the news. the views. the juice.
There’s never a dull moment when “breaking news” meets a “live” update on Indian television. Gautam Roy of Aajtak is the anchor, as India’s premier Hindi news channel, owned by the respected India Today group, chronicles the travails of a cat caught on a parapet for over six and a half hours.
Link courtesy Anupama
There are several ways for journalists, journalism students, journalism educators and journalism consumers to stay on top of what they want from the world wide web. You can surf. You can search. You can subscribe. . You can customise, depending on your interests. You can scan, using an aggregator. Etc.
The indefatigable Guy Kawasaki has now unveiled Alltop, a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Inspired by popurls, Alltop does “single-page aggregation”, without the aggravation, listing the latest five stories from thirty or more sites in over 40 categories.
“Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation.”
So, if it’s journalism you are looking out for, bookmark http://journalism.alltop.com as your one-stop online newspaper, magazine, blog rack.
Angry about your boss? Angry about a colleague? Angry about a rival? Angry about the bathroom? Angry about the “systems guys”? Angry about the money? Angry about this piece? Angry about, well, just about anything?
Fret not.
Journalist Kiyoshi Martinez has just the solution for you.: angryjournalist.com, a “gripe bag” where you can get the poison out of your system and into the public realm. Created “to give angry journalists a place to vent, and to let them know they’re not alone”, angryjournalist is the modern-day equivalent of the suggestions box, according to Editor & Publisher.
On Wired, Sonia Zjawinski writes of how Ruth Kedar came up with what has now become one of the world’s most easily recognised logos.
Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor. Page and Brin, who were having trouble coming up with a logo for their soon-to-launch search engine, asked Kedar to come up with some prototypes.
“I had no idea at the time that Google would become as ubiquitous as it is today, or that their success would be of such magnitude,” Kedar says.
View all the designs here: How Google got its colourful logo
Link courtesy Krishnakumar P
To “test”—(**wink, wink**)—a new technology that allows newspapers to track their content across the net, “sans serif” is pleased to run this report from The New York Times on a new technology that allows newspapers to track their content across the net, in full.
***
By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA
Copyrighted work like a news article or a picture can hop between Web sites as easily as a cut-and-paste command. But more than ever, as that material finds new audiences, the original sources might not get the direct financial benefit — in fact, they might have little idea where their work has spread.
A young company called Attributor says it has an answer, and a number of big publishers of copyrighted material say Attributor just might be right.
The company has developed software that identifies an electronic “fingerprint” for a particular piece of material — an article, a picture, a video. Then it hunts down any place across the Web where a significant chunk of that work has been copied, with or without permission.
When the use is unauthorized, Attributor’s software can automatically send a message to the site’s operators, demanding a link back to the original publisher’s site, a share of revenue from any ads on the page, or a halt to the copying.
The Associated Press and Reuters, each of which publishes thousands of pieces of material each day, are among the company’s clients, and a number of large magazines and newspapers have been in talks with Attributor. Executives at both wire services said they were still adapting the software to their needs and deciding how to respond to its findings, but they do not doubt it will have some long-term value.
“For the first time, we now have a consistent way of getting this data and knowing what actually happens to our product, rather just ad hoc reports,” said Srinandan R. Kasi, vice president and general counsel for The Associated Press, which has used the software for several months.
For newspapers and magazines, financial survival increasingly means raising traffic on their Web sites and revenue from online ads. Executives of some major publishers, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss their talks with Attributor, said they were somewhat optimistic that such software can help.
“There are probably thousands of examples every year where our stuff gets copied without authorization,” a newspaper company executive said. “The ad revenue they get from it might not be much, but if each of those just gives a link back to our original, that could be a significant amount of traffic.”
Attributor, based in the San Francisco area, was founded last year by Jim Brock and Jim Pitkow, veteran executives of technology companies. Mr. Brock, the chief executive officer, was a senior vice president at Yahoo. Mr. Pitkow, the chief technology officer, has a doctorate in computer science and has headed other technology companies.
The problem can be seen in the enormous attention given to a series of articles on Dick Cheney published in The Washington Post last June. One passage in the first article drew particular attention, revealing details like the unofficial stamp used by Mr. Cheney to label documents as secret, and the man-size safe he used to keep office papers.
But a lot of the people who read that passage had no easy way of knowing that it came from The Post, or of finding its source. A recent Google search found more than 80 blogs and political Web sites that lifted a few hundred words of the article or more, verbatim or nearly so.
Some attributed the material to The Post, but offered no link to the original article; others offered a link, but made no mention of The Post, and some had neither. And about half of those pages had ads on them.
The appeal for wire services is different. The Associated Press and Reuters said searching for use without permission may lead to potential sales. “What you find is that the user can become a licensee,” said Mr. Kasi.
Reuters began using Attributor last month, and Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, said that first he wants to learn how his company’s thousands of customers are using the vast stream of information it sends their way.
But finding unauthorized use “clearly is a big opportunity for us,” Mr. Ahearn said, both to drive traffic to the Reuters site and to turn cheaters into customers. He added, “Our attitude is there are enough lawyers in the world, so why don’t we turn this over to our sales people?”
