Many more Americans are turning to the internet for campaign news this year as the web becomes a key source of election news. Television remains the dominant source, but the percent who say they get most of their campaign news from the internet has tripled since October 2004 (from 10% then to 33% now).

While use of the web has seen considerable growth, the percentage of Americans relying on TV and newspapers for campaign news has remained relatively flat since 2004. The internet now rivals newspapers as a main source for campaign news. And with so much interest in the election next week, the public’s use of the internet as a campaign news source is up even since the primaries earlier this year. In March, 26% cited the internet as a main source for election news, while the percentages citing television and newspapers remain largely unchanged.

The New York Times reflects on the developments I’ve mentioned over the past few days. The whole article is worth a read, but this part is particularly interesting:

For readers, the drastic diminishment of print raises an obvious question: if more people are reading newspapers and magazines, why should we care whether they are printed on paper?

The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for.

More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day. A single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it.

The difference between print dollars and digital dimes — or sometimes pennies — is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.

Looking for more information on Search Engines or SEO? If you can’t find it here, try Search SEO Pros, a new search engine specifically for… search engine optimization.

After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to largely give up on print.

The article continues:

Before The Monitor, a handful of small papers had shifted away from print. Earlier this year, The Capital Times in Madison, Wis. went online only, and The Daily Telegram in Superior, Wis., announced it would publish online except for two days a week.

Dropping the print edition seems to tempt newspaper executives. At a recent conference hosted by the City University of New York’s journalism school, a group of publishing executives discussed what a cost-efficient newsroom should look like. They eventually settled on casting aside paper and starting fresh on the Web.

Interesting, especially in light of yesterday’s circulation numbers.

7. Place search on top
Many people who don’t find what they seek in an instant resort to search. So those visitors, especially SV who do not find exactly what they want and who do not spot the search form will leave. If you’re after the conversion this also applies to the call to action.

Wordyard has some great advice for Twitter:

So here’s an opportunity for Twitter, or for someone else, if the Twitter team is too busy: Offer a service very similar to Twitter but optimized for link-sharing. (FriendFeed is cool but it’s trying to do so many other things at the same time that I don’t think it suits what I’m talking about.) Make it easier to share links real-time; expose the actual URL; give us some rudimentary tools for organizing the links; and watch something cool grow.

Of course, Twitter has the critical mass of usage right now, and that’s not going away. But surely there’s room for improvement.

What are you reading today?

Thanks for the note and help in getting the word out about the Macy’s spam attack. We’re also aware of it and believe that only a small percentage of users have been affected. We’re working to update our security systems minimize further impact. Education is also a key part of the solution and we’ve posted a note about this on our security page (http://www.facebook.com/security). Other security tips and links to free virus scanners are also there so it might be a good place for you to send people.

Here are the links they provide on the security page:

Support for your Computer

If your Windows PC or Mac is ever infected with malware or a virus, check out these helpful sites:

* http://www.microsoft.com/security/default.mspx
* http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

Free Online Virus Scanners

You should also immediately run a virus scan using one of these sites:

* http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner
* http://security.symantec.com
* http://us.mcafee.com/root/mfs/scan.asp?affid=56
* http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8
* http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm
* http://ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/scan.aspx
* http://www.ewido.net/en/onlinescan
* http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/activescan

I’m impressed that Facebook responded so quickly. I’ll be even more impressed if they deal with the problem better than Myspace did.

Update: All Facebook has a writeup on the Macy’s spam on Facebook as well.

Twitter Goes Mainstream: A lot more people — and businesses — are finding new ways to tweet

Reddit goes ‘Independent,’ says more deals to come

Putting Facebook and Twitter to work

Most Major Papers Continue Circ Decline

Here are the new circulation numbers for the top 25 daily papers in the United States:

USA TODAY — 2,293,310 — 0.01%
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — 2,011,999 — 0.01%
NEW YORK TIMES — 1,000,665 — (-3.58%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES — 739,147 — (-5.20%)
DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK — 632,595 — (-7.16%)

NEW YORK POST — 625,421 — (-6.25%)
THE WASHINGTON POST — 622,714 — (-1.94%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE — 516,032 — (-7.75%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE — 448,271 — (-11.66%)
NEWSDAY — 377,517 — (-2.58%)

THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC — 361,333 — (-5.51%)
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE — 339,430 — (-7.07%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS — 338,933 — (-9.28%)
BOSTON GLOBE — 323,983 — (-10.18%)
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS — 322,360 — (-4.26%)

STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK, N.J. — 316,280 — (-10.40%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES — 313,176 — (-3.94%)
PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND — 305,529 — (-8.58%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER — 300,674 — (-11.06%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS — 298,243 — (-6.84%)

THE OREGONIAN — 283,321 — (-8.45%)
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION — 274,999 — (-13.62%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE — 269,819 — (-3.00%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES — 268,935 — (-6.88%)
THE SACRAMENTO BEE — 253,249 — (-4.22%)

He begins:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Wired.com, where the article was published, hosts about a dozen blogs. Paul’s fulltime gig is with ValleyWag a top-500 blog focusing on silicon valley gossip. His personal website is, you guessed it, a blog. Apparently irony is easily lost on Mr. Boutin.

