Jim Rosenberg | jerotus.

Poynter’s picked up on a presentation done by Yahoo! News product manager Jeordan Legon for a group of journalism students in Chile. Yahoo! News gets an astounding 36 million unique vistors each month. Salient points:

Advertising is being segmented by audience – search is proving to be most effective.

Innovate without fear of failure.

On the other side of the fence, Yahoo! has launched a search marketing blog for publishers. One to watch, I imagine.

[A view of the future for news - El Mercurio via Poynter]

The New York Times reports on a concerted effort by liberal bloggers to move negative stories about Republicans into higher spots on results pages in Google. This practice is negatively called “Google Bombing” – it is an extreme example of what’s known as search engine optimization (SEO) – which is a way of cross-linking and setting up content so that a search engine sees the content and ranks it more highly in a search result.

It will be harder to manipulate results for searches of the name of a candidate who has already been widely covered in the news and widely discussed in the blogosphere, because so many links and so many pages already refer to that particular name. Search results on lesser-known candidates, with a smaller body of references and links, may be easier to change.

“We don’t condone the practice of Google bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results,” said Ricardo Reyes, a Google spokesman. “A site’s ranking in Google’s search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.”

If you’re wondering why I put a picture of Cleopatra Jones on this entry, well…it’s because that photo came up during a Google Image search on “Jon Kyl,” a senator from my home state of Arizona who is one of the targets of this Google Bomb campaign. It’s a better visual than a guy in a suit, no?

This is a big deal, as Reuters reports:

Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses.

“What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay,” she said. “This allows other companies to offer content for the iPod.”

At the moment, Apple aims to keep music bought from its iTunes online music store only available for Apple products, while songs bought from other online stores typically do not work on iPods.

[Apple's DRM is hacked via Reuters]

A Compete study out this month shows that people who use social networking sites tend to have a bit more discretionary income and spend less time watching television than folks who don’t use such sites.  The study also finds that traditional online advertising is not terribly effective in reaching those people:

Online marketers that are integrating customer forums, peer reviews and branded micro-sites are having the best results in bringing in users than those relying on the more traditional online advertising like banner ads, search result ads and pay-per-click advertisements.

I’d like to see some numbers breaking down exactly how many people online are considered social networkers vs. other.

Today’s Hindustan Times has a story assessing the state of blogs written by Indians – or that are about India. “Can India ever achieve superpower status in the blogosphere?” asks the HT.

My own view is yes – absolutely. Though based on this story, it appears that India’s blogging community has not yet reached critical mass. The HT quotes blogger Amit Agarawal: “There are various factors that currently prevent India from being a blogging superpower. We do not have enough people blogging and more importantly, there aren’t enough people reading blogs. To add to this, the majority of Indian blogs are personal diaries that would only be interesting to the family and friends of the blog’s author.”

That’s an apt description of blogging in the United States about four years ago (and look at how things are now). And yet, Indian blogs have made international headlines at least twice this year. Last July, in the hours after the Mumbai train attacks, blogs brought people together and filled a critical information gap. The same month there was the strange and still not fully explained shut down of certain web sites – ostensibly to avoid offending certain religious groups.

Will India’s blogging community continue to grow and become more relevant? You can bet on it.

U2′s website announced today that fans can go on a global web treasure hunt to locate snippets of lyrics from past songs. These clues – embedded in web sites – will add up to a series of letters that can be used to answer a question. The winner gets to fly to Hawaii to see U2 in concert.

All of this is clearly designed to create maximum online buzz – and I’m guessing it will drive traffic to some of U2′s favorite causes, as well. It’s brilliant, if not slightly confusing. More details to come at U2.com.

This is a real photograph of a virtual reality device from Toshiba. It’s making its way across the web at… well… lightspeed (har har) as a focus of silliness. An excerpt of the mockings:

Evan: “Janie was unprepared for the relentless mocking her new head-mounted display received, especially from her fellow guild members.”Paul: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to bring you the ultimate gaming
experience. Call that job satisfaction? ‘Cause I don’t.”

Ryan: “Yes, we’re gonna have to go right to…ludicrous speed!”

Cyrus: “I though I could stop wearing headgear when I turned 16.”

Richard: “Correction, I need the superior information in your inferior brain to fly this… thing.”

Zatz: “Can you hear me now?”

[Caption Contest: HMD of the Future? via Engadget]