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Kevin: CNET News' Tom Krazit and Declan McCullagh debate whether the tendency of Web sites to stagger under high demand can be avoided, or is even that big of a problem. Read this blog post by Declan McCullagh on Digital Media.
links for 2009-06-28
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How celebrities stay famous regardless of talent – science-in-society – 24 June 2009 – New ScientistFascinating look at why people stay famous. In short, it's because we all talk about them in an attempt to connect with each other on a subject we can be fairly sure the other person has heard of.
links for 2009-06-26
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Kevin: Nieman Lab reports: "MinnPost, the non-profit news startup in Minneapolis, has rolled out a new form of advertising that looks a little bit like print classifieds, a lot like Twitter, and nothing like traditional marketing on the Internet. They’re calling the service Real-Time Ads, and it’s live in the left column of the front page right now.
The service aggregates tweets, blog posts, and other feeds from local business with timely messages to convey — an ice cream shop announcing the flavor of the day, for instance, or a clothing store offering a one-day coupon." -
Kevin: Martin Belam writes: "I think the Telegraph's bunkered attitude to their scoop, and their insistence that they alone determined what was 'in the public interest' from the documents is a marked contrast to the approach taken by The Guardian. The Telegraph are physically publishing a selection of their data on Saturday, but there is, as yet, no sign of it being made online in machine readable format." Disclosure: I work for the Guardian, and Martin Belam is information architect at the Guardian.
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Kevin: John Naughton, who writes for the Observer, looks at a report on trust in the media in the UK. John said this about the report and a debate hosted at the Guardian (my day job): "For me there were eerie echoes of the arguments about the Birt-Jay “mission to explain” in the 1980s, which in turn went back to Walter Lippmann and his view about the role of the press in early 20th-century America. Like Lippmann, Birt believed that the function of journalism was not to “pick at the scabs of society” but to convey to citizens the complexities of the decisions that have to be made by a sophisticated, industrialised society."
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Kevin: David Schlesinger, Editor-in-Chief Reuters News, tells the International Olympics Committee Press Commission: "Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more."
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Kevin: Topix looks at the kind of revenue necessary to sustain newspaper staffs, and finds that newspapers are still finding it difficult to make money online .
links for 2009-06-25
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Kevin: Benji Lanyado, travel journalist and one of the journalistic innovators here at the Guardian, answers some of the questions that I posed in a post on the Guardian's digital content blog about augmented reality – applications that layer information over the physical environment that you're in. IBM is getting a lot of attention for its Wimbledon AR application, the Wimbledon Seer, which layers over match and venue information over the camera view from a Google Android phone. Very clever. Benji and I have talked about the possible applications for AR in travel. He expands on his ideas on his new blog. Worth a read.
links for 2009-06-24
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Kevin: "German publishers have united behind demands that the government pass legislation
shielding their intellectual property from "ongoing theft" over the Internet."
links for 2009-06-23
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Kevin: Every newspaper wants to be The Economist. Even during the recession, the magazine's revenues and circulation are growing. Jeff Jarvis compares The Economist to Apple. Both companies break all of the 40 rules Jarvis laid out in his book What Would Google Do?. They succeed because they are uniquely good. "The problem for the rest of the industry is that they can’t all break the rules as The Economist does because they’re just not that good. You have to be great to the The Economist or Apple and if you fall short, you fall all the way. And staying great is constant work."
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Kevin: The Washington Post decided to publish a 7,000 word, two-part series only on their website. "The Post cited the financial pressures facing the company as the reason for publishing the feature exclusively online. Is this something that you would consider? Why or why not?"
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Kevin: Todd Ziegler at The Bivings Group, a digital consultancy in Washington DC, finds "Traffic from Twitter and Facebook is increasing by 20-30% per month on the sites I manage that (1) produce content on a consistent basis and (2) are working to promote themselves on these platforms." But they don't drive much traffic on sites that 'aren't actively engaged on those platforms".
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Kevin: A new blog about Facebook has launched. To get some buzz, they revealed a hack that could expose crucial profile data. Facebook quickly plugged the hole. Memo to self: Don't rely on privacy settings to keep data private.
