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Michael Amedeo Tumolillo, the author of newsroomnext, is an award-winning, multimedia journalist with strengths in feature writing, documentaries, breaking news and Web site management. [Via Shane Richmond]
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“Our post a few weeks back about when to use Drupal and WordPress generated a pretty good discussion in the comments and on other websites. Below are the best questions/comments and our responses.”
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“. . . they are on newspaper sites.”
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“To enhance your story’s online ferocity, build it as a standalone, interactive network hub for the topic it broaches, and make it easily embedded in other Web sites.”
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“Poynter’s Eyetrack research has taught us some important basics, such as: Online audiences focus heavily on headlines, and in some cases almost ignore pictures… Surprisingly we found that these users click the picture 2-3 times more often than the head
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“We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.”
Entries from September 2007
links for 2007-09-30
30 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-25
25 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“the public will seek out our brands less and less and will detour around the front doors we design for them. Instead, they will arrive because of their own need (via search) or peers’ recommendations (via links).”
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“Internet spending is expected to hit $28.8 billion, a 32 percent growth rate, with branding growth closing in on search (26- vs. 30 percent, respectively.)”
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Expert comment, aggregation and background.
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“Funny if it’s true – from the E&P article, is sounds as if the San Francisco Chronicle is installing touch-screen PCs in a number of coffee shops that people will only be able to use to access the SFGate website”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-24
24 September 2007 · 1 Comment
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“Google is seizing on the popularity of widgets for its latest push into advertising.” Christian Oestlien, Google product manager: “It is what we are calling the componentization of the Web. The Web is sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces.”
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“In April, widget penetration was highest in North America where 40.3 percent of Internet users visited a Web site with an embedded widget, followed by Western Europe (24.3 percent) and Latin America (17.5 percent).”
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“Giving users the ability to share, embed and take widgets with them wherever they go on the Web means that brands have to be willing to give up control over their message.”
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“Welser’s group found that the most informative individuals – dubbed ‘answer people’ – are also relatively taciturn, rarely participating in discussions heavily. They also tend to shy away from the ‘discussion artists’ who dominate most threads.”
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US: “eMarketer projects that local online advertising spending In the US will reach $2.9 billion in 2007, only 13.4% of the total Internet market.”
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“eMarketer projects that local online ad spend will grow $1.7 billion next year, reaching $4.6 billion, or 16.0 percent of all online advertising – 2.6 percentage points more than in 2007.”
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“David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the report, talks to Media Life about the importance of paid search, how local web advertising growth compares with national, and what steps newspapers must take to remain competitive.”
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“Distribution, product and branding, all are critical but at different times. Making sure you focus on the right factor at the right stage in the evolution of your category can help you make sure you’re fighting the next war, not the last one.”
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“Should the Journal fall in line with the rest of the industry and make its 11-year-old paid-subscription Web site free?”
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“Online advertising spending is widely predicted to continue its strong growth even if a US economic downturn squeezes the advertising sector as a whole.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-23
23 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“On the web, it’s a mistake, I think, to rely on brand. Brand, in fact, may be absolutely meaningless. What is more important is A) utility; B) an easy to remember and type domain name. Get those things right and success is much easier to obtain.”
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“Learn the lesson from Times Select — the right lesson. No — not that people won’t pay you anything. The lesson is that you have to rethink your brand and what it means to meet the online audience on their terms. “
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“It’s not that ‘content wants to be free’ – it’s that Internet access ISN’T free, and now that distribution and content have been unbundled, people are reluctant to pay TWICE – once for distribution (i.e. internet access) and again for content (paid
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“AOL’s social news site relaunched today under the new name Propeller. No longer ‘the new Netscape’, Propeller seems on face like a clone of a clone. There may, though, be much more going on underneath the surface.”
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‘New Netscape’ relaunches as Propeller.
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“With its audience expanding and interests diversifying, the popular site is launching new features to help users find like-minded friends”
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“Perhaps it’s not about figuring out when print publications will become obsolete, but more about figuring out how our media habits are changing, how we are mixing in the digital with the analog, what place print publications will have in our future med
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“DMS is a new category… in which companies pull in data from 3rd parties, normalize (clean) it, and then leverage it… These services are creating a layer on top of existing services in order to do something that those services typically don’t want don
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“Radiohead is choosing not to sell their latest album on iTunes… because iTunes is forcing them to break up their album into songs that can be sold separately.”
