December 2009
7 posts
10 tags
Still fit to print the news →
Nice piece of year-end analysis from Dan Kennedy. I found the following passage noteworthy:
There are still plenty of newsroom jobs that can be eliminated
It pains me to write those words. I don’t like to see fellow journalists lose their jobs, and I want my students to find gainful employment after they graduate. But the truth is that newspapers experienced an unprecedented rise in...
5 tags
Doing Less With Less: What Are You Willing to Give... →
This column made me think of Clay Shirky’s point that revolutions and massive disruption typically cause a lot of strive before natural levels are found. The cutting of editorial staffs and subsequent degradation of quality is really just the pendulum of change swinging wildly to one end of the spectrum (or something like that … basically, we’re all crazy balls right now). At...
3 tags
Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy →
When you’ve got 350 million users and no real competition, I guess you can get away with this stuff. But … wow:
If you’ve never edited your privacy settings before, Facebook will set the new default on the “transition” page to share all your posted content with everyone.
4 tags
Animated News Clips Fuel Debate on Media Freedom -... →
The Taiwanese company that produced the Tiger Wood reenactment ran into problems in the past with its own government.
To their credit, they acknowledged their overzealousness:
“We were probably a little too excited by the technology and the ability to do what we couldn’t do before, and we went overboard,” he said. “We apologized.” But he dismissed the suggestion that Apple Daily was...
7 tags
Blackbox Republic, No Longer Just Sex Positive,... →
It took me a while to figure out how Facebook and Twitter co-exist in my online world. I finally decided that Facebook is a private space where I can let my smartass flag fly, while Twitter is where I pontificate as a heightened version of my professional self (with Red Sox chatter as garnish). I value the walls around Facebook’s garden. Blackbox Republic is keen on walls too … and...
4 tags
Official Google Blog: Personalized Search for... →
Life just got a whole lot harder for SEO professionals:
Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of...
5 tags
Eric Schmidt: How Google Can Help Newspapers -... →
Interesting point from Eric Schmidt: news doesn’t drive Google’s advertising.
The claim that we’re making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if...