Today, the one piece of news that has circulated ad infinitum is the story that Ruper Murdoch will block Google from visiting his sites. I will write a longer post tomorrow but,

What the fuck are you doing?

I have yet to see any article actually question this wisdom owing to the fact that he is one of the world’s most successful publishers. He can still get it wrong. Until he shows us how his subscription model will work we will have to assume it is a pile of crap (I am happy to be corrected in time.) His deal with Google for Adwords on Myspace is $100m adrift of the deal target (that’s one hundred million dollars adrift) and the offices for his Myspace digital vision remain empty at the cost of $1m per month.

So, that says to me, he needs Google. He needs Google for traffic, he needs Google for revenue. As some have argued this is probably a [very public] negotiation stance for future haggling but he really needs to be careful. He may have revolutionised the TV industry with SKY but that was when the channels and choices were closed. The Internet is the utter contrast to this.

I will post more tomorrow, but read this article from e-consultancy and this article from Andrew Girdwood, both of which I have commented on.