Keyword: onlinejournalism. Interesting developments in the US regarding ‘illegally’ linking to politicians’ websites, in the context of American campaigning laws.

UPDATE: Mar 9 05: Rexblog helpfully reports the fact that the claims are exaggerated, with a link to another article on CNET saying just that.

Keyword: webdesign. I’m hugely grateful to Niel Eyde for his post highlighting two great tools for testing the accessibility of your website – one for Internet Explorer and one for Firefox. On first use it seems a very quick way to see what needs improving about your website to make it more accessible – including spotting images missing alt tags, missing coding, and colour blindness. With these to hand there really is no excuse.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Thanks to Simone Dixon for pointing out this great webpage about Digital Storytelling. The main body provides a framework for analysing interactive journalism – but there’s also dozens of great examples and resources – with a forum for discussion which also contains some useful links. For those with an academic bent the research page looks invaluable.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Well-informed musings on the changing economic value of information in an online world – aptly sites on citizen journalist site OhMyNews. Some very interesting examples of different tactics that publishers have employed to make money from their content, and one quote in particular that sticks out: “If, for example, the penultimate value is influence, it would be wise to make the content free and permanent.”

Keyword: onlinejournalism. In which Simon Waldman neatly summarises three models of funding for bloggers – although it seems most of the opportunities are for businesses, not the bloggers themselves.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Editor & Publisher reports on The Washington Post pondering the demise of print (demographics and lifestyle changes are said to be the real problem) at the same time as Journalism.co.uk gives an overview of the same concerns, including the strange assertion in Press Gazette that internet TV news could spell the death not only of print, but of radio and TV news.

This sounds far too much like the doom-mongering for print that came with the introduction of both radio and TV news, and is still asserted with reference to the internet. The main danger to the future of print seems to be the extremely low investment in it as a business, but this is part of a wider commercialisation of news that the new trend in ‘citizen journalism’ seems to be addressing.

We’re living in a time of flux. Quite fascinating, really.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Granted, most of us don’t live in the middle of a war zone, but it’s heartening for bloggers everywhere that Salam Pax – the Baghdad Blogger – has won a Royal Television Society award for the programmes he made with Guardian Films and Newsnight. Added to the increasing success of Super Size Me-style documentaries it seems there’s a public (and awards panels) getting hungrier for independent, alternative viewpoints.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Credit to Journalism.co.uk for picking up on the idea doing the rounds to make your vacancies listings an RSS feed. It’s one of the few sites to have a good range of online journalism jobs listed (the Media Guardian Jobs is normally the only other place to find them), so well worth subscribing to.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. The Search Engine Journal sings the praises of TurboScout, a website that allows you to search a good dozen or so search engines – but not at the same time.

It’s a bit of a cheeky way to make some money – piggybacking on the search technologies of others – but could be attractive for those of us who don’t want to have to remember all those search engines and use them individually.

It would of course be useful if TurboScout told us which engines were good for what types of searches…

Keyword: onlinejournalism. That’s the upshot of this report from the Online Publisher’s Association, which also has the useful stats that,

“The largest proportion, 66 percent, report viewing streams of news and current events, while 49 percent see movie trailers, 29 percent eyeball music videos, and 27 percent check out sports highlights. Those figures might be somewhat skewed, however, because many of the sites included in the survey were online newspapers or magazines.”

Somehow, however, I can’t see publishers investing just to please these surfers.