Friday, October 12, 2001

Posted 5:16 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Fair Sports, or How to Get Noticed Online

Steve Klein on Internet sports trivia
It took a record 73 home runs for the season, but Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants has finally cracked Aaron Schatz's Top 10 Lycos list for most-searched-for athletes. Bonds checks in at No. 4, followed by another newcomer, tennis star Martina Hingis. No. 1, now as always, is Anna Kourniakova, who has yet to win her first pro tennis tournament. Proving that he's back, Michael Jordan is No. 2, followed by last year's NBA MVP, Allen Iverson. Skateboarder Tony Hawk is No. 6, followed by English soccer star David Beckham, Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, omni-present golfer Tiger Woods, and Wimbledon/U.S. Open champion Venus Williams. (Someone will have to explain to me why Hingis can beat Williams on the Net and not at it.)

One other bit of Internet sports trivia from Schatz: Now that His Airness (Jordan) is back, his team, the Washington Wizards, has passed the Lakers as the No. 1 NBA team online.
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Posted 4:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Government Web Info MIA List

Amy Gahran on missing government information
Since Sept. 11, many U.S. government agencies have been removing from their websites various types of information resources that might be of possible interest to terrorists — things like the Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams, which recently disappeared from the Web. There are many reasons why this might be a good idea, and just as many why it may not. But one thing is for sure — organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have long fought right-to-know legislation and programs may now be able to make more headway than ever before.

As the battle over right-to-know heats up, it's probably going to be useful to keep track of exactly which government information went missing, and when. I'm starting to gather that information, and will publish a resource page in the next issue of CONTENTIOUS. I'll continute to update it afterward as needed. So tell me what you know! If you know of an online U.S. government resource (federal, state, or local) that has gone missing in relation to terrorism concerns, please e-mail me the name of the agency, the name of the document or resource, the URL where it used to be, and the date you noticed it was gone. I'll do my best to verify and post as many of these as possible. Maybe we'll start to see some intriguing patterns. Thanks!
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Posted 3:48 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Online Doldrums

Steve Outing on online media's lack of initiative
As one who watches online media trends for a living, I've noticed a dearth of significant activity lately. While the media in general continues to be abuzz with terrorism/war activity, online media remains depressed, it seems to me. Traditional media have been suffering from the economic downturn, since well before Sept. 11. But money woes or not, traditional news media ramped up for terrorism coverage — biting the bullet and spending enormously to cover the biggest story since WWII. I haven't seen that with online media. Even war hasn't snapped online media out of its slump. Online terror coverage has been mostly shovelware (inexpensive), with original content rare, other than some animated infographics. (Agree? Disagree? Click the "Discuss this" link below.)
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Posted 2:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

How Much Is Too Much?

Katja Riefler on German newspapers' solidarity with Americans
There have been a lot of impressive reactions among German newspapers to express mourning and compassion with the people of New York after the terror attacks. Even regional newspapers like Ruhr Nachrichten, or Mitteldeutsche Zeitung — by the way, initiated by the online staff — published special print editions within hours. A lot of papers published special pages and sections with the U.S. flag and also made this material available on their websites so people could use them to express compassion. An excellent example of this is the Hamburger Abendblatt. Its special poster, "Amerikaner, wir sind bei Euch" (Americans, we stand by you), was downloaded more than 50,000 times from its website and sent more than 20,000 times as an e-mail attachment within a short time.

Great idea, you might say, and I'd agree on the one hand. But the gesture loses some of its admirability if you know that the owner of the paper, the mighty conservative publishing house Axel Springer Verlag, extended its articles of corporation in the night following the attacks and now requests solidarity with NATO and the values of the U.S. from every employee. These principles are not just a personal statement but enforcable at the labor court. "So at least we know where we will not be able to read anything in case we should ever have reason to fear the U.S.," commented Wolf Schneider, well known author of books on media ethics.
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Posted 10:29 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

New Game, New Name

Steve Klein on the rebirth of an Internet magazine
Don't you just love it when the New York Times gets it wrong? In a letter to readers of the Silicon Alley Reporter titled "Why I'm Changing the Name of Silicon Alley Reporter to Venture Reporter (or, Why the Rumors of Our Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated)," publisher Jason McCabe Calacanis amended comments he made to Amy Harmon in the article that his Internet magazine would cease publication. "The story's over," Calacanis said to Harmon. "You can't have a magazine about unemployed people. You can't have a magazine about people who are taking time off."

