Another well deserved person has received his second Most Excellent Person, for outstanding work and commitment to the projects the winner is:

Simon Sturgess

So now it is a race out of Martyn, Ben and Simon as to who will get the hat-trick! 

I've been watching developments at the Times with interest. On the face of it, it doesn’t appear that the pay wall is working for the Times...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/20/times-paywall-readership

But here’s something to think about...

http://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2010/07/14/the-publishing-model-is-dead-and-has-been-for-years/

When the move to a subscription model on the website was first announced, it appeared to be a desperate last throw of the dice from an outdated organisation in its death throes. News International was swimming against the flow of consumer demand and Rupert Murdoch didn’t understand the online medium. The naysayers were quick to pronounce that both were doomed.

Then, as the launch of the iPad was announced, The Times was one of the first publishers to release a paid for App. This made a lot more sense because tablet devices are the future for publishers. By setting expectation from the start that content on the shiny, new iPad platform is paid for, it gives publishers the chance to regain some control ceded to web users with their "free content” mindset and generate revenue from the high quality journalism at their core.

If the iPad (and other tablet devices) do represent the future, and this is what underpins the publishing strategy for The Times, free content on the web would have been an anomaly, so it's a smart – if unpopular -- move to erect a pay wall and eliminate this problem. The question will be how quickly consumers adopt tablet devices and how long News International can sustain this controversial strategy.

Rupert Murdoch has form in this regard. He has bet everything on a high risk strategy before. In the nascent digital TV market, he gave away free set top boxes and dishes to consumers to drive uptake of Sky digital, weighing up this initial outlay against the life time value of a customer.

He backed himself and bet the business on the fact that once people experienced Sky’s premium, multichannel TV offering with sports and movies, they would not want to go back to the dark old days of terrestrial TV.

Now 21 years old, Sky now has nearly 10 million customers and returned an operating profit of £780 million for the 12 months to 30 June 2009.

Is history about to repeat itself? It looks like Mr Murdoch may be playing a canny long game, so it would be foolish to write him off just yet.