Media Week

Starring on the new Conservative Party website, overhauled ahead of the upcoming party conference, is the Blue Blog where, according to David Cameron's first post, "you'll see posts from me, the Shadow Cabinet, MPs and candidates and Members of the Party".

It's odd that it has taken this long for the Tories to get a blog going, especially as the party was pretty on the ball with Webcameron, but given Dave's bland first post, we haven't been missing much.

What catches the eye is the blog roll, which has to be the most contrived reading list I've ever seen. From BuzzMachine and Comment is Free to Guido Fawkes and Mumsnet, no worthy stone is left unturned, while Boris Johnson's musings are conspicuous by their absence - surely essential reading for any Tory?

Instead of showcasing the breadth of ideas being absorbed by the party, as it's no doubt intended to do, the list merely serves to reinforce the style over substance arguments Cameron battles constantly.

Let's hope future content will offer a little more insight.

The story surrounding Asda staff dumping newspaper inserts from rival supermarket Tesco is an interesting one in itself. 

The Daily Record have covered the story here, but what particularly caught my eye was a comment left by a reader responding to the story which ended:

"Tesco should respond by having their adverts printed inside the newspaper."

Printing ads "inside" a newspaper! What kind of crazy idea is that?

If a dress cost less than a tenner you have to ask questions about who is being exploited along the chain to produce it so cheaply.

And as Primark found to its cost when Panaroma did a bit of digging into the retailer's sources, keeping track of your supply chain when there are numerous contractors and subcontractors involved is no easy task.

Which brings us to the Evening Standard and its latest giveaway. Today, the Standard has been handing out free rucksacks with the paper - at least it has from the street vendor at Hammersmith Broadway. Not great rucksacks. Not even as good as the free rucksacks you get when you join a gym, but logo-emblazoned rucksacks nonetheless.

Having shed 5% of its circulation since July, according to the latest ABCs, it may be in need of a few creative promotions to bolster sales, but would a little digging into where today's giveaway was sourced unearth any unbecoming headlines?

Newspapers are right to splash on exposés of exploited home and factory workers, slaving away to keep the profit margins of multinationals good and healthy.

And don't the majority of us feel some sense of guilt when we read such stories, recalling the cost of the cheap T-shirts littering our wardrobes with the nagging feeling that something had to give to get them on the shelves for such questionably low prices?

Editors would always like to think the strength of their editorial offering is enough to sell a newspaper without lavish promotions, although the realisation that it often isn't is also understood.

But throw an ethically sensitive product into the promotional mix - which admittedly is practically anything these days though products with stitched seams always makes me doubly nervous - and questions over a paper's ability to report objectively on such matters must also be raised.

You would think, and hope, that the Standard - all newspapers for that matter - asks the necessary questions prior to going ahead with promotions. And it would be nice to think that at the end of the chain of this particular giveaway are content, healthy workers paid a living wage for their endeavour. I wouldn't want to unfairly point the finger at the Standard. For all I know, the rucksacks cost a tenner each and were put together by a workers' cooperative in Slough.

I have put a couple of calls in and someone is trying to find out for me. Or perhaps someone from the Standard can respond below and put my mind at ease.

In the meantime, wear your rucksack with, erm, pride.

Google's assault on the browser market has taken flight with Chrome, but despite a raft of pretty amazing reviews, it's got a long way to go to be a player in a market dominated by Microsoft. A few helpful figures from Nielsen Online show just how far.

 As you can see below IE, with a 75% share, is a hefty target if the plan is to dominate the market in the same way Google dominates search.

"Microsoft hasn't made much of an inroad into Google's dominance in search so it will be very interesting to see if Google has more success at toppling Internet Explorer," Nielsen's Alex Burmaster points out.

But if anyone can do it, Google can. They proved when they entered the search market that if the product is good enough, people will use it. Quite whether Chrome can ever be that much better than its competitors is debatable. I would attempt to add links to a few reviews but a quick Google search, using Chrome, natch, will probably do the trick.

I had the privilege of being shown round the TMG building yesterday - the editorial hub, TV and radio studios, the commercial department and their all new digital lab - and I was given a glimpse at a few of the new products they're working on for users and advertisers.

All very interesting and more on which over the coming weeks. The one thing that stood out, and something that I really got from Dave King in his recent interview on Media Week TV, is that TMG do seem to get it. They understand the nature of online, the need to be surrounded by specialists constantly thinking about the new, but always with a strong commercial ‘deliverable' end-game, even if at present the p&l isn't exactly singing.

They understand the need for their teams to aspire to being integrated, even if in practice that's not easy, possible, or even always desirable, which is not true of all media owners. Sticking up a few plasma screens around the office with your website on it is not enough to change the culture of a team honed over decades to produce a daily paper.

Having been impressed, therefore, by everything on show, I can't help think it's crazy that on the day I get to see what great strides TMG is making, Media Week is running a story that the newspaper is, after over 100 years of being in print, finally going full colour.

I'm not singling out TMG on this - the majority have only just taken the full-colour plunge if at all. Again, the arguments for and against the need or desire for papers to go full-colour is something discussed in the Dave King/David Emin interview, but reasoning aside, isn't it a weird state of affairs that on the one hand traditional media owners are really driving their digital strategies and at least starting to think a little like tech companies, even if they have some way to go to operate like them, and yet on the other hand it's news worthy that, finally, their main product can now be seen in ‘colour'...gasp!