On Monday and Tuesday, we’ll be at the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo in Boston, where on Tuesday morning we’ll be sitting on a panel entitled Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms? Here is its description in the…
What is Moblogging? Well, we’re posting this message by using a Pocket PC Phone from waist-deep in Long Island Sound at Greenwich Point beach in Connecticut. Unwired mobile bogging.
Several large UK banks have scrapped their WAP-banking services this week, following sparse demand by banking customers during the past few years. Halifax and Abbey National have scrap WAP. Many European (and few American) publishers still features WAP as their primary wireless…
An executive of a newspaper Web sites posts: “Mercifully, blogging will join the ranks of mood rings, pet rocks and Rubik’s Cubes in the not-too-distant future.” With all due respect, we doubt that. Consider that in their lifetimes Lewis & Clarke, Henry…
We received nice coverage this week in Online Journalism Review‘s story about newspaper digital editions. The only thing we’d change is to note we haven’t ‘worked with all the major digital-edition vendors’ and hadn’t said that. We work for the publishers, not…
The Recording Industry Association of America and several recording companies are suing file-sharing network Aimster (now known as Madster) for abetting copyright infringements and the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is being technohip by releasing the case’s oral arguments in MP3…
Katy Johnson won the Miss Vermont beauty pageant in 1999 and 2001 and operates a Web site that promote “character education”, abstinence, and sobriety. Tucker Max operates a Web site that promotes the opposite of character education, and he had an affair…
Sure, you’ve heard about the file-sharing softwares Napster and Grokster. But how about the friend-sharing software Friendster? A hybrid of peer-to-peer distribution and online dating application, Friendster helps you find new friends or become one. You list your interests, hobbies, favourite movies,…
eMarketer reports an In-Stat/MDR study showing the current price per multimedia message service (MMS) is now $0.40 (0.34 Euro) in Europe. That’s too high a price for consumers, effectively limiting MMS to business use. However, the study believes that the price per…
Although the words Bush and Technology seem incompatible in so many ways, members of the illiterate, hunter-gatherer society known as the San Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert have begun using handheld Personal Digital Assistants equipped with Global Position System cards to map…
Azeem Azhar, entrepeneur and former Internet correspondent for The Economist, wrote in The Guardian last week, “I think that today is the best time in four years to launch a business.” Read why. Now UK managing director of 20six, a blogging company,…
David Winer (Berkman Fellow at Harvard University and Former CEO of Userland Software), David Weinberger (co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto), Doc Searls (of Linux Journal and another co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto), Jason Shellen (of Blogger), Tony Perkins (Creator and Editor In…
Speaking of Dave Winer, his weblog says that the the news archives of The New York Times, which are currently kept behind a paid content firewall, will be opened to webloggers’ hyperlinks. NY Times Digital last year began syndicating its news feed…
Writing in TechCentralStation: Europe, Sandy Starr reminds that, “… October 2003 is the deadline for implementing the European Commission’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, which dictates that ‘member states shall take appropriate measures to ensure that…unsolicited communications for purposes of direct…
If you’re the competitive or betting type and you like to read weblogs, BlogShares is the game for you. It’s a stock market fantasy game in which ‘shares’ of blogs, rather than stocks, are bought & sold. Anyone know how to ‘short’…
Several UK and Scandinavian publishers have allied to set standards for European online classified ads in regional newspapers. Called FinnTech, the alliance includes Schibsted of Norway and the UK publishing groups Associated New Media, Guardian Media, Newsquest Media, Northcliffe Newspapers, and Trinity…
London-based Emap, publisher of diverse magazines such as FHM, Heat, Angling Times, and Pleine Vie, has announced that in 2002 its digital subsidiary earned an annual profit for the first time —
She gets our vote for prettiest use of Macromedia Flash on the Internet. Check out Model Federica Fontana‘s Flash FX Website, created by Arxmedia of Milan.
Good essay by Jim Naughton in the Sunday Observer of London, about how bloggers often are more authoritative sources than are journalist, much to the journalists’ consternation.
Is the newspaper industry determined to convince itself that charging for access to its online content is a good idea? To reach that conclusion, it seems determined to overlook all facts, data, and logic about the subject. For example, here is the…
PEPCWorldwide, whose satellite-connected vending boxes can on-demand print any of 119 daily newspapers from 48 countries, is rebranding itself as Satellite Newspapers. Steve Mannen, CEO of the Dutch company, explains, “This new easy-to-remember name reflects our company’s focus on the seamless distribution…
Furthering the convergence of mobile phones and PDAs into single devices for multiple purposes, Nokia’s Bejing research laboratory has developed a phone that recognizes inputs in Chinese language pen strokes. The Nokia 6108 apparently recognizes all or most of the 2,000 characters…
There’s an interesting article in American Journalism Review about whether or not newspapers should implement user registration and/or charge for online content. Registration makes sense (hello, did anyone remember why NYtimes.com announced in 1995 why it implementing registration?). But charging for all…
Community publishing has been taken to a new technical level by Stockholm’s N
Perhaps no one knows the answer better than Dave Winer, pioneering technologist and manufacturer of one of the first and most popular blogging softwares. Winer is now on sabbatical as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard…
According to a story in the bulletin of the Nihon Shinbun Kyokai (The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association), few Japanese online publications are charging for content or have had success doing that. For instance, Asahi Shimbum on March 3rd began charging…
Literally a higher demographic audience, 95% of passengers who tried Internet access aboard a Lufthansa airlines Boeing 747 liked this service. In mid-January, Lufthansa equipped its Boeing 747-400 Sachsen Anhalt, which regularly flies between Frankfurt and Washington, D.C., with Internet access received…
Congratulations to Monique van Dusseldorp, founder and CEO of Van Dusseldorp & Partners in Amsterdam, and co-founder of Europemedia, who has won a Vosko Award for her long service to the digital media industry in the Netherlands. A veteran Internet consultant and…
We categorically agree with this interesting quote from Slate.com Editor-in-Chief Jacob Weisberg in a New York Times‘ story (free registration required) about his site making a quarterly profit: “As it turns out, e-mail was the killer application on the Web.”
