Just about every news website created in the past 15 years has pushed users down a similar path: show them a whole bunch of headlines, arrayed into a variety of design styles, then expect the user to choose one of them and begin what the site hopes will be a lengthy run of clicking on stories. It’s a decision tree: Here are your options, now make a choice.

The very attractive BBC app takes a key step away from that pattern. When you launch the app, you’re not confronted just with a bunch of headlines — you’re also thrown immediately into the text of the app’s top story, without so much as a click. And once you’re reading one story, the act of flicking to another one seems closer to a default act than when you’ve just selected from a menu of options.

It’s a model that makes perfect sense from a broadcasting background; a BBC radio or TV show doesn’t wait to ask which story the listener wants first. It just dives right in. Considering how many news website users never get past that list of initial headlines, dumping the reader directly into a story might be a way to push browsers into readers. The BBC may not rely on in-app advertising to pay the bills, but for sites that do, it’s a model worth watching.

Then there’s Flipboard, an app that lets you browse your social media accounts in a magazine format. Here’s Robert Scoble talking to Flipboard founder Mike McCue.

Instead of separate pay walls around individual newspaper Web sites, Mr. [Christoph] Keese [Springer’s head of public affairs] wants publishers and Internet companies to work together to create a “one-click marketplace solution” for their online content. In that system, Google or other Internet gateways would display links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from a variety of providers, as search engines do now. But some of the items would include something new: a price tag.

What kind of content would come at a cost? Any “noncommodity journalism,” Mr. Keese said, citing pictures of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy cavorting poolside with models at his villa in Sardinia — published this year by the Spanish daily El País — as an example.

A single mouse click would allow the user to pay for and view the pictures. Readers could also buy flat-rate packages providing access to content from a variety of media companies, Mr. Keese said, just as they can subscribe to unlimited data access plans via mobile phone networks.

Axel Springer’s plans are contingent on cooperation with Google, a company that [Rupert] Murdoch has accused of “theft,”… But Mr. Keese said Axel Springer was happy to work with Google, acknowledging that publishers could not match its expertise in monetizing digital content.

Nytimes.com has the story here.

Gavin O’Reilly, CEO of Independent News and Media and president of WAN-IFRA, told Google off:

O’Reilly, who is also the chief executive officer of Independent News & Media, a major shareholder of APN, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, said that the search engine needed to understand that copyright law was established 300 years ago and could not simply be abandoned.

“Copyright is not some intellectual abstract – it is the law – and I’d suggest that Google needs to start to work in good faith to find solutions that enshrine copyright, not abuse it,” he told an audience in Hyderabad, India.

He called on Google to accept the Automated Content Access Protocol, and other technology tools which would give publishers greater protection against copyright infringement. “Perhaps now is the time for Google and others to stop protesting and time for Google to start working constructively and openly with publishers.”

nzherald.co.nz has the story here.

Rupert Murdoch said News Corp wants to charge for journalism and might block Google’s crawlers from indexing its content:

On charging for journalism, from the Guardian:

Rupert Murdoch has today reiterated his belief that internet users will pay for content, saying they would be happy to shell out for “information they need to rise in society”.

Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, gave a wide-ranging address to US media regulators that attacked internet news aggregation as “theft” and claimed that advertising-only business models were dead.

“From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want,” he said.

He said newspapers should not blame technology if they failed. “If we fail, we fail like a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat.”

His company’s customers were “smart enough” to know they had to pay for news, Murdoch told a US Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the internet age.

Referring to his much-criticised plans to put his newspaper sites behind a paywall, Murdoch said he had succeeded before when nobody had believed he would, adding: “We started Fox when everyone said it couldn’t be done.”

One News Corporation newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, already charges for content and has 1 million subscribers. “We will expend to extend this model to all our news organisations such as the Times in London. At the Times, there are journalists who invested days and weeks into their stories, and our customers are smart enough to know that they can’t get something for nothing,” he said.

“Producing journalism is expensive. We invest tremendous resources in our project from technology to our salaries. To aggregate stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft.

On blocking Google, from the FT:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

Let’s not forget that Murdoch junior, James, said recently that News Corp was focusing on TV more than ‘journalism’:

Speaking at a conference in Barcelona… [James] Murdoch said: “In the business of ideas, which is the business that we are in, we do think journalism plays a role, and we do think there are business models there that will make a lot of sense, albeit perhaps not at the scale of some of our broadcasting businesses and other entertainment businesses.

“Is it going to be as big a role? No… structurally, television is vastly more profitable and a big opportunity.”

Telegraph.co.uk has that story here.

