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“how digital ‘word of mouth’ - in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on - has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people”
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“According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks.”
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“To this college student, there really is no reason to know anything but what is right in front of you. If you put your virtual self in enough networks, facebook, myspace, twitter, wherever, someone is going to ping you with ‘the latest’.”
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“‘Do what you do best, and link to the rest’ is Jeff Jarvis’ motto for newsrooms But I would take Jeff’s web-savvy advice a step further: ‘Make linking to the rest an essential part of what you do best’.”
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“Is Data Portability The Anti-FriendFeed? The whole point of Data Portability is to get social networks talking to each other and exchanging user data, with their explicit permission.”
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“YouTube vs. the world in February: Total videos YouTube: 2.9 billion, Total Web: 6.3 billion. Unique video viewers: YouTube: 70 million, Total Web: 116 million”
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“There are websites that publish content pertaining to a particular locality - but a local website is an oxymoron, because all websites exist on the world wide web, i.e. any website can be accessed (barring censorship) anywhere in the world.”
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“At the end of April I will be joining the Guardian in London to build a new developer program there.”
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“Matt McAlister, currently the director of Yahoo’s developer network… will be taking up the new role as head of the Guardian’s development network from the end of April, leading a new project to offer data and tools for external developers.”
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“what does a news publisher, whose output consists largely of text, need with a developer network of its own? The BBC has managed it - its Backstage initiative has yielded several hacks around weather, traffic and schedule data as well as the basic news”
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Bookmarklet for tagging items on del.icio.us while in Google Reader. Next stop: some kind of Google Reader shared items to del.icio.us feed…
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“The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service.”
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“The reason we get this wrong is that we give too much weight to the first derivative (growth) or even the second derivative (change in rate of growth) and not enough to the absolutes numbers.”
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“What do people actually want from news? I’m wondering if it’s a question we should be asking a little more often.”
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A FriendFeed-esque plug-in for Drupal: “Whether it’s bookmarks on Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia, pictures on Flickr, music on Last.fm, or posts on your blog, anything you create can be gathered into one easy to read stream.”
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“I don’t want a social network, I want a socially *relevant* network (both on-site and beyond). I don’t want a community platform, I want a participation platform where members are rewarded and ranked appropriately.”
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“OmniTI has a new site design, and they’ve done something unusual with their URLs. Rather than have them be primarily noun clauses, as in www.example.com/about/jobs, they’ve made them all complete sentences, leading with an active verb.” [via messymedia]
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“its bloggers do very good journalism — gathering lots of stories, getting them online quickly (if not first), and because its bloggers know what the hell they’re talking about, their commentary is respected.”
Entries from March 2008
links for 2008-03-31
31 March 2008 · No Comments
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-30
30 March 2008 · No Comments
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“I don’t have a website,” she replied. “But you have a blog?” “Yes.” “Facebook?” “Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.” “So you do have a web strategy.”
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“This research on blogging and other social media from Universal McCann, Comscore, Microsoft and other providers has statistics on amount of blogging worldwide and in Europe - also covers social media.” [via Ilana_Fox]
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“The BBC is to roll out the next phase in the relaunch of its internet offering next week, giving its news and sport websites a new embedded video service, more pictures and added emphasis on breaking news and live events.”
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“The BBC will next week unveil the first phase of the redesign to its news and sports websites.”
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“‘It is very demanding to take the poll position both in print and online as VG has done in Norway. It demands a very strong focus on both platforms,’ Torry Pedersen, the editor-in-chief of Schibsted-owned VG online.”
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“In this article, we’ll analyze the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web. We’ll identify patterns that are beginning to emerge, classify the different trends, and peak into what the future holds.”
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“Below is a collection of Twitter apps that I have bookmarked, posted about or Tweeted. I thought it might be useful to have them all in one place.”
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“Guardian News & Media is looking to enroll all 800 of its staff journalists on a voluntary ‘digital awareness programme’ ahead of the publisher’s move to a new 24/7 integrated newsroom this autumn.”
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“Civil servant Mark Thompson wants to turn the British Broadcasting Corp. into an empire on which the sun never sets. To do that, the BBC’s 50-year-old chief executive is determined to get the world to watch more British drama, comedy and news online.”
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“Benton’s thesis goes like this: Eyewitness reporting rendered in real time via the blog represents an interesting and worthy kissing cousin to long-form narrative journalism.”
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“This post should be called ‘the rise of the smart aggregators’ because the new big sources of traffic to this blog are techmeme, reddit, twitter, and delicious.”
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“The Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st Century Way, Please. Now.”
