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Posted 4:17 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Journalism Awards Reminder
Steve Outing on journalism contests
A quick reminder: the deadline is next Wednesday to enter the Online News Association's Online Journalism Awards for this year. Good luck!
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Posted 12:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Live the Zafra From Ecuador
Juan C. Camus on website coverage
The sugar cane harvest ("zafra" in Spanish) has begun in Ecuador. So the website of El Comercio has published a simple story about the issue — with an interesting plus. It's a photo gallery (in the right column) where you can see the real men behind the job. Their faces, clothing, and the landscape show much more than can the words themselves.
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Posted 12:46 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Searching for the Best Blogs
Steve Outing on weblogs
I'm not the only one touting the virtues of blogging (1,2). The Guardian (UK) is holding a contest to find the best British weblog. It's nice to see a mainstream media outlet not treat blogging like a soon-to-pass fad.
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Posted 12:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What Do Children Think About?
Juan C. Camus on website interaction
What do children think about their country's crisis? Part of the answer can be found in a special feature of La Nación, a major newspaper from Argentina, which debuted a section devoted to kids' interaction. The idea is to get children's thoughts, via e-mail, about their own lives, their hopes, and about their country. With that material the newspaper published a special print section.
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Posted 11:55 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Roll-up TV
Steve Outing on cutting-edge technology
According to this Reuters report, technologists are making progress on a material that can create a "roll-up television." This is a step beyond what the developers of "digital ink" have been touting in recent years. In the online media business, we've envisioned a magazine-like portable electronic tablet with which we can read (digital versions of) newspapers, magazines, and books. This latest wrinkle will make such tablets capable of presenting video and multimedia — and you can still roll them up like a magazine. If you've seen the Harry Potter movie or read the books, what we're talking about looks like J.K. Rowling's vision of books with moving pictures.
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Posted 2:31 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Filtering Aids Repressive Governments
Katja Riefler on spam, hackers, and national control interests
A few days ago Vin Crosbie and Norbert Specker complained about online content filtering. It has many annoying aspects. You might forget that it is efficiently used by national governments to prevent their people from accessing information. How effective it can be at this is shown in a study by Harvard Law School on "Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia." The authors chose some 63,000 websites as a sample and then tried to access them through a proxy server in Saudi Arabia. More than 2,000 sites (3%) were unavailable. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, software downloads, and entertainment. It is worthwhile to look at the banned pages in detail. Among them are such sites as the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Islamic Cultural Library, and the AltaVista-World Translation services.
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Posted 1:15 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Emol.com Is the New Leader
Juan C. Camus on Chilean Web audiences
Emol.com appeared this morning as the leading audience website in Chile, with more than 35 million page-views during June 2002, according to data presented by AMI, a group of websites. Those numbers represent the first time that all major players in the Chilean Internet are being measured by the same tool, using a technology provided by Certifica.com.
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Posted 11:48 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Open Source Content Management
Steve Outing on an interesting conference
An announcement landed in my in-box recently for an unusual conference — that I suspect some of you will find of interest. OSCOM, an international non-profit organization dedicated to open source content management, is holding a conference in Berkeley, California, September 25-27. The event will feature presentations from 10 content management system (CMS) projects — and is meant "to galvanize the role of open source in the CMS market," according to the press release. Here's how OSCOM interprets the CMS industry today: "The market has no established leaders, low international acceptance, and high customer dissatisfaction." See the OSCOM website for details.
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Posted 4:33 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Deconstructing Online News Profits
Paul Grabowicz on online media
In a sign that things aren't all bad in Internet publishing, the New York Times reports that revenue for its digital division increased 15.9% in the second quarter of this year compared to last year, while revenue in the newspaper group went up only 1.4%. ... But the devil is in the details.As Online Journalism Review reveals in a package of stories on the profitability of online newspapers, widely different and complicated accounting practices make it very difficult to determine exactly how well a news site is doing. The Times' digital division includes on its balance sheet revenue from licensing print product content to Lexis-Nexis and similar services, according to OJR. But it also pays the Times' print operations a fee for content used on the website, unlike many other online divisions.
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Posted 12:02 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online News Loses a Pioneer
Steve Outing on an obituary
Dean Wheeler, the founding managing editor of AOL News, died late Monday from cancer. The news was announced on Poynter's Online-News discussion list by his colleague, AOL News Services director Gary Kebbel, who noted that Wheeler stayed at his job at AOL News since the service was founded in 1995. Said Kebbel: "He created the best, most collegial and cooperative news team I've ever worked on. He taught every day how to be true to the basic journalistic principles we all talk about. He was the conscience of the newsroom, and the wall separating church and state. He didn't just defend the wall. He was the wall."
