Back to History

Good little debate on Slashdot on the ubiquitous browser Back button. One poster remarks, Back is "almost the only software feature in existence that is universally understood". But does it really do what you want? "Back" really functions as taking the user "up" the directory tree, whereas people perhaps expect it to be "previous".
(From Slashdot)

Moral compass of the internet

Wired bio of Sergey Brin, founder of Google and its head policymaker. Brin tackles issues such as the Church of Scientology's position on criticism, China's recent Google lock-out, racist or inflammatory websites, and companies' attempts to optimise their ranking. In steering the wired world's zeitgeist he could be regarded as one of the most powerful non-governmental influences on world culture and politics. Interesting to hear that his favoured value term is "useful".
(From Wired)

Apple drop X-only January plan

Apple have abandoned their plan to sell only Macs that boot in OS X from January. Report has the usual Quark waffle.
(From CNET News.Com)

IBM chip suits Apple

IBM have confirmed that their new 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip is AltiVec-compatible, which, I'm told, is good news for those who reckon Apple will start using it.
(From MacNN)

Service providers: 1 in 10 jobs now from InDesign

A pretty extensive voxpop survey by Jim Dalrymple on what people think of the QuarkXPress/AdobeInDesign battle. Adobe has made significant gains since InDesign 2.0 (up 188% year on year), and service providers say the number of jobs they receive from InDesign files has gone from 1 in 100 to 1 in 10. But he reckons this success will slow considerably when XPress for OS X finally ships. Quark's Glen Turpin is still sticking to the "we're going to make it solid, not sexy" line. What would be really interesting would be to see how fast XPress will be.
(From MacCentral)

IT projects usually fail -- KPMG

Gulp. A KPMG survey of 134 companies worldwide found that 56 per cent have had to write off as a failure at least one IT project in the past year. The average loss incurreed: 12.5 million euros. Sixty-seven per cent reckoned that their project management function was in need of improvement. A principal reason for failure: poor communication.
(From The Register)

BBC still by far the most popular UK news website

Latest Nielsen NetRatings stats for online news sites here. In October the BBC copped 2.8 million unique viewers; the Guardian 1.3 million, CNN 0.65 million; Ananova 0.5 million; the Telegraph 0.48 million; the FT 0.47 million, and the Sun 0.46 million. The BBC has by far the longest average time per month at 55 minutes.

El Pais now a paid site

El Pais began charging for most of its content Monday November 19. There are two payment options: an annual fee of €80 or a biannual fee of €50. There is also a micropayment option of 0.5 euros for a PDF or 0.2 euros for an html article.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Clarín produces electronic edition

The Argentinian daily Clarín is running a free digital edition using the facsimile page pane, HTML-optimised story pane model. It's pretty impressive, and includes an "other stories" list at the end of each story, No PDFs so far as I can see. See also discussion on Metafilter.
(From Metafilter)

FT, Slate doing trials with tablet PC

The Financial Times, Forbes, the New Yorker, Slate, Les Echoes and Wirtschafts Woche have signed deals with Microsoft to develop tools to publish trial tablet PC magazines. They are hoping to have something usable some time in 2003. Despite the limited take-up of ebooks, the publishers hope to appeal to advertisers for similar reasons: the familiarity and acceptance of print display ads plus the interactivity and personalisation opportunities of electronic publishing. Meanwhile digital edition software company has announced a reader application for tablet PC.
(From CNet News.Com)

When good interfaces go crufty

Interesting essay on "cruft" -- interface conventions that harken back to redundant necessities -- by one Matthew Thomas on his weblog, plus some discussion on Slashdot. Lots of nods to Isys Information Architect's Interface Hall of Shame, home of our favourite Lotus Notes review.
(From Slashdot)

Link farm front pages need to consider Google page design

I've got to agree with Steve Outing on this. News websites just haven't learnt enough from print or TV as regards what to do with their front pages. The headlines before a news programme, or the items on a broadsheet newspaper front page, will rarely stretch beyond 10 items (generic indexes excluded). Even with all the other furniture counted on a newspaper front page, you'll never be taken in more than about 20 different directions. Same goes for Google. Compare that to the Washington Post: 217 links on its front page. Does anyone really scroll down on front pages? I'm not against bundling stories in drop-down menus and leaving the very best editorial picks on the front. Show the quality -- everyone knows there's quantity online.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Reuters sued for publishing public URL

Here's an odd one. Swedish tech firm Intentia International has filed a suit against Reuters for obtaining an earnings report for the company from a web page that Intentia considered private on the grounds that no public navigation directed vistors to the page. The URL, however, was completely open to the world inasmuch as no registration is required to access it -- simply knowledge of the URL. Intentia reckon this means hacking and argue that a ruling against them would set the precedent that anything on an open web server is public information. Tautology?
(From Salon)

Pfeiffer on EidosMedia

Industry pundit Andreas Pfeiffer considers Xsmile, the XML-based pagination component of EidosMedia's Méthode publishing system, and reckons that such systems "could prefigure what standards driven workflow solutions of the future could look like". I did a review of Méthode for GNL IT - colleagues can read this in the "IT Library" or whatever it's called. The main problem with the ideal of a natively XML based solution is that in a medium as mature as print, in many design-driven workflows it is simply unrealistic to draw a line between form and content. The fact that XML and even SVG isn't really rich enough to describe a multi-layered InDesign page using sophisticated transparency isn't a failing -- it's to be expected.
(From Pfeiffer Report)

"91% of XPress users unhappy" -- Macworld

Macworld UK asked 1,268 readers if they were considering an alternative to QuarkXPress or have already switched. Niney-one percent of them said they were unhappy with Quark. Fifty-one percent said they were sick of waiting for a OS X version of the software, and 40 per cent said they had already switched to Adobe InDesign. Nine per cent declared that they would rather use XPress under any circumstances.
(From Macworld UK)

Washington Post 'was forced to sell IHT stake to NYT'

Washington Post CEO told Post editors that the New York Times threatened to drive the International Herald Tribune to ruin unless the Post sold its stake to the Times, according to Editor & Publisher. Apparently the Times threatened to start its own international edition and to block investment into the IHT. The Times has not commented.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Europe leads on cross-media publishing

Review of the Ifra show from Editor and Publisher. Argues that European developers are showing the way for new cross-media publishing solutions. "No less than five Spanish companies -- Ailink, Protec, Quasar, SchlumbergerSema, and Seinet -- will compete with northern Europe's established giants and their equally attractive Italian counterparts to court the world's newspapers." Media tech consultant Bill Rosenblatt, who recognises that American publishers are far more conservative than Europeans when it comes to news tech investment, observes also that European vendors "have the better technologies".
(From Editor & Publisher)

Quark gets SOAPy

Quark has upgraded its Digital Media System to improve access to, and administration of, assets within the system. Also added to DMS is a "Web Site Manager" and a SOAP framework, indicating that Fred Ebrahimi has jumped on the web services bandwagon; "WebCopyDesk", which is fairly self-explanatory; CRM tools; some workflow automation tools; and finally the "QuarkDMS Workflow Engine". This is described by Macword as as allowing publishers to "design and execute workflow processes, track projects, and define custom graphical workflow templates to control how work flows between people throughout the enterprise. This solution includes prioritization, editing, scheduling and production-orientated tasks."
(From Macworld UK)

German ABC to count digital editions

Katja Riefler notes on E-Media Tidbits that IVW, the German equivalent of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, is likely to decide to recognise some newspaper digital editions as paid circulation. The proposed model is such that digital circulation will be counted as a distinct figure to print circulation rather than a component of it.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Pfeiffer on XPress X

