It does take the BBC a while to catch up with these things, but now they have, their article is one of the most readable and accessible introductions to the trend, including some useful links to How to Podcast, Podcast.net and Podcast Alley. Oh, and you’ll need an ipodder.

Bloggers could better protect themselves if they took a few pages out of the reporter’s notebook, says Steve Outing, as a follow-up to What journalists can learn from bloggers. While I’m at it I should mention his article on Alpha Bloggers, too.

The interactive timeline in particular is a wonderful representation of the trends of the last year.

UPDATE (1.Jan.05): eBay pulse does the same thing for items being sold (thanks to rexblog.com for that one).

Quoting my own posting on another blog? How self-centred. Still, saves me typing it all over again…

Worth keeping an eye on for 2005: Backfence.com and Pegasus News. Now, I’m off to rest for the festive season and hopefully finally read We The Media…

Yet another review of 2004 (that year sounds old already) which mentions the impact of blogs – only this time it’s from the OJR’s Mark Glaser, and so worth reading.

PS: Thanks to the posting on Micro Persuasion – a great site in itself – which pointed me to the article (which in turn was turfed up by a search on Findory.com – my how the hours get whiled away…)

Shame on me for not knowing about this sooner, but Findory.com is another personalised news service: this one looks at what you read and what you search for, and builds a customised news page for you (in a kind of Amazon Recommends sort of way).

This does seem better than the more arbitrary RSS feeds that can overwhelm you with the volume of new postings, so I’ll be trying it to see if it does indeed live up to its promises…

Thanks to Cursor.org for bringing left i on the news to my attention, a media monitoring blog whose posts include highlighting

“an AFP story reporting that U.S. troops in Fallujah “had orders to shoot all males of fighting age seen on the streets, armed or unarmed,” a reader comments on “the fact that fighting-age males were prohibited from evacuating the city in the first place.””

(Cursor.org 12/21/04 18:14)

This got me thinking about why the American blogosphere seems so much more politicised than in Europe – and I think it’s this: traditionally European news media has always followed a politicised model, whereas the American model has an objective model tradition (at least according to McQuail et al, 1998: 252): does this mean there therefore seems to be more of a ‘need’ for politicised writing in America which is not satisfied by the traditional news media?

This article from Editor and Publisher about news navigation makes the welcome point that “News sites should learn from other online publishers: Links navigation is becoming less important, and search capabilities must become much more intelligent.” Professional companies should devote a member of staff to search, and probably consider getting into a paid relationship with Google or Topix.net to use their search technology.

For those who aren’t technically proficient enough to add a search facility to their site, there’s still some useful tips, including the ‘less is more’ rule of navigation (i.e. avoid endless navigation columns). Rollover sub-menus and section pages will help the user much more than a list of 50 options on page 1 (eight menu options is optimum, apparently, which isn’t surprising given that humans’ short term memory can generally only store around seven items).

Other tips include including navigation elements within the main body of the page (where most users look, according to certain studies), and focusing some attention on the design of article pages – particularly the ends of articles, where users can be left stranded.



PS: The piece is based on an interview with information architect Christina Wodtke, who seems to have a lot of interesting things to say on the subject based on a quick Google search.

Quite a cute little article by TIME which lists gives a succinct overview of the blogging medium in 2004, including blog scoops, blogs keeping news alive (Instapundit.com, dailykos.com), titillating blogs (washingtoniennearchive.blogspot.com, wonkette.com), fake blogs (plainlayne.dreamhost.com, billclintondailydiary.blogspot.com), blog gendering, political campaigning (blog.deanforamerica.com, spitzer2006.com) and those fired because of blogs.