Last month, the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting Network’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer aired a good, short broadcast [transcript & video available] about blogging. But we do disagree with something that MSNBC.com Executive Producer Joan Connell said in it: “One of the values that…
David Astor, syndication columnist for Editor & Publisher Magazine, has written a column [which unfortunately might by now be hidden behind VNU’s paid archive wall] about how My Comics Page gained 10,000 new paid subscribers this spring. MCP now serves 25,000 paid…
We’re pleasantly surprised to discover that our Theory of New Media has become required reading in the University of Maine‘s Computer Game Design course. Although we wrote that theory to help explain to publishers what the differences are between Traditional and New…
Spain and England are where the most interesting experimentation about paid-access Web content business strategies are underway. There is an interesting story in Online Journalism Review about the Spanish market.
The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph, competitors, are the latest UK dailies to begin publishing digital editions. What’s notable about these large (weekday print circulations ranging from 500,000 to 2 million) dailies publishing digital editions is that the Audit Bureau…
Covering the IFRA Online Trend conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, our friend Rafat Ali notes the interesting ‘Instant News’ project by Sweden’s Sdysvenska Daglbadet newspaper. It involves instant delivery of news through whatever electronic media the user wants at any pre-designated…
Covering the TV meets the Web conference in Amsterdam, theFeature notes how: “The overwhelming success of mobile voting and alert campaigns around popular television programming prove mobile is a natural extension of TV. The numbers speak volumes – literally. In Spain Operacion…
“This is a country who defeated Iraq in three weeks, but still can’t figure out SMS.” That was how Kevin Werbach described the U.S. in his keynote speech to the TV Meets the Web conference in Amsterdam.
“Do your friends nod off or walk away when you start talking about ASP, HTML or CPM? Is the local Starbucks still the only place you can properly brainstorm with your colleagues? Are you onto your 4th PDA?” asks E-Consultancy‘s E-Bore Test.…
O2 tries out mobile video. 02 becomes the latest mobile firm to trial video clips via phones, including highlights of Arsenal matches.
After all the PowerPoint presentations I’ve lately seen at conferences, I feel compelled to hawk Seth Godin’s US$1.99 masterpiece Really Bad PowerPoint. It’s an electronic pamphlet (PDF) about what not to do with PowerPoint. It would be worth all the conference registration…
I’ve written elsewhere about the rise of multimedia mobile telephone access to the Internet and how online publications outside the U.S. are using SMS as a micropayment solution. The South China Morning Post now reports (requires paid access) that China’s three biggest…
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Courts decision backing the U.S. Congress’ extension of copyrights from 75 to 95 years, Reason magazine has published an ‘exclusive interview’ with Mickey Mouse. Among the cartoon rodent’s comments: “For almost 70 years, I’ve only…
Today’s
In one of the largest ‘forced migration’ in Internet history, Comcast will forcibly migrate the e-mail addresses of the 1.9 million AT&T Broadband cable modem users from the attbi.com to comcast net domain. All because the Comcast company purchased AT&T’s broadband operations…
A U.S. District Court judge yesterday ruled that file-swapping software company Kazaa, which is based in Australia and incorporated in the island republic of Vanuatu, can be sued in U.S. courts for copyright infringement. Federal Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that because Kazaa…
Are you shopping for the best country in which to sue for libel in print? In public hearings in Brussels last week, the European Association of Magazine Publishers and the British Periodical Publishers Association protested a European Commission proposal, known as Rome…
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today recommended Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and Mobile SVG profiles be anointed standards. Vector Graphics (VG) are how Adobe PostScript and Macromedia Flash work, although those two companies each uses a proprietary version of that…
Hey, desk-bound bloggers: Perhaps you didn’t believe my prediction last year that there is a rising Third Wave of Online Journalism utilizing wireless technologies? Then point your mouse towards NewBay. This Irish company’s software lets cellular network customers operate weblogs from mobile…
While researching international online privacy issues for a client today, I happened across the Center for Democracy & Technology‘s fairly comprehensive Guide to Online Privacy. I initially came across it while looking for any updates to the U.S. Commerce Department’s ‘Safe Harbor’…
There is a posting on the Online-News listserv today that asks this question about Sybase’s acquition of AvantGo: Do you foresee this changing your wireless/PDA strategy? (Is that question moot?) I think it’s sad to see American publishers mistake PDAs as having…