The annual TED Conference (it stands for “Technology Entertainment and Design”) takes place in California and attracts an impressive rosta of speakers. Through a sponsorship deal with BMW for the first time this year they are releasing all the talks on video. Inspiring stuff.

Wires news reports that a consortium of companies including Nokia, Vodafone and Google, are getting together to produce guidelines which will make mobile surfing easier. In the same piece they annouce that Belo Corp., owner of the Dallas Morning News, is laying off newsroom staff and hiring more on the internet site.

PaidContent.org has taken its first investment, reports BuzzMachine. The sum was said to be ‘less than $1m’ according the WSJ and Rafat says he will make more than $1m in ads this year. Investor Alan Patricof says:

“To start a magazine today would cost a minimum of $15 million to $25 million, and you have to spend through three or four years of losses,” Mr. Patricof said. With blogs, “the economics are a lot better.”

According to Jeff Jarvis senior BBC editors will be going public on their own editors’ blog today, in a further example of media accountability.

The Virtual Handshake Blog Shawn Gold, SVP, MySpace: Marketing in a Networked Culture:
MySpace has 100m users projected by July
84m registered users, 2m new registered users per week (size of Houston), 48m unique visitors per month in US
2nd most popular site for content consumption on the Internet, as defined by page views. 29000 indie film profiles. 1.8m music profiles.
#1 video viewing site
#1 referrer to Google – 8.19% of Google’s traffic
42% of YouTube viewing is happening on MySpace.

iBlogBusiness is a new business blog directory which aims to help people find blogs on specific industries. Sounds a bit like the start of business publishing 2.0.

A study by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Chancellor Professor of Marketing at UMass provides some insight from a fairly large number of well-establised bloggers. Among the advice:

1. Blogs take time and commitment
2. Blogs must be part of a plan
3. A blog is a conversation
4. Transparency, authenticity and focus are good. Bland is bad.

The report (pdf) is here.

WSJ.com reports that Google has begun trials of free streaming videos.

“Google’s move is a key test of how online ads can finance consumer access to premium video content on the Web, the way TV commercials have supported broadcast television for decades. It could impact the efforts of companies such as Apple Computer Inc. to charge users fees to access popular videos from the Internet. If successful, the video advertising could eventually develop into a significant new extension of Google’s ad system that generated over $6 billion in revenue last year,” it says.

Right Media operates the first open media exchange for the interactive advertising industry. Buyers and sellers, interconnected on a common platform, seamlessly trade more than two billion impressions on the Right Media Exchange daily.

As the Internet grows up the news industry is being forever changed says the Washington Post in an article about the challenges and opportunity of the new media space.