DefinitiveInk

The next few links are from  paidcontent.org.  One of them I love because it mentions feedmag  We were  listening to Steven Johnson on the NPR over the weekend and thought about feedmag which he helped start. Then we googled Stefanie Symon the other co-founder and couldn't find her.  So... worth clicking on are:

- Charge v No charge debate continues. Links to Lesley Walker's Wash. Post piece about newspapers and subs. -
- Post and link to article about Salon's subscription mix working.
- post on size of blogosphere and the 4 blogs that have over 150,000 unique visitors a month.

Morning Reading

PressThink - Chris Nolan on stand-alone journalism. Great post and definition. 

"There have always been freelancers and journalists who worked on their own, but one of the headaches they shared was not owning the means of production and distribution. As Nolan says, "We have our own printing press" (the nifty modern weblog) and "RSS gives us our own delivery trucks or satellite feeds." 

and

These are not bloggers. They are people who are using blogging technology--software that allows them to quickly publish their work and broadcast it on the Internet--to find and attract users. They understand that the barrier to entry in this new business isn't getting published; anyone can do that. The barrier to entry is finding an audience. That's why their editorial product is consistent, reliable and known. Readers have expectations and stand alone journalists understand this and put that understanding into practice.

So what--exactly--is a stand alone journalist? That's a definition that's going to vary with the person, of course, just as no group or reporters can really agree on what makes a "journalist." For me, the stand alone journalist succeeds in getting stories told in an honest and forthright manner without benefit of working for a larger news outlet. That doesn't mean they're objective or impartial; it means they're honest about their points of view or assumptions. A stand alone journalist understands that the main job is to inform readers; and the ethics that salaried journalists have when it comes to fairness, accuracy and honesty aren't just phrases. They're a discipline for doing the work that needs to be done: getting your facts right, your assumptions validated, your arguments well grounded.

(via MicroPersuassion)

Yellow page links from Searchblog this morning.
http://www.insiderpages.com/
http://yp.a9.com/
Google search history-  wow.

18-34 Year olds abandoning newspapers according to new study from the Carnegie Corporation.

"Abandoning the News," the study written by MSNBC.com's founding editor-in-chief, Merrill Brown, adds more grim statistics to growing literature documenting the newspaper industry's losing effort to appeal to a young audience.
 
The survey of 18-to-34-year-old finds, for instance, that just 19% read a newspaper daily, 17% read it once a month or less -- and 12% said they "never" read a paper to get their news.
 
By contrast, 44% of the young people visited a Web news portal every day, and 37% watch local TV news daily.
 
Only 14% of respondents called the newspaper their "most important" source of news. Local TV newscasts were called the most important source for news by 31% of the young adults, while another 25% cited the Internet.

 

Morning Reading

Kottke muses on the rise in NYT traffic.

Article about the founders of  Lonely Planet, Tony and Maureen Wheeler,  in The New Yorker. Lonely Planet started at a different time in book publishing and the article covers how it has changed with the times as well as how they travel. Nomadic hippies they remind me of the founder of The Body Shop, Tom's of Maine, Smith & Hawken, ben & Jerry,  and other businesses started in the 70's and how their companies change with success.  A  time when Banana Republic used to put out an illustrated catalog of travel clothing before they became the much more fashionable chain they are today.

Interesting article about the Washington Post's web site and the challenges presenting local and national news in OJR.

Kleiner Perkins funds Zazzle a company similar to cafepress , good notes from Rags Gupta about how they offer some museum and collection merchandise and how their pricing model differs from CafePress.

John Battelle on Wondir.com - answer search engine.  You used to be able to call the New York Public Library for answers to anything. I just have to wonder what would have happened if they had created something like this that combined community with experts. It potentially could have contributed something to their operations budget.

Kos is wondering about which books to read on branding. There is an interesting comment thread at the bottom which is  worth perusing.

NBC Tech Guru paid to promote products. This include the iPod - first does anyone really need to be paid to promote it, second what does this say about Apple?

NBC also mulling blogs by anchors just as Sam Donaldson (ex ABC) is saying that network news is dead.

Pope Joke (heard by B): 3 Cardinals die and each has an audience with God. The first Cardinal goes in and comes out a few minutes later crying "how could I have been so wrong?" The second cardinal goes in and also comes out crying "how could I have been so wrong?" Cardinal Ratzinger goes in and a few minutes  later God comes out crying "how could I have been so wrong?" jokes aside and the NYT editorial.

