Heather Hopkins of Hitwise UK has published some interesting figures based on what young commuters do online. Her hope is to be able to offer some guidance to our ailing newspapers on what topics to cover more fully. People in this age group apparently have little loyalty to traditional newspapers and are turning to freesheets. The [...]
August 31, 2006
Heather Hopkins from Hitwise UK reports an interesting phenomena on Google’s book search. The company may have started to offer PDF versions of out-of-print books, a very encouraging move to be sure. But a significant proportion of users go from directly from book search to book shops. Heather reports: “Last week, 15.93% of downstream visits [...]
August 25, 2006
Douglas Fisher, who has helped set up the online community newspaper Hartsville Today over the last year, has published a 75-page guide (PDF File) to citizen journalism and running a community paper online. It’s well worth a read. Perhaps of especial interest is what he says about training for these new journalists: Other sites have done more [...]
August 15, 2006
This is the most interesting woman in the world. I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by interestingness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon. The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe. What makes for interestingness on flickr? [...]
August 10, 2006
Updated statistics. Following the Bivings Group report into US newspapers’ adoption of Web 2.0 approaches such as blogging and podcasts, which I wrote about here, BBC English Regions Community Producer Robin Hamman has compiled a similar survey for the top eleven UK dailies. The results are as follows (click for bigger):
August 2, 2006
While most teenagers use shorthand expressions in their instant messages, it’s not actually lowering standards of grammar. That’s according to a University of Toronto study by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis. Detailed analysis found that while the words and phrases differed from the registers that would be expected by parents and teachers, the structures of [...]
September 6, 2006