From the Web: Paypal on your phone, Amazon looms, individualized print, blogger-ranked media, employers pay for search

News from the Web and its implications to local news-gathering organizations

1. Ebay's Paypal won a deal with Blackberry to handle online payments for their app store. Pay attention to the companies that will be controlling the cash register in the virtual markets of your local community's future.
2. Recent survey shows Amazon's brand is getting stronger at the same time local news gathering organizations are getting weaker. This is a threat to local content publishers.
3. New York Times reports on MediaNews new initiative to create a individualized print edition that prints out in the home. Not a new idea, but might involve a new business model. I believe that if RSS met the right user interface, it might work.
   
4. Technorati ranks the top websites in terms of the attention they recieve from bloggers. This is relevant to the discussion of whether blogs are a hinderance to traditional media (by driving traffic based on using traditional media's content) or a complement (by linking and thus driving traffic to the original source).
5. Some employers are moving away from the job boards and going to paid search, for mixed results. Local media companies can use this to predict the trajectory of other the flight from newspaper classifieds by other commercial advertisers--to the boards, then to paid search. An opportunity for newspapers? Paid search requires copywriting skills to get good results.
   

Links and Sources

• PaidContent.org: Ebay's Paid Plans for Mobile
  


• CNET News: Amazon Customer Satisfaction Gets a Boost, But Why?
  


• New York Times: Could Customized Newspapers Bring Readers Back?


• Technorati: Since You Asked: Technorati Attention Index.


• PaidContent.org: Newspapers, Online Job Board Ad Sales Dry Up as More Employers Turn To Search