United Kingdom

We've kicked off the New Year into full gear with our own Staci Kramer, Tameka Kee and Tricia Duryee covering the giant Consumer Electronics Show. Their coverage can be seen at our CES 2009 channels on both paidContent.org and mocoNews.net.

Our top headlines of the first full week in 2009:

Britain's national Advertising Standards Authority typically has to rule on questions such as whether a lingerie poster shoes too much anatomy or whether the brand name "FCUK" is likely to be read as something else. Now the agency may have to decide a loftier question: Is there a god?

For the past week, 800 buses have been crisscrossing England with a large advertisement on the side that reads "There Is Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life."

Here are two related items from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) about efforts to offer greater connection between the web and the living room:

We knew it was too crafty to be true - Norwegian public radio network NRK, which on Monday began giving away The Beatles' entire back catalogue as podcast downloads, last night pulled the endeavour after realising the whole thing is probably illegal.

Cambridge, England-based technology VC deals tracker Library House, which went in to administration last month after the venture sector itself dried up, is selling its database to Dow Jones's VentureSource, a larger, similar service. Administrator Leonard Curtis made the sale on December 23, DJ said on Tuesday.

Ed's Note: This is an opinion piece based on UK's newspaper market. Optimistic newspaper proprietors like Sly Bailey and Tim Bowdler blame the business' current malaise (we've covered over 1,000 newspaper job losses in UK since October alone) on an advertising downturn that's merely "cyclical". In reality, 2009 is more likely to bring more layoffs, further consolidation and the death of certain long-running titles than it is a cyclical upturn in fortunes, as publishers grapple with the truth that their businesses have changed fundamentally and forever.

After spending a good amount of time talking to technology customers in Europe
during the last quarter, I've concluded that attitudes towards enterprise social
computing tend to be quite different on the eastern side of the Atlantic, which
seems doubly significant since most (though not all) social software vendors
hail from North America.

-Liberty Media chief John Malone did well by his investors this year, and he did it mostly by getting rid of shares in News Corp. before they went through the floor. [Breakingviews on NYT]

—Departing Time exec's online/offline disappointment: Ed McCarrick, who leaves Time magazine after 35 years this week to go to Omnicom barter unit Icon International, tells AdAge's Nat Ives that one of his biggest disappointments was not being able to change advertisers' habits about selling beyond the paid subscription.