What if the crime of Breaking & Entering into your home were illegal only if the perpetrator wore a mask? Imagine if Breaking & Entering into your home were legal if the perpetrator didn’t wear a mask. Now imagine that we’re not…
Two changes to report about news trade journals: The ownership of Folio: and Circulation Management magazines has changed. Both were wholly-owned by Primedia, a company that during the Internet Boom both overgorged on dot.coms (for example, purchasing About.com for spending USD800 million)…
Here’s another typical example (click the illustration above) of Google News‘ odd choices of news sources. It’s a snapshot from about 2000 hours UTC on 3 August 2004. Google chose the Chinese government news agency Xinhua as the most relevant source of…
Nielsen//NetRatings believes that usage of the Internet from homes actually shrunk worldwide during the past year. The auditing firm estimates that 3.5 million fewer people worldwide used the Internet at home from May 2004 to June 2004. In the U.S. alone, 3.6…
Anne Holland of ContentBiz alerted us to Copyscape, a site designed to show you who on the Internet might be publishing your content without your permission. Copyscape is currently in beta tests.
No designer of Websites should be without the following: Ye Olde Lorem Ipsum Generator. That’s right! Now you too can have a site from which you can download pseudo-Latin textual placeholders in HTML format: Lorem ipsum quo ne posse hendrerit eloquentiam, wisi…
Ever want to do that? Join the club. George Simpson in MediaPost proposes some media industry-specific video games, in one of which you can. On a similar (if not so personal) note, we enjoyed veteran journalist Pye Chamberlayne‘s list of favorite links.
I am back at work after 20 days spent mostly on family business. Sorry about the interregnum.
There’s a good story in Columbia Journalism Review about how the publisher of the Dallas Morning News wants to see a ‘revolution’ in his newsroom. He’s calling for tough investigative reporting, openness in the newroom, an end to complacency there. Will he…
I’ve agreed to talk on Monday to the University of Missouri’s Online Journalism class. I spoke to them in person last October, but this time I’ll be video narrowcasting the talk from my office in Connecticut. A complication is that ‘Mizzou’ uses…
My thanks for three European articles this week that mentioned of my work: Eva Domínguez, writing in Barcelona’s La Vanguardia on the subject of an Observatorio de Prospective Technológica Industrial (OPTI) report about how new technology is going to affect Spanish media…
Transom.org, a showcase and workshop for channeling public radio through the Internet, has won a Peabody Award — the first Web site ever to win a major American journalism award. The annual George Foster Peabody Awards were first awarded in 1941 for…
Posted on Romensko’s media Memos page today was a copy of this: 4/7/2004 8:31:51 AM Memo from San Francisco Chronicle publisher Steve Falk TO: Management Staff/Digital Media Staff FROM: Steve Falk Under Robert Cauthorn’s guidance for the last three and one-half years,the…
John B. Evans, a man who influenced my entry into electronic publishing, died nine days ago at his home in New Jersey. His obituary appeared today in The New York Times. A Welshman, Evans received a law degree from Cambridge University, then…
I’m looking for a few publications for which I can write about subjects such as electronic publishing, e-mail, e-commerce, paid content, digital editions, and other phenomena of the Internet. I very much enjoyed my recent writing assignments for Online Journalism Review (on…
All traditional media companies now publish online and many of them are casting warry eyes at Google News, which is rising in the online ratings. Meanwhile, Google’s introduction of its GMail service this month has shaken up the e-mail application world and…
Google, the de facto search engine of the Internet, indexes the most popular Web sites for a keyword, not the most authoritative. Meanwhile, I believe that Clay Shirky has accurately applied the Power Curve to the phenomenon known as blogging. And blogging…
Many people (recently, Editor & Publisher Magazine columnist Steve Outing) have written about how news Web sites need better graphical layouts. Most of those layouts date back to the early days of the Web, when designers were attempting to replicate printed page…
The Guardian in the UK and The New York Times were among many English-language newspapers today publishing obituaries of Alistair Cooke. A cultural bridge across the Atlantic, he lucidly wrote for one and perceptively read the other. The Guardian‘s Media section today…
Fortunately, the Swiss also manufacture another version that a traveler can carry onto airliners.
