David Black

“My brief was, well, brief. What local newspapers are doing. The snapshot of that activity is here for you to share, use, add to, comment upon or otherwise consume.”

Presentation on UK regional and local newspaper online activity from Sarah Hartley.

“In the podcast we describe some of the methods and technology that we use to build guardian.co.uk.”

“Anyway, the whole issue got me thinking about steps I think media companies should take to improve their comments sections, short of requiring people to post using their real names.”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and again): Managing comments on newspaper Web sites isn’t exactly rocket science. But newspapers seem to keep thinking that it is.”

“To provide a common framework for the diverse participants, we introduced two “value network maps”; one of the old newsroom and the other of the emerging news ecology, along with a description of Value Network Mapping and Analysis.”

“To U.S. exports like blue jeans, iPods, and Iron Man, add the newspaper industry’s mantra of local, local, local. But Latin American dailies are launching hyper-local papers for reasons that differ interestingly from their U.S. peers.”

“Nearly 15 million UK internet users visited newspaper websites during March, according to the latest figures from web measurement firm ComScore.”

“Set up as a means for readers to publish their opinions, sites such as My Telegraph raise questions at the heart of the online debate”

Videos from Google Zeitgeist ‘08 Europe.

“News cannot continue to think of itself as a destination. It has to think of itself as a feed that goes to where you are.”

“the art of effective tagging consists in selecting a comprehensive enough set of keywords that organically describes the specific content while offering enough relevant hooks for this to be picked up by user searches.”

Oliver Luft on the Liverpool Daily Post’s liveblogging day and editorial conference webcast.

“Thomson Reuters has released a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais along with plugins for several blogging and content management systems.”

“Emily Bell, director of digital for Guardian News and Media, told Journalism.co.uk that participating in online discussions is now seen by the paper as another ‘multimedia skill’ that journalists working online will need.”

iPhone-friendly version of Techmeme

Around 40 journalists responded when I asked for comments on the subject of making changes to archived stories. With few exceptions they said that amendments should be visible.”

“Introducing News Spectrum! It is a visualization of the words used for two topics in the latest results from Google News.” [Via Adrian Monck]

“Decker said that, moving forward, Yahoo would use visits rather than unique visitors as the most relevant metric for tracking the relative success of Yahoo sites… Ha! Let me bask in the light of a swift moment of ‘I told you so’.”

“One of the coolest areas of innovation on the web over the past several years has been in the realm of mapping and geolocation. So we’re excited to introduce two new plugins for Movable Type”

“Steve Moore invited me to answer the question: What comes next? In my case, I was supposed to talk about the future of newspapers.”

“TweetWire.com is a neo-newspaper that grabs the freshest links posted to Twitter. Get the most out of citizen journalism with Twitter and TweetWire.”

“The five largest of the Teesside Evening Gazette’s 20 hyperlocal websites have five-figure monthly unique user figures not much smaller than the number of households in the postcode-size areas they serve, the paper’s editor has revealed.”

“articles on the site’s Your View section receive an average of 166 comments a day, while 2,000 comments a day are recorded across the main site.”

“Research into the site’s search indexing, she added, had shown that 60 per cent of the site’s traffic is generated from search and external links.”

“On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. “

“In this edition, editors worldwide see neither their newsroom nor their journalists as being “print-only,” having clearly accepted the multimedia revolution.”

“More than three quarters of newspaper editors believe that integrated newsrooms will be the norm for newspaper production in the next five years, a global survey has claimed.”

Based on US % market share of visits from Hitwise

“The trade group’s Digital Video Ad Format Guidelines And Best Practices (PDF) offers a range of definitions for the various formats related to linear video ads, non-linear video ads and companion ads.”

“This post shares a few new Twitter tools you may find useful.” [via jemimakiss]

“Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other”

“Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post’s online division, said during a panel discussion… that he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards–and if need be–automatically kick them off for good.”

“What’s your preferred method of fostering constructive community through comments? How do you handle emergencies?”

“The idea of building an online community, and in turn, increasing online presence, centres around a few key points.”

“Whilst it may be (relatively) simple to attract users to interact with a website – it is not as easy to keep them stimulated and make them keep coming back. Here are a few useful pointers, in keeping your online community happy”

“there is a zero sum game for attention on this story… If I put my version in the mix, for each time mine gets read, someone else’s doesn’t. So each version of the story reduces that marginal economic value of all the others.”

