The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.
The company had announced in a blog entry that it was imposing hefty rate hikes as of Wednesday -- from $1,250 to $1,675 (£880) in upfront costs and from $195 to $295 (£155) in monthly maintenance fees.
Independent production company, Somethin' Else has been commissioned by the British Medical Journal to produce a series of podcasts.
The programmes will feature broadcasters including former Today presenter Sue MacGregor and the BBC's Case Notes presenter, Graham Easton.
For PR people wanting to contribute to this 'new media' medical space, this could be good news.
Eric Case, a Blogger product manager, acknowledges that Blogger has had a rough time recently due to what he calls "a perfect storm" of network hardware failures and other problems, reports PC Advisor.
Google has apologised for last week's Blogger outages, describing them as a 'nuisance' and not representative of the kind of service it wants to provide. In its Blogger Buzz blog it explains that a number of unplanned outages were followed by deliberate ones as the causes were tackled.However, Case said these issues will be a thing of the past once Blogger moves to a more solid and scalable platform. That's where Google is hosting the Blogger beta version, which is in limited availability and includes many new and improved features.
Still, some are running out of patience. On Sunday, after what she termed an "appalling week" of Blogger problems, Nicola Brown replicated her blog Life at the Edge over to the competing Wordpress.com platform.
Hmm.. if you have a lot of content invested in Blogger.com, this is not good.
It has also bought Quizilla, a community website popular with bloggers.
A news API could let users outside the BBC access BBC content for their own development projects.
The BBC will not be expanding its existing blogs aggressively according to Clifton but he said he hopes to launch a new blog to be written by BBC foreign correspondents around the world.
Clifton said the BBC will not be making new content for mobile phones however, it will be making more of the text, audio and video from the news website central to the expansion of its offering for mobile devices.
The Press Gazette offers more.The executive editor of Computer Weekly was a runner-up in last week's Paul Foot awards for what judges called "relentless investigation" into the £12.4bn NHS IT programme in the face of "consistent obstruction and obfuscation from the Government".
Collins told Press Gazette "We're seeing Government spinning more, Government departments using the FoI (Freedom of Information) Act not to answer my questions. They're referring me to the FoI Act to get them answered, but we're still waiting for a judgement for the request we put in in 2005, 18 months later. It's very useful for a press department to refer the journalist to the FoI Act because the chances are there won't be a decision on it for 18 months."Now we are getting a good idea about what local newspaper TV really looks like.
Four North Wales Newspapers titles have carried video footage on their websites for the first time.
The group used the web to publish footage of two "lunatic" motorcyclists riding erratically at 100 miles per hour along the main arterial highway along the North Wales coast.
The video, in which North Wales chief constable Richard Brunstrom describes the motorists as "crazy", and says the video remind him of an episode of The Wacky Races, was used on the websites of the North Wales Pioneer, North Wales Chronicle, Rhyl Journal and Denbighshire Free Press.
The opportunities for PR video stories are huge.If you agree with me about the importance of buyer personas in Web marketing, then the most important next step is you need to know what you want each of your buyer personas to believe about your organization.Absolutely right. Here he is talking about the nexus of relationships called a person going about the days toils, or a blogger, or author or wiki manager or Digg presence (etc).
TalkSPORT has achieved its highest audience figures in 18 months, allaying fears that speech radio is struggling across the board.
The nationwide talk station, which benefited from a boost in listening last quarter thanks to the World Cup, has managed to keep listeners tuned in after the final match — putting on an extra 176,000 listeners (8.4%) year on year.
Side by side isChannel 4's first foray into radio which has got off to a slow start, with the digital talk station OneWord losing 20 per cent of its listeners.
Figures released today by Rajar show Oneword's audience has fallen from 129,000 to 104,000 in the last 12 months.
Community, focused, passion filled audiences count - sound like social media to me.
A film highlighting how journalists in the UK have learned to deliver TV news in eight days has been nominated for an international award in Berlin.
The film 8 Days features eight regional journalists working on papers including the Hull Daily Mail, the Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Evening News, getting to grips with a murder case re-enacted by Cleveland Police.
The film, made by senior lecturer at the University of Westminster David Dunkley Gyimah, focused on journalists training at Press Association's video training course.
Press Gazette says that the Guardian is launching a new music site today which will be sponsored by computer firm Intel.
According Guardian digital boss Emily Bell, Intel will "integrate their brand" into the site, but she said it will retain editorial independence.
This is interesting because it is another way that a good media brand can generate revenue - sponsorship.
Sponsorship as a public relations practice is well established although it is worth remembering the cost of promoting sponsorship is not cheap.
They are supposed to be grassroots organisations repre
senting the interests of people with serious diseases. But Drummond Rennie, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, believes that some patient groups are perilously close to becoming extensions of pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments. "There's a crisis here," he contends.Rather than grassroots, the word Rennie uses to describe such organisations is "astroturf". Originating in the black arts of politics and public relations, astroturfing is the practice of disguising an orchestrated campaign as a spontaneous upwelling of public opinion.
With the launch last month of www.lphchat.com, Langham Place Hotel invites customers to build an online presence, posting thoughts on any topics close to their heart.
Toni, we see here the break between old and new PR paradigm.
These concepts are significant to the constituencies involved. The exchange also demonstrates that we have a lot to lean about the nature of conversational relationships.
Historically, a person would provide a paper and circulate it for approval and comment – and that is what happened.
Now, there is a different way.
What if the paper is made available using any of the many forms of social media. It needs to be in one of the formats that can be progressively opened up for wider consultation, contribution and participation. It can be surrounded by debate and discussion (email, IM, Blog, wiki, Skype conference, meeting, congress etc), progressively it becomes the common property of all active, aware and latent participants.
This is not soft v hard, old v new it is just a way of creating a conversation. It is as old as mankind and as new as the Internet.
Well entrenched and robust views are still available in this model and progressively more evidence, research and resource can and should be added to enhance its value (peer reviewed knowledge added to any property enhances its value). Reasoned consideration can be in the hands of all participants – even the whole world.
The new way needs avail contribution to a conversation among active, aware and latent participants.
The nature of transparency, porosity and agency is the at the heart of this way of doing business.
As it turns out, you posting the papers, is a move in this direction but suppose the debate and discussion used modern communications tools. Would that not be more useful powerful and relevant?
The very fact that the initial paper is an old fashioned word processed document set the agenda.
The medium affected the message as much as the contribution by the participants.
One alternative might start like this: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhd98n6g_26f2twh2 and can then be moved to any number of channels for communication such as as a wiki, word document attachment by email, an email, a web page, a blog post, an instant message or even as (dead tree) paper.
Public Relations is changed but we have to walk the talk.
Ignorance, of course, is no defence when the participants are …… communicators?