[via Yuvaraj] Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley writes: "The real China exists at the provincial and local level -- far removed from the Beijing-centric power network. Even after 27 years of extraordinary reforms, the real China remains very much a micro story -- oftentimes at odds with the macro story that drives Western perceptions. This is one of those times...While economic control was close to absolute under the old model of the state-owned economy, that is not the case today under the increasingly marketized system. Power has been diffused away from the center, making macro control from Beijing exceedingly difficult."

SearchEngineWatch Blog writes about a pssible mechanism to combat click fraud:

n Pay-Per-Percentage vs. PPC, Shimon Sandler points out an interesting new paper from the folks at Microsoft Research - Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions: An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud (pdf)

As Shimon notes, the idea is that this type of advertising approach would be "immune to both click fraud and impression fraud," and would use something called "pre-fix match" instead of broad match.

The author of the paper is Joshua Goodman, who is a Principal Researcher, and the head of the Microsoft Learning for Messaging and Adversarial Problems (LMAP) team, and who has an impressive page of other publications listed on the Microsoft domain, including a recent one on Finding Advertising Keywords on Web Pages.

What does pay-per-impressions mean? Simply, someone can can for a percentage of all impressions for certain keywords or keyword phrases over a period of time.

SiliconBeat writes:

The traditional advertising supported media model is based on bundling content with advertising, with a large helping of proprietary distribution infrastructure. The entire media value chain is being reconstructed with the "help" of online. Social media are re-defining content. Advertising networks are re-defining revenue generation models. Blogs are redefining the concept of "editorial brand" in media.

The fatal flaw of the online newspapers has been to be newspapers, online. This is obvious to everyone. What is not obvious is what local newspaper companies can do online that is defensible. Online local aggregation is kind of an oxymoron. It can be done more efficiently on a national scale, as Craigslist is proving.

Perhaps Craigslist holds a model for what newspapers become - a series of specific unbundled "newspaper-like" services, but done with community-generated content and executed on a national scale.