Blogging cartoon in Romanian
A couple weeks ago I published the ‘5 Stages of a Blogger’s Life‘ cartoon, drawn by Alex Hughes. It was an experiment to test a theory of mine: that cartoons could be particularly successful in increasing news website visitor numbers, and that news organisations should be doing more with them.
The results? In one week that cartoon got over 40,000 hits, making it the most popular single post ever on the Online Journalism Blog . Continue reading
UPDATE: A response from the Daily Mail’s Martin Clarke: “comments on the article in question were not published, because the story was already a few days old … If you want to complain about a story some days after it’s published you have to take a more traditional view of things and write to the editor”
I’ve blogged before about the problem with ignoring comments. But recently “marketing man gone native” blog Bloggerheads has been providing a rather stronger case.
Julie Moult is a journalist who wrote a particularly poorly informed non-story for the Daily Mail about UK MP Hazel Blears being Googlebombed (in short, Blears wasn’t Googlebombed at all: the top result for her name just happened to be a humorous image). Continue reading
Last weekend I attended the first WordCamp UK – a conference for WordPress-using bloggers, developers and designers. Aside from the tips on plugins, backups and content management systems, one line stood out for me “If you’re a web developer get to know a journalist. We need them. And they’re cheap.” Continue reading
The Google News Blog has posted on some truths and myths about its ranking systems (via Cowbite) – and this one caught my eye:
“Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we’ll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.”
In other words, the commercial pressure here is not to update a single article, but to instead create new ones with the new information (there is already an imperative here in that this increases your page count stats).
I’m not sure if this is a bad thing (errors go uncorrected?) or good (twitter-style newsrivers?). Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 