Tim Berners-Lee says something about the Semantic Web that finally I understand

"Suppose you’re browsing the Web and you find a seminar advertised, and you decide to go. Now, there is all sorts of information on that page, which is accessible to you as a human being, but your computer doesn’t know what it means. So you must open a new calendar entry and paste the information in there. Then get your address book and add new entries for the people involved in the seminar. And then, if you wanted to be complete, find the latitude and the longitude of the seminar, and program that into your GPS [Global Positioning System] device so you could find it. It’s very laborious to do all this by hand. What you would like to be able to do is just tell the computer, 'I'm going to this seminar.' "
So that's what it does.
(From Technology Review)

New Smart Connection features

Woodwing have introduced a "Power Pack" for their Smart Connection software that includes three new InCopy features. A "Remote Module" allows users to work on InCopy articles with geometry and page pictures without actually being linked to the page. "InCopy Layers" allows an InCopy user to switch between the layers from the source InDesign file. "InCopy Frames" is interesting: it allows InCopy users to make basic changes to a frame size so that they will get passed back to the layout. See them at Ifra.
(From WoodWing)

Quark responds to BBC Magazines' move to InDesign

Following BBC Magazines' decision to dump QuarkXPress and purchase 350 licences for Adobe InDesign, Quark's UK marketing director said that this is "not a trend". He added that the imminent release of XPress 6.5 should incorporate some of the features that XPress currently lacks compared with InDesign. The article ends with the comment "empirical evidence suggests, meanwhile, that Adobe is seeing greater take-up of its software in the magazine publishing world than the newspaper publishing sphere." Some of the principal reasons for this are clear. First, the newspaper market is traditionallly slower to migrate. Second, InDesign does not (yet) have a globally established workflow system.
Good comment about this article in the design weblog.
(From Tim M)

In case you missed it....

Ian Mayes what we'll be up to for the next two years.
(From The Guardian)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette now live on NewsSpeed

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is now up on running on Digital Technology International's NewsSpeed editorial system, which utilise Adobe InDesign and InCopy. They have 58 layout seats and 211 editor seats.
(From Editor & Publisher)

AOP Online Publishing Awards shortlist

Categories in which GNL has been nominated:
- Innovation (Guardian Observer Digital Edition);
- Editor - consumer (Jane Glentworth);
- Integration of media-consumer (Guardian Unlimited Politics)
- Online advertising sales team;
- Digital product or service - business (MediaGuardian.co.uk)
- Online publisher - consumer (GU)
(From AOP UK)

Indy circulation has not translated into ad revenue

From Media Week: "In a statement commenting on the slowed growth in advertising income, INM said the issue was compounded during the negotiation of new advertising rates."
(From Media Week)

Steve Outing on "other" classifieds

This week's Stop the Presses is on "merchandise" classified -- i.e. small ads -- which account for about 17% of classified revenue in the United States. He argues that newspapers should run such ads for free online, and even some print ads for free. This may even help support paid classified revenues.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Tabloidisation update: Evening Gazette

The Teesside Evening Gazette will move from broadsheet to tabloid next week. They will print on Trinity Mirror's new presses, which will allow 128-page full colour editions of the Gazette.
(From Media Week)

Reprinting weblogs without permission

As part of its effort to appeal to the "iPod generation" (see below), new Frankfurt tabloid News included an "Interactive" page feature excepts from various weblogs. Without permission. Trouble.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

At least we don't do air traffic control

Techworld reports that the radio system for Southern California's air traffic system shut down last week, leaving 800 airborne planes out of contact. The servers were set to shut down if they hadn't been restarted for 50 days. D'oh!

TheSun.co.uk scales back following cannibalisation

According to this article on e-consultancy.com, the Sun plans to scale back content on thesun.co.uk after finding that the paper was losing 90,000 paying readers a day to its free website. The article, by Mike Butcher of mbites.com, says nice things about the Guardian: "Its web title has helped reinforce the brand's standing amongst readers, attracted an international audience and even made readers more likely to purchase the paper when offline."
(From E-Media Tidbits)

"A newspaper for the iPod generation"

Handelsblatt is planning to launch a daily tabloid for 20- to 39-year-olds who don't currently read newspapers every day. It looks like a direct competitor to Axel Spinger Verlag's Welt Kompakt.
(From Macworld UK)

Tabloidisation update: The Buchan Observer

And yes, they're calling it a compact too. Sister papers the Fraserburgh Herald and Elton Times will follow suit shortly.
(From Ifra)

Tabloidisation update: Irish News

The Irish News plans to switch from Berliner format to "compact" (tabloid) when it moves to its own presses next spring. The move should allow for much more colour.
(From HoldtheFrontPage)

Irish newspaper readership rising

Ireland is bucking the trend: most newspapers experienced readership gains in the past year, according to Lansdowne Market Research's Joint National Readership Survey. The number of adults reading at least one paper per week reached 92 per cent of the population: up to 2.9 million from 2.8 million the year before. Readership or the Irish Times rose 14 per cent; and the Irish Independent grew 16 per cent. The growth if beliueved to be thanks to an improved economy and a more literate workforce.
(From Business World)

Short paragraphs

The Eyetrack III survey is out and once again it endorses the widely held view that people are more likely to read a whole piece if it is broken up into short paragraphs -- as noted on E-Media Tidbits. Why is it so hard? (I found it nearly impossible: take a look at this weblog.)

Some other findings (wow, a second par): the upper left zone of a web page is still the "sweet spot"; smaller type leads to more concentrated viewing; get the "meat" of the headline or blurb in the first few words; text ads are viewed most intently.
(from E-Media Tidbits)

Three newsrooms in South Africa

A "Letter from Johannesburg", describing Douglas Foster's impressions from visiting the newsrooms of the Cape Times, INM's The Star, and the formerly GMG majority owned Mail & Guardian. The M&G's current editor tells the (American) reporter, "The state of our media is healthier than the state of your media".
(From Columbia Journalism Review)

"We're still hunter/gatherers in the new information world"

Part 2 of Vin Crosbie's "Online Publishing: The Long View" essay.
(ClickZ.com)

QPS 3.0

Only four years after the launch of Mac OS X, Quark have announced a version of its highly popular Quark Publishing System that runs natively in the operating system.
(From Quark)