“Using social media as part of the production process makes it more authentic, honest and ultimately successful. It’s also sustainable – even if journalists and production staff spend all their time doing it, it’s equally true that it takes no time at all

“Facts, figures and analysis from Ad Age’s 64th annual agency report” [via SimonWaldman.net]

“Instead, in the last few months, I’ve been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on.”

Jeff Jarvis: “Notes used for discussion with faculty of CUNY Graduate School of Journalism”

“As you can see, the top 10 sites contribute about ~29% of the headline content, and the Top 25 contribute about 45%. More importantly, the sites that have never set foot on the Top 100 contribute 33%, or about one third of the headlines”

“I quickly compared the twenty five newspapers that appeared most often in Google News with a list of the twenty five largest newspapers in terms of print circulation. A couple of quick things jumped out at me…”

“It may be a niche publisher, but the International Data Group has been working out the answers to some big mainstream questions.”

“Cheng, who has worked for the FT for eight years, will become the director of product management for advertising on Google’s European leadership team.”

Google Trends, BlogPulse Trend Search, Technorati charts, Technorati Chart, Icerocket Trend Tool, Trendpedia, Facebook Lexicon, Twist…

Stats on US newspapers twitter usage.

“go to Google Maps, click on the “Show search options” link near the search box, and select “Mapped web pages” from the drop-down menu that appears.”

“The New York Times once epitomised all that was great about American newspapers; now it symbolises its industry’s deep malaise.”

“Pew said that in 2004, 53 million Americans ‘have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online’.”

“It’s nice to see that the printed word is still, at least for now, the most powerful medium for reporting on the death of the printed word.” [Via Virtual Economics]

“According to a study that is to be published in New Scientist magazine tomorrow, Facebook and Wikipedia are better at getting crucial information out during emergencies than either government agencies, emergency services — or the traditional media”

“‘Slows news’ would see us organising our news sites in a way to allow attention to be given to a news story over time, rather than just at the instant at which it is producing the brightest light.”

“Wikipedia is such a good news source because it only behaves as a new source when there’s actual news going on. Pages change rapidly as events change – they stay still when nothing’s going on.”

“FeedShaver takes feeds and automatically tags items with the names of people, locations and other subjects it finds within their content. You can then subscribe to only items containing those subjects”

“Mappnig the Digital Media Landscape, by Anton Grutzmancher of Hitwise, UK, on 29 April 2008″

Comment from Alfred Hermida: “We should be discussing the future of journalism, rather than the future of one delivery mechanism for the news.”

According to Hitwise, Myspace has a 54.6% share of US visits, Yahoo TV 6.9% and Google Video 3.0%.

“Template – URL optimization; Content optimization; Improving internal link structure; Google News optimization”

Press release: “62 percent said they believe that content will be supported by a variety of digital advertising methods, including branded content, search, sponsorships, performance and a mix of all of these within the next five years.”

“Enter your Twitter username. Get suggestions on interesting people to follow.”

Joanna Geary’s interactivity index spreads: “Nicolas Kayser-Bril, contributor to the Online Journalism Blog and Observatoire des Media, has created an index of the interactive tools used by European news websites.”

“del.icio.us will provide you with very important information on: how popular the exact page is; how your readers defined your page.”

Excerpt from The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr

“On one hand, they’re heartily embrace the ability to directly engage with consumers. And on the other hand, they fear that engagement and are desperate to figure out how to control it and measure it.”

On the Guardian.co.uk Sport redesign: “The majority seem to appreciate the new functionality and feel that they’re getting a richer experience, which is the whole idea; but sadly not everyone agrees. They never do.”

“Once you have a feed or gadget — and for those of you who already do — you can start promoting it”

“according to a source close to the company, these are the current Twitter usage stats: March 2008: Total Users: 1+ million, Total Active Users: 200,000 per week, Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day”

“Exactly 15 years ago the directors at the lab where the web was first developed signed a document which said the technology could be used by anyone free of charge. “

“OK – so I have a slight nervousness about anyone who includes a quote from themselves in one of their own presentations… but this deck from David Armano is a pretty neat summary of how brands and consumers increasingly engage online.”

Jeremy Bullmore: “A long time ago, I wrote a short piece about brands in which I said: ‘People build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon’.” [Via SimonWaldman.net]

“What I discovered was this: it was about a conversation, not a publication:”

“My friends aren’t on Friendfeed. Right now Friendfeed is a tech elite’s aggregator…Friendfeed at best could be an alternative for an aggregator like TechMeme. A better one too since it allows interaction with the commenting system it provides.”

“Today I’ve been working on a tool – I’ve dubbed it UGC Finder – for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites.”

“With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort.”