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)