There are sometimes doubts about US brands overseas and whether they enjoy the same influence and respect as they do at home. I wonder, however, whether the opposite is a bigger worry.

The thought is prompted by talking to senior executives of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, the US hotel chain that owns brands including Sheraton, Meridien, W, Westin, and St Regis.

Starwood has been refurbishing half of its 200 Sheraton hotels in the US at a cost of $1.4bn because it wants to bring them up to the standard of Sheratons in countries including China. There are 50 Sheratons in China already, and a further 75 in development.

“The standard is very high in China and we did not want our Chinese guests one day to come to the US and be disappointed,” says Frits van Paasschen, Starwood’s chief executive.

Sheraton is far from the only well-known US brand that has a stronger brand image in emerging markets than in its home country. Buick is well respected in China while GM, its parent company, is still trying to revive its  reputation at home.

Similarly, KFC outlets in China often look smarter than many of those in the US, although it is owned by Yum Brands and had its origins in Kentucky. The same has been true of McDonald’s in Europe and Asia compared with McDonald’s in the US.

In some ways, it is only natural for mature brands in the US to have a better shot at reinventing themselves in overseas markets, where they have no legacy problems. One reason why Starwood hotels are rated highly in China is that its hotels there are newer.

All the same, it casts an interesting light on concerns about whether foreigners respect US brands. Some 80 per cent of guests at Sheraton hotels in China, for example, are Chinese.

Rupert Murdoch’s talks with Microsoft about removing his newspapers’ stories from Google, and giving the rights to index them to Microsoft’s Bing, could be a pivotal moment in internet economics.

Mr Murdoch appears to be willing to sacrifice a lot of traffic to the websites of papers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Times in return for a payment from Microsoft. In effect, he would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing.

That suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible.

Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review did some calculations the other day and suggested that the Journal gets less than $12m a year in advertising to people who come to its site through Google, although it accounts for 23 per cent of the Journal’s traffic.

The [New York] Times typically gets about twice the traffic the WSJ does. For simplicity’s sake (I don’t know if the WSJ gets more or less per unit of traffic than the NYT does), let’s say the Journal will get half what the Times will in online ad revenue this year, or $51 million. If all visitors were equal (and they’re not!), that would imply Google brings just $11.7 million a year in ads or $978,000 a month.

In fact, as he says, this estimate is probably too high because it equates the yield from advertising to people who arrive at the Journal site through Google with the yield from advertising to paid subscribers. In practice, advertisers are willing to pay far higher rates to reach paid subscribers.

As I pointed out the other day in a column for the FT, advertisers (correctly) do not value random traffic from search engines on a par with paying subscribers. The former are readers while the latter are customers who are signalling loyalty to the product.

So traffic drawn to news sites through links and search engines is better regarded as a marketing device to attract subscribers than as a big revenue stream. The Journal’s policy of giving away some of its stories and charging for others is thus a “freemium” strategy.

Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming.

He may have got the idea from the fact that Google was willing to pay News Corp $900m three years ago for the right to provide search and sell advertising on MySpace until 2010. The deal has not worked as planned because MySpace’s traffic has fallen below target.

Presumably, any payment from Microsoft for the right to index news would be a lot lower than this, even if it included rights to advertising revenue from people clicking through to News Corp sites.

Nonetheless, the principle does not strike me as far-fetched, even if we have yet to find whether he can pull it off. If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?

My column in the FT this week is on Beijing’s rapid development:

Shooting down the multi-lane highway from Qingdao airport to the centre of the coastal city this week, I had the usual impressions of a visitor to China. The roads were immaculate, the drive into town took a long time because of the sprawl of what is only a medium-sized Chinese city – only 8m or so people in the metropolitan area – and buildings sprouted on all sides.

I also noticed that I, the sole westerner in the Audi cruising in from the airport, was the only passenger wearing a seatbelt.

That is a metaphor for China itself in the week when Barack Obama paid a visit. It is travelling rapidly along the path of development into one of the world’s largest economies, without much room for error.

The US president’s visit this week has focused minds on the tensions in the US-China relationship in the wake of last year’s financial crisis. America relies on China to finance its trade deficit, while China needs the US to buy its goods in order to keep export-led growth on track.

Please read the rest here and comment below.