Andreas Pfeiffer on the forthcoming timing showdown between Apple machines booting in OSX only (Jan 2003) and Quark's forthcoming X-only release of XPress (probably Q2 2003). He notes that businesses would prefer to migrate OS and application environments at different times, but they may well be forced to change both at the same time. The article is pretty much verbatim what he argued in his recent eWeek report, albeit more management summary. Conclusion: what people really want is an XPress 4.x that runs both in OS9 and OSX -- so they have control over their upgrade migration.
(From Pfeiffer Reports)

Telegraph sales drop below 1 million

The Daily Telegraph circulation has dropped below 1 million for the first time in eight years following the paper's move to reduce discount sales and free copies. Like the Guardian and the Independent, the Telegraph recently raised its price by 5 pence to 55p.
(From Media Guardian)

PA moves north

As anticipated, the Press Association has announced that it will shortly move part of its Victoria operation to Howden, east Yorkshire, where PA's contract publishing outfit is based. There will also be a number of redundancies. The departments affected will include the website and Teletext operations, plus some people in PA's IT department. The TV and radio listings teams will remain in situ.
(From Media Guardian)

200 newspapers now have digital editions

Vin Crosbie on Tidbits notes that a Digital Dots/Ifra survey has concluded that European newspapers believe that digital editions -- ie, online representations of the newspaper as printed, often in PDF form -- will be commercially viable within this decade. And Crosbie's consultancy firm Digital Deliverance concludes that nearly 200 dailies -- mostly in Europe and Asia -- are now producing digital editions.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Nine newspapers in top 20 US news sites

August's Nielsen NetRatings figures for US news sites still show a healthy newspaper presence. The figures below also show the average monthly time spent at a site by consumer.

	Unique visitors	Time per person
CNN General News	18.6 million	24 mins 37 secs
MSNBC	17.4 million	28 mins 11 secs
Yahoo! News	15.2 million	20 mins 48 secs
New York Times	11 million	34 mins 13 secs
USA Today	9.4 million	12 mins 05 secs
ABC News	9.1 million	12 mins 16 secs
Gannett	7.6 million	15 mins 00 secs
Washington Post	5.5 million	20 mins 37 secs
Time Magazine	5.4 million	06 mins 40 secs
IBS	5.3 million	17 mins 03 secs
MSN Slate	5 million	11 mins 21 secs
Hearst	3.8 million	28 mins 08 secs
Fox News	3 million	34 mins 56 secs
LA Times	2.3 million	15 mins 21 secs
New York Post	2 million	16 mins 06 secs
Cox Newspapers	2 million	21 mins 01 secs
AOL News	2 million	08 mins 32 secs
Belo	1.9 million	19 mins 17 secs
Associated Press	1.9 million	06 mins 00 secs
Drudge Report	1.7 million	37 mins 41 secs

(From Editor & Publisher)

OSX is boosting InDesign

The current Apple/Adobe promotion (shipping InDesign free with new PowerMacs), coupled with Quark's likely failure to release an OSX version of XPress prior to Apple shipping OSX-only hardware, is giving a real boost to Adobe's attempt to make inroads into Quark's market share, according to market analysts.
(From C:Net)

Mac will only run OS X + Classic from January

Apple announced at Seybold that hardware release from January 2003 onwards will only boot into OSX. Pre-OS X applications (such as QuarkXPress) will only run in the Classic environment. And if they don't work in Classic, they won't work at all
(From Apple)

URLs in letter cross-refs

Steve Outing has echoed one of my personal hobbyhorses in E-Media Tidbits: print URLs of original stories on letters (and corrects & clarifications). Two points: 1, you'd have to use a service like TinyURL to provide nice, short URLs that people can type (unlike our Vignette monstrosities); 2, if you run cross-refs in Corrections and Clarifications, how does this affect the policy pertaining to the original story online? Do you append the correction to the bottom? Do you correct the story? How do you tackle repeated corrections? And what of those cases where you're legally obligated to remove the story altgether?
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Do not pass Go

Playing computer games - both in public and in private - has been outlawed in Greece. I'm moving there.
(From Kuro5hin)

Progress with microdisplays

Ohio State University has been conducting some tests with a bunch of new "near-eye displays" - eye glasses with built-in computer monitors that can carry as much information as a full-size computer screen. A bit daft in the office, but could be useful for the hack on the move (and in many non-media applications). No sign yet when these things might make it to market, but they seem to be ironing out some of the nasty side-effects ("headache, eyestrain, sore or irritated eyes, blurry vision, dizziness, nausea, disorientation, neck ache, backache")...
(From Science Daily)

A plan for spam

Essay by Paul Graham on how he uses a Bayesian statistical approach to decide whether an email is or is not spam. The method filters each user's email based on the correspondence (both spam and non-spam) that that user receives - so words that some would regard as spammy, but that others would not, are judged in context to the user's usual correspondence. Graham's filter lets through fewer than 5 spams per 1,000 messages, with zero false positives. A good lesson here for commercial spam filters?
(From Tidbits)

Are web shells changing journalism?

Interesting (well, I thought it was interesting) essay on web shells in OJR. Web shells are the navigation surrounding a story, linking to related data, resource, sidebars, backgrounders, archived stories etc. Delivering a good web shell takes you straight to the keyword/autonomy/etc debate about how you identify the context of a story. I have a problem with keywords because the context of a story changes over time: simply chucking a story about Imran Khan in the "cricket" folder might have seemed OK 20 years ago, but that story could now have an entirely different relevance now. The question with web shells is: do you build them from the story (very labour intensive: do you keep going back through your archive and putting new links to old stories?) or from the subject (restrictive: 50 stories in a subject folder X won't necessarily fit when the subject "evolves" into Y). Then there's the question of context over time: should you "snapshot" the web shell around an archived story to show the context as it stood at the time; or should you always show what you reckon to be the context now, rather than then?
(From Online Journalism Review)

Shazam

Anyone tried this yet? Lovely idea. "Shazam is a brand new service which tags music over your mobile phone anywhere in the UK. Just hit 2580 on your mobile and hold your mobile phone towards the music for 15 seconds after the tone. We will then end the call and you will receive a txt with the name of the track and artist."
(From Azeem Azhar)

Bye bye happy Mac days

It's true - it's not just the GM release. Jaguar has ended 18 years of happy Macs. Your box will now start up with a grey Apple logo. Sob.
(From New York Times)

Large primes proved conclusively

OK, it's not exactly on the subject at hand, but it's gotta be noteworthy when when of the world's most famous problems is solved.
(From Wired)

Electronic paper update: more on Gyricon

More on electronic paper , focusing here on the Xerox offshoot Gyricon Media, whose "SmartPaper" uses the electromagnetic bead rotation approach. Gyricon have just opened a $10 million dollat plant to manufacture SmartPaper for store signs and suchlike. The Wall Street Journal have engaged in a pilot to show headlines on newsstands, beamed in wirelessly.
(From ePrairie)

NYT reviews Jagwire Registration required

David Pogue, author of "OSX: The Missing Manual", has reviewed MacOS X version 10.2 in the New York Times. He's enthusiastic: "This is a polished, innovative and — if such a term can be applied to something as nerdy as an operating system — exciting upgrade ... as fast as Mac OS 9 was, and often faster ... impressive Windows compatibility features ... plenty of big-ticket features ... the best-looking, least-intrusive and most thoughtfully designed operating system walking the earth today."
(From New York Times)

Paid content update: Outing's review

Good Stop the Presses column from Steve Outing this week reviewing paid content. Quick summary: (1), give people diverse and easy ways to pay to read your content, to allow for the variety of potential entry points; (2) small content providers should seriously consider paid content networks such as Qtik (see "Another attempt..." below); (3) digital editions will get interesting when people start buying tablets; (4) paid wi-fi and paid content don't mix; (5) like paid content networks, shared registration may become increasingly popular.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Knight Ridder to install CCI throughout