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“The award-winning success of the Teesside Evening Gazette website has enabled the title to invest in more staff, according to its editor, Darren Thwaites.”
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“Trinity Mirror Regionals is this month launching a course with the University of Central Lancashire to help senior editorial staff at the group understand the challenges of multimedia.”
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“Keepvid allows you to grab a source FLV file from most video sharing sites (YouTube, Blip.tv, etc.) simply by copying the URL of the video you want into the site. Keepvid then spits back a link to the source file, you right click and save as and you are
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“Single Person / Group Blog (Use WordPress), Blog Community (Use Drupal), Blog Driven Website (Use WordPress), Full Featured Website (Use Drupal)”
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“Having identified a group of influential US political bloggers, the media company gives content to these individuals in order to begin circulation, Mike Seery, chief information officer of The Economist Group, told delegates at an AOP forum, in London ye
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“The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth… This model can also be represented as an alternative to the inverted pyramid: a ‘news diamond’, if you like.”
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“Congratulations to Mike Arrington on hiring Erick Schonfeld as co-editor of TechCrunch — extending his hand to the Business 2.0 writer and editor as he stepped from the wreckage of Time Warner-owned magazine, which has gone down in flames.”
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“How to be wrong: measure the mean when you really should measure the median. Consider a website that reports a mean (average) of 2.1 pages per visitor… That’s because there’s a large number of people visiting 1 page and a large number visiting 10 or 20
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‘I see two distinct types of motivation. One is, “I want to communicate better with the people that I already know and trust”. The other is, “I want to increase my visibility so that I can connect with more people”.’
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“For instance, the Washington Post created a widget for Facebook called “The Compass”which helps Facebookers to compare their political views with those of their friends.”
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“Widgets, small bits of software that users can add to personalize their Web space, are slowly making what could be a significant impact on online marketing, although many advertisers have yet to catch on.”
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“Google announced the limited release of their new Gadget Ads program, which they tout as ‘mini versions of your website in any AdSense ad size’.”
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“Here’s the rundown on Google Gadget Ads: The ads are interactive, Google Gadget Ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, Different targeting options – contextual, site, geographic, and demographic, Built on an open platform”
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“In light of Google’s launch of Ad Widgets, Kevin Kelly riffs on my 2004 Cost Per Influence, Sell Side Advertising and transitive advertising concepts, and then discovers this new corner. Perhaps the future is automagically subliminal?”
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“The cool idea is that ads can now be packaged as little widgets that you can drag and drop onto your blog or website, as easy as it is to embed a YouTube video… John Battelle calls it sell side advertising.”
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“The near-total reliance on ad revenue means redoubling and re-tripling efforts to get the online ad business right, maximizing traffic and yields.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-21
21 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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After Times Select: how do you support a big newsroom online? – Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard
“Still: the near-monopoly newspaper always had subscription revenue, display ad revenue and classified revenue to bank on. Google ads can’t match that today, and probably not for a long, long time.”
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Organising for online – Messy Media
“There’s no simple answer to this, although I like Rosenberg’s nod towards a “thousand and one little experiements in the Web journalism business.” …[N]ewspaper businesses have to organise themselves to make the most of their editorial expertise in an o
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PressThink: Consent Decree with the Open Web Shuts Down Times Select
“That’s the decision in Web court accepted by the New York Times. Dismisses all courses of action against Google. Times agrees to drop Times Select, which was a barrier to Google–and the blogosphere–working the right way.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-20
20 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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Who’s Afraid of Online Advertising? – Publishing 2.0
“A new McKinsey & Co. report called ‘How Companies Are Marketing Online’ draws the astonishing conclusion that many advertisers are reluctant to shift dollars online — despite the massive shift of consumer attention online..”
