Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
links for 2009-06-30
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Kevin: Erik Sass at MediaPost says: "The lack of interest among creditors could be a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it may signal that creditors don't believe there is an immediate threat of McClatchy defaulting on its debt — a rare vote of confidence in the beleaguered newspaper business. On the other hand, they may have quietly arranged insurance for their debts in the form of credit swap defaults, in which case, it would mean the opposite — that they believe a default to be likely and are hoping to collect more money on their default insurance."
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Kevin: Anyone who looks at their site stats knows that aggregators - such as Google News, Yahoo News, the Drudge report, Newser, Digg etc - drive the vast majority of traffic to news sites. Rob Weir, the director of digital development at the Columbia Missourian in the US says the vast majority is more than 71%.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis takes issues with more calls in the US to change copyright law to help save newspapers. I'm in full agreement with Jeff that the lawyers on the wrong side of the First Amendment. The desperate arguments would attempt to return us to not only a pre-internet news cycle but a pre-radio news cycle. Law should not be used in an attempt to turn back the clock. Furthermore, laws that attempt to do this fail.
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Kevin: As other news organisations cut staff during a recession, US political blog Talking Points Memo is adding staff, doubling their editorial staff. They are adding four reporters and three other editorial staff members.
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Kevin: John Timmer at Ars Technica writes: "Although attempts to formalize online codes of behavior have run into a buzzsaw of criticism, a survey of over 1,000 bloggers shows that most of them hold themselves to some standards of ethics. But they rate ensuring material is properly attributed ahead of any sort of personal accountability."
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Kevin: A service to see how many updates are being posted to Twitter. I used it to get a rough idea of how many updates were being posted to Twitter as news of Michael Jackson's death broke.
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Kevin: This is the power of an API, and it's one of the reasons that Twitter has seen such growth. Like Last.fm, Flickr, Delicious and other web services, it shows why building an API is key to fostering an eco-system. It is why content companies such as NPR, the New York Times and my employer, The Guardian, have made the effort to build an API.
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Kevin: Jon Donley writes about new developments in Web 3.0, aka the Semantic web. Key work is being done to build sites that are architected with machine-readable formats, but much work remains. And it's not clear what will motivate companies to do the work left. Both Yahoo and Google are building services that will accelerate that work whether it is Google's Rich Snippers or Yahoo's Search Monkey.
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Kevin: Rich Miller cites a Keynote Systems analysis of the internet traffic as news of Michael Jackson's death broke. "Advertising networks and widgets are being cited as the key factors in the performance problems experienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson."
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Kevin: Google has launched a suite of mobile services in Africa that include SMS-based mobile search, an SMS-based marketplace and an SMS information service that includes topics such as agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports and health. This is something that Google is doing for obvious feel-good PR, but with the number of mobile phones available around the globe with nothing but voice and SMS service, this is a huge new opportunity not only for development in Africa but also for Google's development.
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Kevin: Intel shows off a prototype gadget to let you know when information that you might find on the internet is "contradicted by other information". Sign me up.
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