These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs | NYTimes.com — “Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”
- Journalism: Learning from Obama | Doug Fisher — “Obama’s crew, I think, will finally understand how to use that technology to effectively bypass journalists and journalism. (Think of how that much-vaunted e-mail and text-messaging list could be used to effectively blunt the impact of any negative news. Start by simply releasing the news using these channels while the journos are tied up in the news conference.)”
- Daniel Brandt (Scroogle, Google Watch) on Google ranking anomalies | Infothought — “I believe that there is some sort of backend filter that affects which top results are shown by Google. This actually makes some sense, since most searchers never go beyond the first page of results (at 10 links per page). This means Google’s reputation and ad revenue depend heavily on the utility of that first page. A filter that favors recency is one component of this, because Google jacks up recent forum and blog posts (and increasingly even news posts). Everyone expects this by now. Static sites such as wikipedia-watch.org must compete in this sort of environment.
In addition to the recency factor, I think there is filter weighting based on what I call “newbie searches.” A newbie search is grandpa or grandma searching for single words such as “wikipedia” or “email” that normally return millions of results, which of course is useless to the searcher. Such searches are stupid to begin with, but Google must cater to stupidity in order to push ads…”
- Report: Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments | ReadWriteWeb — While older Millennials still spend around 9.5 hours a week writing and receiving work-related emails, younger Millennials in the workforce only spend about 7.7 hours on email. In contrast to this, high school and college students only spend about two hours a week on email and clearly prefer instant messaging, text messaging, or social networking sites to talk to their friends.
- Reflections Of A Bridge Blogger | EastSouthWestNorth — “Five years ago, I had the missionary complex that I was going to help change China by getting the western media interested in certain matters and hence create international pressure. Maybe good things will occur as a result.
Today, I no longer have any sense of mission. Instead, I am a passive observer who is recording how the Chinese people are forging their own destinies by their own actions…
I don’t have any sense of despair. Instead I am very optimistic. For the longest time, people have said that freedom/liberty/democracy/human rights and all that are not going to come to China through exterior imposition. Instead, it must come from the Chinese people themselves. So why would I despair when this is happening here and now? I am just honored to be an observer in this moment of history.”
- Seniors Make Each Day Count | washingtonpost.com — “I make the mistake of asking Malkin for advice, too. “Newspapers, huh?” he says. “Is there a future in that? I think they’ll all be gone in 10 years. Best thing you can do is become an entrepreneur: Sell used horseshoes or else marry a rich wife.”
- Protecting the identity of Baby P’s killers: The courts vs the people vs the Internet | currybetdotnet — 17 November, 2008 — Trying to stick to the terms of the court order preserving the anonymity of ‘Baby P”s killers has been very testing for a lot of sites online. Today, Wikipedia editors had to make several revisions to the ‘Baby P’ page to remove the killer’s names. They also took the unusual step of removing the ‘diffs’ that showed what had been added and removed.
Nevertheless, all this information was carefully being archived on the Wikirage site, which produces a chart of which Wikipedia pages are currently getting the most edits.
Google was also a useful tool for finding out the details that the court wanted kept secret.