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“The UK’s amazing They Work for You — citizen watchdog of government — has started a campaign calling on Parliament to put all bills in XML… That’s what I mean below when I say that I want government to be searchable”
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“For those of you on the go, LinkedIn has added easier access via the iPhone/iPod touch… [and] you can now receive updates to your LinkedIn network via an RSS feed.”
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“The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library…”
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“Online ad spend in the UK will exceed £5bn by 2012, according to eMarketer. The report predicts that online advertising spend will hit £3.4bn this year, rising to £4.3bn in 2010 and then over £5bn two years after that.”
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“The number of Western Europeans accessing the internet on their mobiles will reach 125m by 2013, predicts Forrester.”
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“by 2012 the Internet will reach roughly 70% of all UK residents. “
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“After creating a well-structured and usable grid, consider allowing it to breath. A page without a grid is a usability nightmare. On the other hand, a grid that has creatively overlapping, escaping, or energizing columns leads to a more enjoyable user ex
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“In six short months we have taken major steps to solve some of these issues, creating a consistent navigation and look and feel now being deployed across the site, making the homepage useful & personalisable…”
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VG.no editor-in-chief Torry Pedersen: “he thinks online and print are entirely different disciplines, and, to his mind, being number one in both print and online requires different organisations”
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Graph your Gmail: “an IMAP-based email analysis project, which generates tables, graphs & visual distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, & so on.”
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“We want to talk to the people who talk to the people. Talking to those people means having access to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of clients… We simply perform individual semi-structured interviews that last no longer than 30 minutes.”
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“the top 25 video websites in the UK accounted for 2.22% of all UK Internet visits in February 2008, equivalent for one in every 45 Internet visits last month. YouTube is the most popular video site in the UK and the eighth most visited website overall”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-26
26 March 2008 · No Comments
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I am now on FriendFeed. Drop by and say hello…
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“For consultant Jevon MacDonald, who thinks that lifestream aggregators are starting to become ‘noise aggregators,’ the solution to the problem lies in the development of filters that learn what you want to read.”
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Great critique of E&Y report: “This is one of those Adam is a man, Adam lives in Reading, therefore all men live in Reading bits of logic. Google uses CPC. Google gets £2.40 revenue per user… therefore all sites using CPC will generate £2.40 per user”
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“I’ve noted before that predictions are a dangerous game. But I’m glad people keep making them. They make entertaining reading years later.”
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“The death and life of the American newspaper.”
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List of regional and local newspaper websites [via cybersoc]. Must get ours updated on this.
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Robin on Facebook’s traffic trends: “Facebook’s market share of UK Internet visits last week (w/e 22 March 200
was equal to its previous record high of 2.16% during the Christmas week (w/e 29 December 2007).” [via techcrunchuk] -
“Jicims – the Joint Industry Committee for Internet Measurement Systems – is inviting media research agencies to submit their ideas for tracking and reporting on the web habits of panels of people.” [via AOP]
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“I thought it might be worth a few words here to talk about how we made the new home page work for disabled users.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-25
25 March 2008 · No Comments
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“The cartograms below show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief, in 2007. Countries swell as they receive more media attention; others shrink as we forget them”
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“Quotably may be the best third party Twitter-related service so far. That’s because it reformats Twitter messages into threaded conversations, making it significantly easier to follow actual discussions that are occurring on Twitter.”
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Easter facts - you’ll need to scroll up and down a bit. [via currybet]
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“Bloggers school publishers on the wild ways of the Web.” [via MartinStabe]
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“Relevancy, accuracy and up-to-datedness of content are key problems that websites face today. You don’t need a redesign to address these issues.”
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“This month, the company introduced a search-within-search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites like those of The Washington Post, Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal-Mart and others.”
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“Unlike circulation figures for newspapers, which are calculated as a daily average, website unique users are cumulative. So there is some merit to the theory that numbers suffered because February was a short month..”
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iReport.com: “Susan Grant, executive vice president of CNN News Services, answered some questions about the new site via e-mail:”
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Steve Dyson: “While I’m out of town, I challenge you all to write better page 1 splash headlines than appear in the print edition of the Birmingham Mail each day from Monday March 24 to Saturday March 29.” [via Martin Stabe]
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Hadn’t spotted this before - Press Gazette is using Disqus to power the comments on its articles.
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“Clay Shirky points out that much of the confusion we face in contextualising blogging and other so-called ‘user generated content’ comes from misunderstanding the grey area that the Internet has created between broadcast and communications media”
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“Mapping and geosearch infrastructure provider MetaCarta has launched GeoSearch news, which locates news stories on a map. One can search by keyword or browse by category in a location.”
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Geotags and maps news stories.
