Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine has posted an interesting piece predicting the end of the advertising-based revenue model for publishers, and, by extension, the end of advertising. Rupert Murdoch's decision to erect a paywall around The Times website has received a great deal of publicity and it seems as though Condé Nast may be following in his footsteps. However Jarvis believes that there is little chance that publishers will ever achieve the sort of revenues that they are used to simply through selling their content. Instead he thinks that the only way that publishers can survive in an era where scarcity has been removed as a means for inflating value is to enter the world of commerce. In other words start competing with the brands that used to supply those advertising dollars and sell the stuff themselves. Of course, having expertise in writing about fashion, for instance, in no way qualifies you to start operating as a fashion retailer.

I think there will be some tough times ahead for the publishing industry it has yet be shown whether consumers will ever be willing to pay a price for content that realistically reflects the true cost of generating that content - they are so used now to all of those free-to-access websites and magazines with cover mounted gifts. Sooner or later someone will develop a business model that works, and, who knows, maybe publishers will all become retailers. They will need to radically shift their areas of expertise first though.

Do you find Twitter a bit "last year"? Fed up with the 140 character limit? Would you like to include some images or videos or sound in your micro-blog posts? Then you should try Posterous. It is the most ludicrously easy blog site to use. If you want to create a page you just send an email to post@posterous.com and that's it. You don't even need to sign up first. And if you want to share your content you can automatically post it to your Facebook or Twitter account.

If you want to know a bit more about the blogosphere's latest poster child, you can read this interview with the site's co-founder Sachin Agarwal. Or just have a go, it really is amazingly easy. If you can send an email, you can build a blog.

Microsoft unveiled it's new search engine, Bing (But Its Not Google) without much of a fanfare yesterday. On the surface it might look like just a rebranding exercise, and we've been here before - MSN became Microsoft Live, but little else changed. We have also heard of numerous so-called Google killers in the past. Anyone tried Wolfram Alpha yet? Anyone even remember Cuil?

But put your cynicism to one side for a moment and there does actually seem to be some genuine enthusiasm for the product amongst experts in the search field. The way search results are presented is quite clever. You get commonality searches (ie what you might look for next) down the left, related searches below that and over on the right a list of similar companies to the one you have found.

Add into the mix the fact that Microsoft are going to spend $80 million building and promoting the Bing brand and it starts to look like they might just be able to give Google a run for their money.

You can try the beta version of Bing here.
Location: PostList

Augmented Reality (where real world and computer-generated data are blended in real time) has been around for a while now - think of the Hawkeye replay clips you see in cricket and tennis coverage - but up to now it has not really been used to any great effect within the marketing space.

The Wall Street Journal (you need a subscription to read the full article) has a piece about how some brands are starting to experiment with it. Papa John's have launched a campaign based around a road trip in a 1972 Camaro (the car that the founder sold in order to fund the business). The road trip is happening for real but consumers will be given the opportunity to take part in a "virtual" trip by pointing the icon on the bottom of their pizza delivery box at their webcam. Once on the virtual trip they will be offered exclusive discounts on future purchases displayed on virtual billboards along the virtual road.

This all sounds a little bit gimmicky to me and I'm not sure how many times you are likely to go back to this site once you have played with it once. The United States Postal Service, however have come up with a genuinely innovative and useful implementation of the technology. Their Virtual Box Simulator allows you to hold an object that you want to send by post in front of a webcam and use the resulting 3-D image to determine the right size box for shipping the object.

Another area of AR that has been receiving a lot of attention recently is that of Building Recognition. There are a number of mobile applications being developed that allow you to take a picture of a building using your camera phone, upload it and then get information back about that building in real time. The technology uses GPS to narrow down the field of possible buildings that you could be looking at, and once it has identified the exact building from the database, returns you data about it. You can easily imagine a world of possibilities that this opens. For example, you are stood in front of a restaurant, you point your camera phone at it and immediately receive the menu with prices, opening hours, a list of customer reviews and a link to make a reservation. You can read a bit more about this here or watch an episode of BBC Click that features it here.

For all those of you who think that Google already knows a bit too much about your online behaviour, the latest patent that they have applied for might really terrify you. If you can't be bothered to read through all of the technical detail, here is a summary.

The technology they are patenting uses the accelerometer found in their Android mobile phone handset (as well as the iPhone) which can detect the speed and direction of movement of the phone. In this way they hope to be able to determine what you are doing whilst carrying your phone, and offer you functionality accordingly. For instance, if you are going for a jog at 6am it might start playing music for you automatically. Then you drive to work and the phone automatically switched to speakerphone mode. Or perhaps you catch a train in which case it will offer you up some light reading to pass the time, perhaps the news headlines. You arrive at work and put your phone on your desk and all of your awaiting work voicemails are loaded onto it for you whilst you make yourself a cup of coffee.

Of course, just because they have applied for a patent does not mean they actually have the technology to implement any of these ideas yet. But I wouldn't bet against them being able to do it soon.