Link roundup - 5 Nov

by andrew pascoe on November 5th, 2008

In the UK: Virgin Media and BSkyB have kissed and made up around carriage fees (details of fees weren’t disclosed, not surprisingly) so now you’ll be able to get the main named Sky channels on Virgin, and the main named Virgin channels on Sky -(link: The Register)

NYT release another nifty little data visualisation thing - this one based around the US election - check out the word trail here

Omniture have released a free Jupiter Research report "Search marketing and analytics - Making sense of the data overload" (found via Will Scully-Power at Mark). You can get it here (or try here - this link may take you past the form straight to the doc). The report is from Jan this year, but isn’t any less relevant because of that. (I quite like the approach too btw, a nice little co-marketing effort that benefits both companies.)

In Australia: Sensis has finally admitted its search offering is rubbish - it will run Google search and AdSense ads across its properties. In addition, businesses listed in the Yellow Pages will show up in Google Maps results. This obviously secures wider distribution for any businesses coughing up to go in the Yellow Pages which Sensis sales people can use as a sales point to maintain the custom of small businesses, but isn’t Sensis also handing Google a massive wealth of content to Google Maps that will in turn make that product - and not Sensis’ mapping product WhereIs- more and more valuable to Joe Public user? (News found via Shepherd, and B&T article also now accessible.)
Forrester’s James McQuivey has a great post on the MTV/MySpace/Auditude announcement - the one where everyone’s hoping to make money from user-posted copyrighted content. The post is here.

In the UK: MSN has gone and commissioned an "exclusive online drama" - it will be 10 3 minute episodes, shown over 5 weeks. It’s called Kirill and is a co-production between Endemol and Pure Grass Films. Those who don’t already have Silverlight installed will either end up installing as the video player is Silverlight-based, or just give up and go find other 3 min distractions elsewhere. (via a Media Guardian article here)