David Black

Round-up of recent examples of convergence and integration and UK publishers.

Martin Stabe’s Press Gazette blog makes a comeback with some liveblogging from the Online Publishers Association conference.

“Report, view, or discuss local problems like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting” on the latst site from MySociety, the people behind TheyWorkForYou.

“MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to: Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system; Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog”

“Online ad revenues continued to grow at a quick pace in Q4 2006, reaching nearly $4.8 billion, according to numbers released today by The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its independent research partner PricewaterhouseCoopers.”

Search AskCity by drawing circles on maps.

“Like Google Base, Freebase is a massive database. The purpose of the database is to centralize as much data as possible, and allow participants to freely add and access data - developers can [add and] extract information from Freebase via a set of APIs”

“It then turns its users loose on not just adding more data items but making connections between them by filling out meta tags that categorize or otherwise connect the data items, using a typology that can be extended by users, wiki-style.”

“Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data.”

“It’s like a system for building the synapses for the global brain,” said Tim O’Reilly

Newspapers recruiting software developers onto their editorials teams as news programmers.

“David Montgomery’s newspaper investment group Mecom has launched a £570m share issue today to fund acquisitions in continental Europe.”

“We still have much further to go: we need integrated software, we need to stop thinking in terms of print structures and we need to ask whether it’s viable to remain a 6+1 day publishing operation, rather than a seven-day one.”

“Yesterday, in London, these points and principles of a new working practice and online awareness, were announced to editorial staff at the Guardian, Guardian Unlimited and The Observer.”

“The New York Times Company said yesterday at a Bear Stearns media conference that it expects digital revenue to rise 30% to $350 million this year on the back of ad revenue at its websites, which include NYTimes.com and About.com.”