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Excellent overview — good open government work from a surprising place. Speaking of surprises, I was tickled to learn how Brazil’s existing public disclosure laws were passed during the junta dictatorship era!
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Glad someone with $$$ is thinking ahead! “The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will be a Platinum sponsor at DrupalCON Boston March 3rd – 6th. What you may not know is what the Knight Foundation does and how they are connected to Drupal.”
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Just in case you’re taking life too seriously…
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Having trouble Skyping with your friends in India today? This may be why…
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Cool idea to connect print ads to mobile tech! Could be interesting for content, too! “Saves readers the trouble of typing a URL into their phone. Bring reader sto a specific page. Also ties into Google’s analytics tools.”
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Apparently, formal education and degrees are overrated.
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Great! Now only if they would crack down on splogs with scraped content, too…” Tasters”buy domains (normally misspellings of existing websites), place ads on them — often via Google AdSense — and return the ones that do not perform well.”
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“A tactical victory over rivals Google and Yahoo. The deal also covers other sites in the Wall Street Journal Digital Network — including Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, AllThingsD.com, and other online properties operated by WSJ owner Dow Jones and Co.”
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Mindshare Interaction’s Margaret Clerkin: “I have a big budget to put on phones. The tech is there. The carriers are very cautious about how they open up, they want to make sure they know consumer sensitivities. Also, mobile search is pathetic.”
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Per Lost Remote: “MSNBC.com acquired inspection data for 100,000 bridges through a FOIA request, and then mashed the data with Microsoft Virtual Earth, so you can see the condition and inspection schedule for bridges along your route. Cool.”
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“From start-ups to large corporations, everyone wants to wrap their arms around social media … but they do not want to spend the time it really does take to do community relations.” And it’s not just companies, but news orgs too.
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Yes, it’s time for mindset change: “The traditional path of a journalism career has clearly shifted. Today the reporter might launch a blog, a podcast or video reports as a one-person operation, handling editorial and business duties simultaneously.”
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Hey, I resemble that remark…
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“WordPress team has released a new theme: Prologue, like a group Twitter. Allows contributors to post directly on the blog front page, displaying a stream of recent updates. Ideal format for a breaking news site. Reporters add latest details.”
Monthly Archives: January 2008
links for 2008-01-30
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Looks good for exercising while on the phone, but I’m skeptical about whether you could write with it….
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Very cool example of a Google Map being used as part of a breaking news story. Well done!
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More about that cool breaking news Google Map that the Spokesman Review put together.
links for 2008-01-29
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Oh, this is hilarious! Talk about privacy issues!
links for 2008-01-28
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I gotta admit, I think there’s a lot of truth to this one — especially re: media’s role.
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Interesting resource on the nutritional content of food. I’d love to see some good mashups with this!
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I totally agree with this: “To get editors and reporters using a new system, it has to be DEAD SIMPLE.” Which is why it astounds me when I see online publishers wrestling with publishing tools. The tools should never get in your way.
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Great overview of the key differences between linear print publishing and nonlinear online publishing in the news biz.
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“That is why video storytelling is so important. Video speaks the universal language of the social networking universe. Unless you are tapped into the social networking universe, I don’t believe you can really understand what being web-centric means.”
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Pretty good outline of a process for online journalism that uses a full range of communication channels. Oversight (IMHO): Doesn’t have much of a role for conversation & community; or for participation beyond the news org’s site.
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“The Newspaper Association of America reported the number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites last year rose more than 6 percent to a monthly average of 60 million. Monthly visits climbed 9 percent in the fourth quarter from a year ago.”
Flickr Comment Spam: Any Solutions?
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| A great photo by Wolfpix seems to have attracted a lot of obvious Flickr comment spam. |
(UPDATE: Turns out the comments I’m complaining here are not comment spam — but man, they sure look like it. See Karoli’s comment below for an explanation.)
I love Flickr and other photo-sharing services. Not that I’m much of a photographer myself, but I love that Flickr makes it easy to designate and find Creative Commons-licensed images. I even have a Flickr CC search plugin on my Firefox search bar, and I use it daily. That’s because I prefer to include an illustrative image with every post. It just makes blogging more fun.
Whenever I use a CC-licensed image, I always comment back thank the owner and let them know I used it as an illustration, and where. I figure it’s the least I can do.
Because I leave lots of comments on Flickr to thank photographers for their CC-licensed images, I’ve been noticing lately though that comment spam seems to be picking up on Flickr. That’s a bummer.
Case in point: This morning I used this great duck picture by Wolpix to illustrate this E-Media Tidbits post by Steve Klein. When I went to leave my comment, I noticed many other comments that appear to be spam — they’re identical, except they’re left by different “users” — as if someone set up fake Flickr accounts for the purpose of leaving spam.
Spam in this environment especially sucks because it cuts off conversation and dilutes relevance.
What could Flickr do — or are they doing something I’m missing — to either prevent comment spam or discourage it by making it harder?
links for 2008-01-27
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I just installed the latest version of the Opera browser for Mac. Haven’t used Opera in a long time, looking forward to taking this tour and playing with the new features.
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Fabulous site offering multimedia for journalists in a way that’s not only slick and compelling, but very search-engine friendly. Yes, you can do both!
The best eulogy ever
I’ve been thinking about the impermanence of life lately (not in a morbid or suicidal way, just in a that’s-how-it-is kind of way). And it strikes me that eulogies can be pretty important. I think this is the best one ever: John Cleese’s eulogy of his Monty Python cohort Graham Chapman, in 1989:
For the record, when I eventually die, I want my eulogy to be at least this good. If no one’s laughing at my memorial service, something’s REALLY wrong, and I’d be pissed off.
Boulder windstorm continues
It was like being rocked to sleep last night… ALL night… and still today. Good thing I’m not prone to motion sickness.
Courtesy National Center for Atmospheric Research
Notice the difference in scale (vertical axis) from the chart I published last night. Oh yes, the wind is kicking up today! Hang on!
links for 2008-01-26
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“This suit is the latest attempt by the music and content industries to go after anything that acts as a search engine. Argument: if they allow people to search for copyright-infringing files then they are contributing to that copyright infringement.”