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Kevin: Google has greatly improved their maps of Iran through their Mapmaker programme, which allows users to add details to Google maps. O'Reilly looks at the improvement in mapping in just a couple of Iranian cities.
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Kevin: Steve Outing is sceptical of news organisations demanding that users pay for content, but he says that news organisations need to investigate ways that effortlessly allow people to pay for content. He was one of first to write about Kachingle, which has an intriguing model that allows people to support the sites they love, and other companies are starting to provide similar services.
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Kevin: How not to use Twitter. Habitat, an up-scale furniture company in the UK, is accused of using spamming popular hashtags with offers, including using hashtags related to the Iranian election protests.
The future of civil society and social technology
I’ve been working on this section of my report for Carnegie Uk Trust pretty solidly for the last few weeks, and I finally have something to show for all of the brainstorming, mindmapping, matrices and post-it notes stuck to my office wall! The section is 7,500 words long, so quite a decent chunk of the final report (although also 1,500 words over its allocation!).
You can, if you wish, read the section here and leave your comments as per usual at the bottom. I am, however, also putting it into BookOven for paragraph by paragraph annotation. (That’s a nice collisions of clients!) If you want to be able to comment at a paragraph level, please email me and I will send you an invitation to the site (we’re still in private alpha).
I’m particularly interested in any references you have that either support or rebut my points – many of these were arrived at through interview and workshop, and if there’s something that it’s hard to do, it’s to reference stuff that’s come out of other people’s brains like this whilst simultaneously being imaginative and trying to guess what might happen in 15 years! My schedule makes it a tough job to fully reference everything, so any help you can give would be much appreciated.
I look forward to your comments.
Continue reading
links for 2009-06-22
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Kevin: From a Dow Jones report: "Axel Springer AG (SPR.XE) expects consumers will pay for high quality online content in time, although the publisher of Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper, already has a successful online business model, according to chief executive Mathias Doepfner."
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Kevin: Reuters Global Community Editor Mark Jones looks at how different news organisations including the Huffington Post have handled running web coverage of the post election protests in Iran. Mark wondered why the HuffPo might have a large number of private emails, more than the Guardian, the BBC and the NYTimes. I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the HuffPo's southern California roots, home to a large Iranian ex-pat community. But that's just a guess.
Mark also made this observation: "CNN via its iReport, and the BBC via its Have Your Say service, all had rich seams of user-submitted pictures and videos. But they didn’t appear to be able to weave such material into their running commentary on the Web — perhaps a case of being overwhelmed with material and being forced to keep it in silos."
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Kevin: The French government is to give all 18 to 24-year-olds a free newspaper once a week for a year as part of 600 million euro aid package for the press.
links for 2009-06-20
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Kevin: "What information on Twitter is fair game for a journalist to report? There needs to be further discussion between media professionals, their employers, journalism academics and social media experts to help navigate this complex territory."
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Kevin: Nicolas Rapp who has created this list of the best infographic RSS feeds.
links for 2009-06-19
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Kevin: AP is cutting fees for newspapers and broadcasters, but it is looking to renegotiate its deals with internet giants such as Yahoo, AOL, Google and Microsoft.
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Suw: Fun and quite accurate decision-making tool. It's a bit limited at the moment, but it shows real promise.
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Suw: Fabulous bit of work that it's hard to stop playing with!
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Suw: I know a ton of people who should read this, and make very careful notes.
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Kevin: Craig McGill reports: "Now, here’s an interesting one, passed on to me by someone we shall call CIPRMole where basically the NLA (the Newspaper Licensing Association) want to charge organisations – starting with cuttings services then moving on to others by 2010 – for including links to newspaper stories:"
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Kevin: Beijing will seek to employ at least 10,000 "internet volunteers" before the end of this year to monitor "harmful" websites and content, said an official at the municipal authority's information office.
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Kevin: Joshua Micah Marshall describes Talking Points Memo as a hybrid of collaborative reporting with readers and traditional reporting.
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Kevin: A look at the internet filtering being used in Iran and how technology is being used to organise protests. Ethan Zuckerman "senses that the technology isn't helping opposition supporters as much as are traditional organizing methods like phone calls and word of mouth".