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Posted 11:46 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Selling Ads: The Power of Inertia
Steve Outing on online advertising
Here's a cool idea floated by Anne Holland in her ContentBlog: sign up advertisers for "auto-renewal." Internet publishers who charge for subscriptions commonly auto-renew — where a subscriber's credit card is continually charged and the subscription only canceled when the subscriber requests it. Holland suggests that the same approach can be taken for some forms of online advertising — where the monthly/annual fees are small enough to be charged to a credit card. This can work for paid directory listings, for example, where $20 or so is automatically charged each month.Here's Holland writing on the advantage of such an approach: "'You can cancel at any time,' the reps tell advertising prospects, 'it's so easy.' Then the publisher sits back and relies on the 'power of inertia' to keep revenues streaming in. According to a publisher (who tried this approach), his/her ad revenues are up nearly 100% since the auto-ad-renew program began a few months ago."
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Posted 10:45 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Adjust Your Calendars
Steve Outing on online media conferences
There's been a change in the line-up of the most prominent online news conferences in the U.S. The next Newspaper Association of America "Connections" new media conference will be held January 23-26 in Orlando, Florida. Connections has long been held in the heart of summer. (This year's conference, in Denver, ended yesterday.) Meanwhile, Editor & Publisher's "Interactive Newspapers" conference — which has long been held in February — is undergoing a slight change in emphasis, and switching to a June date (as yet not specified; location not yet announced). The E&P show will be broadened to attract more than just newspaper attendees, and produced in conjunction with sister publication Media Week. (I'll report more details here as they become available.)And outside the U.S., Norbert Specker (fellow E-Media Tidbits contributor) has changed the date of his Interactive Publishing conference this year. It's always been in November; this year it will run January 16-17, in Zurich.
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Posted 10:28 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Slow Company
Steve Klein on America's "fundamentally strong" economy
I hate to differ with President Bush, who said on Monday that Americans should "build on the good statistics we're beginning to see," but I wonder if he's received his most recent copy of the magazine of the New Economy, Fast Company. I just received my August issue, the 61st overall. At 108 pages, it's the thinnest I can remember (heck, my copy of this week's New Yorker is 86 pages!) — about one-quarter the size of the magazine during its more prosperous days less than two years ago. Back then, the magazine was SO heavy that I stopped carrying it with me when I traveled. Now, I can barely swat a fly with it!
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Posted 8:53 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
NewspaperLinks.com and Paid Content
Steve Outing on online news business models
The Newspaper Association of America issued a press release today touting the success and popularity of its NewspaperLinks.com website, which is a gateway for people looking for news outside of their local areas. "Site visitors (who took an online survey) were enthusiastic in their praise for NewspaperLinks.com," gushed the release. The site does some of what the old New Century Network did. That was the newspaper-industry consortium (which died a few years ago) of websites.NewspaperLinks.com is a great service, but what I'm wondering is how it will evolve if more newspaper sites decide to wall off all or some of their content with access fees. The NAA obviously sees the value of the "Internet newsstand." But the newsstand will shrink in usefulness and importance if newspaper publishers indeed steer too sharply down the paid-content path. If every paper charged, the Internet newsstand could become a viable business. But when only some of them charge (which is likely), only the free sites will get much usage from the newsstand's customers and paid sites will be mostly ignored. Where NewspaperLinks.com might come in handy is if it can establish a multi-site access fee, which would get a consumer into the paid areas of any newspaper site listed.
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Posted 8:39 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Yahoo!, Condiment Giant Tie Up for PDA Content
Madan Rao on innovative content
The 114-year-old global Chinese condiment giant Lee Kum Kee has found an interesting way to reach new tech-savvy consumer bases. It has formed an alliance with Yahoo! Hong Kong to send recipes to PDA (Palm Pilot, et al) users and Internet users via e-mail. Future offerings: recipe contributions from users.