Ariana Huffington of Huffington Post said Murdoch was missing the point about aggregation and News Corp itself was an aggregator:

“In his speech this morning, Rupert Murdoch confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation. Wholesale misappropriation is against the law – and he has legal redress against that already. Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web’s DNA. Period.

“At HuffPost, aggregation goes along with a tremendous amount of original content including original reporting and over 250 original blogposts a day. And we love it when someone links to one of our posts, or excerpts a small amount and links back to us.

“Most sites understand the value of this and the way the link economy operates. It’s why HuffPost gets hundreds of requests from news outlets asking us to feature their material and link back to their site. They understand that the web is not a zero-sum game and that consumers love the freedom to be able to follow where their interests – and the offshoots of a story – take them.”

She added that News Corp sites are also aggregators: “The Wall Street Journal has a tech section that’s nothing more than a parasite – uh, I mean, aggregator – of outside content.

“FoxNews.com has a Politics Buzztracker that bloodsucks – uh, I mean aggregates and links to – stories from a variety of different sources, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others.

“AllThingsD has a section called Voices that not only aggregates headlines, but also takes a nice chunk of text – and puts the links out at the bottom of the story.

The Huffington Post story is here.

Jeff Jarvis said News Corp blocking Google wouldn’t hurt a bit:

News Corp. leaving Google would be a mosquito bite on an elephant’s ass. Unnotice by Google or by the audience. For there will always be – as Murdoch laments – free competitors: the BBC and Australian Broadcasting Corp, which he and his son complain about, not to mention the Guardian, the Telegraph, NPR, CBC, and any sensible news organization worldwide.

This silliness is emblematic of the end of the Gutenberg age, the industrial age, the age of control, the age of centralization, Murdoch’s age. The problem here is that Google-virgin Murdoch simply does not understand the dynamics of the link economy. He roars against them. Google et al do not take his content, they send it audience and value. It is up to him to exploit that. The business failure here is Murdoch’s, not Google’s.

Jarvis’s post on BuzzMachine is here.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said ‘we send you guys a billion clicks a month’:

With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

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 any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.

Eric Schmidt’s post, on wsj.com, is here.

Google changed its ‘first click free’ policy but some people didn’t understand it, according to Malcolm Coles:

The biggest load of old rubbish ever has been written about the changes to Google’s first click free program…. First, a reminder of how first-click free works. If you have a paywall (ie you require registration or subscription to access content), Google has a problem. It wants to index your pages. But it doesn’t want its users to have a rubbish user experience…

The solution was the first-click-free compromise:

1. Publishers allow Google behind their paywall.
2. Google indexes their content and shows it in its results – on condition that searchers can also see it if they come via Google.
3. If seachers click a link in Google, the publisher lets them read that page of content.
4. If searchers click any other  links on the publisher’s site, the publisher shows them a sign-up now message.

[But] It is easy to circumvent First Click Free if you can be bothered. If you want to read a second story on a first-click-free site, you copy and paste the URL into google and then click the result… The change that Google has announced means publishers can limit to five a day the number of pages a user can see when they come via Google.

Malcolm Coles’s post is here.

Google also launched ‘living news pages’ in partnership with nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com:

Google has now unveiled the result of a collaboration with the NYT and Washington Post to develop a new online story format that fits with the “living” concept. The format features a summary of recent developments related to a topic, along with a timeline. The pages are automatically personalized so that the latest updates on the subject are highlighted for return visitors. Right now, there are only eight “living stories” from the Washington Post and NYT on Google Labs, spanning topics such as the “struggle over health care” and the Redskins football team (See examples here). The pages also are not hosted on either the NYT or the Washington Post websites, although they do play up those publications’ branding. For the moment, it’s also unclear how advertising would fit in.

PaidContent has the story here.

Five US publishers band together over an ‘iTunes for magazines’ ‘newsstand’ concept:

Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time Inc are making it formal: the five publishers are equity partners in a new digital publishing venture with grand designs. They want nothing less than to develop open standards for cross-platform e-reader technology, advertising and digital sales – and they’re going to put their brands behind it. Together, the company says the five represent an unduplicated audience of 144.6 million.

Guardian.co.uk has the story here.

Hearst talks about Skiff, a platform for e-readers and other digital devices:

The incubated startup Hearst is looking to as a digital content savior is now Skiff, LLC, although the better name might be “Swiss Army E-Reader Ink” given all that it’s trying to do. Skiff, led by Gilbert Fuchsberg and headquartered in NYC with offices in Palo Alto, promises a 2010 launch with a “complete” digital content solution that can handle it all but will specialize in magazines and newspapers via a platform that can be used across devices and its own dedicated devices to be sold at retail. It also promises a business model that respects publishers’ needs.

