Wednesday, 6 February 2008, 23:37
Comments
"[Reuters' Open Calais API] oes a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events."
Saturday, 2 February 2008, 14:05
Comments
"One of the priorities of the new [Guardian] CMS was to extensively tag rategies - Editors Weblog- Analysisall editorial – and non-editorial – items, so that “every piece of content has a relationship inside the system,” said Neil McIntosh"
Wednesday, 2 January 2008, 11:25
Comments
Nik Silver looks at the argument that big publishing could be done with ‘lighweight’ CMSs like Wordpress and asks ‘what has the Guardian’s big CMS ever done for us"? Lots, it seems…
New German regional newspaper site is well worth watching
Sunday, 28 October 2007, 07:00
A much-hyped, much-anticipated and much-delayed, very “Web 2.0″ regional newspaper portal is finally set to launch late this evening in Germany.
While many regional publishers are pulling away from regional portals in favour of sites using established newspaper titles, the Essen-based WAZ newspaper group is going the other way, creating a new brand for its new [...]
Wednesday, 24 October 2007, 10:01
Comments
"Twitter users Nate Ritter and Viss have been busy posting rapid-fire updates of the current wildfire situation in Southern California. … Twitter users can enter "track sandiegofire" in SMS or IM [to get their updates]"
Thursday, 28 June 2007, 07:42
Comments
Paul Bradshaw: "Most impressive is a tagging system which allows users to click through to articles on the same subject/person - potentially making the accompanying ‘Related articles’ box redundant."
Thursday, 12 April 2007, 22:49
Comments
The Economist’s innovation team, Project Red Stripe, has narrowed its list of potential projects to a very interesting shortlist.
A crash course in journalism and Web 2.0
Monday, 22 January 2007, 10:46
A lot of people have been linking to the new issue of Nieman Reports, a special issue titled “Goodbye Gutenberg” and about the transformations happening in newspaper journalism and the rush to digital.
There’s a lot to get through, but a good place to start is the introduction to Journalism and Web 2.0 by Francis Pisani. It begins with a summary of the always-controversial discussion of what “2.0″ actually means, and then admonishes journalists to take note of these developments even if they can’t see the immediate relevance to their craft as it is traditionally understood:
Change starts at the edges. That’s where people—our readers and viewers—probe new practices. That’s also where their emerging culture is forming, a culture in which they look at media from a different perspective. And so journalists’ new thinking needs to begin at the periphery, where change comes quickly among the younger generation of users, and a lot more slowly for us. Tomorrow’s potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how. Yet news organizations have been all too slow to notice movement in places that are away from what has been their center.
In remarkably few words, Pisani runs through the effect on traditional media being caused by the ideas underlying Google, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Digg, Newsvine, and news mashups like ChicagoCrime.org. Blogging, citizen journalism and RSS are covered, too. It’s an invaluable crash-course introduction.
A whole new Focus in Germany
Tuesday, 2 January 2007, 07:57
Several German news web sites will be relaunching in early 2007 with a host of “web 2.0” features in a bid to catch up with the dominant Spiegel Online.
The cover story of November’s issue of the German journalists’ trade magazine Medium has a lengthy set of stories about the relaunch of Focus Online, which is expected to happen this month.
Since his appointment last January, the Focus Online’s editor, Jochen Wegner, has been tasked with helping the companion site for newsweekly Focus catch up with its rival Der Spiegel.
The site will end its partnership with MSN that has seen focus.de redirect to focus.msn.de, and implement a clutter-free redesign.
Interactivity and personalisation are central to the “community” elements that Wegner describes as one of “three pillars” to his stategy.
The first pillar is use of “classical journalism” — virtually the entire print newsroom is now filing for Focus Online and there is growing cooperation with Focus TV for new multimedia offerings. Focus Online has hired eight additional editoral staffers of its own.
Wegner’s second pillar is usability — the new site will include more better use of its archives and aims to make everything on the site accessible within three clicks. Tagging will play a major role in this.
Finally, the community elements of the new site will include two major features. One is Focus Online LIVE. A trial version of this Flickr-like photo- and video-sharing site went live during the World Cup this summer.
The second is “Mein Focus”, which will allow users to create personalised start pages, including RSS feeds from other publications — even Spiegel Online will be included, Wegner insists.
The next step, he says, is to let users add tags to stories within their personal space on the site.
Wegner told Medium that “Web 2.0″ is a buzzword which will barely have registered with most of his readers. Only a tiny proportion of his audience will know what a tag cloud is or how tagging works. But this doesn’t stop him from using them, he says.
Wegner will have to peer over his shoulder a bit, because Welt Online has a 30-strong staff under Christoph Keese which also plans a relauch from the Welt group’s new integrated newsroom within the first quarter of this year.
Spiegel Online leads the German online news market with 314 million page impressions in October 2006, according to Medium. FAZ.net and Sueddeutsche.de had 60m each, with Welt Online trailing at 30m.
