The Digital Gloss Files

...with Margaret Tran
 

The winners of the 15th Annual Webby Awards for 2011 have been announced with Nowness nabbing Best Fashion Website; Vogue.com took out the People's Choice Award in the same category, and The New Yorker won for best magazine site. Other bastions of digital goodness included MarthaStewartLiving.com (Lifestyle), Angry Birds (Best Mobile Game), National Geographic (People's Choice Magazine) and Groupon (Retail).

Stuff White People Like, Stuff Hipsters Like and now, Stuff Journalists Like for the super word nerds among us. Bylines, free food, name-dropping and inverted pyramids are so obviously like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens for me.

Melbourne-based mummy blogger Louisa Claire has launched agency Brand Meets Blog to help advertisers connect to their market through bloggers, initially through Facebook and Twitter (clue: at least spell the blogger's name right). Claire's own blog is Everything Is Edible.

What's the age that an internet entrepreneur expires?According to TechCrunch, it's 25. Cripes, another marker toward the quarter-life crisis.

Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark (a 20-something internet entrepreneur) recently shared his thoughts on an open internet, criticising traditional media's blurring of editorial and advertising and the importance of a sharing a great product with a community.

Image courtesy of Paid Content

Ever wondered how news consumption in print and online compares? The folks at Paid Content have put together a handy indicator, showing that readers spent an average of 29 minutes a day with a newspaper compared to online news consumers who only spent just 1 minute and 12 seconds on news sites per day. One might say this has much to do with how readers interact with content through each medium, and let's not get started with news consumption through iPhones, Androids and the plethora of mobile devices currently in use.

How do you keep mobile users engaged for longer? According to NPR's usage data for the first quarter of 2011, audio streamers visited 4.2 news items per visit in contrast to almost half that amount for the text-only crew.

It's predicted that Android's app store will soon be the size of Apple's, the latter boasting 300,000 apps and counting.

The market of apps collating news is booming and possibly gearing to replace the role of social media in doing so. Indeed, this might only come about depending on how many consumers adopt said apps (disclaimer: I have a sexy smartphone with unfortunately laggy 3G of doom, so unfortunately apps don't always work for me).

Despite the apparent threat of apps, social media advertising reportedly topped $2 billion in 2010. Thank you, Facebook Ads/ Promoted Tweets.

One example of social media advertising? Try shopping via Facebook. US fashion brand, Express Clothing, has opened access to their online store through Facebook without users having to leave their accounts. One could almost ask, what brand needs a website when all your entire catalogue of sartorial goods can be bought through Facebook?

Time Inc. has finally struck a deal with Apple, offering all iPad editions of their mags free with print subscriptions.

Freelance writers, here are 5 super useful online tools lovingly smushed together for your convenience by the good folk at Mashable.

B&T reports Google Shopping has finally launched in Australia. Similar to how their search function currently works, Google will trawl through a number of e-commerce sites for you to do a second trawl through what you're looking (or not looking) for.

But, hey, lookie, websites that take care of trawling for you by sending shoppers what they like. Founded by 24-year-old Emily McNish, JewelMint is part of a new group of e-commerce sites that decides what brands you like based on your favourite TV shows and other bits of pop culture. Indeed, we're talking personal stylists at the click of a mouse and it's certain to be a game-changer in the bubbling market of online shopping.

For more tips on how to reach an audience, Mashable sums up how three companies used well-tailored content to market their audiences.

Margaret Tran is an digital producer and freelance writer often found eyeball-deep in the goodness of the internet and all things digital. She recently departed the glittering ranks of the digital crew at Pacific Magazines, where she had the privilege of working with that's life!, InStyle, K-Zone, Total GirlandGirlfriendmagazine. Nowadays, she can be found freelancing, eating lots and swimming through her mutating piles of magazines in her home.