Archive for July, 2009

Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’: Not worth buying

In his review of Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’ and its thesis that “making money around Free will be the future of business” Malcolm Gladwell writes: “The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are
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Collate dozens of RSS feeds from one page (Something For The Weekend #16)

Here’s a very useful tool if you come across an article that gives you a whole bunch of RSS feeds you’d like to subscribe to – or, indeed, if you’re writing such a post yourself.

The end of news websites?

The question is no longer just a hypothetical one. With increasing convergence between social media and traditional content, what is known as a traditional news website might not exist in the coming years. Perhaps a revealing example is the creation of Facebook applications by a Seattle-based aggregator, NewsCloud, which received a grant from the Knight Foundation to study how young
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UK hyperlocal blog, meet Icelandic blogger: the iDaventry council debt campaign

Launched in April/May 2009, idaventry is a community driven local news and features site with strong editorial comment. I invited publisher Dave Raven to write a guest post for OJB on their latest campaign regarding Daventry Council’s investments in Icelandic banks. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be writing this guest post, since there will be few occasions when a
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Charging for mobile content – Steve Outing on the Men’s Health iPhone app

Steve Outing highlights how Men’s Health are exploring the new features of the 3.0 iPhone/iPod Touch operating system: “Now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app. “Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you
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Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’ – free

I’ve been reading Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. So far, it seems far much better than his previous book The Long Tail, incorporating a much broader set of ideas rather than rely on the ‘simple-concept-plus-copious-examples’ genre. [Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]

Newspapers on Twitter – how the Guardian, FT and Times are winning

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across all their Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10 newspaper accounts. That’s according to a massive count of newspaper’s twitter accounts I’ve done. The Guardian’s the clear winner, as it’s place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers – 78% of the total …

Best RSS feeds for information graphics – in one lovely OPML file

There’s a great list of RSS feeds for infographics news over at Nicholas Rapp’s blog, which I’ve belatedly discovered. It’s thoroughly recommended – but copying and pasting them all into your reader is a bit of a chore – so I’ve created an OPML file of them all which you can import in one graceful motion. Here’s the OPML file
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Parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou launches redesign

MySociety, the non-profit organisation led by Tom Steinberg, has redesigned their TheyWorkforYou.com website with data about UK Parliamentary politics. The site provides easily accessible records of the UK Parliamentary process, and now contains data going back to 1935. The immediate benefit for journalists is that the records going back this far are now far more accessible than previously. Previously, the
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More crowdsourcing from the Guardian and NYT – this time on Iran

Iran election: faces of the dead and detained | World news | guardian.co.uk via kwout They’re at it again. Following the very domestic issue of MPs’ expenses, The Guardian’s latest experiment with crowdsourcing goes international: Iran.