Sitting in Qingdao at the FT Chinese annual forum, I am confronting at first hand the shift in the pattern of Chinese censorship towards social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

It is easy to access media sites such as the websites of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Twittering or adding an entry to Facebook is, however, much harder.

Both Facebook and Twitter appear to be blocked by “the great firewall of China” so my efforts to sign on to my Twitter account have all failed.

That suggests that the Chinese authorities are now more worried about the social media than the mass media. In other words, what journalists have to say is less threatening than the spontaneous interactions of average citizens.

Although there is debate about how influential Twitter was in the protests in Iran earlier this year, some state authorities are clearly taking no chances.

Meanwhile, it seems easy enough to use Wordpress, the blogging software used by FT.com and, to judge by the advertisements thrown up on Google if you search for Twitter and Facebook, there are ways around the traffic blocks.

Several Chinese companies are offering VPN services to allow people to get through to Twitter and Facebook unimpeded. Censorship is a tricky challenge in such a rapidly developing and technologically sophisticated economy such as this.

I’ve written a piece about Rupert Murdoch’s stand-off with Google for the Weekend FT, saying he ought to stop talking about it and go ahead and charge for access to newspapers such as The Times online. You can read it and comment on it here.

Do not be quotable is probably a good motto for bankers, one that was ignored by Chuck Prince, the former chairman and chief executive of Citigroup. Now Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, appears to have fallen into the same trap.

Mr Blankfein’s wry claim that Goldman is “doing God’s work” by financing companies and investors is among the most memorable things a Wall Street banker has said since Mr Prince told the Financial Times that “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

A long profile of Goldman in the Sunday Times last weekend ended thus:

Goldman Sachs, this pillar of the free market, breeder of super-citizens, object of envy and awe will go on raking it in, getting richer than God? An impish grin spreads across Blankfein’s face. Call him a fat cat who mocks the public. Call him wicked. Call him what you will. He is, he says, just a banker “doing God’s work.”

By Wednesday, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times was getting up a fine head of steam:

As far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.

I have always found Mr Blankfein a likeable, intelligent and entertaining advocate for Goldman but he has one quality that, while appealing, is risky in a chief executive. He is funny.

In good times, the fact that he is a wise-cracking sort who does not take himself too seriously is a fine thing. But in bad times it makes him very quotable, which in turns provides material for the bank’s critics.

Mr Prince never escaped that quote once Citi ran into trouble (even though he was making a perfectly decent underlying point) and he resigned four months later. I think it will take Mr Blankfein some time to live down his own bon mot.

Perhaps, sad as it is, Mr Blankfein needs to train himself to be a boring banker.

In my FT column this week, I have written about this week’s recall of 1m folding pushchairs by Maclaren, the British company - and what we can learn from how it mishandled the event. FT.com has now introduced a comment facility on all articles so please add your comments there.

Incidentally, the most confusing thing I found in researching the piece is that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission refers to all large after-market interventions - such as Maclaren’s provision of repair kits for its pushchairs - as “recalls”, even if the product is not actually called back.

It ought to change its terminology because I am definitely not the only person baffled by it.

One does not need statistics to know that a lot of media companies - music labels, film studios, newspapers etc - are facing a crisis of profitability. However, the figures do bear it out.

Some new research from Deloitte has found that, while many industries suffer from intense pricing pressures and falling return on assets, the media industry is doing worst of all. In fact, the industry now has a negative return on assets of 4.4 per cent, compared with a positive 7 per cent 40 years ago.

I wrote about the Deloitte Shift Index in a column in June but it has now been updated to break out results for individual industries. The results are gloomy from the point of view of corporate profitability, although the consumer is getting a good deal.

Interestingly, although one might think instinctively that profitability is transferring from media companies to technology companies - sparking, among other things, Rupert Murdoch’s protests at Google - the latter are themselves struggling to adapt.

John Hagel of Deloitte argues that falling return on assets results from intensifying competition, both from  deregulation and the rise of digital technology. That means that increases in labour productivity are hard to retain as profits, instead being passed on to consumers in price cuts.

That looks very like the theoretical world of freely competitive capitalism, in which prices tend to fall to the marginal cost of production. Chris Anderson wrote about this effect in his book Free.

“All other things being equal, margins tend to get competed away. In the past, all other things have not been equal but they look pretty equal right now,” says Mr Hagel.