The United States' second largest newspaper group, Knight Ridder, announced last week that it has made a deal with CCI Europe to install CCI NewsDesk Release 6 at all of its 32 daily newspapers. KR already runs CCI systems at many of its papers, but also has SII, Atex/Dewar and Unisys sites. For a couple of years KR has been pushing for homogenous environments in both print and web publishing systems across the group.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Newspaper execs stick to mantra

Newspaper industry figures are continuing to talk up the role of newspapers on the web, and are remaining in a holding pattern pending the introduction of a magic cure-all business model. W Dean Singleton, CEO of the MediaNews Group in the US, told attendees at the annual convention of the West Virginia Press Association, "We are well positioned as the cornerstone of media convergence". Singleton reiterated the usual call for "immersion" in new formats and in interactivity. "I'm a believer that the payoff on the web is there; it's just waiting for us to discover the right models."
(From Yahoo News)

Northrup: cross media or crossed out

Kerry Northrup has taken Ifra's obsession with convergence to new levels by declaring that traditional journalists who work to their existing skills and specialisms are "media bigots" who will in time be "phased out". He emphasises also that convergence should be about recognising media consumers' behaviour rather than by seeking out huge mergers. Fair point, but changing content generation and distribution models isn't synonymous with the redudancy of specialisation.
(From EPN World Reporter)

Piece on the Valley

Illuminating potted history of the East Valley Tribune's launch of their Olivesoft-provided Digital Edition. They did a free 60-day trial — which required registration, so made their marketing department happy — and backed it up with extensive promotion. "We have converted about 5 percent of those (6,800) who registered for a trial of the electronic edition. We see a steady handful of signups/payments every day."
(From The Digital Edge)

Technology Review trials Zinio

Another article on digital editions in the New York Times. This one focuses on MIT's Technology Review, which is introducing a digital edition service (provided by Zinio — see earlier blog). It's interesting how papers are using articles on other publisher's introduction of digital editions as a way to attract interest in their own service — promotion by proxy.
(From New York Times)

Europe overtakes North America online

There are now more internet users in Europe (185.8 million) than in North America (182.3 million), according to a study by Nua.com. This is most likely because North America has reached saturation point earlier than elsewhere. Asia/Pacific clocks in at 167.9 million. The total figure approximates to 580 millon, compared with 407 million in December 2000. Most people online per capita: 1, Iceland (69.8%); 2, Sweden (64.68%); 3, Denmark (60.38%); 4, Hong Kong (59.58%); 5, USA (59.1%); 6, Netherlands (58.07%); 7, UK (56.88%); 8, Norway (54.4%); 9, Australia (54.38%); 10, Canada (53.79%).
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Tools to harvest rather than to sow

Nice little Six Degrees weblog entry from Mark Lemmons; an exposition of the philosophy that the interesting tools nowadays are those that exploit work that has been done already. Worth considering in light of the "move it upstream to benefit downstream" philosophy.
(From Creo)

Digital editions becoming popular in Canada

Globe and Mail article on increased interest in digital editions of newspapers in Canada. "It may be an old way of presenting information, but it is one that has proved successful over 300 years of newspaper history, because it organizes material in a logical and consistent way, while giving readers the freedom to flip through pages, picking and choosing what they want, says David Estok, adjunct professor at the University of Western Ontario's School of Journalism."
(From Globe and Mail)

Web doesn't hurt print (again)

Further evidence that newspaper websites don't cannibalise readership from the print products, and may even help single-copy sales. But it's a close-run thing.
(From Editor & Publisher)

More spent on paid content

Americans spent 92% more on online content in 2001 than in 2000, according to an Online Publishers Association study. Eighty-five percent of the $675 million spent went on subscriptions. The top three categories for spending were business content, entertainment, and lonely hearts.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Another attempt at a multi-site pass Article requires logon

Qtik is the latest idea for a flat-fee pass to enter a set of paid content sites. The model is the "cable TV package" variety, where the user gets to choose a bunch of participating sites tand then pays a fee appropriate to their package. In return they get a single logon to access all the sites on their network. One nice thing about Qtik is that there is no requirement separate logons as you switch around between sites.
(From Silicon Alley Reporter)

Publishing industry fears OSX-only Macs

Good article in eWeek following on from recent rumours that the next major Mac releases will not boot in OS9. It focuses on the publishing industry and how newspapers and developers are not yet ready for a pure OSX (or even OSX plus Classic) environment. The main problem is, of course, Quark and Quark XTensions.
(From eWeek)

Trinity Mirror revenues drop

Trinity Mirror has posted a 50% drop in online revenues in the first half of this year. The total revenues for the group's regional and national digital media operations was £300,000. However, the overall loss was only £4.4 million. Last year it was £14.7 million.
(From Revolution)

XPress for OSX expected in Q1 2003

Quark has finally given some signal that it is prepare an upgrade to XPress that will run on OSX. The new release should include support for PostScript Level 3 and will enhance the avenue.quark XML functionality. Meanwhile Quark are starting to warm people up ready for release of the workflow upgrade to DMS; they've found yet another new name for the server version of XPress: "Dynamic Document Server"; and they've announced a further reduction in development staff, this time in the German office.
(From eWeek)

How newspapers can be profitable online...

... according to an NAA report. Apparently the World Association of Newspapers says that 38 per cent of us are in the black. Of course, calculating the profitability of second use is a pretty subjective thing.
(From Newspaper Association of America)

17,000 sign up for paid FT subscription

The FT has announced that 17,000 of its 2.8 million users have signed up for paid subscriptions since the FT introduced subscriber-only in May. It's not quite on the scale of the Wall Street Journal, which now has over 600,000 piad subscribers, but Marjorie Scardino described the rate of signup as "outstripping what we ewxpected".
(From MediaGuardian)

Deep linking update: "violation of EU law"

German newspaper Mainpost's ongoing battle with news search site Newsclub has led to a Munich ruling that deep linking by search engines violates the "Database Directive" of European Union law. "Legal experts believe that if the ruling is upheld, it could easily become a firm legal precedent across the European Union, drastically limiting the information that many European search engines are allowed to provide to their users."
(From Wired)

Nexpo review

Nexpo review from the NAA with summary of the new version of CCI NewsGate, a report on the launch of InCopy 2 and some U-turns from Modulo...
(From NAA TechNews)

Linuxworld falls in love with Xserve

Interesting article in Linuxworld arguing that the Linux community should embrace Mac users. Appropriates Moore's Law to the overall cost (hardware plus OS) of server systems. Xserve and Linux trounce Windows.
(From Linuxworld)

Media course students not interested in journalism

Depressing reading in a James Silver feature in The Times. The number of media studies places in British universities has gone up by 50 per cent in the past six years, but Silver found little or no interest in journalism or current affairs, and precious little general knowledge, in his New Media degree students. "Of nearly 60 students, only a couple had ever picked up a broadsheet." The article smacks of snobbishness at times, but it does illustrate the difference in quality between "dumping ground" media studies courses in some colleges, and the more serious journalism degrees that are taught at others. This follow-up report in EPN World Reporter seeks to distinguish them.
(From The Times)

What will replace the keyboard?

Wired questionnaire. Peter Skillman of Handspring: it'll get smaller but remain tactile. Jakob Nielsen: it'll shrink, then handwriting recognition will take over, then (2008 onwards) voice recognition will come good. David Gelerntner: Mirror Worlds (natch), a microphone and a joystick.
(From Wired)

Newspapers: gone in 2022?

