links for 2007-03-11

Tom Curley: “The citizen community has produced some of the most exciting counters to cover-ups. The growth in public involvement and sophistication in information gathering and distributing are among the most positive signs in connecting the people to th

“The latest predictions from Deloitte there is a high risk that the vast volumes of digital information bouncing around the planet could exceed the web’s available capacity before the year is out.”

The New Yorker has relaunched its web site. Lots of white space, lots of video. Jason Kottke has a careful analysis of the changes.

A classic New Yorker cartoon, now animated.

The reason Holovaty and Curley stand out is “not that their ideas are so much better than the ideas of a 100 other smart people in the newspaper business — it’s because they’ve been given the freedom to pursue those ideas”

Kevin Mitchell: “I was talking to a room full of journalism students in Eastbourne the other night. … I asked the students how many of them got their first sports news from the web. Nearly all put up their hands. It was a jolting response.”

Naughton agrees with Nick Carr’s digital sharecropping thesis. To media orgs, UGC is free. “Users give it to you gratis in return for your kind provision of a space in which they can publish. So all that remains is for you to devise a way of ‘monetising’

“Some 452,000 national daily sales have disappeared in a year. … Meanwhile, websites are buoyant. Journalists’ words are read more widely than ever. But when are we going to be able to measure that properly and start cautiously to smile again?”

Measuring online readership “is further confused by what you measure and how you measure it. Online is global; most advertisers are national, regional or local. And how are we measuring the numbers logging on to a particular newspaper website…”

Edwina Currie: “I had never read my Wikipedia article before. Now I have, I’ve lined up with critics who say the online encyclopedia is rubbish.” Peter Tatchell, Peter Hitchens and Craig Murray have much more favourable views of their entries.