Chris Smith: January 2009 Archives

800 newspapers participated in the Google newspaper ad program - including some big names such as The New York Times and Washington Post. Google started the program in 2006 and acted as a sales agent, taking of cut of the ads they sold. Their newspaper ad business provided a way for advertisers to buy ad space, and the pricing was intended to be more fluid than traditional ad rates. Google says that sales were good for some participating newspapers - but apparently it wasn't good enough for Google's bottom line.
Collaboration between print and online advertisers takes a set-back from this. Print publications will need to continue to seek out new ways to bring in revenues that have been sapped by the slow economy and the shift to more on-line advertising. The Boston Globe showed the first signs of that shift the day after the inauguration with a movie advertisement running the full length across the front page - something that was never done in the past, but is becoming mroe common. But it will take more than front-page ads to keep revenue flowing into newspapers - they need to find ways to monetize their content, generate revenue from their writing, photography, and other content.
Because we provide training to many newspapers - such as InDesign training and Photoshop training - we hope the business models can be changed to allow them to succeed. And I'm not ready to give up the Boston Globe with my morning cup of coffee each day.

A small pack of my colleagues gathered around a computer monitor in our office on Tuesday to watch the inauguration ceremony. To make certain we didn't miss a beat, we had a Silverlight stream in one window and a Flash stream in another. We weren't alone, as video delivery provider Akamai reported 7 million live simultaneous streams on the sites they serve - which appears small when compared to the 21.3 million live streams CNN indicates they streamed. While this shows this huge increase in demand for on-line streaming video, the bandwidth and infrastructure aren't quite there for a flawless performance with live streaming video. While the Silverlight stream looked better, both streams stopped from time to time - and neither stream could be viewed on an iPhone, where neither Silverlight nor Flash video have a player.
Because we provide Flash Training and Silverlight Training, we were pretty excited to be able to watch such an important event on-line using technology that we help organizations adopt. published by: Christopher Smith