Newspapers will exist only as a philanthropic venture within 20 years, according to Arnold Kling on Tech Central Station. He cites this NAA report and this data from the founder of American Demographics Magazine: "63% of households 25 to 34 years old bought any newspaper product in 1985. By 1995 that figure had slid to 56%. But by 2000 it was down to 35%." Not so!, says Sidney Goldberg (formerly of United Media). Electronic paper will save us!
(From Romenesko's Media News)

PDFs for voucher copies

Provision of voucher copies electronically using PDF is growing in popularity, according to Editor & Publisher. Both Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company in the US have recently signed up for MerlinOne's E-Sheets software. MerlinOne may soon be able to attach electronic invoices to the PDF.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Five new newspaper clients for Olive

Five more publishers have signed up for OliveSoft's ActivePaper electronic edition software. They are Forum Communications Group; Freedom Communications' Northwest Florida Group and Colorado papers; Oklahoma Publishing Company; The Reading Eagle; and WEHCO Communications.
(From Editor & Publisher)

QuarkXpress 5.01 released

Quark have released a free upgrade to XPress 5 that features various performance enhancements, improved spellchecking and hyphenation, and the facility to use an emergency key launch sequence to deal with problems with the painful License Administrator. But no Carbon.
(From MacCentral)

Web links on classified ads

El Mercurio has adopted the much-discussed idea of putting cross-references on print classified ads to allow readers to look up richer, more detailed versions of the ads on the paper's website.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Online presence: help or hindrance?

API profile of online newspaper users (1.2Mb PDF). "Online newspapers are the dominant online source of local news and are second only to printed newspapers as a primary source of local advertising . . . Compared to online audiences in general, online newspaper readers spend more hours and dollars online. But only 40%of all online users have ever visited an online newspaper, half don't use the Web for local news and most say they've never used the Internet to shop for homes or cars."
(From American Press Institute)

How easily is your software accommodated?

Essay by Zach Nies (former chief software architect, Quark; now part of Mark Lemmons's team at Creo) on software design and the principle that good interfaces should use natural metaphors. When designing Six Degrees the team followed the adage that "perfection is achieved when nothing more can be removed".
(From Creo / Six Degrees)

Worldwide web & local laws

Roundup of recent cases where local laws can get international organisations (eg, websites) into trouble, wherever the organisation may be based. Questions over jurisdiction in these matters remain unanswered. Interesting implications for copyright, libel and advertising regulations.
(From CNET news)

Jagwire in August?

Apple's OS X version 10.2, which was widely expected to be out in late September, may be ready for release in early August, according to CNET. Beta testing is apparently being wound up, and the latest builds feature interface tweaks, which suggests that the core work is now locked down.
(From CNET news)

More on Méthode

Editor & Publisher report giving more detail on EidosMedia's solution for the FT. The pagination end of the Méthode CMS will be either XPress, InDesign or EidsMedia's custom pagination system (to be announced shortly) and an XML editor Xsmile, which allows editors "to create and see stories in WYSIWYG mode". The whole lot will be based on cascading stylesheets. "Form and content are separate, and are only brought together when we render or output content, so we can apply different style sheets to the same content," says FT Publishing Editor William Dawkins. "The most important function is the single-copy principle." How to tackle geometry in a system where print appears to have come last in the design process is not explained.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Aggregators preferred to newspapers

Lycos's news-only search engine now indexes 3,000 news sites every minute, making it the most up to date non-wires news seeker on the web. Google's news search, though better presented, clocks in at a paltry 100 sites per hour or better. According to Forrester Research, people prefer the portals to newspaper sites to get news: their search found that 42% of internet users read news online at least once a month - but just one in four visit newspaper sites.
(From Lycos)

Little growth in news consumption

Research by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press suggests that news consumption is not significantly being increased despite the internet. In the past tw o years the number of respondants who said that they go online for news at least three times a week has only gone up by 2% (to 25%). Meanwhile the number who said that they read a newspaper the previous day went down by 6% (to 41%). "It seems that the universe for news consumers is finite and doesn't seem to be growing."
(From Editor & Publisher)

Electronic paper update

Nice little report on what Xerox (aka Gyricon) and E Ink are doing with electronic paper. E Ink has already demonstrated displays that are half the thickness of a credit card. Roll on rollable...
(From Business Week)

Nexpo preview

Editor & Publisher's preview of the main editorial system exhibitors at Nexpo this week. Short summaries of the "cross media solutions" being offered by CCI, Netlinx, Eidos Media, etc.
From (Editor & Publisher)

Figures for US news sites

Nielsen/NetRatings have released figures for the 20 most popular news websites in the United States. CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo! top the list, but several newspapers get a look-in. The New York Times comes fourth with a unique audience of 7.6 million; Gannett group comes sixth (6 million); and the Washington Post seventh (5.4 million).
(From Editor & Publisher)

Irish Times tries background ads

Norbert Specker on E Media Tidbits has spotted that the Irish Times is trying out background sponsor messages on its World Cup coverage. See example. Specker is also taking a snapshot of the world's coverage of the World Cup — a nice example of differing perspectives on a single event.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Blog, blog, blog...

I know I'm part of the problem and all, but I do find it a little exasperating the way that weblogs seem to err towards the opposite of what they set out to be (individualistic, off-beat, drawing readers' attention to stuff they would otherwise not know about). Just look at blogdex. Obviously an index of the most referred-to stories in weblogs will highlight the lowest common denominator. But it's interesting how the subject matters have changed. When blogdex was launched, the most popular stories on weblogs tended to be amusing or controversial. Nowadays, it's almost always stories about blogging. And the mainstream media's fetishising of the subject doesn't help.
(From American Journalism Review)

Newspapers still Britons' favoured read

Research commissioned by the Orange Fiction Prize found that people spend on average two hours a week reading newspapers. Two hundred couples were surveyed. The daily reading average was: Newspapers: 17 minutes; Fiction, 11 minutes; Internet, 7 minutes; Magazines, 5 minutes, Reference books, 2 minutes.
(From BBC News)

Big screen iMacs in Q3

Quanta Computer, the manufacturers of Apple's LCD screen iMac, is due to start producing 17in and 19in iMacs in the third quarter, according to DigiTimes. No indication yet of how much they will cost.
(From DigiTimes)

Paid content update: El Pais

Apparently El Pais plans to charge for online content by the end of the year. The argument: "It is not fair that readers of the paper pay for online readers." If you can read Spanish, the announcement is here. Dreadful Google translation here.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

FT goes public with Eidos deal

Eidos Media has released a press release detailing its deal with the FT for Méthode, its CMS now being described as a "news management system to create and publishe the daily mulitple print and online editions of the paper".
(From Eidos Media)

"Eight Technologies that will change the world"

According to Business 2.0: (1) Biointeractive materials (smart clothes etc); (2) genetically engineered fuel crops; (3) bionics; (4); direct brain-computer interaction; (5) genotyping; (6) a posteriori theories (using computing power to analyse data and identify trends, rules, etc); (7) molecular manufacturing; (8) quantum nucleonics (tapping the power of atomic nuclei).
(From Busines 2.0)

Felt tip wreaks revenge on Celine Dion

After all the "Celine Dion kills your computer" furore, it turns out that you can overcome Sony's key2audio copy protection by scribbling on the CD with a marker pen. Now that's hi tech.
(From Yahoo News)

Broadsheets "will go tabloid"

Eminent newspapers designer Mario Garcia predicts that many broadsheet newspapers will go tabloid in the next 20 years, as papers such as Le Monde and El Pais have proved that tabloid does not necessarily mean low brow. Garcia, who has just redesigned the San Francisco Examiner from a broadsheet to a tabloid, reckons that European and South American newspapers are taking the lead in this respect.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Google Sets

Another Google Labs beta, Google Sets allows you to enter a set of words and Google will attempt to expand that set to include other related terms. Example: enter three song titles by one artist, and you'll get a whole load more. Each resutl is clickable to run a search on that term. I've found it quite successful, but it could do with some sort of set restriction, perhaps: I'd like to enter three song titles and an "AND" album title to see just the songs on that album. Since Dictionary.com started spewing popups all over my screen I've converted to Google Glossary.
(From Google Labs)

Kartoo search map

Another implementation of topic mapping à la flux and numerous "3D thesauruses" that have come and gone; this one is a meta search engine. For pure aesthetics, see also the Atlas of Cyberspace.
(From Kuro5hin)

Factual error found on internet!

