Content Wise

NY Times Upgrades Online Video, Powered By Brightcove

When the New York Times upgrades its whole approach to video, it's worth noting what's on the back end. The answer is Brightcove, an online video platform whose name we see more and more next to successful video content on publication-related Web sites.

Video is an increasingly valuable—and expected—form of content for Web publishers. It's both an effective way to keep the audience engaged and a promising source of ad revenue. We've heard anecdotally that video advertising isn't shrinking as fast as other online ads.

MediaPost has details on the Times strategy and the capabilities of the Brightcove technology. Tech Crunch covers other Brightcove customers, video viewing stats, and more technical bits.

Social Media May Be Better Than RSS for Engaging Audiences

The appeal of RSS feeds (or Web feeds) still seems limited to a geeky slice of the online audience. Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion has a succinct analysis of a new Forrester Research report on trends in RSS use.

Some highlights:

RSS adoption among consumers is at 11% up from just 2% of users three years ago...

Here's the kicker, though. That might be all she wrote for RSS' growth track...

Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehicles that bring content you care about to you.

Smart Strategy: Send Visitors Away From Your Site

Nice to see The New York Times gave some ink this morning to our colleague Scott Karp and his crusade for "link journalism," a strategy designed to send Web visitors away from your  site.

The Times reports that mainstream media sites—including those of the Times itself, The Washington Post, and NBC TV—are starting to embrace the idea.

Scott has long championed link journalism through regular postings on his incisive blog, Publishing 2.0. The basic idea is that you can provide a great service to your audience by filtering and aggregating links to the most interesting and relevant content that is scattered across other sites around the Web.

Many magazines, newspapers, and other nervous Web publishers still question the wisdom of pushing visitors away. Scott offers this one-word rebuttal: Google.

“It’s all about sending people away," he told the Times, "and it does such a good job of it that people keep coming back for more.”