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Matthew DeBord’s, Apple Will Change Cars posting at The Big Money web site foresees Apple’s IPAD as the forerunner of a touch screen dashboard, eliminating all the instrumentation except the odometer. For auto journalists he believes, “it could be a huge deal for the so-called “buff books,” magazine titles such as Car and Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, etc., because it will allow these glossies to program more dynamic content, including video, and still showcase cars with vivid photography in a format unbound from the desktop and not mixed up with the full-blown computing capabilities of most laptops.”

Wired editor Chris Anderson, interviewed by OnLine Media, said, “If you look at the Tablet in particular, the prototypes we are working on now are applications of traditional magazine-making techniques to a much more efficient distribution platform, and much more powerful presentation platform, with all kinds of multimedia aspects to it. It is designed to leverage our existing skills. You know — photography, design, editing, and control of the experience – the packaging of the ideas. These are skills we believe transcend paper, and the Tablet is the first opportunity we’ve had to show that.”

Photo By: Artiom Chernyshevich

That opportunity means added impact and that is where the future lies for Online Spin columnist Joe Marchese: “ ‘Scale’ is not necessarily as important as it once was. Advertisers coming from a world where ‘reach and frequency’ was a success metric need to realize that in this new world scale is out and impact is in.” In other words, buying billions of impressions online — where click-throughs amount to no more than a ’rounding error’ and the number of people who recall seeing the ad, let alone remembering the message in the ad, can hardly be measured on a logarithmic scale — is not impactful.”

Emotion is the key according to a new study by Innerscope, as reported by Karl Greenberg in Media Post. He says: “The firm found that while consumers’ overall emotional engagement with car and truck ads dropped from 2008 to 2009, some ads engaged consumers at high levels across brands and classes. And those ads had specific characteristics that were missing from ads with low engagement scores.”  What Innerscope CEO Carl Marci tells Greenberg about ads is relevant to auto writing and reporting, “Seventy-five percent of behavior, including engagement, is driven by subconscious responses. We are measuring unconscious emotional response to auto ad stimuli, and if the ads aren’t relevant, you aren’t going to be engaged.”

Still another informed look at web communications is offered by Craig Newmark, founder of CraigsList. From his piece in The Huffington Post: “Trust is the new black, as I like to say. The great opportunity for news organizations is to constructively demonstrate trustworthy reporting, and to visibly do so. News curation, that is, selecting what’s news and should be visible, that’s an equally big deal. …The successful news organizations of the future will pursue models for news curation/selection which is a hybrid of professional editing and collaboration among talented consumers.”

Helping readers weigh the output of crowd-sourced input is a new product from a start-up firm, Jodange, reported by Steve Smith in Media Post. “Thoughts, feelings and sentiments coming off the Web — that is what the technology is about,” says (Jodange) co-founder Larry Levin. The technology uses linguistic analysis to extract opinions from text, identify the sentiments expressed, the opinion holder and the topic. When combined together they produce, for example, the ‘Top of Mind Recovery Pulse’ which analyzes everything from news articles to blog posts and even Twitter tweets to surface and quantify attitudes.”