Nice bit of foma, for once: "The Internet's status as the world's definitive repository of incontrovertible fact has been jeopardized" It may have happened before . . . "In 1998, an e-mail made an unverifiable claim that [the reader] could earn thousands of dollars from an initial $5 investment. The claim was never conclusively proven false."
(From The Onion, natch)

Online Subscriptions Summit

Steve Oututing's summary of Marketing Sherpa's Anne Holland's summary of conclusions drawn from the Selling Subscriptions to Internet Content Summit: 1. Renewal! 2. Automatic Renewal! 3. Take credit card details for free trials — then auto-renew! 4. Cater to medium; sound unique. 5. Direct marketing! 6. Be clear about what is free and what is not. 7. Advertisers pay to sit with paid content.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Freeland on FT.Com relaunch

FT.Com editor Chrystia Freeland on the site relaunch, which features a tranche of subscription services. The emphasis is on rebranding the site as an extension of the paper — which, of course, people have been willing to pay for. "The reporting, writing and editing judgments you will read in those online sections are faithful reflections of the journalism in our newspaper. They are produced by a fully integrated team of reporters and editors, working in the same offices around the world, at the same desks."
(From FT.Com)

Deep linking update: printer-friendly links

Wired reports on a new take on the deep-linking controversy: health mag publisher Rodale Press has demanded that LetsRun.com stop linking to the printer-friendly versions of its stories. Arguably, the legal point here is stronger, given that linking to an advert- and branding-free version of a story could have identifiable financial implications for the publisher. LetsRun.com's reply is here.
(From Wired)

New tech can bring revenue

Editor & Publisher essay giving examples of how automation can generate revenue as well as cut costs. As usual, the big winner is improved customer data providing new ways to flog advertising or subscriptions.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Papers shrink book sections

Several US papers have been cutting back their book sections to save on newsprint and restore advertising ratios. When one reader complained after a six-page section in the Philadelphia Enquirer was whittled down to one and a half pages, he was told by the editor, "I could find nowhere else in the paper to reduce expenses that would not have an impact on readership." Ouch. Other papers shrinking their book sections: New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury-News, St Paul Pioneer Press.
(From US News.Com)

Five million OSX users by end of year

In an interview with CNET news, Steve Jobs predicted that 20 per cent of Apple's current 25 million customers will be using OSX by the end of the year. At present somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million (6-8%) are using OSX, although a good 3 million Macs have shipped with OSX installed.
(From CNET news)

Flying robot assassins

The United States is tripling production of unmaned air vehicles (UAVs) this year. These craft are now so sophisticated that hey can be used to pick out and destroy precise targets such as individuals. A UAV was responsible for the identification and destruction of the jeep carrying a "tall man" near the Tora Bora mountains earlier this year. The accelerated production of more UAVs suggests that political assassination is now very much back on the US foreign policy agenda.
(From MIT Tech Review)

Paid content update: more on mobile phone micropayment

Europemedia.net has some more detail on Vodaphone's "iPIN" technology that provides a plausible micropayment system for web sites and services. The idea is this: (1) Customer goes to website and and sees something that they want to access. The thing they want costs £x — which could be as low as 5p. (2) Customer sends an SMS message to a number listed on the site. (3) Customer receives a reply containing a PIN number. The user is billed £x to receive the message — so the fee is deducted as a normal part of the customer's phone bill. (4) Customer types PIN number in to website and accesses the material.
(From Europemedia.net)

Tampa Tribune joins NewsStand

The Tampa Tribune has signed an agreement with NewsStand to deliver an electronic edition of the paper for 50 cents a day or $22.75 for 15 weeks. NewsStand sales count on the ABC in the United States, but not in the UK.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Copyright update: beware the dinosaurs

Interview with "net freedom fighter" Lawrence Lessig in Business Week — fleshing out his theory that the grip on intellectual property now being exercised by the big media giants will lead to a stifled medium.
(From Business Week)

Adobe converts to OpenType

Adobe has converted its extensive font catalogue to OpenType, the cross-platform format that supports a much wider character set and is supported by InDesign 2.0. Explanation here. The move may encourage other foundries to do the same — which should precipitate a wider adoption of the format.
(From MacUser)

"Ganging up on the public"

Readable rant by Dan Gillmor on manouevres by big players from Hollywood to Belo to force customers to experience media product in the precisely way the publishers wish — by banning deep linking; by disabling the fast forward button during the adverts/copyright intro to DVDs; by accusing people of "theft" if they decline to view every advert thrown at them. "Law and technology are combining to carve away your rights in favor of the owners' control".
(From San Jose Mercury News)

ABC figures for US papers

Here are the ABC figures for the top 20 papers in the United States, for the past 6 months (with percentage change on same period last year). The average weekly circulation for a total of 820 newspapers was down 0.6%, according to the NAA. More info on Yahoo news.

1.	USA Today	2,120,357	(-3.5%)
2.	The Wall Street Journal	1,820,525	(0.1%)
3.	The New York Times	1,194,491	(3.8%)
4.	Los Angeles Times	1,011,732	(N/A)
5.	The Washington Post	811,925	(0.7%)
6.	Daily News, New York	733,099	(2.2%)
7.	Chicago Tribune	689,026	(1.6%)
8.	Newsday	577,796	(0.1%)
9.	New York Post	562,639	(15.4%)
10.	Houston Chronicle	545,727	(0.1%)
11.	San Francisco Chronicle	525,369	(-1.4%)
12.	The Dallas Morning News	511,159	(2.0%)
13.	The Arizona Republic	496,373	(N/A)
14.	Chicago Sun-Times	487,480	(0.5%)
15.	The Boston Globe	478,735	(1.9%)
16.	The Star-Ledger	406,717	(0.0%)
17.	Star Tribune	405,459	(1.6%)
18.	The Atlanta Journal-Constitution	405,367	(1.2%)
19.	The Philadelphia Inquirer	381,104	(-3.0%)
20.	The Plain Dealer	368,322	(1.3%)

(From Editor & Publisher )

Classified drift update: Monster revenue up 41% in 2001

Another article suggesting the doom of print classified: Ad Age.com predicts that newspapers are unlikely to recover fully from that advertising slump last year. As people begin to spend money on advertising again, increasingly they will turn to online sites such as Monster.com, who made excellent business during (and possible thanks in part to) the slump. Monster.com's revenue reached $535.8 million last year, while newspaper classified revenue in the US fell 15.2% to $16.6 billion. The biggest loser in print was the jobs sector, with job ads slumping 37%.
(From AdAge.com)

Paid content update: Irish Times

The Irish Times announced on May 1 that it is joining the "pay for premium" newspaper brigade on the web. The cost: 79 euros per annum, with short subscription alternatives. The product: pretty much the standard interpretation of premium — breaking news, access to the archive, and full access to the newspaper content. Partial access to the paper will remain free, as will the ad revenue sites (jobs, cars and property) and specials such as a World Cup site.
(From Irish Times)

British newspapers least trusted in Europe

A study by the European Commission includes that 20 percent of British newspaper readers trust newspapers — far less than the European average of 46 percent. Surprisingly, 20 percent marks an upward trend: last year it was 15 percent. Radio and television are trusted more; averaging at about 63 percent. More Britons (48 percent) read newspapers than the European average (40 percent).
(From Guardian Unlimited)

