links for 2007-01-11

The Sun Online is today launching a campaign against “the web’s sickest sites”, and is calling on its readers to “shop” sites with illegal content.

The full text of the Information Tribunal’s decision to reverse the BBC’s section 36 exemption for the release of the Governors’ meeting that led to the ouster of Greg Dyke.

Seamus McCauley says Trinity Mirror’s Sly Baily is wrong: the newspaper advertising downturn is not cyclical; it’s structural. The 9m people who looked for a job online last month all did so without a newspaper, he notes.

“One depressing feature of the internet today is that there is exponentially more meta-commentary about the promise and potential of citizen journalism than there is actual, you know, citizen journalism.” Here’s an exception.

The long-expected RFID application for locational advertising has made its debut in Japan. It’s not quite the Minority Report-style personalised public sphere feared by some. But it is a step in that direction.

“Bogus prototypes, bullying the press, stifling pillow talk – all to keep iPhone under wraps. Fortune’s Peter Lewis goes inside one of the year’s biggest tech launches. “

“Peter Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of MySpace parent News Corp., says company doesn’t want to “Fox-ify” social networking site.”

Tom Foremski on Backfence: “Dan Gillmor’s favorite refrain is that his readers know far more about the subject he writes about than he does. That might be true, but that doesn’t mean they know how best to tell a story.”

“Time spent reading magazines and newspapers has remained stable over the past two years despite the growing use of the Internet, concludes a recent European survey from Jupiter Research.”

Danny Sanchez leaves no stone unturned as he examines the Cliché Finder web site.

New research shows that just 24% (12) of the top 50 English-language blogs provided mobile content, while 54% (27) of the top 50 newspaper web sites offered a mobile browsing option.

US radio research shows that medium is also losing the yoof audience. Plus: Michael Wolff on billionaires who want to buy newspapers.

Michael Wolff has lunch with one of the US billionaires who want to get into newspaper publishing. Key quote: “Oh, but there will always be lots and lots of people who want to read a newspaper.”

The BBC’s commercial arm has a £350m war chest for expansion into social networking. The Top Gear site will expand and BBC Good Food will be made “community-based”.

Andrew Grant-Adamson says Backfence’s patch was too big: “We probably need to go back to something more akin to the model of the parish magazine. Editorially such projects may be more likely to succeed in communities of probably not more than 5,000.”

Scott Karp: “For all the love-festing around “social,’ ‘sharing,’ and ‘community,’ mosts of the biggest successes of recent years have been driven by a singular vision rather than ‘collective intelligence’.”

Some reasons why there is so much coverage of the virtual world.

Mindy McAdams points out “a very straightforward how-to about shooting video” for newspaper web sites, by Chuck Fadely of the Miami Herald.

Mitchell Stephens looks at what newspapers should be doing now that basic news is available everywhere: exclusives, investigations, and smart analysis is the “something extra” others can’t offer. The Independent may be one model to examine.

Preparing for a March relaunch, Wired is experimenting with some new technologies, notably, public voting and reader submissions based on Reddit, which Wired bought a few months ago.

Journalists risk a longer jail term than all those in the drug scandal they exposed, writes Lawrence Donegan in the Guardian.