Steve Yelvington with Morris Newspapers has done the math on a soft paywall as proposed by the New York Times (we discussed this last week).  Steves figures that a newspaper should be prepared to give 35 to 55 percent of their advertising inventory by implementing a soft paywall because power [...]

A free Canadian newspaper, Metro,  has struck a deal with foursquare. As you travel around Canada checking  foursquare on your phone you’ll find Metro’s restaurant reviews, city tips, to-dos and stories. It’s a great use of foursquare’s geolocation technology giving the experts at local, your newspaper, a way to give [...]

I don’t know if mobile is the next big thing or already here, but adoption of geolocation in online tools is a must for mobile to achieve it’s full relevance. Since Foursquare just opened up in Little Rock, I’ve been playing with it via my iPhone this past week and [...]

Flash content is an important part of the overall mix of web content and has a steeper learning curve than most other kinds of web content creation. Unfortunately, Macromedia and now Adobe have changed the flash creation process/interface so often that if you once learned flash it’s like you’re starting [...]

You’ve probably heard of mission creep and home page creep when you slowly ad links and bloat your home page overtime, but it’s also important to remember to be goal focused when you’re redesigning your home page. In a large organization I think  your home page design is often like [...]

This morning I received a “breaking news email” from the New York Times that the New York Times had decided to start charging for access in 2011. I really don’t understand why they would send a breaking news email over this news. First, everyone else had been reporting the Times [...]

Some very informative social media graphics on the Penn Olson blog. My favorite one follows

Have you ever seen an ad on paper that you just go yuck, that ruins the page. How about a front page ad? I ran into one of those this week on the front of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette owned weekly entertainment tab called Sync. Yuck! I completely understand and support [...]

Here’s Ashton’s online advertising model/brand promotion model from the December 2009 Fast Company: Make entertaining stuff, give it to people where they already are, let them have fun with it, and mix in brand messaging. And because of the viral nature of the Web, each new consumer is cheaper to [...]

For several years I’ve been on a kick that traditional advertising metrics are bogus and it’s impossible to compare traditional advertising numbers with online advertising numbers.  On top of that I think traditional advertising is way, way overpriced when you consider their real numbers. In this month’s Fast Company Ashton [...]