Paid content update: Financial Times

FT.Com has published more details about its paid subscription plans. "Subscription-only features will include the full Lex column; top columnists such as Martin Wolf, Peter Martin and Lucy Kellaway; web pages devoted to specific industries; and all articles more than seven days old." There will be two levels of subscription: the first, at $110 per year, will include all editorial content written for both the paper and the website, plus "the opportunity to read and print important pages of the newspaper". The second level, costing $300, will also include a database on 18,000 companies, plus the past five year's worth of FT Profile archive. FT.com has 2.7m unique users, according to ABCe figures.
(From Financial Times)

Google Answers

Google is beta-ing its take on the internet research community concept: Google Answers. The idea is that you submit a question for 50 cents and say how much you think the answer is worth to you (between $4 and $50). Two communities of researchers then try to answer the question. The first community consists of volunteer logged in users who get to try to answer your question just to prove how clever they are. The second community consists of "experts": if you choose to "buy" an expert's research skills, you pay him or her the value of the question (provided you get an answer). Google takes a 25% cut.
(From Google)

Circulation spike is over

The newspaper circulation boost following September 11 seems to have been erased, writes Editor & Publisher's Lucia Moses in a review of the figures currently being published by many papers in the US. The Newspaper Association of America predicts that overall, figures will show a trend of no growth or even a drop of 0.5%.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Future looks good on paper

New York Magazine's Michael Wolff mulls over changes in the New York press world in recent weeks — the WSJ redesign, the launch of the New York Sun and new sections in the NYT — and concludes that focusing on newsprint is not only in fashion, but a sound business strategy.
(From New York Magazine)

Quark not yet carbonised "because OSX isn't ready"

Quark's Glen Turpin has repeated the company's claim that "technical limitations" in OSX are at the root of Quark failure to carbonise XPress, despite the fact that all the other principal Macintosh applications are now running happily in Apple's year-old operating system. Printing is the main culprit. Joel Friedman of Heidelberg is similarly unenthusiastic about OSX, although his main complaint is simply that it isn't being used, rather than that it can't be. Some good comments on this article on Slashdot.
(From Newsfactor)

Coursey falls in love with Mac

ZDNet's Executive Editor Jim Coursey, a "Windows-dependent technology columnist" spent the past three month trying out life on a Mac. It was supposed to be a one-month trial, but Coursey stuck with the iMac and admits that "I ... don't want to give it up. It's a whole lot more fun than my Windows machine ... Mac, enhanced by OS X, has a level of simplicity and transparency in operation that allows it to get out of the way and just let me work. That's something Windows never does."
(From ZDNet)

Le Monde launches paid online edition

Le Monde has launched a paid-for subscriber edition online costing 5 euros per month. Subscribers get limited access to the archive, wires and pictures, PDF versions of the paper, a news ticker and some personalisation and research tools such as checklists and an online file system. Click on "édition abonnés" on the front page for the Flash demo.
(From Poynter's E-Media Tidbits)

Times Co goes public about CCI

The New York Times Company has finally announced its deal with CCI to install NewsDesk at the Times, the Boston Globe and the Telegram & Gazette. Implementation is scheduled to begin this year. The plan is to use LayoutChamp on most pages but InDesign on the more designed bits such as section fronts. No mention is made of InCopy at present. CCI will of course work hard to integrate NewsDesk with InDesign but clearly they've already given up on a single layout platform or true H&J.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Google top 10s are self-affirming

Interesting article on K5 noting that, with the release of Google APIs, the practice of Google Bombing may be exacerbated inadvertently by "Google Boxes", ie, engines that list top sites on subject X via Google. "Remember that Google uses links as votes, which in turn determine relevancy. By embedding these Google Boxes sites are creating recursive link structures. In other words, sites are querying Google to find the most authoritative links on a topic and then creating links to the results, which in turns makes them authoritative. The rating system is essentially feeding itself." However, sites such as blogdex avoid this by using a redirect. Perhaps Google should insist that Google API users set redirects...
(From Kuro5hin)

Blogging: "antidote to the liberal monotone"

Rightwinger Norah Vincent, "a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank set up after Sept 11 to study terrorism", observes that the big names in blogland lean to the right, and induces from this that this is a response to "the left's carefully combed and bowdlerized opus of ideals served up daily on the gray pages of nearly every big-city newspaper". And that's why so many of these papers are complaining about it. (Actually the complaints tend to focus on the self-indulgence and lack of editorial review of this medium, rather than the political bias.) According to Vincent, weblogs "provide a healthy criticism of the liberal establishment's hopelessly arrogant monotone", quoting James Lileks: "The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation." Perhaps the real difference is that some sort of conversation takes place before a newspaper chooses to publish an opinion. And it's interesting to note that the article attacks the very newspaper it is published in. Doesn't that rather undermine Vincent's premise?
(From Los Angeles Times)

FT starts a blog

The Financial Times's Silicon Valley commentator Louise Kehoe has joined the blogging plague with an weblog examining use of information technology in the corporate sector. It's of the commentary, rather than portal variety, so (unlike on this site) you at least get something original...
(From FT.com)

Express slashes price

Richard Desmond has chopped the cover price of the ailing Daily Express from 35p to 20p, of the Saturday Express from 50p to 25p, and of the Sunday Express from £1 to 50p. Desmon says the promotion will continue "indefinitely", whatever that means. The Express circulation has gone down by 10% to 883,000 in the past year. Associated say they have no plans to enter into a price war.
(From Media Guardian)

Integration means efficiency

Integrated systems are providing news organisations with all manner of new opportunities to leverage information, writes Meg Campbell in Editor & Publisher — and not just in editorial and production. A single information schema can allow a classified rep to offer an advertiser a subscription. Quality CRM finally becomes a real possibility. Systems can produce standardised reports and analysis across departments.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Convergence: coherence or homogenisation?

Online Journalism Review's JD Lasica reviews moves by various US news groups to unify their means of producing online content — and to unify the presentation of that content. Using shared content management systems and standardised designs, news organisations are speedily accessing and delivering stories across multiple regions and media. However, for the user, such "digital news networks can mean deeper and better news coverage — or a sterile, homogenized product lacking soul, personality or purpose. When it comes to this flavor of chain convergence, execution is everything."
(From Online Journalism Review)

Crash course in copyright

The University of Texas has published a neat little guide to copyright (US law), explaining fair use, digital copyright etc. They also have a tutorial and nice little libel checklist — again, pertaining to US libel law. It's cute.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Le Monde to carry NYT section

Le Monde is to carry 12 pages of articles from the New York Times every Saturday. The section will be in English.
(From Editor & Publisher)

NYT and WSJ go head to head

The New York Times is launching its first new section in four years: a competitor to the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal section. Both focus on weekend holidays and real estate. The launch coincides with the $225 million redesign to the WSJ (April 9) and moves by both papers to beef up midweek offerings in national editions to attract more national advertising. Given that the Journal's average reader is over 50 and male, the redesign — which is likely to resemble the WSJ Europe — is targeted to attract a younger readership. WSJ total circulation: 1,780,000. NYT: 1,109,00.
(From Editor & Publisher)

NYT invests more in NewsStand

The New York Times appears to be confident that its NewsStand initiative is a goer: they've upped their stake in NewsStand to 14% and put their circulation head on the NewStand board. They are now quoting 2,800 subscribers, of which 20% are from the New York area. Perhaps the other 80% are journalists.
(From Editor & Publisher)

CIA website breaks own cookie policy

D'oh! The CIA's Electronic Reading Room website appears to violate US federal privacy guidelines and even the CIA's own privacy policy, according to an NGO called Public Information Research. Despite the use of cookies, the CIA says here that "The Central Intelligence Agency Web site does NOT use the "cookies" that some Web sites use to gather and store information about your visits to their sites."
(From Washington Post WashTech)

