Every week I come across some web-based service that makes it possible to do in a few clicks what a year ago would have required anything from a day of fiddling to months of developer time. Today’s tool is one of a number offered by Dapper, a company which aims to “make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website.” The tool is the Facebook Appmaker. Continue reading
Here’s a little graph using Google Trends to compare how many people have been searching for the terms ‘celebrity’, ‘politician’ and ‘footballer’ in the past few years – more interestingly, along the bottom is how often those terms are mentioned in news articles. Even since 2004 the gap between ‘politician’ and ‘celebrity’ has noticeably widened – particularly since 2007 (narrowing this year, presumably due to the US candidate elections). Continue reading
Virtual intern Natalie Chillington rounds up last week’s online journalism-related news
WordPress
Could the BBC be funded by a tax on web and mobile? In France President Sarkozy has just announced that, from next year,
“prime-time advertising on public television will be phased out, with the lost revenues to be replaced by taxes collected from internet, mobile phone and commercial broadcasting companies Continue reading
Allison White has written this wonderful roundup of last week’s news for the OJB. But now she’s got a job. Persuade her to do this again in the comments…
-Announced no desire to create content and will respect copyright.
It added face-blur technology to its Street View mapping serivce to protect privacy. Also speculation from Groves Media on whether this technology is more of a threat to civil liberties than CCTV.
Microsoft
-Looking to limit the kinds of computers that can use their low-cost OS, making them poor computers even if they could be better and still be as cheap. Continue reading
This was originally published in Press Gazette as Del.icio.us social bookmarking explained and Need some background info? Just follow the electronic trail.
Every newspaper has a library, and most journalists have kept some sort of cuttings file for reference. But what if you could search that cuttings file like you search Google? What if you could find similar articles and documents? What if you could let your readers see your raw material?
That’s what online bookmarking – or ‘social bookmarking‘ – tools allow you to do. And they have enormous potential for journalists.
There are a number of social bookmarking services. Del.icio.us is best known and most widely used and supported. For this reason this article will focus mostly on Del.icio.us. Continue reading
Another day, another set of questions from a journalism degree student – this time, one of my own, Azeem Ahmad. If you want to help him by answering the questions, post your comments below.
How important is blogging to you, and your business?
If my ‘business’ is education and freelance journalism, then: enormously important on every level: generating ideas, gathering information, publishing stories and ideas, and marketing and distributing those and, I suppose, myself as a journalist and (*cough*) academic. I find conversation extremely helpful in working through ideas and finding new information, and blogging is a wonderful way of having that conversation with some very well informed and intelligent people. I hope it makes me more intelligent and well informed in turn. Continue reading
Matt Wardman has an interesting post on the Economist having its PageRank cut by Google (translation: Google punishes Economist for unknown transgression by giving its website less importance and therefore, probably, lower ranking).
Here’s what he says: Continue reading
From Google-commissioned NAA research. Translation: “print newspaper advertising is great! Google advertising is great!”
“Techcrunch and Huomah are reporting that Google is looking into launching a Do It Yourself Publishing Service for Magazines.”The patent abstract says that Google is investigating
“A method includes receiving personalized content from a plurality of content sources. The personalized content is based on user input. The method further includes receiving a personalized advertisement based on user input, and creating a customized publication including the personalized content and the personalized advertisement.””
More here. Thanks to Richard Grimes of the NUJ New Media mailing list for the link.
Online Journalism Blog 