PaidContent has the story here.

NBR publisher Barry Colman writes a letter to consultant Lance Wiggs talking about the execution of NBR’s paywall and what the numbers look like now:

The biggest fear for the site was that our traffic would tank and people would turn to the free sites. This was certainly one of the things that kept me awake at 3am.

It didn’t happen. There has been a reduction but by our own measure of uniques we’ve held on to 77% of them. And, more importantly, the quality of current readers constitutes a group of highly paid, highly educated business people. Exactly the sort of audience NBR editorial has traditionally called its own. And our advertisers will pay to reach.

The second biggest fear, advertising volumes would fall if impressions fell back. It didn’t happen either. Since the launch the advertising booking volume has risen by 21% post paywall.

It’s important to note, however, that the volume of web advertising is feeble compared to NBR print. It was failure of sites everywhere to achieve decent advertising revenue that convinced us that web readers would have to pay to finance a real newsroom service.

The number signed up and growing is now at 7500 and growing.

We have sold individual subscriptions and bulk subscription licenses to some of the biggest companies in the country, which enables all their staff on their domain name access the paywall.

The real access number based on the computer-enabled employees among the corporate subscribers is in the region of 21,000. But the access rights purchased are being heavily used by the senior executives and partners and not the by junior staff, which make up the majority of the employees. Hence our internal estimate is 7500.

I don’t want to break down the details of these numbers because we are in a very competitive business. But our corporate clients include some important early adopters including Russell McVeigh, Minter Ellison, the Reserve Bank, NZTE, Colliers International, AMP Capital, Commerce Commission, Ernst & Young, Chapman Tripp, AWS Legal, University of Canterbury, NDA Engineering Ltd, Institute of Chartered Accountants and Forsyth Barr.

The NBR story on this is here. Lance Wiggs’s blogpost is here.

And Lance Wiggs and I talk about a few related issues with Russell Brown on TVNZ’s Media 7:

I was struck by a few commonalities between the cultural heritage sector (known as GLAM – Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and the digital news media.

Both deal with sizeable repositories of digital content, for a start, and are grappling with how best to manage those assets, ensure their longevity and make them readily discoverable.

Here are a few thoughts on a couple of themes that I picked up on from the conference, which was held at Te Papa (Museum of New Zealand). The conference was nicely organised, had some interesting guest speakers from here and overseas, and was very enjoyable (my thanks to the organisers).

Copyright/copyleft

Since passive audiences have become active users of content, we’re all trying to figure out how to manage content ownership online and get a balance between commercial imperatives, the costs of digitisation, and the need to enable innovation and maintain a lively public domain of enduring use to citizens.

This is a big issue, and complex, and I don’t propose doing it justice in this post. I just want to acknowledge that it’s an issue affecting all branches of the creative industries and wonder out loud if we can’t jobshare the task of finding local solutions.

Five years ago copryight didn’t get a mention in a journalism curriculum. Now I feel dutybound to raise it, introduce Creative Commons, have discussions about how to use images found on Flickr and Google, and introduce questions to ask yourself when publishing your own work – who do you want to be able to use it, how do you want them to be able to use it, do you want to be credited, how will you enforce your rights and so on.

Libraries and museums, meanwhile, have to track down who holds the copyright on historical images and material, decide what to do if the holder cannot be found, very often seek permission to use the material, and determine how to indicate to end users what they are entitled to do with the material (without making them read dense legislation, clauses and exceptions).

Then there’s the people, like NZ On Screen, who are dealing with archival film and television material who also have to hunt down copyright holders, very often consult dozens of people about a single video clip (producer, director, writers, etc) and manage how end users interact with the material.

Meanwhile there are anomalies in the way we reference material. We think nothing of grabbing a couple of paragraphs from a report or speech or blogpost to include in a news story or essay or artwork, but we tend to feel differently about grabbing a few paragraphs out of an audio or video clip to use in a news story or essay or artwork.

Content ownership, use and licensing isn’t simple. Laws and regulations vary in different jurisdictions, how they’re applied varies even within jurisdictions, and they are often densely written and impenetrable to your average end user. Creative Commons stands out not only for giving content creators simple licences to choose from but also for creating simple icons to describe them that are instantly recognisable.

To extend that kind of simplicity to digital content management in the New Zealand context would be fantastic.

There was also a clearly articulated need for greater education about copyright/fair use issues.

There was a suggestion at the conference that members of the forum should work together on a coherent and simple set of guides/licences/icons for New Zealand.

If that conversation continues, my instinct is that the news media should be involved. I suspect we have insights from our industry to share, and would benefit from learning more about the issues and insights of others.

