AOL.com–which would like the portal’s core site to attract a slightly younger audience.

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Thursday, November 27, 2008

Riveting Tragedy=Boring Twitter Debate

This is now clockwork: Some kind of calamity happens somewhere. Shortly after, an Internet debate breaks out about who did a better job of breaking and/or covering the story–citizen journalists/bloggers or boring old mainstream media.

But if you want to find out why the Mumbai attacks happened, or why India is seemingly beset with terror attacks, you’re out of luck no matter where you turn.

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About Peter

Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.

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Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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