There’s a great column from The Seattle Times which examines the most popular stories from 2005 according to web stats analysis and concludes that the “soft” stories, so often discounted by journalists, are actually the ones that are the most read. It also mentions a Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias which has gone the whole hog and writes stories entirely based on web traffic: if people read a story they write more like it; if they don’t the story type is axed. Going too far, you may say, but Las Últimas Noticias is now the most read newspaper in Chile!

Interesting mash-up showing current Google news as a tag cloud – brought to you by NEWZingo.

Internet commentator Clay Shirky wrote a very interesting piece on the dynamics of internet communities which I found contained some real insights for those of us interested in building up these interest groups. Particularly interesting is the notion that pure democracy is the enemy of the successful online community. Worth the read, even though it is a bit long.

There’s an old saying that if you owe the bank £100, you have a problem; but if you owe the bank £1m, then the bank has a problem.

This is the reason most commonly credited as being behind the AOL/Google deal. The $300m earned from AdSense on the AOL portal was just too large a percentage to comfortably put at risk.

But there’s another saying the money makes money. And it seems from the SEC filings that the deal creates the conditions for a floatation of the AOL business in the foreseeable future and if that were to happen – and if Google’s other properties like Video Search really work some magic with the underused AOL content – Google’s stake could end up as a real investment.

How’s that for having your cake and eating it?

Looks like it’s not just me reading the tealeaves about web advertising in 2006… if eWeek’s reading of the reasons behind Yahoo’s share price movements are correct

According to research from Burst Media, reported by The Kelsey Group blog, Americans over 55, often thought to be the really difficult market to crack, are deserting traditional media in favour of the internet with 36.6% now spending less time reading magazines, for instance, in favour of the delights online.

According to theOfficial Google Blog Google launched 77 new products in 2005!!!

Jeff Jarvis’ Guardian column on tagging makes the point that the huge rise in the popularity of tagging demonstrates that the value of the connection between ideas outweighs in the nakes ideas themselves. This is similar to a psychological point Doc Searls was making that conversation is the basic form of human interaction and the human brain is optimised to work at this level.

Doc Searls predicts that 2006 will be the year when media unbundling really takes hold. He has a long post on the implications here.