I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting. The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly [...]
February 4, 2010
On most news organisations’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most commented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist experiment suggests an interesting alternative. Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary – if depressing – reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not [...]
December 17, 2009
The latest storm in a teacup to upset the blogosphere is the spectre of ‘fast-food content’. Raised as a threat by McArrington himself, the worry is that fast and loose content quickly generated to match popular keywords will swamp quality content in search rankings. …what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that [...]
October 7, 2008
I’ve been thinking about the future of newspapers a fair bit over the last few weeks, because we’ve been preparing a panel event on just that topic. It’s involved a range of reading and on-record and off-record conversations with a load of people involved with newspapers – readers, editors, pundits and the man on the [...]
January 8, 2008
I’ve been tagged twice for this so here goes. I have also cheated and extended this out to two weeks… Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly [...]
November 19, 2006
The Observer reports an interesting decision over at the Daily Mail. With the retirement of its television critic Peter Paterson, it has opted to replace him with… no-one. Since television reviews are among the best-read sections of any newspaper, the decision seemed perverse. But, as Peter Preston explains, it is actually cleverly calculated: Once upon a [...]
November 9, 2006
Great post from fellow Good-blogger Kate on the bête noire that is partial feeds. I share her thoughts entirely on this issue. She’s unsubscribing from anyone or anything that only offers partial feeds. Unfortunately for me, since some of my most important news sources (every (?) UK newspaper and the BBC) only offers partial feeds [...]
October 9, 2006
A report at FT.com sums up a recent survey by Jupiter Research. The amount of time devoted by Europeans to web use has, for the first time, overtaken the time they spend reading newspapers and magazines: Print consumption has remained static at three hours a week in the past two years, as time spent online has [...]
October 5, 2006
Former humourist and Daily Mail correspondent Keith Waterhouse makes friends with the blogosphere: Seasoned googlers, of whom there is already a vast tribe, are nerds, anoraks and braces-wearers of the worst sort who spend every working moment searching the infernal engine for other people’s blogs. They are descended from a generation of titterers, pranksters and spokespersons of [...]
October 5, 2006
An article in the (London) Times newspaper on Tuesday talked about the extent to which newspapers have been slow to embrace the ‘era of unbundling’. What is unbundling? The author, Jonathan Weber, recalls a remark from Bill Gates in the early 90s. Newspapers, Gates said, bundle together a lot of different stuff, local, national and [...]
September 21, 2006
In breaking news err… yesterday, NewAssignment.net has received a $100,000 grant from Reuters to hire an editor. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen explains the project’s agenda: The idea is to draw “smart crowds – groups of people configured to share intelligence”into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now. By [...]
September 20, 2006
What’s the business case for Web 2.0 technologies? Well, it depends on your business. For newspaper publishers, the answer appears to be that more is better. You may recall from an earlier post that the Guardian newspaper website tops the league in the UK for Web 2.0 features (research conducted by Robin Hamman. click for [...]
March 9, 2010