In his letter, Calacanis contradicted the Times' headline: "Requiem for a Cheerleader: Silicon Alley Magazine Is Dead." "SAR is not in fact dead. We're simply changing the name (to Venture Reporter, beginning Jan. 1, 2002) and refocusing our attention beyond New York and the Internet. ... We've decided that instead of pretending that the Internet industry is going to make some miraculous rebound, we will expand our mandate beyond the Internet industry and beyond New York City. After all, spending our time covering layoffs and shutdowns is simply not as interesting as covering high-growth firms."
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Thursday, October 11, 2001

Posted 5:35 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Microsoft Makes a (N)Ice Deal

Steve Klein on Internet sports webcasts
Sports people love win-win scenarios, and the National Hockey League seems to have found one with its new three-year deal with Microsoft to webcast league games. What's in it for Microsoft? The NHL Internet Network broke into the Nielsen/NetRatings top 10 in September, and the broadcasts will attract users to Microsoft's audio and video software, Windows Media Player, and eventually to a set of paid subscription Internet services called .NET. Lisa Gurry, a Microsoft product manager, wouldn't say whether the company eventually plans to charge for listening to the games. Microsoft already features sports content from ESPN.com, which in turn already features NHL.com. "(We) want to provide news and information and also to kind of spread the gospel of hockey,'' said Keith Ritter, president of NHL ICE, the company's website. "To do that, you've gotta go to somebody who draws an enormous amount of traffic.''

Microsoft's chief audio and video player rival, RealNetworks, has deals to broadcast live MLB and NBA games on the Internet. Those webcasts include audio and video, but are only available through RealNetworks' paid subscription service.
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Posted 4:25 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Understanding Islam

Carla Passino on the Economist's use of archive material
On the Online News mailing list, fellow E-Media Tidbits writer Vin Crosbie suggested that news sites could provide unique coverage of the war against terror by featuring maps, diagrams, chronologies, histories, audio and video, and archives of local stories about al Qaeda, the Taliban, Afghanistan, and Islam in general. Almost on cue, Economist.com has published several articles from the magazine's archives, which explore the relationship between state and religion in Islamic countries. An excellent piece of journalism, which is well worth a read.
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Posted 12:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

No TV for bin Laden, But What About Web?

Steve Outing on government calls for media restraint
As the New York Times reports this morning, the major U.S. television networks have agreed to a Bush administration request to edit future video statements by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cronies (which are being distributed by an Arabic language satellite network). The idea is to prevent him from using American media to spread his propaganda and potentially incite followers within the U.S. to further terrorist acts. While that controversial move by the networks will have some impact, it's ultimately a hollow gesture. Full video transcripts of terrorist leaders' statements can be published on the Internet, and the agreement does not include foreign media. (It's not as simple to get all news websites to make such an agreement; with the networks, it just took a conference call between national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and CEOs of the major TV networks.) In the modern-day media environment, there's little hope of preventing bin Laden from "speaking" to the world — or to his followers inside U.S. borders. And that's the way it is.
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Posted 11:39 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

A Wider Range of World News

Amy Gahran on Afghanistan coverage
If you're interested in reading coverage of the Afghanistan conflict from news organizations around the world, don't miss Afghan Daily — part of the WorldNews.com family of sites. Afghan Daily and its sister country-specific sites aggregate and link to coverage of Afghanistan from online and print outlets as diverse as TheAge.com.au, Online Asia Times, Kyodo News, AfricaNews, the Las Vegas Sun, and more. It's well worth at least an occasional check-in.
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Posted 11:33 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

A Step in the Right Direction

Rich Gordon on usage tracking for Flash
Macromedia's Flash software is truly a remarkable phenomenon — the de facto standard for creating interactive multimedia content online. But for content producers and advertisers, Flash has one big drawback compared to HTML: It's much harder to track user interactions such as clicks and page views. That's starting to change. Macromedia and Web tracking firm WebSideStory have announced the release of a toolkit that will make it easier for websites to track user behavior inside Flash content. This will be particularly useful in the context of the large Flash-based ads that are proliferating on news sites. They're a big improvement over "traditional" banner ads because users can interact with the ads without leaving the content pages they came to see. But until now, tracking using behavior was a challenge.
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Wednesday, October 10, 2001

Posted 9:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Newspaper Website Coverage of Attacks

Paul Grabowicz on online media
A couple of papers are making good use of the Internet to put up interesting background on the terrorist attacks. The Providence Journal tracked down the Web pages of several terrorist and extremist groups, and did a story about extremist sites on the Internet. The Dallas Morning News put together an interactive database of the confirmed dead and missing in the various attacks, which lets you search by the name or age of a person, a city, state, or country, or by the location of one of the attacks. The use of the Web to honor the victims of the attacks is a topic Steve Outing just wrote about for Editor & Publisher. (Full disclosure: I helped the Journal in a minor way in compiling its list of terrorist websites, and I'm quoted in Steve's story.)
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Posted 4:47 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Terrorism and the Environment: Online Resources

