links for 2009-02-10

"All the many desperate attempts to propose means to save newspapers/journalism seem to me to be efforts to swim upstream, for force something to happen that doesn’t want to happen in the internet age. I prefer instead to look for models that allow journalism to go with the flow (pardon me: as Google does) — to find ways to take advantage of the economics of online rather than fighting them."

"The Bivings Group took another look at The Use of the Internet by America's Largest Newspapers , and compiled a list of 2008's top ten Newspaper sites. Newspapers selected were among the 100 largest in the U.S., and in addition to being judged by their abundance of web features, were graded on design and easy usability."

"Since I can’t fully support the total indulgence in the tool that has the tech-world (and beyond) glued to their favorite Twitter client, I thought I would share a few very useful ways to make the service much more productive while you’re living inside of it. Here are 10 things you can accomplish while never leaving your TweetDeck:"

"This strategy doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price." [via Martin Stabe]

"The Wall Street Journal has expanded its European and Asian web sites, and launched a dedicated India site, with more regionally relevant content, streamlined navigation and multimedia features."

"Walter Isaacson has a big article extolling micropayments as the future of the publishing industry — despite the fact that, as he admits, the technology simply doesn't yet exist to make them easy enough to be workable."

"And here comes another old new idea: Micropayments!"

"European online ad spend is forecast to rise 10% this year despite the global economic crisis, with the UK taking the biggest slice, according to a new report. However, the forecast from Forrester Research, indicates that growth will be slower than in previous years, compared with growth of 30 per cent in 2007."

Matthew Ingram: "broadly speaking, content — including the news — is just data, and if it is properly parsed and indexed it can become something quite incredible: a kind of proto-journalism, that can be formed and shaped in dozens or even hundreds of different ways."

"What does that mean? It means that sites around the web will be able to add dynamic links to New York Times articles, or excerpts from those articles, to pages on their own sites. The ability to enrich other content with high quality Times supplementary content is a powerful prospect."

"With the Article Search API, you can search New York Times articles from 1981 to today, retrieving headlines, abstracts, lead paragraphs and links to associated multimedia."

"The Article Search API is a way to find, discover, explore, have fun and build new things. We’ve accumulated quite a few blocks/articles over the last 28 years — all of them tagged and labeled with loving care."