Morning Reading

Television has been taken over by idiot culture - "For the first time in our history, the weird, the stupid, the coarse, the sensational and the untrue are becoming our cultural norm -- even our cultural ideal," he says. "The gravest threat today to the best obtainable version of the truth comes from these lowered standards. And the consequences to a society that is misinformed and disinformed by the grotesque values of this idiot culture are truly perilous." --Carl Berstein in remarks to the Kansas Press Assn.  (via Romenesko)

Nice article about Remenesko in Slate.

Jeff Jarvis on the changing nature of reporting the Pope's election.  I remember watching TV as a kid and being fascinated by the whole colored smoke thing. NPR was talking about the duration of the  conclave. In the middle ages one of them lasted 3 years and I thought how bad could that be? Small rooms yes, but the food was probably better than what they had at home. A PopeCam.

NY Times.com has record page views in  March. Of these, RSS feeds generated 5.9 million pageviews which represents a 342 percent increase year over year and a 39 percent increase from February's 4.3 million pageviews. (via Paid Content)

Surfcams from Primedia will cover 75% of the surfing spots in the country. Article describes new technology and ad supported model.

Reviews of new food at McSweeney's.  And a link to real reviews of snack food.

Morning Reading

Post by Evan Williams on the off the shelf  or rather on the web apps he is using to help run ODEO (via Susan Mernit) also from Susan a link to alarm:clock a site I'm glad to know about with the scoop on John Battelle's next venture which could be a publisher services platform for bloggers.

Teen Mags blamed for rise in girls'  suicides.

Series of articles on Media Futures by Seth Goldstein (via Fred Wilson)

Article in the Detroit news on Craig Newmark and the future of newspapers.

On the train in this morning I began Manhattan '45 by Jan Morris.  The book begins with the arrival of the Queen Mary as she brings back over 14,000 service men and woman and it will go on to describe a time which she describes as a special moment of grace, a period between times pre-war and post-war that  "... lasted no more  than a few years, and by the mid-1950s was fast becoming hardly more than a regretful memory. New York was never to lose its excitement, its power to move, its limitless energy; but never again, perhaps, would it possess the particular mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and self-amazement, which seems to have characterized it in those moments of triumph."  As my train went over the Manhattan Bridge her joyous description of the city on the verge made me incredibly sad, not because of  a longing for a time past but, I think, for my inability to embrace the changes in character that the city has had since 9/11 when we have been embraced and, somehow smothered in the bosom of the rest of the country.  I'm not sure whether my feeling is based on my family's leaving the city;   the invasion of chain stores; the quest for the Olympics masking real estate grabs; the police actions during the RNC; the way money has created a new sort of classism; or the monstrous SUV's that now crowd the streets making walking, biking, and even driving feel much more precarious than they did in the past.  Or perhaps it is Bob Herbert's edtorial in the NYT about Roosevelt this morning. I'm going to keep reading and look forward to the section on the great hotels that are now being turned into condos.

Morning Reading

Several articles about the economics of blogging and author payments handily collected by Susan Mernit.

So Rupert Murdoch gave a big speech about underestimating the Internet. Opined on paid content. And Jeff Jarvis had a hand in writing this speech. (Talk about media consolidation Murdoch and Newhouse. )

The ParkSlope Coop has a blog about which produce is in and out of stock.  It also had an interesting news bit about Grade B syrup. For those of you who have never had this, it is delicious and apparently illegal to sell in NY. you can get in New Hampshire if you are lucky.

Grade B Maple syrup For some craazy reason it is apparently against the law to sell Grade B maple syrup in New York State. I was told by the owner of Coombs maple syrup that this law has been on the books for many years, but that recently some bureaucrat decided to enforce the law when he happened to see it on sale in a store in upstate New York. Our distributors are not allowed to sell Grade B syrup to me, but they can sell it in Pennsylvania, Vermont, etc. This is not a health issue. Apparently there is some "protectionist" element to the law--wanting to protect the price of NY maple syrup from Vermont or Canadian syrup producers flooding the market. However, NY producers aren't allowed to sell syrup labeled B either, so it sounds like a no win situation for everyone. I was sent some incomprehensible info on spectrographic grading of maple syrup--it included no reason why syrup labeled Grade B could not be sold as such. My limited understanding is that NY state only recognizes two grades, Grade A and Cooking Grade, which is considered to be inferior to Grade B.

I'm a member fo the coop but had no idea that this blog existed. Thanks curbed.

A very silly video of people playing ping-pong as if they are in The Matrix.

The finalists for the  MoveOn Social Security flash animation contest.

Morning Reading

The Guardian is having a contest for the best suggestions for the President's iPod playlist.

Boldtype - e-mail Book reviews from the folks at Flavorpill. Resuscitating the Blodtype magazine from Random House.

