-
Kevin: US news giant Gannett will use Barack Obama's inauguration to roll out ContentOne, a portal or megasite for their 85 US newspaper titles. The company hopes that site will be attractive to national and local advetisers.
-
Kevin: Help Daniel Victor define his new role as a mobile social journalist. I will be writing about similar ideas very soon on Strange Attractor. I think this is the right direction to be heading in. Journalists need to be closer to their sources and their audience. They should be seen rarely in the office but heard from constantly on the web and mobile.
Author Archives: StrangelyAttractive
links for 2009-01-06
-
Join us, and 998 other people, in celebrating the achievements of women in technology!
-
Kevin: To fight despair, you have to seize or create your own opportunity during this economic crisis. I agree with Jim Long that there are tremendous opportunities in social media. The difference between 1999 and 2009 is that you don't have to wait for your employer to create the future for you. You can create it on your own often with next to no outlay of funds.
-
Kevin: A link for Suw to get her into the writing habit for 2009. We've both got a book or two to write. Let's make it the year for our first one.
-
Kevin: Jay Rosen is writing an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education in the US about Twitter and its usefulness. I have used Twitter both socially and professionally. During the US elections, I traveled across the country, and it was invaluable as a reporting and community tool. It's incredibly light-weight. With the end of mobile service in the UK, I think it's easy to forget how effective a bridge it is between the web and mobile users.
-
Kevin: Jeff Jarvis writes on the Media Guardian why Google 'defines the economy'. "In a sense, Google itself is built on a derivative: its data on data. Like the derivatives that got us into this mess, Google's are based on creating abundance. But unlike those corrupted financial products, Google's metaknowledge creates new and real value."
-
Kevin: A tip of the hat to Aaron Spiegel who mentioned Debate Graph on Twitter about interesting uses of social media in the context of the Israel-Gaza conflict of late 2008, early 2009. "@israelconsulate using twitter to answer questions about israel and @debategraph plotting answers www.debategraph.net" With the ever increasing amount of data on the web, visualisations will be important in helping people make sense of large amounts of information. I could see other ways to visualise this information rather than the tree model that they have, but it's a very interesting idea that merits development.
-
Kevin: SkyGrid is offering a free version of its news aggregation tool. They also offer a $500 a seat premium service, which they believed would rival pricey Bloomberg terminals, but in this down market, they found few takers. The service not only allows users to create custom filters from both blogs and traditional news sites, but it also has an algorithm to determine 'sentiment' of articles.
links for 2009-01-04
-
Al Jazeera is testing the Ushahidi open-source, crowdsourced crisis reporting engine for the current conflict in the Gaza Strip. News organisations need to have these labs areas to try technology and reporting methods.
-
The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline.
links for 2009-01-03
-
It's great advice on how to run a business, whether you're in technology or journalism.
-
The Airforce has created a process flow diagram that indicates very succinctly how the Air Force can and should respond to blog posts.
-
"What should be Barack Obama’s resolutions for the New Year once he takes office? He needs to look no further than his transition Website, Change.gov, where more than 74,031 people have submitted more than 53,369 questions (and counting) for his administration and voted 3,122,015 times to prioritize the questions in a Digg-like fashion."
-
Put the web to good use in setting and keeping your New Year's resolutions in 2009. Here are our picks for best free web applications for managing your New Year's resolutions; and if getting fit and healthy is at the top of your list, check out how to track your fitness goals with free tools.
links for 2009-01-01
-
John Robinson takes newspapers, including his own, for not linking to original source material. Scott Karp, head of journalistic link service Publishing 2.0, says on Twitter: Failure to link to original sources should be seen as failure of practice of journalism generally, not just online.
-
It's a lovely tongue-in-cheek post that newspapers finally get some of the US bailout money as auto giants place full page ads thanking America for believing (and investing) in them with taxpayer dollars. Trickle down economics is alive and well I guess.
links for 2008-12-31
UPDATE: Jay Rosen sent me a message via Twitter saying that it was the comment he was referring to as his clearest explanation and not the original del.icio.us link. We regret the error.
-
Jay Rosen says of this comment: “My clearest explanation of the difference between “closed” and “open” editorial systems and why their ethics differ.”
-
And the news really in this post is that: “Former Washington Post military reporter Tom Ricks, who took a buyout from the paper in April, will soon launch a blog for Foreign Policy magazine, FishbowlDC has learned.”
-
“Jimmy Wales in response to Jason Calcanis trying to bust his chops about not paying the people who create wikipedia – as quoted by Jeff Jarvis in his book – What Would Google Do?”
links for 2008-12-30
-
Daniel Victor says: "So journalists: Let’s stop complaining about the fact that we’re getting our asses whooped at today’s news model. … This round is over. Journalists lost. But lucky for journalists, there are plenty more rounds to come. Time to invest our money and expertise into focusing on the next ones."
-
For those of you using the iPhone as your primary camera phone, here are some good photo taking tips. Journalists should be looking to smartphones as breaking news tools, and the more proficient that a journalist gets with one, the better.
links for 2008-12-29
-
WordPress plugins, Firefox plugins and other tools to make it easier to write, tag and code posts for WordPress. Journalists need to try WordPress to see how easy creating content for the web can be.
links for 2008-12-28
-
In the US, the internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news.
-
I'm always interested in new ways to tell stories. It's one of the reason that I got into and have remained in online journalism instead of taking a more traditional path. This project from The Atlantic reminds me of some of the experimentation going on at the dawn of broadband, many projects that were cut short or abandoned after the dot.com collapse. As The Atlantic pursues and develops this project, I hope that they learn in public and allow us all to see what is successful and what isn't and ask why. Please, Think Again about digital journalism.
-
China, some economists say, lulled U.S. consumers and leaders into complacency about their spendthrift ways.
links for 2008-12-24
-
Steve Yelvington does an excellent job of rebutting Joel Brinkley's 'if only newspapers charged for content online everything would be OK' arguments with examples, many from his own experience, of how people coming late to the game don't really know the history of the online content business. Check out the Borrell Associates report about internet pure-plays and how they are taking almost 60% of local online ad share, more than newspapers and broadcast TV. Steve knows his numbers and knows his newspaper industry history.