Morning Links: January 9, 2009
— How and where Google makes its money. Notice the string of red “X”s next to Google News (and many other products) — it’s the unending wave of cash generated by its advertising business that allows Google to spend so much of its energies on products that don’t raise a nickel.
— If you were planning on buying Adrian Holovaty’s book to learn how to program in Django — the newspaper-derived framework for building web applications — don’t. Wait until the second edition.
— Eric Ulken looks at the New York Times’ data strategies. Interesting that they used Django for mapping on Represent; I was under the impression the Times was mostly a Rails shop, Rails being Django’s to-the-death rival in the framework space.
— Mark Luckie shares the conventional wisdom of eyetracking studies.
The Google item is innerstin — not clear Google gets news, per the recent comments about the company not buying newspapers. Vint Cerf of Google gave a talk at USATODAY a few months ago and relentlessly talked about news as a “commodity”.
Someone in the audience mentioned to him that almost every news story was a non-commodity (stock ticker updates aside) and a difference existed between an investigation and a city council update, thus thinking of them as commodities might not be the smartest approach. He didn’t seem to see the point.