After all, journalists need cultural and heritage collections for research and should be linking to them for the benefit of readers, and I suspect the news media could learn a lot about managing archives from the GLAM folk.

Visual and digital literacy

Newsrooms everywhere are trying to get journalists comfortable online and competent at storytelling in visual, aural and written forms (video, audio, images, text) so they can get their product out to their customers in whatever format they demand.

Journalism schools are finding ways to do the same while still teaching traditional skills such as writing clearly, checking facts, attributing information, providing context, avoiding ambiguity and being fair and balanced and accurate.

It’s deceptively difficult, in my experience.

You think to yourself,  ‘I’ll introduce Flickr, that’s a useful resource’, then find yourself talking about how to shoot images, crop images, caption images and add metadata, search engines 101, how to use software such as Photoshop or Gimp, choose file sizes, understand compression and loss and file types, manage uploads and downloads, collaborate on content creation, use in-house content management systems, manage online accounts and profiles, understand privacy controls, host images for blogs, links, broken links, how to consider copyright and apply and acknowledge it in a variety of scenarios. Phew.

It’s not just newsrooms. The GLAM crowd face similar challenges of bringing their staff up to speed in these and other skills, because they too have to learn how to give their audiences what they want in a variety of engaging formats.

I get the feeling we’re all still finding our way and could use a bit of help.

Making our stuff findable

We can build beautiful, rich websites till the cows come home but they’re no good to anyone if people can’t easily find all that lovely content lurking beneath the homepage. That’s as true for news websites as it is for cultural archives and exhibitions, and it’s a topic that arose often in conversation at the NDF conference.

I’ve been cooling on destination websites for a while. You need to have a destination website, of course, but you need even more to have your content out where your audience is so they can trip over it often and usefully.

I often think it would be nice to create a website from the premise that you publish content all over the web and use the home site to curate it, rather than aggregating/curating first and then pushing out from your home site.

Either way, the big deal in making our content findable is…

Joining the dots

We reinvent the wheel a lot online, and we duplicate content and destinations. That’s partly because we’re all separate organisations doing our own thing. It’s partly because our stuff isn’t findable enough – I often go looking for information and come up empty, even though I know it must be out there somewhere.

But I think it’s also partly because we don’t try hard enough. We don’t allocate enough time for staff to go searching around topic areas, vet what they find, select the most relevant for users’ benefit, and think about how best to link to it.

News websites are perhaps the worst culprits. Some still don’t link out at all, to anything or anyone. Others have begun throwing in a few links to public documents and have finally brought themselves to link to, gosh, YouTube clips that they’re writing stories about. Others are doing a much better job.

But there’s often not enough evidence of news organisations behaving like they’re a member of society. There’s little thought about what a reader coming to a given news story might want to know about its background or what other questions it may raise for them. There’s little interaction with cultural, non-profit, government and other organisations with rich content that would be useful to readers.

There’s often little thought about how to provide useful links – links in stories and listed at the bottom of the page are a great start but how about ways to search other sites from the keywords generated by a news story, a way to book tickets to the show you’ve reviewed, a link to an online bookseller from a book review, a map showing the location of the story topic and a way to click through and explore the location.

Easier said than done, I know, but still.

Those are just a few things chasing round in my mind after the NDF conference. There are many more. We were shown some great sites and exhibitions as well, which I’ll try to collate into another blogpost in a while.

From RWW this week came a post about Twitter turning on its Geolocation API, which means Twitter users can choose whether to indicate where they are when they tweet.

RWW imagines some interesting apps being built around this function. They suggest, for example, an app that tracks who are the biggest Digg-style promoters of content in a location, one that lets newspapers know what people are tweeting about in its neighbourhood, and one that can track spikes in conversation about a product alerting inventory managers to stock up on in that area.

FourSquare

This comes at the same time that FourSquare reaches Wellington. FourSquare is a geolocation app that lets you ‘check in’ to show where you are – so you can maybe meet up with people who are nearby for a drink, or tell people you’re attending a conference, gig or exhibition opening. You can give tips about your city for the benefit of other users. Appears to be a high correlation between iPhone ownership and participation in Wellington so far.

Shirky on Twitter

From OJB, this is GritTV’s Laura Flanders interviewing Clay Shirky about Twitter and how it’s grown through ideas generated by its users,  about journalism after newspapers, copyright and more.

Neiman Labs wrote a great post about ‘four lessons’ learned from the experiment, which was turned around very quickly.  They talked to developer Simon Willison (who visited NZ in 2008 to speak at Webstock) who started coding one week before the project launched. There are a few outtakes from that piece below.

