Media ::

Johnson Press today announced an A/B testing approach to different revenue paths for local media titles.

Local news websites are being tested to ascertain the price elasticity on news stories. The titles in the test are Northumberland Gazette, the Whitby Gazette, the Worksop Guardian, the Ripley & Heanor News and the Southern Reporter and the Carrick Gazette (based in Scotland).

Three of the titles are removing nearly all media local coverage on their website – instead encouraging consumers to go out and buy the newspaper. Three others are to charge users to view content (£5 per quarter).

The outcome of this test is going to be very interesting – for the company and also all major media owners.

A paper entitles Stop the Presses, by Patrick Collings presents his views on paid for content.

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Anthropology ::

A paper by Dan Ariely on how we try to interpret the value of money.

Fascinating.

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Augmented reality ::

A pretty impressive demonstration of what is termed ‘Sixth Sense’, which is a project that is being developed by MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group.

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Social Media ::

A paper by Jordan Kretchmer, Co-founder of LiveFyre at LiveFyre that presents another take on how we should devlop creativity.

Worth a read.

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Trend Watching ::

From Karl Fisch, re-edited by Scott McLeod. Opinionated and as such, not everything stands up.

Microblogging ::

Admittedly, a paper from Metropolis is due this week on Twitter for Business. But this paper also looks at some issues, more on the peripheries of the platform.

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Planning ::

The COI has published a consultation paper on calculating Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) and are looking for feedback.

Research ::

ReadWriteWeb has written about the top e-commerce internet trends of 2000 – 2009.

The research shows there are signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping is gaining traction.