Amy Gahran on tools for journalists
The recent terrorism crisis has thrown most newsrooms into chaos. Journalists are being pulled from their regular beats in order to cover events and issues related to terrorism and war. This is especially true for the environment beat. I've worked closely with the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) for many years, and in the last month I've heard many environment reporters complain that they've hardly been able to get environmental stories in print or on the air. Recently, in its biweekly TipSheet e-mail newsletter, SEJ published an excellent list of resources (online and otherwise) and ideas for environmental stories related to the current crisis. See SEJ TipSheet special edition, Sept. 26, 2001.
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Posted 1:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Media Consolidation on the Horizon

Rich Gordon on more fallout from Sept. 11
Inside.com is handicapping the prospects for further media consolidation in the wake of terrorist attacks, the economic downturn, and the likelihood that the FCC's media cross-ownership rules will be eliminated or pared back. The prospects, according to Inside:

• A competition for AT&T Broadband's cable systems — involving AOL Time Warner, Comcast, and Cox.
• AOL Time Warner to go after NBC.
• Tribune Co. and Gannett to aggressively seek TV station groups (Sinclair or Belo, which also owns the Dallas Morning News and other newspapers).

One analyst suggests that other companies will make AT&T's mistake: "They will get as big as [they can] get — the size of an AT&T in the telephone business where it can't move very fast — then in another few years it breaks apart again."
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Posted 12:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

The Icarus Effect

Vin Crosbie on the fall of content-related stocks.
Autobytel, BarnesandNoble.com, Ibeam Broadcasting, iVillage, Salon Media Group, MediaPlex, Razorfish, VerticalNet, etc. Content provider or content software and consulting companies that once had high-flying stocks, now have fallen in value to what the NASDAQ Exchange terms penny stocks — equities trading for less than a dollar per share. For example, pity the shareholders of HealthCentral.com, a health care information site whose stock reached a high of US$718.75 early in 2000, but was trading for only 25 cents this week, before it filed for for bankruptcy on Tuesday. Forbes magazine last week listed these NASDAQ stocks, whose prices had risen too close to the Sun and had found their waxen business plans become unglued.
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Posted 10:19 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Free Fall

Andrew Stroehlein on free e-mail
Owen Gibson, writing in the Guardian today, draws attention to Another.com's announcement that it will start charging for its Web-based e-mail services. The thrust of the piece is that this move may foretell the end of free e-mail everywhere. Steve Bowbrick, chief executive of Another.com, is quoted as saying, "I fully expect this to trigger moves from other sites in the sector."

But will Web mail giants such as Hotmail and Yahoo follow suit and move to a paid-subscription model? Well, each will be reluctant to be the first to charge. As we saw with online content, we are now in a who-blinks-first situation. However, I'm not sure we can equate Another.com's move with Salon's move to "premium" services. We're still waiting for one of the big boys to blink.
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Posted 1:53 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Britney's Dead; Bert's a Terrorist

Steve Outing on more Internet hoaxes
These are strange times ... made even more so by the Internet and the ease with which it can disseminate misinformation. The latest example: As Newsbytes reports, someone faked a CNN.com story about pop singer Britney Spears dying in a car crash last weekend. The prankster was smart enough to not only copy CNN's style, he/she also took advantage of a quirk in CNN.com's system whereby people who forwarded the news item on to others triggered an e-mail featuring CNN's branding. Apparently, many thousands of people were fooled as the faked story spread around the globe. And here's a bonus (but I'm not sure if it's a hoax, or just bizarre): This photo published on a Dutch news site shows an Osama bin Laden poster spotted at a rally. Note the presence of "evil Bert" (as in Bert from the children's show Sesame Street) above bin Laden's left shoulder. Don't believe everything you read or see on the Web. ... But you already knew that.
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Tuesday, October 09, 2001

Posted 11:01 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Fun With Photoshop

Steve Outing on Internet hoaxes
By now you've probably seen the faked image of a tourist having his photo taken on the observation deck of the World Trade Center as a 767 is about to smash into the building. Perhaps it was someone's idea of fun, albeit under the circumstances, sick fun. Now with a bit more distance from September 11, some folks are finding humor in these dark events. I direct you to Cathie Walker's SillyGirl.com hoax page, which takes the WTC tourist fake and pushes it a step further. (SillyGirl did not originate these; you can find them circulating around the Internet.) The photographic variations of the original fake are, dare I say, funny. Hey, we could all use a good laugh right now.
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Posted 4:46 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Freelancers Win Again

