MSNBC, the news site jointly owned by Microsoft and US TV network NBC, has bought Web 2.0 news aggregator Newsvine. The company will continue to operate independently from its Seattle HQ, says the official annoucement.

Netvibes has announced that it is now building cross platform widgets which can live on Vista, Macs and other online platforms.

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Google is recruiting Facebook application developers who can add Google adwords to applications running inside the insanely popular social networking site.

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Jeff Jarvis reports that Google now has an estimated 40% share of the online advertising market.

PaidContent (quoting the FT) says Hearst, the US owners of the UK’s NatMags, is on course to acquire the consumer magazine division of EMAP, while Phil Riley, ex-head of Chrysalis Radio, has put in a bid for the radio operations and Apax Partners is front runner to take the B2B interests, worth an estimated £1.2bn.

BT has announced plans to allow its broadband customers to join Fon, a Spanish broadband sharing service. According to a BBC report all customers joining the scheme, which will provide access to a small portion of their broadband, will then be able to enjoy free access to other members’ broadband wherever they are.

A panel discussion on social networks brings together four people with very different backgrounds to discuss the issue.

Patrick Fuller, What Car publisher is talking about Pistonheads, an auto forum which Haymarket bought and which has grown under their stewardship, despite concern from the faithful audience. The site now has 75m impressions, up from 24m at the time of the purchase. It is very untidy as a site, he says, but Haymarket can’t change it much as the audience is resistant to change. Wikis and user generated news is next as well as highly targeted and relevant advertising.

Meg Packard, head of community at the Guardian, is talking about the ways people react to contact:

• consumption (passive, but increasingly an act of creation as reading is an activity which can be tracked)
• contribution
• curation (social data play – including adding folkosonomies, or recommending, or annotation)
• creation

The level of intensity of engagement increases as you go down the list. However, she points out, that people don’t necessarily follow this linear pattern, Publishers have to change from creating content to creating context. Content is the what, context is the why. She has a holy trinity of community development: human solutions, technical solutions and editorial solutions and they all have to work together to be successful. The Guardian has people working in several countries to be able to work round the clock. The moderators are often seen as policemen but they aren’t and they don’t report into the editors in order to preserve their independence and avoid journalists just taking down things they don’t like.

Pete Picton, editor, Sun Online talks about My Sun which was launched last October. Early examples of interaction included flood pictures and a debate on the Olympics logo.

Alison Wheeler, ceo of Wikimedia UK talked about Wikipedia which she says is a top 10 world website, with 285,000 pages per minute, or 12.3bn pages a month. Wikipedia is now 15 times as big as Britannica, she says. English is now only a quarter of the total today. Over 100,000 users in English have made edits. 8.4% of internet users in the States visit each day – 5.6 pages views per user. Wikipedia is the largest site in Bangladeshi worldwide. Why do people come back? People contribute because they feel valued, she says.

The discussion
Mike Butcher asking about what went wrong at the LA Times when it famously opened up the front page which was then vandalised by the users. Alison Wheeler says the reason was they didn’t have proper processes in place to manage and reverse the effects of vandalism when it occurs. Pete Picton says the Sun is happy to take tips from users, but these still have to be checked.

Meg Packard says the Guardian watchword is to embrace not replace – and Peter Picton agrees – the Sun has feed widgets which can be put on Facebook pages.

What about the traditional role of editorial, asks Mike Butcher? Patrick Fuller says he recruited an editor for Pistonheads and “he found the interaction terrifying”. Meg Packard says there is a steep learning curve when traditional editorial and user generated content collide. There is an education job to be done on the users to show them that they need to be responsible for their words, but journalists have to learn new ways of writing and reading – it is difficult to read that “you are full of shit”. But sometimes they are right.

We are not asking people to write stories for us, we are asking them to be witnesses, says Meg Packard.

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Caroline Slootweg, digital and new media marketing director, Unilever says online started off being so focussed on ROI that it “shot itself in the foot by being too measurable”.
Also Unilever (and other FMCG companies) were late to the party but now have caught up. She says the big shift was away from campaigns to 24/7 always on support. This has meant moving from banners and websites to search, gaming and other more integrated online experiences. “We are now breaking out of the confines of the word ‘digital’,” she says. “Six months ago I banned the word ‘website”.”

The web is inherently female – women are flocking online, blogging, chatting, shopping… hence In the Motherhood – a site in which women are invited to share their real life stories, vote of them and the best ones then become part of the script of the associated TV sitcom. This was a partnership with MSN and a production company, and not through an agency – quite a threat to the agency world, you would think, given that Unilever is the second largest advertiser in the world.

“Only the web can deliver things which are almost as powerful, if not more powerful, than TV”. Hope yet for those of us who have online properties without effective ROI-based options…

Karl Schneider asks what metrics would be valuable. “Integrated metrics – we are not looking for independently measured metrics. We are throwing them all into research.”

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Jeff Henry, director of ITV Consumer is now on stage. His message: television is alive and kicking! ITV channels reach 81% of the population and the free to air model is sound, he says. Now they are making the journey to free to screen. The aim is to be the UK’s favourite source of free entertainment. The reason: the online advertising opportunity is strong. By 2010 he wants to have £150m of online advertising and he is confident because, he says, of the new ITV.com – which, I note, doesn’t yet support the Mac! This includes user generated content (Jeff claims that ITV invented user generated content – through You’ve Been Framed) and web-only commissioned content.

He finishes his talk with a clip of Paul Potts on Britain’s got Talent. The challenge – three times as many people watched this on YouTube as watched it on ITV. That is the challenge that ITV.com is aiming to meet.

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Angus Bankes CTO of Moreover Technologies, introduces himself. He was one of the founders and the company is now owned by Verisign. He says weblogs.com – the web’s largest ping server – shouldn’t just be for blogs – all content should ping it so that they get “great distribution”.

Joshua Cohen, business product manager, Google News argues that the internet is not a zero sum game. “We are a technology company which is in the search and advertising business. Our focus in Google News is on the news enthusiast” he says. Google News’ aim is to provide many different perspectives on a story. Simon Waldman asks what has changed with the decision to host AP stories directly. “It was driven by the desire to show as many perspectives as possible” – but without showing duplicates, which is the case when many papers take the same newswire stories.

Technorati Tags: AOP 07