The UK media have learned nothing from the debacle over the MMR vaccine - where they relentlessly covered stories doubting the safety of MMR, putting the lives of children at risk.
They are continuing their habit ...

I just tweeted that I was finding it hard to resist the temptation to be the first to sidewiki the home page of UK newspapers. (Sidewiki is Google's new way to let you see what other users have said about a page while you look at it).

It looks like I'm too late as the Mail already has been sidewikied as this picture shows.

Patrick Swayze has died. So has Keith Floyd.

So no surprise that UK newspapers are rushing to publish as many news stories as they can on the subject to try to appear multiple times in the news and web search results, even if some of the pages are very similar.

Google's logo over the weekend showed one of its Os being abducted by aliens, triggering an SEO scrap among UK newspapers, which the Telegraph won.

National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures in the table.

I'm giving up comparing websites using Alexa.com's data. Checking the accuracy of Alexa data using ABCe numbers led me to believe they were good enough to rely on. But the Times reckons the Alexa numbers in my latest post relating to referrals from the BBC were rubbish - and the Guardian agrees.

The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).

Can't decide whether to watch a film? If you're searching online for a current film review, the Telegraph is winning the SEO battle.

There are more than 100,000 citations on Wikipedia that reference the Guardian - more than twice as much as any other UK national newspaper. The FT is way down the list - barely higher than the Sun.

Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. And 62.8% of users look at just one page. Only the Sun (4 pages/day per user), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) come out above average in terms of daily page views per user.

Short and to the point. But @guardiantech reached 1 million followers early this morning.
It benefits massively from being on Twitter's suggested users list. But impressive nonetheless. You can see more UK newspaper twitter numbers here.

Overall, Google drives the most US traffic to the nine UK national newspaper sites - 19.1%. News aggregator Drudgereport.com is the 2nd highest source of US traffic. Next is Yahoo at 5.2%, with Facebook 4th at 1.6%.

With 981,359 followers, @Guardiantech is closing in on a million, as I reveal the latest figures for UK newspaper Twitter accounts. @GuardianTech has jumped 150,000 followers in a month. @TimesFashion (29,190 followers) has moved up one place to 2nd, overtaking @GuardianNews (27,802) which is now 3rd.

On average, US traffic to UK newspaper sites is 36.8% of the UK traffic. The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5%) and for the Mail it's a massive 62.5%.

By making use of ABCe data, we can check what Alexa says with the official audited data for UK newspapers. As the table shows, it's OK but not brilliant.

Figures from Compete.com, which tracks American internet use, show that, of the 4.7 million unique users that the Mail added from May to June, 1.2 million were from the USA, and foreign searches for Michael Jackson's kids also drove the Mail's growth.

Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian's URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months - way more than any other UK newspaper.

The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail - but they're not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across all their Twitter accounts - with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10 newspaper accounts. The Guardian's the clear Twitter winner, as it's place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers - 78% of the total ...

OK, newspapers shouldn't turn off RSS feeds. I was wrong.
The point I was trying to make was that there didn't seem much point having RSS icons in your header (Express) or by your search box (Mirror), or offering a brilliant RSS mashup feature (Guardian), or having RSS icons by each section of your news area (Independent) etc etc - but not doing anything to educate people about what they could do with all this.

The latest subscriber figures (see table below) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it's time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds - and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to something else. Like Twitter.