Recruitment ads are migrating to web

The research firm IDC says that United States newspaper recruitment advertising revenue fell by 35% last year, whereas online job sides saw an increase of 38% in the same period. Monster.com is now one of the most successful companies online, and appears to have benefited from the recession as advertiser move their business from expensive print to cheap web. An analyst for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter estimated that 10% of US recruitment advertising is now online, and that this will increase to 25% within three years.
(From New York Times)

Good news for online news

OJR has launched a new section titled The Future of News in its redesigned website. The redesign is a big improvement, incidentally. The first essay in the section is titled After the Meltdown and is a good summary of the new sense of cautious optimism prevailing in online news organisations. "Amid all the clamor and clatter about viable business models, there remains this simple, unalterable fact: Users want us."
(From Online Journalism Review)

Cautious optimism over advertising recovery

Big media organisations such as AOL Time Warner and News Corp are voicing their hopes that the advertising recession is coming to an end. Leland Westerfield, an analyst for UBS Warburg, reported that "the cyclical recovery appears to be under way sooner than expected", and predicted a 0.7 per cent increase in US advertising spend this year. Others are less optimistic but there is consensus that 2002 will be far less painful that 2001.
(From Yahoo! Finance)

East Valley Tribune uses Olive

Arizona's East Valley Tribune has launched an electronic edition using Olive Software's ActivePaper Daily engine. The paper has been running adverts online using Olive since November, but has now put the whole paper online. The paper is currently running the paper as a free trial here.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Irish Times to begin charging

Ireland.com, the website of the Irish Times is to begin charging for "premium content" from May. "Premium content" includes most Irish Times content, breaking news and the archive. Price to be in the region of 100 euros per month. Ireland.com currently has about 1.5 million unique users. Meanwhile AP observes that online subscription is starting to make an impact.
(From Revolution)

Will they pay? Won't they? tennis

Wired reports that a Jupiter Media Metrix study suggests that "70 per cent of adults ... can't understand why anyone would pay for any online content". D'oh!
(From Wired)

Integration is more about culture than tech

Ideas Magazine's Vin Crosbie observes that while newspaper readers are increasingly treating different media as no more than different points of access to a single content provider, and while newspapers are endeavouring to promote that "same brand, different outputs" concept, the organisations themselves have done little to restructure according to those principles. "Most print editions that are downloadable online or transmitted to hotels, resorts, offices, and automatically printing vending machines are operated by print production and circulation staff. But New Media staff runs the Web sites, mobile phone, and PDA editions. And those two staffs have little involvement with each other ... Convergence won't become a reality for the newspaper industry until the staffs that produce them converge."
(From Digital Deliverance)

Times joins charging charge

The Times has announced that it will begin charging overseas users for access to its online content, and will extend the scope of its paid-for content to include law reports and a special World Cup section. The Times already charges for its crossword and archive, and requires registration to view any content, anywhere. The Times plans to use an interesting micropayment system via users' mobile phone bills. Some online publishers have expressed doubts over the accuracy of technology used to distinguish domestic from overseas readers. Meanwhile, Steve Outing continues to argue here that we need "some sort of central service that allows consumers to purchase "packages" of content access — so they aren't nickeled and dimed to death by individual paid sites."
(From Media Guardian)

NewsStand for magazines

Zinio is for magazines what NewsStand is for newspapers. You can download a demo (PC only) here. It was showcased at last month's DEMO conference and was highlighted in this Editor & Publisher review.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Longhorn to use database file system

The next release of Microsoft Windows is likely to include file system based on SQL Server technology. It should make for far better searching and file retrieval. But every application will need to be rewritten to work with it.
(From CNET News.Com)

Email after Enron

Following Andersen's unsuccessful attempts to remove documents related to their audit work for Enron, Jim Carroll considers the legal and technological issues pertaining to a form of correspondence that is almost impossible to erase without trace. Furthermore, "e-mail is particularly risky when it comes to legal issues, since people will say things in e-mail that they might not normally put on paper. There's an informality with e-mail that can often be misconstrued in a legal situation."
(From Canoe Tech News)

NYT teams up with education website

The New York Times has gone into allience with education publisher McGraw-Hill to put a NYT news feed to students using McGraw-Hill's Higher Education Online Learning Center websites. The hope is to raise interest in the Times amongst the student population.
(From Silicon Alley News)

Tribune requires registration

The Chicago Tribune Internet Edition has become the latest news organisation to requre user registration. Many newspapers in the United States are using obligatory registration to make their websites more attractive to advertisers (c.f. this earlier Editor & Publisher report).
(From Editor & Publisher)

Signing up for subscriptions

The Washington Post predicts that "this may go down in internet history as the year millions of people started paying for online content", while Michael Rogers on MSNBC reckons that "Internet news will begin to be sufficiently compelling and integral to users’ lives that they will be willing to pay something for it" — whether that be money, details about themselves to allow targeted advertising, or some combination of both.
(From I Want Media)

Community search engine

Researchers at Princeton have created a search engine that looks solely at all the links on a webpage and builds up networks of "social groups" based on these links. The resulting groups tend to illustrate communities of common interest. It may even prove a way to identify emergent trends.
(From Nature)

Copyright treaty "will encourage online publishing"

The World Intellectual Property Organisation's international copyright treaty comes into effect today. WIPO's director general, Kamil Idris, argued that the new rules will encourage copyright owners to put their work online because their enforcement rights are now much more clear. However, civil liberties organisations have countered that the new rules will restrict freedom of speech and expression.
(From Financial Times)

How to blow up Google

Appropriately enough, Blogdex, the blog of blogs, took me to an article on the power of blogs and their influence on Google. It turns out that blogs can be used to make a "Google Bomb", whereby keywords in referring pages can boost the rating of a site that may not even contain those keywords. The inventor of the term, Adam Mathes, lobbed the first Google Bomb by referring to his friend Andy Pressman's website with the words "talentless hack". A year later the site comes Number 1 in a google search for "talentless hack".
(From Corante)

News Corp says there is no way to profit from web publishing

Peter Chernin, president and COO of News Corporation, argued that there was "no viable business model" for the internet at the Financial Times New Media and Broadcasting conference. News Corp websites will be run merely as promotional vehicles for the print publications.
(From Financial Times)

Germans win e-paper race

Katja Riefler observers on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits that electronic edition distribution is not just being monopolised by Olive and NewsStand. Several German newspapers, eg, Rhein Zeitung, developed their own technologies in 2001. "More than 1,000 of [Rhein Zeitung's] 8,700 original subscribers have converted to a paid subcription in the first month, although you can only buy the e-paper as an add-on to the printed edition as yet. The price varies from 2 Euro to 5 Euro a month."
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Trinity Mirror posts £11.3m loss

The Media Earnings Watch on FT.com keeps track of company reports by media earners. Trinity Mirror last week posted a loss of $16m and said that the advertising market has remained "tough" in 2002.
(From FT.com News)

Online input good for newspaper classified

Report by the Advanced Interactive Media group argues that allowing advertisers to buy and input classified ads online is good news: it reduces costs, generates new revenue (both in attracting new customers and encouraging existing customers to spend more), and improves customer service. Not surprisingly the study was sponsored by a company that provides an online classified input service. Download report (800K pdf).
(From AIM)

Don't get complacent

Journalist Dale Peskin argues that newspapers shouldn't get too smug about the dot com crash, and that new media could spell the end for newsprint. His reasons: (1) Everyone is a journalist. Hacks are no longer uniquely qualified to inform. Communities and networks can be much more effective than one-directional broadcasting of information. (2) Consumers place a low value on online newspapers. Newspapers provide information - but people want entertainment nowadays. "News organizations thrive — or fail — on their ability to create experiential stories, and their ability to create products and services that evoke emotion." And newspapers may not be best qualified to do this. (3) Content is not king. "The capability to connect consumers — one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many — is more valued than the capability to produce content." (4) The Internet is rendering newspapers obsolete. "Two emerging economies provide models for growth and a future. A service-based economy enables access to a variety of paid-for services delivered through electronic networks. An attention-based economy enables news companies to create a new kind of wealth based on their capacity to extend their brands and their stories."
(From American Press Institute)

Charge for your most valuable assets

Discussion on New Media Age about the implications for the UK newspaper industry of the FT's decision last week to charge for an area of its website. "It's been widely rumoured that Guardian Unlimited will be introducing some kind of subscription services before too long. If that happens we will see if the market for paid-for services is unlimited or not. "
(From New Media Age)

The bad guys always use Windows...