Editor & Publisher features a story about Pulitzer Prize juror and Philadelphia Daily News Editor Zack Stalberg and how he was so impressed with the post-9/11 coverage of The Onion satirical week that he almost made it a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I’d…
Azeem Azhar pointed me to Terry Eagleton‘s essay about the importance of theory, which the Guardian published on Tuesday. Azhar writes: “… it’s a brilliant criticism of the critics of thinking, reason and principle. During my time working for large organisations there…
Many techies have told me that media companies would be wasting their time to produce a customized edition for each reader, that search engines or RSS already make this unnecessary. That amuses me. What they’re saying is ‘There’s no market for pre-built…
Although it doesn’t have a direct bearing upon online publishing, here is a revolutionary technology worth noting by media companies that use imagery or that report about technology: Philips Research has developed lenses that focus without mechanical moving parts. These lenses operate…
Afer studying long-term declines in newspaper circulation, Philip Meyer, the eminent professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a few years ago calculated that the last American newspaper will be read in September 2043. Using that type…
Last week, I wrote about Topix.net, which spiders more than 3,000 other local news sites, then lets users enter their local ZIP codes and see a page showing all local news from all local media. The San Jose Mercury News quoted me:…
I’m having a busy Monday because the previous day one of the journalism reviews commissioned me to report about the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s The State of the News Media 2004 study, specifically the section about US online journalism. The study,…
Aside my article this week at Online Journalism Review, someone has posted a comment that amuses me: Shameless Plug I find it more than a little coincidental that Vin’s prescription for online success involves using products quite similar to his PublishMail product,…
I’m now writing this blog solo, a change from the past two years when I’ve written perhaps two of every three postings. So, blame just me from now on. — Vin Crosbie
He’s returned from across the pond, but this time continued across flyover country. Rafat Ali, editor & publisher of PaidContent.org, MocoNews.net, and European Digital Media Weekly, the commercial überblogger whose efforts makes Jason Calacanis’ look like a mom & pop shop, has…
“I prefer visions of the future to the entire history of the past.”— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana (1863-1952)
“It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communications facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and…
EditorandPublisher.com features an article headlined Tony Ridder Still Having Fun. We’ll presume that Rupert Murdoch, the Cox family, and the Newhouse brothers are also having fun.* The real question is whether their employees are enjoying themselves, too. * We should note that…
If you are an American who has submitted your e-mail address to a ‘National Do Not E-mail Registry’ that promises to reduce the amount of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) you receive, then you may be the victim of a scam, said the…
In today’s Internet Advertising Report, Rebecca Lieb tells of how AOL’s sales staff tape recorded the amazing tirades of their now departed boss Lisa Brown because Brown would later deny making such tirades. Lieb reports: In them, she repeatedly launches into obscenity-laced…
Are keywords trademarkable? Add another case to that fray. The 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals has reinstated Playboy Enterprise‘s lawsuit against America Online’s Netscape subsidiary. The lawsuit, first brought in 1999, claims that Netscape infringed and diluted Playboy’s trademark…
I’ve recently been testing a Sony Ericsson P900, the state-of-the-art in mobile devices: It’s a tri-band mobile phone, PDA, MP3 audio and MPEG4 video player, and digital still & video camera, with 65,536 color VGA screen, a Web browser, e-mail access, SMS,…
Hong Kong already is the world’s most telecommunicative major city, having more wired and more wireless access than any other. San Jose Mercury News Columnists Dan Gillmor (who’s doing his annual sabbatical teaching gig in Hong Kong) says that the future of…
Today is my tenth anniversary (3,650 days) of working full-time in online publishing. “
Not on an anti-telemarketing ‘Do Not Call’ list and still bothered by carefully scripted telemarketers? Martijn Engelbregt offers an equivalently careful anti-telemarketer counterscript (PDF format).
After gorging on turkey during the long Thanksgiving Holiday in America, we’re now in the mood to eat anything but foul. However, what we found at the American Hotel off Amsterdam’s Leidseplein was an entirely new culinary treat. Yes, live pasta! Although…
Our thanks to Ola Ahlvarsson, Rosenthal Alves, Bruce Annan, Colby Atwood, Azeem Azhar, Clyde Bentley, Matt Benner, Gordon Borrell, John Breen, Peter Brennan, Dan Bruns, Neil Budde, Mike Cassidy, David Card, Bob Cauthorn, Todd Chronis, Craig Cline, Séamus Conaty, Peter Conti, Ron…
Ben Hammersley points us to the UK’s Wildfowl & Wetland Trust‘s site tracking the migration of individual Beswick and Whooper Swans and East African Flamingos. The birds have been tagged with lightweight (35 to 45 gram) transmitters whose signals are tracked by…
Confounding the predictions of Internet analysts and stock analysts, Salon.com continues to survive and has just celebrated its eighth birthday.
Slate.com has hired former stock analyst Henry Blodget to cover the securities fraud trial of household lifestyle doyen Martha Stewart. That’s like Fox News hiring former national security adviser Col. Oliver North to cover the the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Slate.com Editor…
We’ve been dwelling on Jeff Jarvis‘ remarks about how there was the no interactivity demonstrated in the presentations during the Online News Association‘s panel entitled Engaging Readers with Interactivity. During our trip this week between Chicago and Detroit, we were discussing how…
Last month, we noted that Penthouse Magazine Publisher Bob Guccione, Sr. had lamented, “The future has definitely migrated to electronic media” and that he admitted that there may no longer be a future for magazines such as Penthouse” and that his bankruptcy…
There are search engines for Web page, search engines for quotes, but no search engines for jokes.
If you think the new hires on your Web staff are getting younger each year (which actually means you’re getting older), fear not. As they get apparently younger, too young to be drinking Coca-Cola® or Red Bull® energy drinks, the beverage industry…
Do you publish e-mail address on your Web site? For years, we’ve been suggesting that webmasters encode those addresses in JavaScript to prevent spammers’ robots from capturing and spamming those addresses. The only problem with this solution is that not all Web…