Advertising Age online has a short story about the plummeting rates for advertising online amid serious market downturns.  The range, explained in a helpful slideshow at the bottom of the story, goes from nearly zero CPM (cost per thousand views) to well over one hundred dollars per CPM.

“The slideshow…culled from agency buyers and media sellers, is far from scientific, but gives a good sense of who can still charge bank and why.”

The takeaway: Organizations with specialized content (The Wall Street Journal, WebMD) or those with big audiences (Yahoo, Aol) command the higher rates.  Makes sense.

Nicholas Carlson, senior editor at The Business Insider, talks to Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 about what the big portals like Yahoo, Aol and Microsoft are generally doing with video strategy.

What happens to one’s social media accounts after death?  MyWebWill, a start-up company in Sweden, is trying to address the problem of handling the online lives of people after they die .  VentureBeat’s Kim-Mai Cutler sat down with founders Lisa Granberg and Elin Tybring to get an explanation of the service.

The Sun newspaper in the UK has a brilliant video describing the high-tech attributes of its hand-held device.

On a related note, the French technology company, Tebaldo, has announced a semi-flexible, black and white electronic paper.  Editorweblog.org has a story about it here.

A bronze sculpture of the Labrador Duck sits in Brand Park in Elmira, New York, near the site where the last living survivor was seen. (photo by Scott Anger)

The Lost Bird Project, which memorializes five North American birds driven to extinction in modern times – the Carolina Parakeet, the Great Auk, the Heath Hen, the Labrador Duck and the Passenger Pigeon – has a launched a site. 

While looking for a story about climate change in North America, photographer Nina Berman stumbled upon a tiny subject with a huge impact.  The Mountain Pine Beetle is an 8 mm-long (about 1/3 of an inch) insect that is killing millions of acres of forest across Canada and the northern United States. 

BRIGHTCOVE OFFERS LOWER-PRICED SERVICE – There’s no perfect video content management system on the market today.  As a result, many organizations have opted to build their own.  But one of the “out-of-the-box” video platform leaders, Brightcove, has announced an express service starting at $99 a month.