Organisers of the 2005 British Press Awards have said for the second year running that they will not be making awards in the categories for best online news site and best online journalist. Apparently this is because they attract too few entries, and the standard of entries is not high enough. Someone should show them the Guardian and BBC’s best work, which has been winning awards in America.

Another one for my Xmas list: a doll that looks just like me. The power of interactivity is being put to its best use at MyTwinn.com, where you can make your own doll, including choosing hair, skin, and eye colour as well as experiment with face shapes and hair styles. Oh, and you can also have a freckle pattern replicated from a photo onto the doll. All for only $119. Now if I can get it to talk in a creepy voice, ideally during the small hours…

Interesting comment on a revision to the Intellectual Property Protection Act in America, as Big Business seeks to protect its copyright. There’s a mention here about a person potentially getting three years for filming in a cinema – I wonder if anyone’s ever done a comparison between sentences for this type of crime, which harms big business, and those that harm actual people?

The Independent reports staff at Reuters fearing that management will outsource their jobs to Asia. The editorial reference unit is one area bound for Bangalore, along with a news diary service and some financial reporting. CNET’s Charles Cooper isn’t that sympathetic.

How helpful of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, an investor advocacy group, to release its list of the 10 most violent games. This is supposed to be a warning to parents, but as a side effect it was very nice of them to help me out with my Xmas list.

My favourite quote comes from Dr. Martha Burk, president of the Center for Advancement of Public Policy: “The retailers have standards for other products,” she said. “Would Wal-Mart sell a board game where a player has to have sex with a prostitute to move forward four spaces and then kill her to move forward another six spaces? I don’t think so.”

Grand Theft Auto Monopoly, anyone?

As Google launches yet another arm to what is becoming an octopus-like operation, I’m yet again impressed by what looks like a very useful search tool for academic writing. Google Scholar ranks results by how many articles reference it (among other things) rather than how many sites link to it – and it even pulls out references within texts and presents them as separate results, even if these are books or publications not available offline. I did a search for Online Journalism and immediately discovered some very useful stuff.

Meanwhile, bigger fish Microsoft is looking to challenge Google with its own search technology, expected to be bundled in its next OS (a la Explorer) in 2006. Apparently if you type in “more evil than Satan” Google comes up top, partly because the Google motto is apparently ‘Do no evil’, which is better than those bland corporate mottos you usually get (although the company is doing a good deal of its own gobbling, including Blogger.com and Usenet).

For those animation students struggling with the limitations of their hardware, here’s a novel solution to the problem: processing power you can tap into, via your network.

While tidying up my office I came across this posting on the excellent Poynter website about blogs devoted to watchdogging the media. Useful links include Regret The Error (strangely addictive), CJR Campaign Desk (from Columbia Journalism Review) and ChronWatch, which focuses on the San Francisco Chronicle. Time to find something similar in the UK…

Conspiracy theories flying around re: 9/11 and a compelling video (with at times hilarious hard rock soundtrack) launched by multi-millionaire Jimmy Walter as part of a campaign to re-open the 9-11 investigation, and who claims that there is no evidence of a plane crashing into the Pentagon.

For more background, see this debate between author Jimmy Walter and Gerald Posner.

Two recent articles have raised the old spectre of the internet taking readers away from printed newspapers.

One concerns a recent survey which found that Europeans were spending nearly twice as much time online (20% of media consumption) as they did reading newspapers (11%). Of course, this was conducted by the European Interactive Advertising Association, so they do have a vested interest, and while most people went online to check email (88%), only 61% used the web for news.

Meanwhile, the eminent Roy Greenslade twins the decline in newspaper readership with the increase in newspaper website use, and envisages “a potentially disastrous situation for printed newspapers in which their sales have fallen to levels that are hard to sustain, yet their website offshoots will be hugely popular. […] Just as worrying”, he notes, “is the fact that many people get their news from net sources unconnected to newspapers, especially the BBC. There are hosts of sites offering news of varying quality and integrity, including those famous solo journalists known as bloggers.”

Roy quotes Pete Picton, the Sun’s online editor, as believing that the balance between what appears in print and online requires investigation. “The question of cannibalisation”, Picton told last month’s Association of Online Publishers’ annual conference, “is worthy of a whole separate debate in our industry.”

This is certainly an issue. I buy a paper perhaps a couple times a week these days, but most of my news consumption comes from electronic sources: my two homepages are the Guardian NewsBlog and the website of the journalist George Monbiot; I receive email briefings from the Guardian, NewsIsFree.com and the Online Publishers Association to name a few; and I’ve installed RSS reader on my computer, which duly chimes in twice a day with headlines from the areas that interest me.

We’re getting closer to that Daily Me that Nicholas Negroponte talked about almost ten years ago, but rather than being supplied by media organisations it’s being crafted by ourselves out of available sources. The important factor here is what those sources are. RSS Reader, for instance, leans heavily on American feeds, and when writing a blog it’s easy to fall into the trap of “If it ain’t online, it doesn’t exist” – because you can’t link to it.

This is perhaps the more immediately important debate. The low resolution of computer screens and the portability of newspapers will ensure they remain popular for a time yet. It may also be that online sources are offering something that newspapers are not. Newspapers face a journalistic and technical challenge; readers and bloggers face one of trust and reliability.