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“How does the feed concept scale — without forcing people to hire their own netops team to watch the feed. And I’ve come to two rough conclusions…”
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“Ponyfish is a FREE web-based tool that allows you to create your own RSS feeds from almost any web page.”
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“What is demographic bidding? It’s a feature that helps you target your ads to users of a particular age group (such as ages 18-24), by gender, or to combinations of those groups.” [Adwords
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"From a widget analytics perspective, I would of course always consider the grab rate... number of times the widget has been shared and whether or not those new placements of the widget are staying active or churning off." [via Ilana_Fox]
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“eMarketer predicts that, despite the economic rough patch, US online advertising will continue to grow through 2008. Online ad spending will rise by 23%. “
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Jeff Jarvis: “Will big media brands, Google’s ad network or an open network win more of the online ad market?”
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“Aggregate everything into one easy to monitor dashboard, take action automatically on critical things that I’ve told the dashboard it can take action on, and organize the rest of the notifications in a way that I can deal with.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-24
24 March 2008 · No Comments
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“The media is doing rather well in reporting the crisis of the markets. A pity, then, that the markets are treating the media so very poorly. As major share prices see-saw, it is noticeable that the media sector appears to be on a perpetual slide.”
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Good list from Shane Richmond. Automagic Google Reader shared items to del.icio.us posting is my number one wish.
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“What we are left with is a model for estimating online newspaper revenues that if it is right is right by chance; some strategies that are either already being pursued… or have not been thought through”
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Charlene Li’s presentation: “Social networks will be like air.”
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“the problem with open is that it’s messy. It’s not neat and clean like Facebook. It requires work. And so I’ll be doing more work now. But most importantly, open also means a platform for innovation.”
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“Google’s tool can help online publishers tweak their content to maximize traffic from search engine users. Plus, it’s a fun way to kill a lot of time.”
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“Allowing people to populate their photo albums from Flickr, for example, or replace the standard status updates with a full Twitter stream, would keep people on the site for longer periods of time.”
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“URL shortening service such as TinyURL or RURL are very bad news because they break the web. They don’t provide stable references because they are Single Points of Failure acting as they do as another single level of indirection.”
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“In the several months since the launch of Comments, we’ve made some improvements that we wanted to let you know about.”
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“What I hope we’ve created is something which is common sense. It does not restrict BBC staff from conducting legitimate activities on the Internet. But it does raise awareness of how crucial the BBC’s reputation for impartiality and objectivity is.”
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“Because you chose to follow to a particular entity (person or service) then the context is already given. So witty headlines will work.”
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“eMarketer projects that US companies will spend $40 million in 2008 to create, promote and distribute widgets and applications, up from $15 million in 2007. “
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US: “February was a very good month for the top 30 newspaper Web sites with all but three making gains in traffic year over year. “
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“If you are going to win - you are going to have be successful in planning all the story components before a word is written and then decide what dimensions of the story are best told with video, graphic, photos, text, headline, list, links…”
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“the rise of the Web has vanquished the traditional once-a-day production cycle as reporters and editors in the Post newsroom file original stories to Washingtonpost.com to feed 24-hour-a-day news consumption.”
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“It’s tempting to recognize the symbol as a ‘P for paragraph, though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for ‘chapter’.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-23
23 March 2008 · No Comments
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“Social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business.”
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On Twitter and Microblogging: “It’s not heavy on intelligence but it’s high on immediacy and this concept of intimacy is scaled up when intimacy and immediacy are combined.”
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“even though we buy into Charlene’s vision of a site-less social-networking future, we’re not ready to pronounce Facebook toast.”
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“The real point is: Friendfeed is a next-gen, open version of Facebook’s social feed… competition for openness would ultimately begin to eviscerate Facebook’s pseudo-platform;”
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“How should journalists conduct themselves in online conversations?”
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For font-fans: “So there are people who would rather use straight quotes, for aesthetic, ease-of-use, technical and even social reasons, and their reasons do have some validity. But why do we have straight quotes at all?”
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“In the YouGov survey of 11,000 people, 14% said online news is the most trusted medium compared to 11% for newspapers…. in terms of accuracy by 13% to 10%, and in perceived quality, with 13% to newspapers’ 11%.”
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“Learning to blog really takes turning one simple switch in your head: This isn’t print journalism.”
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Upload photos from mobile to Flickr with geotags. Uses mobile phone cells to automate tagging.
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“eople may be watching less of the traditional broadcast channels in favor of cable, time-shifted content and Web-based content, but overall TV usage has still increased, according to Nielsen Media Research.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-19
19 March 2008 · No Comments
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I have succumbed to Twitter. Join my, er, exclusive band of followers.
