David Black

"I didn’t ask this question, although I think about it quite frequently. Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media with Al Jazeera, posed the question on Twitter – Twitterverse: If you were building a news website from ground up what would be the most important things to include?"

"Web-savvy reporters right now are the Underpant Gnomes. We’re getting better at gathering the underpants, but we don’t know how to turn them into profit yet."

"Defamatory comments on internet “bulletin boards” are more likely to be slanderous than libelous, a High Court judge ruled last month."

"Yahoo has relaunched and rebranded its advertising network today, claiming that with a string of new advertising partners its network now reaches 80% of web users in the UK and Ireland."

"As an internet reader, I’m increasingly suspicious of journalists who don’t link. Yes, if they quote an official that gives me a sense of the source. But why not link to original source material? "

"Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives."

"To mark 1000 posts on this blog, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learned since post #1."

"I started wondering about the lifecycle of a news story, and how online tools have improved the ways journalists can source, tell and share our news. And of course, how we can get our audience to be a part of it."

"A lot of research can go into a piece of reporting, and in print the value of that research can only be passed on through brief quotes or references. But on the web, no longer limited by finite column inches, newsrooms can create huge value for readers by providing links to the source material that journalists have gathered."

"Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it 'ambient awareness.' It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye."

"Back in March 2006 I wrote a post about the "feedization of the web UI" where I observed that I was seeing more and more web UIs that reminded me of the news feeds that are common in the financial markets. I predicted that we'd see more of that in the coming years."