A significant move happened in the online publishing world this week and it is a sign of things to come for any online publishing company that is burning money managing their own hosting operations.

Newsweek.com announced this week that the site is outsourcing its Web site hosting duties to Amazon, joining a small but growing number of companies experimenting with cloud computing.

“Until now, Newsweek.com had been hosted by its parent company, The Washington Post Co. The media company has been trying to cut losses at its magazine division, which recorded $29.3 million in operating losses in 2009. By joining the cloud, Newsweek expects to save close to $500,000 annually.

“It saves Newsweek money,” said Geoff Reiss, vp, general manager, Newsweek Digital.

“Lots of people out there built their own infrastructure and are going to be tortured by this idea of sunk costs.”

Kontexto started using Amazon Web Services in early 2008 and now our whole real time content analytics platform is built on the Amazon cloud. We have always been lobbing the idea around of launching a cloud based news infrastructure that takes care of everything post publishing including storage, search, delivery and analytics. Give the CMS and editing freedom to the content creators, but hand off everything else.

After newsweek.com, it is hard to say who will be the next to transition hosting to the cloud. Some other certainly have without announcing it. But it is good to see a brand name publication make an organizational shift to the cloud.

Full jump to Mediaweek article

The UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) released its annual Organisation Census today and although you have to be a member of the AOP to read the full report, you can see an in depth overview of the census data in this release at econsultancy.

The census had a 100% response rate and it seems thing are looking up for online publishers in 2010 with hiring, new product development and a general sense of optimism back on deck.

I can certainly attest to the fact it has been a tough 2 years since the general economy and traditional media took a nose dive. Our original business plans had to be put on hold for a while given frozen budgets and a general uncertainty amongst online publishers. But I can support some of the optimism in the census data as we are back in meeting rooms giving presentations and lining up pilot programs for our real time analytics service publishflow™.

So of all the data in the census 2010, what are the three biggest challenges facing online publishers, with which they require help?

1. Mobile services development (51% of respondents)
2. Measurement of ROI (41% of respondents)
3. Database development and utilisation (40% of respondents)

This is a very good time to be a start up either looking to set up as an online publisher (maybe someday for us) OR to supply software and services to online publishers trying to take care of the three concerns above (today for us).

Most of the newsrooms we work with are using traditional web analytics services like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics to quantify their traffic and page impression stats on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Nothing shocking here, pretty much par for the course.

But it is rare that we see newsrooms really studying their analytics data on an hourly or daily basis to uncover new insight about visitor behaviour, story preferences and overall engagement with authors. There is a ton of information trapped in traditional web analytics packages that can help newsrooms become more efficient and make more money.

It has long been our vision at Kontexto, that newsrooms will need to start using traditional ‘return on investment’ business metrics for every story they create. Like every other business that makes decisions based on future returns, newsrooms can be no different if they wish to survive.

Companies like Demand Media, Huff Post and others are onto this, but AOL is the first big media brand embracing this approach and you can get up to speed on it in a brief, but timely article from Businessweek ‘AOL Moves to Build Tech ‘Newsroom of the Future’… CEO Tim Armstrong deploys software that helps journalists collaborate on articles readers seem to want, then reports the traffic they generate.

They are using stats, stats and more stats to determine what topics, stories and authors are successful over time. But more importantly, it uncovers what is not working over time so adjustments can be made.

“ROI”, “efficient allocation of resources” and “market driven story creation” may seem cold and dry, but I want as many newsrooms as possible to be around 3, 5, 20 years from now and using stats to help make sure this happens is something we (and AOL and a growing list) believe in.

Watch out for a big transition to data driven reporting in the coming years. Can’t wait.

The Palm Pre smartphone has been receiving stellar reviews on the whole across the web Engadget, Gizmodo, CNET.

In a recent article by The Globe and Mail Palm’s plan for Pre apps the question is posed as to how Palm intends to make this device a consumer success given it only has about a dozen or so apps available at present versus tens of thousands of apps for competing devices like the iPhone™.

On the surface it seems like the classic chicken and egg scenario for Palm.

Not enough apps, consumers don’t want the device. Not enough consumers with the device, developers won’t build apps for it. But can Palm make the Pre a legitimate contender to the iPhone™ with only modest growth in apps? I think they can and here is why.

The mobile browser.

Tons of services can now be experienced in the mobile browser with the same quality as a downloaded software app. Just the way desktop apps have given way to the browser, the same can happen on mobile devices.

In the case of @follow™, we made the decision to build a browser based service instead of native apps for each mobile platform such as iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian. It’s not to say we won’t roll out native apps over time for specific platforms, but in order to get on as many devices as possible with the same exact code base, going after the mobile web browser was the correct choice for us.

This is why I think the Palm Pre is wide open for creative web developers. Hunt through the Apple app store and pick a bunch of apps that can be recreated as a web app, build them and right away you have Palm Pre owners as an audience.