More stories from London show that even the mainstream media is turning to blogs to check the pulse of things. One news report tonight on the local ABC station had nothing but pics from camera phones, technically called MoBlogs. For the unfiltered shots of the area, check LondonBloggers, and LondonUnderground.

One blogger caught this fella with his guitar, close to one of the affected spots.

And, of course, there are plenty of images (linked to flikr) like the one below, of the massive Olympic bid that London won the day before.

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What could a terrorist gain by killing civilians? Nothing, unless, they assume publicity is an end in itself.
It will be a long day for all those office workers and children who have been asked to stay where they are.

Interesting twist to the use of mobile phones. BT is seeing a surge in the use of fixed line phones, as mobile phone networks are jammed.
Check the blogs from the London underground. One blogger on that blog network is keeping her chin up:

"Well as we’ve won, let’s just be thankful than this didn’t happen on the day that the Olympic inspectors were in town.."

Thanks to these citizen journalists we get live reports. This picture, for instance, of Bus number 59, near Russell Square station.

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Just interviewed Suranga Chandratillake, the co-founder of Blinkx, the new search engine I am testing out. Amazing story. You could look at it from so many angles: the death of text-based search, managing information overload, or even from the perspective of what-is-this-guy-thinking (treading on the toes of the 800-pound gorillas, Google, Yahoo and MSN!)

But that still won’t be getting to the crux of what Blinkx is all about. (You’ll have to wait for my article on this.) I am a big believer in customization, and can see this search company as taking information management down that path. Marketers will love what’s coming, because they have declared very clearly that the mass media model is broken. (Remember P&G’s Jim Stengel’s warning shot to the televison-is-everything crowd?)

People spend gobs of money to ‘advertise’ on a search engine, swallowing up every keyword, but that cannot be the only way. Being satisfied with that is like saying plonking down $1.5 million on a Super Bowl ad is smart targeting! Speaking of targeting, heck, even medicine is aggressively pursuing the path of ‘targeted’ drugs. Seriously! Check the latest Newsweek special issue that talks about ‘treatments designed not for massive conquest but for narowly targeted strikes..’ But I digress.

How targeted can a search engine be? I put this hypothetical question to Suranga: What if I was searching for a particular song, used in a BBC television report on the 3rd of July, covering the Live8 concert in Moscow. Can his search engine do that? Potentially, yes, he replied. For now, it is the only engine that exhaustively searches audio (podcasts, for instance) and video. And it’s going to get phenomenally better, he promises.

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In the future, ads will pop up in our cereal bowls. Our dreams will be interrupted by commercials. But we’ll still look to magazines when we don’t want to be found.

The above is actualy copy from an ad for magazines by the Magazine Marketing Coalition. The campaign (magazine.org) features some intriguing facts. Check out too, the ‘covers of the future’ that magazines could be featuring (like the one on the left.)

Stories such as the ‘see-through SUV’ for an automotive mag, and ‘What your man’s POD says about him’ for Cosmo etc would be still in the print medium, they say. As a big fan of magazines, I don’t see them going away; back in 1998 I argued with one publisher that having an online version would not erode the reader base!   

HOWEVER, there is evidence that if print doesn’t pull up its socks, the portals are going to make a killing. Case in point, the BBC. Yes that BBC! For all it’s problems over the years (I know, I went through a BBC radio training in1988) ‘aunty’ as it is affectionately called, has been ahead of the curve in marketing its services to the 24/7/365 news-hungry world. They are also currently running a podcasting experiment for BBC radio.

The Economist magazine had a story (Ha! see what I mean) a couple of weeks back on how the ‘lumbering giant’  is partly responsible for sliding newspaper readership in Britain. BBC has a whopping 525 Web sites, and BBC news has 7.8 million unique visitors –a week!

So against all this, it is wonderful to see the renewed interest in publishing, here in the US, and definitely in Asia. Tim O’Reilly the founder and brains behind several ventures around O’Reilly Media, recently introduced a magazine that he calls the "Martha Stewart magazine for geeks." It’s called "Make." Actually MAKE is a ‘mook’ or what the publisher calles a hybrid between a magazine and a book. There’s a companion Zine, too.

So is print here to stay? The Magazine Marketing Coalition has these numbers. The popularity of TV viewing fell from 25% to 21% from 1995 to 2005. In the same period, the popularity of magazines jumped from 28% to 35%. Customers have spoken: To mangle the Fox network’s words: you report, we decide!

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