Steve Outing on e-rights
Freelancers have another win to their credit from the U.S. Supreme Court, which today turned down an appeal by National Geographic over the issue of reprinted photos that the magazine put in a compact disc product without paying freelance photographers extra. As Wired News reports, the court refused to reconsider a lower court ruling that went in favor of photographers. Just as in the Tasini v. New York Times Co. case that the Supreme Court decided in favor of freelancers this summer, the court again ended up affirming that content published in print cannot be freely used by publishers without contractual consent of the content creators. Of course, this doesn't ensure that freelancers will get paid for electronic use of their work; most publishers are now demanding that writers and photographers sign contracts that allow digital re-use.
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Posted 12:43 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Swedish Newspapers Want to Charge on the Web, Too

Steve Outing on paying for content
Online newspapers in Sweden are, like their counterparts in the U.S., seriously considering charging for their content. As this article from FT.com notes, the country's biggest newspapers are tiring of losing money from their websites. A couple of approaches are likely: 1) Using a micro-payments system from Citygate (a company that designed the Internet platform for 30 of Sweden's largest regional newspapers) to charge for certain parts of their services and content, and 2) banding together to charge ISPs for access to their content. Because of the small size of the Swedish market and the limited number of credible news websites published in the Swedish language, those are strategies that do hold promise. They might work in Sweden, whereas the same strategies tried in the U.S. would be extremely difficult to pull off.
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Monday, October 08, 2001

Posted 6:20 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

The Puck Drops

Steve Klein on online sports sites
It's worth noting that five of the top 10 sports websites are now official league/organization sites. According to the end-of-September Nielsen/NetRatings, the NHL Internet Network had skated in at No. 10 for the week before the start of the regular season (obviously thanks to fantasy players), joining No. 1 NFL Internet Network, No. 4 NASCAR.com, No. 6 MLB Properties, and No. 9 NBA Internet Network (with regular season still several weeks away). Portal sites held the other five spots: No. 2 SportsLine.com, No. 3 ESPN.com, No. 5 CNNSI.com, No. 7 SportingNews.com, and No. 8 FansOnly, which consists of college sports sites. The sports world has firmly moved into the publishing business.
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Posted 3:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Internet Continues to Grow, but More Slowly

Steve Klein on Internet growth
The Internet is growing, although not quite as fast. International Internet bandwidth grew 174% between 2000 and 2001, according to research group TeleGeography. But that's down from a year earlier, when cross-border Internet links increased by 382%. The U.S. remains the world's main hub, with more than 80% of international Internet capacity in Asia, Africa, and South America still connected directly to a U.S. city as of mid-2001. The statistics come from "Packet Geography 2002,” TeleGeography’s book-length study of the Internet's infrastructure. The report provides new rankings of top Internet hub cities, country-by-country Internet infrastructure statistics, and maps and charts that show where the Internet has boomed and where it has not.
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Posted 10:30 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Online Journalism Awards Finalists Announced

Steve Outing on honoring online media work
Judges for the annual Online Journalism Awards gathered in New York on Friday and selected winners for the annual competition (which is administered by the Online News Association and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism). Finalists in each of the categories were announced today, and the winners will be announced at the ONA's annual meeting in Berkeley, California, on Oct. 26. Among the finalists chosen in more than one category were: BBC, Beliefnet, CNET News.com, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, New York Times on the Web, PBS.org, Salon, Slate, USAToday.com, WashingtonPost.com, and Wall Street Journal Online. (Here's the full list of finalists.)
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Posted 10:19 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Britain Uses Web to Publish Terrorism Background Report

Paul Grabowicz on news from governments
While the U.S. government has been reluctant to release many details of its investigation into who was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, the British government late last week published on its website a report summarizing the links investigators allegedly have found to Osama bin Laden.
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Posted 10:01 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Info-SWAT

Amy Gahran on emergency response for the 21st century
In the midst of any disaster or turmoil, communication becomes everyone's prime concern. But as we saw on and soon after Sept. 11, existing communications networks can become hopelessly jammed — making it difficult for survivors to contact their families, and for hospitals and emergency workers to coordinate and share information. Senator Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate Science, Technology, & Space subcommittee, has proposed an interesting solution: the Emergency Technology Corps, an all-volunteer network of geeks who could ensure that important messages get through. See MSNBC.com: "National geek guard to save the data." Hmmmmmm, maybe I should get my HAM radio license after all.
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