Monthly Archives: December 2004

The Wireless: Another fad that’ll never catch on

Thanks to my colleague again for this one: podcasting, a new form of broadcasting audio content, as reported by the Boston Globe. An opportunity for the rebirth of talk radio – or just another excuse to fill up your mp3 player?

PS: This posting was done using Blogger’s lovely Blog This! feature (top left of screen). Bloglines has a similar feature – but how frustrating that you can only do it on Blogger’s own sites…

Yahoo to add video search

Looks like Yahoo is following in Google and Micrsoft’s footsteps and looking to allow people to search for video clips (reported by CNET). Lengthy quote:

“For search providers, offering searchable video is an extremely attractive new market because it not only keeps them relevant to consumers hungry for multimedia, but it also helps them appeal to brand advertisers, which spend about $60 billion annually on commercials. Major TV advertisers are comfortable with the effects of commercials, and they’re likely to wake up to Internet opportunities once on-demand video is ubiquitous.

“As a result, Yahoo, Google and others are already courting Hollywood to cinch relationships. Their courtship will be essential in building business models for video advertising, distribution and content sales–all hurdles to making multimedia search a success.”

It looks like RSS will play a part, and one interest for bloggers is, “the system could be used to allow people to aggregate video feeds on a personalized Web page, for example.”

More standards from W3C

CNET reports “The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) on Wednesday released Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, an ex post facto conceptual blueprint of the Web that it’s pushing as a practical guide for designers of Web software. […] Subjects covered in the document include how the Web links documents to one another, how it scales to large numbers of surfers, and design pitfalls to avoid.”

My new search engine friendly URL

As if to make a point about writing for the net, I have dropped this blog’s previously too-ambiguous name and plumped for the much more browser-friendly O-Journalism. I would have gone for the even plainer Online Journalism but it was already taken (and as for e-journalism, well the days of putting an ‘e-‘ in front of everything are better left behind). This also represents a certain narrowing of focus, although I will still comment on other online developments that inevitably impact on online journalism.

For more along these lines see this article in the Search Engine Journal, which talks about search engine friendly URLs, albeit with more of an emphasis on archived postings. Now to update my search engine listings…

Making a good magazine cover

…in which Dylan Jones goes over what makes a good magazine cover, including the excellent tips:

  • Never promise what you can’t deliver
  • Never ask a question on the cover
  • Cover lines can never be too big
  • Cover words need to make sense.

Personally, my three favourite cover line words were “FREE”, “NEW” and “SEX”. Sadly, I never got much chance to use the third.