David Black

“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”

“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.”

“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’.”

“‘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’.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“At the end of April I will be joining the Guardian in London to build a new developer program there.”

“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.”

“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”

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…

“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.”

“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.”

“What do people actually want from news? I’m wondering if it’s a question we should be asking a little more often.”

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.”

“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.”

“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]

“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.”