Blood From a Stone?

New York Post reports today:

Media companies have had a hard time getting consumers to pay for content online, but Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is attempting to leverage its worldwide news-gathering operation to get them to do just that.

In one of the most ambitious online undertakings by a media outfit, News Corp. has assembled a team of executives to devise a system to charge for content on the Web.

In related news, my dog and two cats have assembled to figure out cold fusion.

(and why is "Web" capitalized?)

Top 10 Online Newspapers: Traffic +16% Since Last Year

Nielsen-Online (PDF):

New York, NY – January 26, 2008 – Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today reported a 16 percent year-over-year increase in unique visitors to the top 10 newspaper Web sites, growing from 34.6 million unique visitors in December 2007 to 40.1 million in December 2008.

NYTimes.com was the number one online newspaper destination in December 2008, with 18.2 million unique visitors. USATODAY.com and washingtonpost.com took the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, with 11.4 million and 9.5 million unique visitors, respectively

This article points to several different trends we've been seeing. More and more people are using the internet to get not just their news, but all information. More people are switching from print to online content in the way in which they get their news (which is why we see newspapers folding (hehe) everywhere. And even in this economy, companies all over the world are moving advertising dollars to online outlets, whether it is Google Adwords or site-specific adverts.

It's not just that it's good to be in the web business in this economy. The economic environment is serving as a catalyst for a move already in progress and when conditions improve, all these companies will be more than reluctant to return to an already-floundering print world.

Internet wins. I guess paper still beats rock.

Google Tool Increases Efficiency

The Official GMail Blog had an interesting post on Wednesday about a new function to Send and Archive at the same time:

Turn on "Send & Archive" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new button in the compose form labeled just that. The button does what it says: it sends your reply and then archives the thread with one click.

Tasty. It might actually motivate me to get my disastrous inbox in the shape I know it could be. But as far as creating an entire blog post about it? Meh.

But then the Official Google Blog went and did this six hours later:

However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.

Google's efficiency is unmatched; not only did they make the difficult decision to send away 100 people, they apparently used a newly-developed tool to do it while simultaneously moving the records of the newly-unemployed to the Google Archive.