Article on Wired reinforcing the cliche that in TV and Hollywood dramas, the good guys always use Macs and the bad guys use Windows. In the series 24 the standard model applied - except there were two disconcerting exceptions. One goodie starting using a Dell PC; and worse, a Mac user started to look like a traitor. However, to the relief of Mac lovers, the Dell user turned out to be the traitor. "The producers of 24 pooh-poohed the idea of any connection between computing platform and moral fiber." Who're they trying to kid? Amusing discussion (and pictures) on Metafilter.
(From Wired)

It's for you!

MIT have invented an "Audio Spotlight" that projects a beam of sound so narrow that only one person can hear it. The technology could be very useful in fields from entertainment (eg, no more squabbles over what to listen to on the car stereo) to military (to confuse or inflict pain on enemies).
(From Wired)

Webhead goldfish

Frequent web users end up with an online attention span of about nine seconds - the same as that of a goldfish. The impulse to move on to the next choice means we lose the ability to concentrate, Ted Selker of the MIT told the BBC. The answer, Selker argues, is to give yourself goals and not to "be pushed around by the most exciting words in a never ending sea of information."
(From BBC Sci/Tech)

Another web-supports-print study

Media Week features yet another report suggesting that online success supports print circulation rather than eats into it. "The study, by Starcom Motive, says that "on average, titles with websites attracting more than 100,000 monthly unique users enjoyed a sales increase of 5.4% between 1999 and 2001. Meanwhile, papers without a strong website saw print sales fall on average by 3.5%." The reason? "Good newspaper websites help shore up sales ... by building brand equity. The better the site, the greater the stature afforded to the brand." The study saw no correlation between circulation and advertising spend.
(From Media Week)

Newspapers should pay attention to mobile devices

PDAs, handheld tablets and e-paper will be more pervasive in the latter half of this decade than the web is now, according to Digital Deliverance's Vin Crosbie. Crosbie argues that newspapers should act now to create models that will work well - for customer and publisher alike.
(From American Press Institute)

Outing says: Get Flash

Editor & Publisher's Steve Outing sings the praises of interactive and multimedia content on news websites, and observes that the big boys in Spain, El Mundo and El Pais, are at the vanguard. The Society for News Design is offering a new award for pioneering news design on the web.
(From Editor & Publisher)

OJR assesses NYT on NewsStand

The Online Journalism Review has taken a look at the NewsStand version of the New York Times. "Is the E edition worth it? As a once-in-a-while substitute or add-on, yes. Every day? Not for us and -- my educated guess -- not for most inveterate Times readers with easy access to the print edition."
(From Online Journalism Review)

Alberta to provide "broadband to everyone"

The Canadian province of Alberta has teamed up with companies such as Cisco and Microsoft to install broadband internet connections for every school, hospital, library, and government office in 422 communities - some of them very remote. The infrastructure will then be made available for ISPs to provide services to private customers - provided the ISPs charge a low enough rate.
(From Cisco IQ)

NYT projects 20,000 NewsStand users this year

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr believes that major newspapers must compete "as distributors, as well as providers of news". The competition will include those with "control not only of certain degrees of information, but real control over the systems and applications that drive that" - in other words, Microsoft, AOL Timer Warner, etc. Speaking at Seybold New York, he cited the Newsstand initiative as an example of a new publishing channel, and said that the Times now has 3,000 NewsStand subscribers.
(From New York Daily News)

Price of democracy too high?

Trying to rush in a western-style democracy to the likes of Afghanistan could prove damaging, according to US academics interviewed in the New York Times. With no infrastructure, elections are difficult, expensive and could spark further conflict. Additionally, early elections tend to strengthen the most aggressive factions.
(From New York Times)

Alien alphabets

Create your own TrueType font of an exotic alphabet using The Alphabet Synthesis Machine's art applet. It uses slider controls and a set of algorithms to generate glyphs that do look pretty human ... or at least, organic.
(From Metafilter)

InDesign 2.0 trial

Adobe are offering a fully functional 30-day demo of InDesign 2.0 for download. It's 115Mb, so if you can't hang arouond online you might want to go for the CD instead.
(From Adobe)

Macs too bulky for clusters

Scientists such as those working on the Human Genome Project use clusters of desktop computers to effect a cheap supercomputer. They'd rather use Macs than PC - especially since OSX - but the boxes are just too bulky. Will Apple make a rackmount G4?
(From Wired)

The blog of blogs:

MIT Media Lab have developed a blog that lists the stories most referred to in a set of popular blog sites. Another example of the web eating itself. Good articles about weblogs and blogging on Wired, Camworld and Rebecca's Pocket. Some famous blogs/weblogs: Metafilter, SlashDot, Robot Wisdom, Arts & Letters Daily.
(From MIT Media Lab)

Young bypass print for web:
Further evidence that internet users in their twenties are giving up the print habit in a study by Forrester Research. Forty-five percent read newspaper websites regularly, and 31% say they have reduced their print reading because of the web. Fewer than 30% prefer the print version of their favourite paper to its website.
(From Media Life Magazine)

Convergence bad for ugly talent:
Getting hacks to deliver for multiple media - print, web, audio, video - could mean curtains for those uncharismatic specialists who excel in dark corners. "It's great for TV news, great for newspaper marketing and awful both for the maketplace of ideas and the marketability of talented geeks."
(From Phoenix New Times)

More tech, less thought:

The lives of journalists in the field are being changed by new technology - and not always for the better, argues The Independent's Ray Whitaker and others on BBC News. The demand for immediate, often multimedia coverage and the reduction in thinking time could result in both a homogenisation of content and a tendency for speculation.
(From BBC News)

Bye bye copytakers:

IBM plans to make computer speech recognition almost perfect in the next few years - better even than any human. The "Super Human Speech Recognition" project aims to produce a machine that will understand up to 20 languages and flawlessly transcribe even technical speech no matter what the speaker's accent, inflections, etc.
(From News Factor)

Convergence with caution:

Most news organisations are planning to integrate their different media operations - but no-one's in a hurry, according to a report by the World Assocation of Newspapers. The barriers? "Lack of financial resources, the individualistic nature of journalists, and the lack of modern multimedia editing systems".
(From Europe Media)

Thumbnail pics OK online:

A US federal appeals court judge has ruled that it is OK to reproduce thumbnail versions of other people's pictures - but that "full size" reproduction is a copyright violation. A problem for those image search engines, and perhaps for the Jigsaw project...
(From Washington Post)

Registration on the increase:

"Twenty-five major newspaper sites ... will be implementing some form of registration in the next six months, and I predict that half of the major sites will have a registration strategy ... by the end of the year." - A viable alternative to charging for online news?
(From Editor & Publisher)

Artificial reporters:
Natural language processing algorithm trawls news reports from 13 online sources and makes its own summaries. It's called Newsblaster. It doesn't plagiarise - it does actually write new stories. The future of Nibs? For light relief, try Headline haikus - News poems by Perl module.
(From Online Journalism Review)