DefinitiveInk

E&P Fires Editorial Staff, Replacing Reporters With ‘Experts’ via paidContent

Instead, an internal memo said the print edition will rely more on individuals who are “experts in their individual fields as opposed to reporters who track down experts and put the expert’s story into the writer’s words.”

via paidcontent.org

So an editor or community outreach person to find the experts, a platform to give them voice, and a brand to aggregate those voices.

R.I.P. Platial - too bad!

Platial put itself right in the middle of those heady times. We were all going to describe, categorize and display our world on our terms. Blogger had just been bought by Google the year before and WordPress had just launched. Delicious and Flickr had just gone live and would be acquired by Yahoo a year after Platial's founding.

These were revolutionary tools, like tiny virtual Gutenberg dynamos, the number of publishers and amount of content and data published exploded. People were telling their stories through blog posts, they were posting their photos and using Platial and Frappr, which Platial later acquired, they were making maps.

They made maps about the history of Palo Alto, California. About the reconstruction of New Orleans. About the companies that make London, England the arms trade capital of the world. In the end Platial held 5 million user-created maps.

via www.nytimes.com

Enterprise social bookmarking

On PaidContent I read today that ConnectBeam, an enterprise social bookmarking product has raised some money but even more interesting to me is the fact that when I visited their site and clicked on Demo it took me to a really good video demo that they had posted on YouTube. Below is the CEO walking you through their product.

How many social networks do you belong too?

Michael Streefland, director of marketing for Cyworld. “There is a site for the
real you, a rite of passage site that you would join during a particular phase
of your life, and the fun, hot, new trend site...” and even multiples of these.

New Chowhound design launches

I'm not sure exactly when this happened, my guess is earlier in the week but Chowhound has a brand new look courtesy of mule design. Wow, it's going to take me a bit of time to poke around but what a transformation for one of the best food communities on-line. Gone are the old threaded boards and it looks like they've added profiles, and post tracking.  Very interesting to read the user comments on the Site Talk forum to see their reactions to the changes. This whole redesign was begun by gathering feedback from the members so in some ways I think they may be gentle. Chowhound is part of CNET now  and I wonder what elements they are going to add, video, menus, blogs,  etc. The challenge will be maintaining the community that got them here in the first place. 

NSA to mine data on social networks

An article about how information on social networks is going to be mined by the NSA and then combined with other forms of information to give them complete profiles etc. (This article was originally sent to me by Mark Crispin Miller but I see the link in MediaBistro's daily news feed as well. A rare convergence from these two link sources.)

Links - 3/14/06

Guardian launches commentisfree... <¹>(via paidcontent.org who says it is somewhat like a British version of the HuffingtonPost)

WeSmirch - gossip aggregator (via Susan Mernit)

On the subject of aggregators, it looks like Fox has not (yet) acquired Dogster. Instead the acquired company Newroo a still in alpha company, that according to TechCrunch, has "NewRoo is a real-time news aggregator that allows users to create their own customized news and content pages."

I'm fond of the nav bar on The Independent, and I think it might be SEO friendly as well.

You will see a Pandora widget on the sidebar. I added it yesterday.  I'm listening to Pandora and trying to get it to make a great Elvis Costello station. The song listed as a favorite is a cover of Start Me Up as played by the Folksmen on the "A Mighty Wind" soundtrack. It's very funny as they repeat the last line over and over in harmony. Pandora announced that it can be streamed on a  Squeezbox  so we are also thinking of getting one for home, so we can listen to it on our stereo. What a great name for a product, great Who song.

Lastly, for those of you who may have missed it Sandra Day O'Conner gave a speech recently in which she said that the US risked edging near towards dictatorship.

1. David - not a Typo. That is the way they are spelling it

Pew finds that the Internet

Pew finds that the Internet serves as "social glue"

LibriVox - the people's Audible

LibriVox is a project in which people read and create audio files of books in the public domain. Sounds like a really nice project. TechCrunch)

del.icio.us/flickr - now yahoo has two services that I use often

del.ici.ous - bought by Yahoo, Flickr bought by Yahoo. So now even though I rarely use my Yahoo id I now log in almost daily to their services. I think the reason that MyWeb2.0 or Yahoo 360 didn't get traction is that they seemed like extra steps. So this new approach of bringing together great apps that they can then tie into a main start page seems more likely to succeed if that is in fact a goal.  This is me; my photos, my bookmarks, my feeds, my recent blog post, my network, etc. but based off extending apps I use,not just a free-standing extra app. and hopefully open to other non-yahoo based services.