Jul 14, 2009
July 14th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw
Searching is the most popular activity online after email. It is the prism through which we experience a significant proportion of the world’s information – from news and information about our community, through to health information, commerce, and just about anything that has a presence online.
Search Engine Society takes a critical look at search engines, how they work, the techniques used to manipulate them – from gaining better rankings to censorship, and the implications for privacy and democracy. [Read more]
Nov 13, 2008
November 13th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
Interesting research from (ahem) Yahoo highlighted in Search Engine Land suggests that there are actually areas where users don’t go straight to Google – and makes encouraging reading for local news organisations. [Read more]
Jul 11, 2008
July 11th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
Every week I come across some web-based service that makes it possible to do in a few clicks what a year ago would have required anything from a day of fiddling to months of developer time. Today’s tool is one of a number offered by Dapper, a company which aims to “make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website.” The tool is the Facebook Appmaker. [Read more]
Jun 30, 2008
June 30th, 2008 by nataliechillington
Virtual intern Natalie Chillington rounds up last week’s online journalism-related news
Google
- Lots of debate over whether Google is making us stupid
WordPress
- Puffbox.com announces it will be sponsoring WordCamp UK in July,bringing together around 100 devotees of WordPress in Birmingham for aweekend of code and conversation. [Read more]
Jun 11, 2008
June 11th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
Yahoo! have released a family of Reputation patterns:
“They don’t tell you how to lay out a page or where to put an interactive widget. Instead, they address how to design a reputation system for your social software.”
Why is this important? The patterns are a wonderful resource for any news organisation looking to plan a community element in which reputation performs a role. In my experience, reputation systems are pretty important in encouraging users to keep coming back to your online community – you could argue, for instance, that the number of friends in Facebook or followers in Twitter is one simple example. Plurk more explicitly uses ‘karma’, as does (in a much better way) Slashdot (for more on Slashdot and karma systems I thoroughly recommend Gatewatching by Axel Bruns).
Yahoo say these are “the first of several collections of social-design related patterns that we’re working on,” so worth keeping an eye on what comes next.
May 20, 2008
May 20th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
Allison White has written this wonderful roundup of last week’s news for the OJB. But now she’s got a job. Persuade her to do this again in the comments…
Google
-Announced no desire to create content and will respect copyright.
It added face-blur technology to its Street View mapping serivce to protect privacy. Also speculation from Groves Media on whether this technology is more of a threat to civil liberties than CCTV.
Microsoft
-Looking to limit the kinds of computers that can use their low-cost OS, making them poor computers even if they could be better and still be as cheap. [Read more]
Review: Search Engine Society by Alexander Halavais