He continues:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother?

Yes, there is far more garbage in the blogosphere now than at any time prior. The other side of this though is the fact that there is more research, factchecking, sharp analysis, breaking news and “folksy self-expression” than ever before. Better yet, now we’ve got social news websites, blog search engines and web-based RSS readers to help us sort through the clutter.

The crux of the argument is as follows:

The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Mr. Boutin fails to mention the fact that a pretty good percentage of Tweets are automatically generated from a blog’s RSS feed via Twitterfeed. The same is true for status updates on Facebook. Flickr is a great tool for uploading, storing and sharing photographs, but if your Internet outreach efforts are limited to photo-sharing, you won’t have much luck.

To get the most out of social media you should participate broadly. Just having a blog is as limiting as just having a Facebook account. Your flickr account is worth little if you have nowhere to post the pictures. If you spend all of your time creating short-form content on Twitter, will you have anything to link to? A comprehensive social media outreach plan should encompass all of the above and more. Ideally, organizations should be using social news sites (Digg, Reddit, Buzzflash, Current, etc.), social networking sites (Myspace, Facebook, etc.), social bookmarking sites (Simpy, Furl, etc.), microblogging sites (Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) blogging software (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, etc.), email lists, listservs, targeted blogger outreach, search engine optimization and more.

When the world wide web was popularized, we didn’t unplug our phones and throw away our stamps. When we need to send a quick note, we email. When we wanted something more personal or more in-depth, we pick up the phone. When we want to formalize a communication or reach someone across the globe, we write a letter. We learned to choose appropriate communications tools for the types of communication we were engaging in. We are going to have to do this more and more in the future, as our communications options continue to diversify. Just as Twitter is ideal for a quick, one-sentence not with a link, blogging is still ideal for mid-length communications with embedded pictures and video.

The bulk of the article is dedicated to hand-wringing over the social media habits of several early-adopting bloggers like Jason Calcanis, Robert Scoble and Mark Pilgrim. The article would probably be better off with more facts, and less anecdotal fluff. Here are a few facts he could have taken into account:

42% of Americans have read a blog and 11% do so daily.

The liberal blog reader project found that 74% of blog readers voted in 2006. Just 41% of all eligible voters did so that year.

71% of journalists have a list of blogs that they check on a regular basis.

Here are a few institutions you may have heard of who disagree with Mr. Boutin’s analysis:

“The Democratic Party cannot win major national elections without the netroots.” -NY Times

“The netroots now rank alongside [unions and interest groups].” -The National Review

“Liberal bloggers [have] quickly become a formidable constituency in Democratic politics.” -The New Republic

“Now that the Netroots’ power has been cemented, any Democratic presidential candidate will have to consider how to woo these Internet activists.” -Time

Here is the bottom line: Blogging is not dead. As social networking and microblogging claim a larger share of the new media landscape, they justify a larger share of an organization’s media outreach strategy. Just as it wouldn’t have been wise to stop reaching out to newspaper and the traditional press when you hired a blogger, there is no reason to stop blogging because you want to create a Facebook or Twitter account. Shifting priorities to reach your audience as effectively as possible is a good thing, but Mr. Boutin’s assertion that blogging is no longer useful is way off the mark.

It appears the answer to the question ‘how many words in a text link” is 55 characters, about 8-10 words.

Why is this important to know?

1. You get to understand how many words Google will count as part of a link
2. You can see why you should keep titles to a maximum amount of characters
3. You can see why your domain name should be short and why urls should be snappy
4. You can see why you should rewrite your urls (SEF)
5. It’s especially useful especially when thinking about linking internally, via body text on a page.

Google Analytics is, with good reason, the most popular web analytics software in use today. Here are a bunch of great plugins and hacks you can use to make this super functional software even better.

• here are a few (both free and paid) tools to help you identify what your competitor is already ranking for;
• don’t forget to check your competitor’s PPC keywords;
• use keyword prominence tools (to analyze which terms the site is optimized for);
• analyze your competitors’ website visitors behavior (“Keyword Engagement” and “Keyword Effectiveness”).

Quick tip: don’t forget to compare which terms your competitor tried to rank (i.e. which terms he is using throughout the site) and which terms he ended up ranked for. Thus, you will be able to do better than him.

Google took a look at the searches coming in during the third Presidential debate. Their findings were pretty interesting:

Read anything useful over the weekend?