To reach its newsroom, you have to wend your way through cutfruit wholesalers. Its staff strength is a grand total of four. At rush hour, the place has the hushed intensity of an air-traffic-control tower. Together, they put out their reports, columns, tips, links and more on a quartet of interconnected websites.
When the editor wanted to go to New Hampshire to cover the 2003 primaries, he passed the hat around. There was $6,000 (Rs 24 lakh) within 24 hours. When a new site was to be launched, readers chipped in with $40,000 (Rs 16 lakh) which brought in the first paid employee. Another site launch fetched $80,000 (Rs 32 lakh).
Welcome to the world of Talking Points Memo—Josh Marshall’s web network that “breaks news, connects the dots, stays small”, and causes more palpitations on Capitol Hill than many of the big players.
Read the full story here: The (Josh) Marshall Plan
A group of web architects belonging to the Japanese firm Information Architects have come up with a map of the internet, along the lines of the Tokyo metro map, and it makes for fascinating viewing. The map organises the movers and shakers of cyberspace into an easy-to-read chart.
Read the full story and view the map in its magnificent complexity here: Japanese experts publish map of the net
When Katrina crushed New Orleans, its circulation was down to zero from 245,000. It lost 20 per cent of its staff, mostly due to personal reasons. Still, the Times-Picayune, the 171-year-old daily based in the Big Easy, is an odd success story in an industry reeling from bad news.
“We’re a relatively healthy business again in contrast to most newspapers in the country right now. It’s counterintuitive. I figured within two or three months the adrenaline would be gone and we’d collapse from exhaustion. I am amazed to say this has not happened,” says editor Terry Baquet.
Reason?
The paper’s enthusiastic embrace of the internet. Before the hurricane struck, the paper’s site, received 80,000 page views a day. In the first week after the storm, it received 32 million and became a hub for people sharing information, looking for loved ones and seeking solace.
Read the full story here: New Orleans’s must-read newspaper
In 2003, Esquire termed Gay Talese’s profile of Frank Sinatra as the best story it had ever published on its pages.
“The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in Los Angeles, hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published…”
In this week’s New York magazine, Philip Weiss sets out to profile Matt Drudge, the author of the Drudge Report, the seventh most visited website on the planet, ahead of—yes—even the New York Times and Washington Post. And unlike Talese, Weiss doesn’t even get to see Drudge, a full time manager of a gift shop in his previous avatar, let alone speak to him. Drudge craves attention but hides.
Weiss emails Drudge, writes letters to him at the two places he owns in Miami, calls his radio show number 1-866-4-drudge, visits the two addresses, calls his friends to put in a word… but “America’s most influential journalist” is elusive. All he gets to hear is Drudge’s defence of his privacy on air.
“I just don’t want to be watched when I’m visiting the Lincoln Memorial, going through Penn Station, or walking down Hollywood Boulevard. So many cameras everywhere. And now you start feeding that into some kind of database and start linking it up with a Fascist company like Google? This is a serious issue. And it’s not given serious consideration—when it is a total transformation of our society and our liberties.
“What gives you a right? Why are you watching me? People say, well, what do you have to hide, Drudge? What do you have to hide? You know what? The burden should be on them. I think I have a right not to be watched.”
Read the riveting profile: Watching Matt Drudge
Aziz Haniffa’s rediff.com/India Abroad interview with India’s ambassador to the United States Ronen Sen has been the big story of the week.
The “headless chicken” quote has become canon fodder for the communists and other critics opposing the UPA government’s nuclear deal with America. Parliament has been stalled, apologies have been tendered, statements have been read in Parliament, and there have been cries for the recall of the ambassador.
But guess how many of our media houses have had the good grace to either name the Sri Lanka-born Haniffa—who earlier scooped an interview with George W. Bush—in reporting the aftermath of the Sen interview, or in naming the media organisation he works for?
Asian Age: named rediff.com but not Haniffa
CNN-IBN: did not name Haniff or rediff.com
Deccan Chronicle: named rediff.com but not Haniffa
Deccan Herald: did not name Haniffa or rediff.com
DNA: did not name Haniffa or rediff.com
Hindustan Times: did not name Haniffa or rediff.com
NDTV: did not name Haniffa or rediff.com
The Hindu: named both Haniffa and rediff.com
The Indian Express: named rediff.com but didn’t name Haniffa
The Telegraph: did not name Haniff or rediff.com
The Times of India: did not name Haniffa or rediff.com
(Some newspapers and TV channels carried feeds of Press Trust of India, which too did not name Haniffa or rediff.com. However Indo-Asian News Service, whose earlier avatar Haniffa worked for, named rediff.com)
Are our media houses reluctant to name rivals because they do not wish to give publicity to rival organisations? Do they fail to acknowledge a web portal because they have websites of their own? Is it sour grapes? Is it a fair practice?
|
Now on Churumuri
![jaggesh1[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3032/2673246731_ca656d4897_t.jpg "jaggesh1[1]")
![mukesh_anil_ambani[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3278/2662838881_62c27b4df9_t.jpg "mukesh_anil_ambani[1]")