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Posted 4:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
In Search of Universal Registration
Rich Gordon on the Liberty Alliance
A group of technology and e-commerce companies have unveiled their proposed online authentication standard — an effort to keep Microsoft's Passport from controlling the dominant universal registration/authentication system. The Liberty Alliance's project bears close watching. If it is not successful, I expect that Passport will become, for the average consumer, the SSO (single sign-on) of choice. Last week, Microsoft announced a partnership designed to tie Passport to credit-card authentication. Many consumers will appreciate a registration system that allows them to register once, enter a credit card number once, and then purchase from many websites. According to proponents, the Liberty Alliance protocols are "technically agnostic." There's even a chance that Passport and Liberty will interact rather than compete. But if you're nervous about having Microsoft's "digital wallet" between Web users and your paid content, root for Liberty to be successful. (For more technical coverage of the Liberty Alliance announcement, check out InfoWorld, The Register, and Digital ID World.)
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Posted 11:42 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Tablet Threat to Online Publications
Steve Outing on print vs. webzines
In his speech yesterday at the NAA Connections conference in Denver, Slate's Michael Kinsley made a good point. Portable digital tablets represent both a threat and an opportunity for electronic publications like his. Opportunity: tablets (receiving content via home or office wi-fi wireless networks) should eliminate the "I just don't like reading on a computer" reader complaint, and you can take a tablet with you to the bathroom for reading. Digital publications then are on equal footing with printed ones. Threat: when tablets are commonplace, pure online/digital publications will be competing directly with powerful and well-funded traditional publications, which will port their content to digital tablet form. That will be tough for pure digital publications. Kinsley says the way for the likes of Slate to compete is to stay one step ahead technologically of traditional periodical publishers — creating new, innovative forms of digital content presentation.
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Posted 11:20 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Excellent Digital Storytelling
Norbert Specker on content techniques
Picture Projects recently won the Online Journalism Award of the Online News Association for 360degrees, which put 360-degree photography to good use along with many other convincing elements for interactive storytelling. Other of its projects deserve closer investigation. Aka Kurdistan, for example, might be a blueprint for community projects involving readers and their stories.
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Posted 11:03 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Broadcasting With Written Words
Eva Domínguez on covering a political debate
The traditional debate on the state of the nation is taking place these days in Spain. During this discussion, the president of the Government claims his political, economic, and social successes while the leaders of the opposition parties remind him of his failures. The debate can be followed live on television and radio and also on the Internet. In this case, some newspapers online, such as El País and El Mundo, employ a peculiar broadcasting technique, by writing in short everything that is going on inside the Parliament minute by minute. (This way of being live on the Internet has been used for a long time for soccer matches.) Special reports also include dynamic graphics — for example, to visualize the time the president devoted to each hot topic.
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Posted 10:52 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
It's Baa-ack!
Steve Klein on dot-coms that won't go way
Depending on how you want to remember it, drkoop.com was once the most reliable site for online health information — or the poster boy for the dot-com bust. (Disclaimer: I provided consulting services for drkoop.com during 1998-99.) The website has remained online despite declaring bankruptcy last December (although it has not been updated since Dec. 13), and it still attracts more than 900,000 visitors per month and has a database of more than 2 million registered visitors. That seems to be worth something. Formerly valued at more than $1 billion, drkoop.com now has new life as a result of Vitacost.com buying it out of bankruptcy court for $186,000, according to a Reuters report. That includes the brand name, trademarks, domain names, the website, and the e-mail addresses of its registered users.What the deal doesn't include: "The drkoop.com URL and website is not associated with C. Everett Koop, M.D., former Surgeon General of the United States," according to a press release from Vitacost.com.
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Posted 8:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No, You Don't Need to Know That!
Katja Riefler on German news portals' information politics
Last weekend, people on the streets in Germany discussed the future of Ron Sommer, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, the formerly state-owned dominant telco in Germany. He's well known because the stocks of Deutsche Telekom had once been advertised as "stocks for the people," but now have disappointed many people who had bought the first stocks in their lives. All the news coverage reported about possible successors — the board of directors will probably make its decision on Tuesday — but wait, not ALL the news. If by chance you went to the website of T-Online, the biggest portal in Germany, you couldn't find a word about this issue. (I stopped looking Monday evening.) That's astonishing, for T-Online is trying hard to change its image from being the most important ISP in Germany to becoming the most important CONTENT SITE (partly a paid one). So no matter whether this happened because T-Online is partly owned by Deutsche Telekom or whether the editors at T-Online thought that their readers would not be interested, it has a long way to go to become a trusted news site. (Thanks to Torsten Sewing for the tip.)
