You may have caught this interesting news piece last week, Brand Finance announced their latest league table ranking the most valuable brands in the world, with Google supplanting Walmart to become the new king of the hill.  Microsoft also rose up the chart, pushing Walmart into third, with IBM and Vodafone making up the top five.  Anyway, we thought it’d be worth while to compare the top ten in terms of share of voice across the news headlines:

As can be seen Google live up to their ranking as the globe’s most valuable brand, weighing in with almost a quarter (24.7%) of all news headlines when compared to their peers.  Although not far behind Google, with 24.17% of stories, is Apple whose coverage has no doubt been buoyed this past month by the release of its iPad 2.  Microsoft comes in at three, but possibly more surprising, is the inclusion of AT&T in fourth with 12.77% share of articles – although this can be explained by the massive spike in coverage since the recent announcement of their intended acquisition of T-Mobile USA.  IBM make up our top five, in terms of news coverage, suggesting perhaps that (American) tech companies make for the best headlines?

Any surprising results in there – brands you think deserve to be ranked higher or ones that deserve more press coverage?  For the complete BrandFinance Global 500 click here.

The past year saw the worlds of news and mobile collide, as the iPhone and iPad both grew in market share, the article in particular cites the innovative apps from the Washington Post and CNN, both integrating a social media element to them taking them beyond the realms of traditional news.  From here the article predicts a further grow in mobile applications, but a greater focus on social media as the social web continues to change our online experience.

Beyond social and mobile, the article also looks at the influence of WikiLeaks, the M&A climate, location-based services and the future of news syndication.  But for the full low down, read the full article here.

We’d love to know your musings and thoughts for the upcoming year, either on news or further afield.  If 2010 was the year of Facebook, can we expect more of the same in 2011?

So what will drive this downfall?  Dawson predicts newsprint will be replaced by mobile devices, tablets computers and the advance in technology of lightweight digital papers.  We’ve already seen that e-editions of newspapers are rising quickly, but quick enough to see the end of newspapers as we know them in the UK and US by the end of the decade?

Download the app here and let us know if there are any events you think we should be covering in the app!

With the decline around traditional media being widely reported, it seems that the digital world is more than capable in filling those gaps.  Around a third of participants went online for news, which is slightly higher than those reading it in print and the same numbers as news radio, however if you broaden that to include mobile, email, and social media then the figure rises to 44% of Americans getting their news digitally.  Of course I fully expect the Moreover iPhone sport news app to be making up a healthy proportion of that number..

The table (left) breaks it down nicely, illustrating the general upward trend for digital content and the more mixed curves for traditional media, television still being our chief source of news.  As much as anything else a report like this shows how we are now consuming information from a wealth of differing outlets – 36% of Americans reported getting news from mixed sources, compared with a marginally higher 39% relying solely on traditional.

Overall this can only be a good thing for users and publishers, as we are offered more ways to consume news and as such have increased our time spent with the news.  Check at the full report here at Pew Research, and let us know below in the comments how you see the shift in media consumption patterns affecting the ways you read the news.

We’ve still got all the sport feeds you’re familiar with but now added the ability to create your own saved searches and customised feeds.  So search for your favourite team or niche sport over our categories to get breaking news and latest scores from global sport news sources.

We’ve also added localised menus for US, UK, Global, and Event (think the Ryder Cup, Tour de France etc) focused sport, so whatever your interest we’ve got it covered.  Download the app from iTunes here, and as before tell us your thoughts so we can score another app success!

Techmeme could become a model for other industries as a useful way to harness the increasingly unwieldy Web and arm readers who are preparing for business meetings or cocktail parties. Techmeme, a start-up company based in San Francisco, also publishes aggregation sites for politics, celebrity gossip and baseball, and hopes to expand to topics like business or energy.

Industry-specific aggregators like Techmeme provide focused, grouped news stories which can be essential for readers requiring a succinct digest of the main topics of the day. With aggregators often getting a bad press, it is refreshing to see the benefits they offer being discussed and encouraged not only for readers but for publishers too.

Oneupweb have carried out an eye-opening eye-tracking study into the effectiveness of real-time web search results. The study split a group of users into “consumers” searching for products you would consider buying or “foragers” looking for current news and information on a topic. The results were mixed to say the least:

73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study.

Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers.

The report also showed the users took more than ten seconds to to settle their gaze on the real-time results, but the foragers were more willing to spend time on the page which could be indicative of their willingness to consider more options before clicking and hence their increased likelihood to test the real-time results.

So the results perhaps don’t show real-time search to be quite as popular as the buzz may suggest – not yet anyway, but as users adapt the social aspect of search will become ever more relevant as real-time becomes a reality.

Outsell picks up on the recent Nielsen blog post Changing Model: A Global Perspective on Paying for Online Content, which investigates whether consumers will be willing to pay for online news content. This study matches previous findings from Forrester and Outsell’s own research, essentially that when it comes to media content consumers seem less willing to pay for news than other types of media.

Such findings lead Outsell to conclude that consumers have been conditioned to spend on particular content at particular price points, and that household budgets are pretty fixed. Would you be prepared to cancel that ESPN TV subscription to pay for access to your local newspaper online? So rather than expecting a change in business models to be the next big thing, Outsell suggests publishers place more focus on “serious product design, user engagement, and the things that delight and differentiate”.

Certainly food for thought, as the recession eases and ad spending looks to be slowly bouncing back will the trend toward paywalls lose some momentum?