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Why Clients Withhold Ad Spending Online – Adweek
“McKinsey polled 410 marketing executives in five sectors, and among those already advertising online, 52 percent said “insufficient metrics to measure impact” was the biggest barrier, followed by insufficient in-house capabilities (41 percent)…”
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How companies are marketing online – The McKinsey Quarterly
“A McKinsey survey of marketing executives from around the world shows that in marketing, things are starting to change: companies are moving online across the spectrum of marketing activities, from building awareness to after-sales service…”
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The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet – blog.pmarca.com
“Level 1 is what I call an ‘Access API’. Level 2 is what I call a ‘Plug-In API’. Level 3 is what I call a ‘Runtime Environment’.”
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Tabs, Used Right: The 13 Usability Guidelines – Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
“It’s a rare pleasure to come across a user interface on the Web that uses dialog controls correctly.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-19
19 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.”
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Vivian Schiller, SVP and GM of NYTimes.com: “Think about this recipe—millions and millions of new documents, all seo’d, double-digit advertising growth… the revenue that would come from that over time” will more than replace the subscriptions reve
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“TimesSelect is dead. It was a cynical act doomed from the start. With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.”
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“The TimesSelect pay wall has officially been torn down. Does this mean newspapers should forget about paid content? Yes, if they want be part of the “conversation” and participate in the web’s link-based ecosystem and economy.”
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“While the ‘content needs to be free’ crowd hails it as a victory, the fact is that TimesSelect was the right idea, badly executed. Simply put, the Times put the wrong content behind its $49.95 pay wall.”
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“The big news for online content creators this week is of course the New York Times abandoning its foolish paywall”
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“I think allowing bloggers and other sites to link freely to columnists and other writers at the Times will help increase the discussion around the issues the paper writes about, and that will benefit the Times in the long run”
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“even though I made the calculation that the content was worth paying for… the Times made the calculation that it was harming their business overall by limiting their distribution on popular search engines.”
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“Pinch Sulzberger’s attempt to put his prized columnists behind a subscription wall on the theory that they were so much better than free bloggers that people would pay for them–is finally so doomed it’s actually dead, dead, dead, as of midnight tomorrow
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“News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said on Tuesday that he was leaning toward making the online Wall Street Journal free, but had made no decision yet.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-17
17 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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“The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.”
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PEJ Social News Report Demonstrates Only That Digg and Reddit Are Highly Niche Sites – Publish2 Blog“The irony of the report’s title subtitle — “Your Vote Counts” — is that for most users of Digg and Reddit, their vote actually doesn’t count much in determining which stories get attention.”
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“A news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists.”
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“What they didn’t tell you is that few people on Facebook care: despite all the cool ways that the app lets you interact with New York Times content, only 16 people used the app today.”
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On PEJ report: “They found that the stories in the user-driven sites were ‘more diverse’ but also ‘more fragmented and transitory’.”
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“Even if it is a myth that lots of people edit Digg and Reddit, lots of people read Digg and Reddit. These are people who want to read the news but find their requirements for content selection not met by mainstream media.”
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“No hell has not frozen over, Ordnance Survey finally launched their explore portal this week, a site designed for walkers, hikers, cyclists and anyone interested in the outdoors to share their walks and favourite places.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-12
12 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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Josh Chasin, Comscore: “One of the consequences of being the most measurable medium is that the Internet ends up as the medium with the most measures.”
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On Facebook’s one-size-fits-all definition of friendship: “Combining college friends with work friends with friend-friends with family results in strange and for some uncomfortable juxtapositions of lives”
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It’s back, with Mike Butcher as editor.
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“My new favorite saying is, ‘The goal isn’t to connect brands to impressions, the goal is to connect brands to people.’ What’s needed is a new system of measurements based on a true and solid ‘foundation metric’ that actually means something to ea
Categories: Daily links
links for 2007-09-11
11 September 2007 · Leave a Comment
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A South African newspaper executive has identified five supposed myths about young newspaper readers… I think it has wider relevance. So here it is.”
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“The interactif unit of France’s Le Monde newspaper has launched a bold Web 2.0 experiment, LePost.fr, that turns the newspaper inside-out.”
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“Le Monde launched the beta version of The Post on Sep 9. The Post is a website that offers continuous news updates, produced both by journalists and users, and enables users to personalize their news content and share it with others.”
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Social media site from Le Monde, France.
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Open University paper with alternative viewpoint on energy efficiency: “energy conservation lowers the real price of energy and thus induces demand expansion” [via cshirky]
Categories: Daily links