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Posted 8:23 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Morris Continues Reign; WashingtonPost.com Returns to Podium
Steve Outing on The Edgies winners
This afternoon in Denver, the Newspaper Association of America presented the winners of the Digital Edge Awards (a.k.a., The Edgies). As is becoming predictable, Morris Communications papers cleaned up in the small- and mid-size categories. CJOnline.com (Topeka, Kansas) won three awards, while SavannahNow.com (Georgia) also won three. (Topeka new media director Rob Curley got to make multiple trips to the podium. Charming aside: he sat next to his parents, vacationing in Colorado, at the luncheon.) There was one other three-award winner: WashingtonPost.com. What's interesting is that the site last February was totally snubbed by judges of Editor & Publisher's EPpy Awards. In previous years, WashingtonPost.com has been a consistent multi-award winner of the EPpies and Edgies.Winner of the New Media Pioneer award this time was interactive news industry stalwart Michael Silver of Tribune Interactive. (The previous winner of that award was Rob Curley.) For a full list of the Edgies winners, see this article.
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Posted 11:13 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Calling All Company Memos
Steve Klein on weblogs
This gleaned from Leslie Walker's Washington Post column on dead-and-dying dot-coms: F***edcompany.com owner Phil Kaplan, who has provided an online weblog space for disgruntled employees to speak out "in the executive-dominated business world," will launch InternalMemos.com next month to showcase more than 800 internal company memos he has received. And, he will be soliciting more.
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Posted 10:47 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Spam, Spam, Go Away
Steve Klein on dealing with e-mail
Having just returned home from Chicago following a six-week National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship on "Sports, Culture, and Modern American Society," I've found that my e-mail habits have changed — and for the better. Of course, my ISP, Cox Communications, got the ball rolling when it ended its association with Roadrunner, issuing me a new e-mail address (steve.klein@cox.net), and killing my old address cold turkey as of July 1. Anyone who has lost their primary e-mail address knows how painful that can be.However, the new address is Web-based, which made lugging a laptop to Chicago unnecessary since I had easy home and school Internet access. I decided not to "pop" my MSN address, mainly because it has become inundated by spam. In fact, when I got home, I totally submerged it, eliminating an address I've used for more than seven years. Back in the days when I had to download e-mail over a telephone line, MSN was useful. But seven years and too many poor opt-in/opt-out decisions later, my mailbox needed a cleansing. The bottom line is that I had a more than 90% inbox reduction this weekend. What will I do with all the time?!
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Posted 10:36 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Did Reporter Use Web to Go Too Far?
Steve Outing on using Internet to find sources
Editor & Publisher has a fascinating story today by Joe Strupp about a Washington Post reporter who went fishing for sources on the discussion board of another newspaper website. The reporter was working on a story about a murder in Maryland, and posted a message asking users of the Fredericksburg (Virginia) Free Lance-Star to contact him if they knew the victims or suspects. Post reporter Nelson Hernandez was accused of crossing an ethical line with his discussion board posting (which the Free Lance-Star site kept online). What do you think?
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Posted 10:04 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Filtering Keywords Is Gravel
Vin Crosbie on online content filtering
Filtering e-mails that might contain spam. Filtering websites that might contain pornographic or violent content. Maladroit attempts to filter out impurities aren't new. The Sus'ruta Samhita, a Sanskrit medical treatise, says that 2,500 years ago ancients attempted to purify water by pouring it through sand or coarse gravel. I imagine that the coarser the gravel, the worse their results. So too are the coarse results of most e-mail and Web content filtering efforts today. Using keywords as the particulates by which to filter the contents of websites or e-mails is too coarse and ineffectual a method to work. It's as maladroit as attempting to translate one language word-by-word into another. Or like trying to clean water by filtering it through gravel.For example, if you use Microsoft Outlook and turn on its Junk Mail or Adult Content filters, Outlook automatically rejects any e-mails that contain any of the following words or phrases: "money back," "cards accepted," "removal instructions," "extra income," "for free?", "for free!", "special promotion," "one-time mail," "order today," "order now," "money-back guarantee," "success," "check or money order," "over 18," "over 21," "be 18," "18+," and "sex." Is that stupid? Very! In fact, just because I've listed even one of those phrases, any of you who receive E-Media Tidbits by e-mail delivery from Poynter and have your Outlook e-mail filters turned on won't be receiving this message. Don't worry, I'll make up for that by buying you a gravel-filtered espresso next time we meet.
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