What a cameraphone can do in the hands of a real photographer. (via Kottke)

Program listing from the Buying and Selling e-content,  good for thinking about questions and seeing who is answering them.

Last night I watched a documentary on The Great Transatlantic Cable on PBS.  A very inspiring story about technological dreams and massive effort. The companion site is worth a look.

 

Morning Reading - well afternoon really

NY Times on the President's iPod playlist.

iBeam launches Contagious Media Showdown contest.

Combining Goolgle maps and Craig's list real estate posts. A very cool hack/remix. (via curbed)

Jason Kottke's report on his micropatron adventure.

A very funny Treasurer's Report.

Jay Rosen on the people he would like to listen to on a panel about local blogging.  (via an interesting post from Fred Wilson on the local community and the future of newspapers.)

Morning Reading

Jesse Oxenfeld, of Editor & Publisher,  on the bubble of blogging conferences.

Moveon.org's Bush in 30 years contest to find great shockwave animations about the President's  plans for Social Security privatization.  It is based on a "am I hot or not" type of mechanism where you have to sit through one of the animations, vote and then get to another. While I applaud any effort to fight this proposal I have to say that I am disappointed by this site. I only made it through 5,  somehow B made it to 10.  Many  aspire to be jib-jab, the ones with audio all seem to have the same monotone voice, yuck.  The make your own anti-Bush ad contest they ran before the election got  much broader  and creative responses. I wish they had put their effort into a series of podcasts by George Lakoff on the framing of the Social Security issue, rather than try to get people to make; animations about the great depression, tax rates, the social security lock-box, the nature of an IOU, and old age. They could just have pointed people to talkingpointsemo. MoveOn lately has been disappointing me. I find it sort of pathetic that we are being urged to help our  elected Democratic representatives " find more courage" to fight  the Senate's " radical leadership's plan to eliminate the filibuster" to keep our basic system of government functioning.

Link to audio of the Who Owns the Culture Panel at the NYPL last night with Steven Johnson moderating, Jeff Tweedy, Lessig, etc.

J.D. Lasica on Google and people's video.

Morning Reading

Paidcontent.org is a must read today.
-  First comments and links to articles about digital magazine editions.
- Second - Exclusive about CNN's changing online video strategy.
From the BBC, MTV to launch online video channel.

If Willie Sutton were alive he might be starting a broadband video channel instead of robbing banks.

Susan Mernit's notes from her talk The Real Deal: How Young Adults Spend Their Time Online. Sadly I am no longer a "young adult" though I feel like one.

The NY Observer on Arianna Huffington's blog project and with an interview with Matt Drudge. So Warren Beatty is going to blog. I'm a little dissappointed that Annette Benning could only come up with when meeting Druge at a party was "How's Sidney Blumenthal" you would think that she could have come up with a more withering one-liner.

Scoble on CNET's purchase of HeyPix the 4 month old photosharing company they are merging into Webshots their photosharing service. He points out that webshots (which i join him in not knowing) has over .23 million members to flickrs less than a million and that it gets over 750,000 uploads a day which is more in a week than flickr has gotten since its inception. 

On another numbers note why is it that a petition signed by 20 million Chinese in a country that has over a one and half billion people gets coverage  in the Times, but a rabidly anti-semitic petition  signed  by 50,000 top Russian citizens about outlawing Jewish organizations gets no coverage,  yet gets  covered by AlJazeera of all places?

Lastly continuing my NY is becoming Atlanta meme the Port Authority is considering selling naming rights to bridges and airports. I'm having a huge flashback to Snowcrash.

Morning reading

Sploid - new tabloid from Nick Denton. Looks good.  Jeff Jarvis has the scoop on the team members.

Jason Kottke on the designer adage of "good, fast, or cheap, pick two", and general ruminations on why pick two out of three is the rule.  Interesting because it in fact isn't the rule when it comes to consumer choices.

CNet on  privacy or the lack of it and the Patriot Act.

Faster than a speeding bullet Memory maps group on Flickr- adding notes to google maps.

My early attempts at mapping my childhood on mygmaps.com.

Google Maps satellite view of Augusta National. 

I'm very fond of Gawker's weekly dissection of NY Magazine's Look Book.

 

Morning reading

Fred Wilson on RSS and feedburner's new pro product, google ads and other things. A good read and more importantly a must do when I get my act together and flatten these templates.

Fools in April playing polo on their Segways.
A very funny parody of BoingBoing (via Susan Mernit)
A link to a parody of Yahoo 360 - a community site for community sites (via kottke.org - earning his keep)