As Twitter passes one billion tweets a week founder Biz Stone is join AOL as a “social impact adviser”. Nice title. No he isn’t leaving Twitter. He is clearly having way too much of a good time helping to run the business. What he is going to do is advise AOL “on cause-based initiatives” and “philanthropy”.

The idea is to take some of the lessons he’s learnt working with good causes such as Charity:Water and Product RED and inject that into AOL, but can you really change a corporate culture like that? Read More »

AOL is to begin its next round of job cuts and it is being reported that as many as 900 could be lost. The cuts come on the heels of AOL’s $315m deal to buy the Huffington Post and the reorganisation that has followed.

Last week AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, while speaking at a conference in the US, said that there would definitely be “job changes”.  He said there was “no way around it, but we’ll do it thoughtfully”.  Many of the job cuts will hit India, which supports AOL US content operations. Read More »

Gather round kids, it is time for a story about search engines. In the dim and distant past there were many search engines, but now now there are only two.

Okay, so it’s a short story, but infographic shows how since Yahoo! called it quits and other players such as AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, Ask.com and AOL have faded it is now just a battle of two.  Read More »

What do you do if you have a creative brief to fulfil but don’t have a good writer, photographer or designer to call on? Until a few years back it meant either doing it yourself (badly) or going the full hog and employing an agency, with all the accompanying overheads and formal processes.

Things have become easier with the arrival of web-based platforms where a client can post a brief and receive bids from specialists for the work. Read More »

News of the failure of high profile hyperlocal site TBD.com, which some said could provide answers to questions about the future of online news, offers lessons for future ventures and raises the question again about how much of a future hyperlocal sites have.

TBD.com, which launched last August, failed for the same reason all start-ups fail: small audiences, big expenses and small revenues. That all led to big losses and redundancies. Read More »

AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post has claimed its first casualty as the departure of AOL Media president David Eun is announced.

His duties will go to Arianna Huffington, who was named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. There could be more changes in store as well as AOL introduces new bigger ad formats. Read More »

Very interesting update from Google. The latest extensions to its Chrome browser will block the crappy content being pumped out by content farms, which ironically are creating content based on what users are searching for.

This is going to hit the likes of Associated Content, owned by Yahoo!, Demand Media and AOL’s growing Seed operation. Read More »

I missed this last month, but as hardly a day goes by without Facebook unveiling expansion plans of some sort (today with more social commerce and last week with Facebook Deals), it is well looking at author Douglas Rushkoff’s prediction that we are “witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook”.

He might not be the first to argue that Facebook won’t last, but it is is well worth a read as he argues that even as the company is valued at a stratospheric $50bn its days are already numbered. Read More »

No one saw this one coming. AOL has snapped up the biggest blog out there with the acquisition of The Huffington Post for $315m (£195m).

The is an audacious move by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and is part of his vision to recast AOL as a content business. Read More »

As AOL pushes forward with its content strategy it has set new targets for content echoing the strategy of Nick Denton’s Gawker.

As part of a major AOL presentation (“the AOL Way”) it lays out guidelines that say that material from its content farm Seed requires 7,000 pageviews to break even, but video requires a whole lot more. Read More »