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“In an attention economy information overload is a serious concern. Services that can aggregate activity streams — things that command a lot of our attention — and make sorting through all that information easier are welcome. “
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“It’s a pretty good bet that if you’re not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you’re probably making a lifestreaming application.”
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“Inot only is there a separate discussion on FriendFeed, there may be hundreds of separate discussions within FriendFeed on the very same topic or link (because different people are sharing the link, and different people have different friend groups).”
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“Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.”
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“FriendFeed is more like another social network rather than a simple aggregator. That seems to be a deal breaker for many people — although others see it as a benefit.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-18
18 March 2008 · No Comments
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“The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago. And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have predicted.”
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“The State of the News Media 2008 is the fifth edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism.”
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“News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, website or newscast — to becoming a service — how can you help me, even empower me?… A news organization and a news website are no longer final destinations.”
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“Two stories — the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign — represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found.”
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“John Hutcheson, S&UN’s online editor, told Journalism.co.uk that the group was aiming to let the reader ‘take ownership of the community sections’ of the sites by using only light moderation of material submitted to them.”
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“Regional newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror is set to launch two new ‘hyperlocal’ websites next month.”
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“The simple takeaway is that younger audiences are no less interested in news, they just get it online. Print attracts older audiences:”
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“Younger news readers, though less likely than average to read newspapers, are more likely to get news online, while heavy readers of newspapers are more likely than average to read online versions of print brands”
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“The Internet is a river, it’s not a well. Don’t let your web site be a well where readers go to die… The point of the metaphor is the importance of linking…and sending people out to other web resources instead of trying to hold them on your s
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“Carat issued revised forecasts for global advertising expenditures in 2008, lowering them marginally, to 6.0% from 6.2% in September last year… The strongest growth remains in internet/digital, at 23.3% for 2008″
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“Users can complete maths puzzles of increasing complexity to give their votes more weight, so the news is biased towards the cleverest, or at least most mathematically gifted, users.”
Categories: Daily links
links for 2008-03-17
17 March 2008 · No Comments
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“I think every newspaper on the web should at least offer the reader a choice of a reverse-chronological view of the news. I think they would find most readers would use this view, most editors would too.”
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“The new Ad Manager service, which a limited number of Web sites are testing, will provide the ad serving free, where companies such as DoubleClick have traditionally charged Web publishers to serve up their ads.”
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“Over the past couple of years, I’ve found again and again that WP is not only up to the task of serving as far more than a blogging platform, it’s a great content management system for many types of sites, once you learn a few tricks.”
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Latest new newspaper site, for the Sunday Sun in the NE.
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…and our new tourism site for North Wales.
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“I’ll say no more other than to ask you to visit www.northwales.co.uk and fill in the message box below with any comments you have on the site. Many thanks, Rob Irvine, editor of the Daily Post and fretful father of a newborn website.”
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“We’re using an embedded media player which, within the BBC, is known by the secret code name of the Embedded Media Player - or EMP.”
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“The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.” Hmmm.
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Yahoo’s location-sharing service
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“I have big hopes for Yahoo’s new FireEagle platform announced in November 2007. They first described it to me as a Twitter for location.”
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“Reuters has released an API for its Calais Web service. The free service discovers entities, events and relations in text and returns the results in the form of RDF data. The services use information extraction technology from ClearForest, which Reuters
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Web-based version of Google Sky
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“Tim Brooks, who leads the parent company of the Guardian and the Observer… said digital technology was ’smashing our business model and at the same time it is showing us journalistically some fantastic opportunities’.”
“
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“Measured by the total number of diggs in this period, the novelty-based strategy for ordering stories on the home-page proved far superior to the popularity-based one.”
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“According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the trend in tagging is growing among US web users. It found that over a quarter of online Americans - 28% - had tagged content such as a photo, news story or blog. “
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“It’s an overview of some of the top trends we cover on ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines. The presentation is available as a slideshow (embedded below).”
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“We want to believe that media is becoming more social. And in many ways it is. But with individuals able to get what they want, when they want it, there is an equal and opposite process making media into something inherently less social.”
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“Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.”
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“Google Ad Manager is one critical piece in creating the open network of networks where any site can take any ad and any marketer can advertise on any site. “
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“As part of our aim to create more community tools we also have a facility to allow your friends keep up with you, to show them what you’re reading. This is what we call clippings.”
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“as technology attenuates the very definition of ‘friend’ and gives us 24/7 access to thousands of these acquaintances, the idea of sharing media consumption only with the people who happen to be in the same location as us begins to look quaint…”