Last day of the year, and pulling out those excerpts that have been gathering dust in the draft box. Stay tuned for the New Medici network to go live in Q1 2010, as well as a  breakdown of media companies for last year and going forward into the new year.

via How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions - WSJ.com

It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

via How Google Can Combat Content Farms

• Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn, who further wrote that “the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem.”
• Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky’s post on “Algorithmic Authority.”
• Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli.
• Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger.  
  

A must-view from the Monaco Media Forum: Arianna Huffington from Huffington Post debating with Axel Spring AG CEO Mathias Dopfner, who runs one of the largest newspaper publishing companies in Europe. A very sophisticated debate on traditional publishing versus internet/aggregated or citizen journalism; plus, Arianna’s key quote on “traditional media versus digital media: ADD versus OCD.”

via HuffPost Game Changers: Who Is The Ultimate Game Changer In Philanthropy: The Extraordinaries

Making it effortless to add brief volunteer activities to your busy day. The Extraordinaries delivers information via mobile phone about micro-volunteer opportunities that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot. Standing in line at the DMV? Sure you can listen to music on your iPhone, but won’t you feel better about yourself if you use that iPhone to spend those stray minutes adding identifying tags to museum photos, or translating a Spanish document into English? With over 700 million smartphones expected to be in use by 2012, these innovators see billions of hours of spare time ready to be tapped into for the greater good.

Killer Quote: “We hope people might look differently at that ride on the bus and not just play video games. Micro-volunteerism is perfectly suited for the Millennial Generation. They are used to text messaging, MySpace, Facebook, get-in, get-out, instant gratification.” Must Click Link: BeExtra.org

via Sony Posts Fourth Consecutive Quarterly Loss SNE | SAI

Sony SNE lost $292 million in the quarter ending in September, the company announced this morning. This marks the fourth consecutive loss for Sony. It is now predicting that losses for the year will total ¥95 billion ($1 billion).

via The New York Times’ Coming Jihad Against The Huffington Post | 24/7 Wall St

There has been a great deal of speculation about what the basis of a suit of The Huffington Post by The New York Times would look like in legal terms. First Amendment attorney David Marburger has said in widely circulated comments that the best legal leverage that the old media has is to get Congress to amend the Copyright Act to restore the common law as a way to fight unfair enrichment that aggregators get by utilizing content created by other media.

The Huffington Post recently passed The Washington Post and LA Times in terms of the visitors each has to its website each month. Huffington’s revenue is rumored to be small, perhaps as little as $8 million this year. As that number grows, it will take more advertising share from its old media rivals.

Update: Several sources have told 24/7 that a suit by old media may be brought under the Interstate Commerce Act.

via Can Nintendo Rebuild? - BusinessWeek

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told financial analysts and journalists that the company had been unprepared for the sudden drop in sales of its Wii living-room game console. “We sensed that the market mood was cooling off in the spring,” he said. “But frankly, we hadn’t expected to get as bad as it did by summer.” In the past six months the stock has slid 22%.

In the July-September quarter, Nintendo’s operating profit dropped 52%, while sales slid 28%. Nintendo now expects full-year profits of $4 billion on $10.9 billion in sales, instead of $5.4 billion in profits and $19.7 billion in revenues. Last fiscal year, the company had its best year ever, raking in profits of $6.1 billion on revenues of $20.1 billion.  

With Rupert Murdoch’s mention yesterday of making consumers pay for all content, no matter the relative quality, e.g., WSJ, NY Post, Telegraph, Fox News, etc. has again paved the way for a heap of dicussion about “pay walls.” With the WSJ’s 1 million users bringing in $65 million per year, and the FT free-to-pay model working, Murdoch is trying to lead by supply, and see if demand and the rest of the competition accept the anti-free model. While this may momentarily resuscitate some of the publishing models, while recreating the cable model where free tv became paid, will it also curtail more voices or media navigators (read: niche blogs and news aggregators).  

Via Gerd Leonard’s brilliant Media Futurist: Arianna Huffington talking to the House Committee about the Future of Journalism. Basic points: there’s no “way back” machine, tax subsidies and bailouts are like “putting [one's] finger in a dike to stop the flow of innovation.” I.e., not going to happen. Her two thoughts on saving journalistic media: online advertising and investigative journalism increasingly done (aka “rescued”) by non-profit foundations.

If Sherman McCoy (think Tom Hanks in the disastrous feature) was a “Master of the Universe” - who would that “Master” be in the blog world? Would it be a Nick Denton, Arianna Huffington, Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Henry Blodget or another? While The Bonfire of the Vanities was a bestseller for its generation, a “Blogfire” could be interpreted as the next generation - or “New Medici” - of innovative publishers who challenge mainstream media newspapers, magazines, tabloids and even television market share.