Here’s Simon Willison talking at a News Innovation Unconference about how he and the rest of the team got the crowdsourcing off the ground in a week.





Here’s an excerpt from the Nieman post about four lessons:

Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. Willison started coding one week before the Thursday launch date, teamed with a designer on Tuesday, a system administrator on Wednesday and leaned on everyone in his 15-person department for ad-hoc help on Thursday. But the bulk of the labor would come from Guardian readers.

How to lure them? By making it feel like a game…The Guardian’s four-panel interface — “interesting,” “not interesting,” “interesting but known,” and “investigate this!” made categorisation easy. And the progress bar on the project’s front page, immediately giving the community a goal to share.

Public attention is fickle, so launch immediately. Before Parliament released its records Thursday, Willison’s team thought they might be able to postpone their launch to Friday if necessary. When they saw Thursday’s newsbroadcasts, they realized they’d been wrong. The country’s imagination was caught. “It became quickly clear on Thursday that it was a huge story, and if we failed to get it out on Thursday, we’d lose a lot of momentum,” Willison said.

Speed is mandatory, so use a framework. Willison’s project was built on Django, the custom Web framework “for perfectionists with deadlines” that he and Adrian Holovaty created for the Lawrence Journal-World. In the world of database programming, a framework is like an offset press: hard to build — Django 1.0 required three years of open-source development — but once it’s set up, there’s no faster way to churn out content. Hand-coding an application like the Guardian’s would have been like publishing a daily newspaper with movable type.

Participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready. As well as the Guardian’s first Django joint, this was its first project with EC2, the Amazon contract-hosting service beloved by startups for its low capital costs.

Willison’s team knew they would get a huge burst of attention followed by a long, fading tail, so it wouldn’t make sense to prepare the Guardian’s own servers for the task. In any case, there wasn’t time. “The Guardian has lead time of several weeks to get new hardware bought and so forth,” Willison said. “The project was only approved to go ahead less than a week before it launched.” With EC2, the Guardian could order server time as needed, rapidly scaling it up for the launch date and down again afterward.

He starts by showing how Twitter has grown over the past couple of years and how it’s moved beyond a place for talking about your breakfast then says:

Twitter hit critical mass and suddenly what Twitter was useful for flipped around.

See what people are saying about … YOUR COMPANY

Twitter has become a real time social graph on almost every business of significance.

Before Twitter, if you had a disgruntled customer, they were hidden in your call center queue. Now they have a voice than anyone can hear and even find some time well after the event.  And if you don’t join the conversation they still keep shouting.

So for the company Chairperson and Boards in general they have new risk surfaces they need to consider.

1. What is being said online about your business?
2. What are your risk minimisation strategies for dealing with social media?
3. What additional resources are required to work with social media?

He adds that for Xero:

Our strategy is to engage.  That is a real commitment but we feel it’s an investment we need to make. As we are a new company and we are growing quickly we can keep on top of it.  Our market is a word of mouth ‘recommender’ model so we have to be on the ball.

But if you are a large company that has been around for a while how do you deal with it? I can understand this stuff is hard for larger organisations with a large customer base. They will likely have some dissatisfied users who have the potential to be very noisy.

I suggest being honest and put processes in place to gather the feedback so you can report on it.  I think customers do understand it can take a while to turn the ship around. If you provide a way for customers to engage and have the dialog they may understand and can at least take some satisfaction from venting.

The rest of Rod’s post is here.

Xero said recently is now has over 12,000 customers in 50 countries. I can see why. I started using Xero a few months ago and have to say it makes the task of keeping my accounts and sorting GST returns way easier.

‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on:

* 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
* Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
* Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
* iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
* 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
* YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
* UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
* Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
* Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
* Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
* Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
* SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

He aims to keep updating the source data. You can grab the widget here.

From 1981:

“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.”

“It takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly use charge of $5 the new tele-paper won’t be much competition for the 20 cent street edition.”

Nice overview of the History of the Internet:







My, how things change:
In the next video John Allen (sp?) is talking about the anonymity of bulletin boards and says:

“It’s interesting the kind of restraint that you find. There’s not a lot of cursing and swearing, there’s not a lot of personal cuts, there’s not a lot of put-downs that one would expect to find. There’s not screenfulls of ‘go to hell’, which is surprising… It’s interesting because one would think that if people are anonymous they could do whatever they want.”

Imagining, in 1969, what the internet might bring us:







This one will test your French (but it has pictures if your French fails you):







No show is complete without a weather forecast (complete with magic markers):







This one may make you feel better next time silly Telecom throttles you to dial-up speed for daring to bust your measly data cap:

When I recently wrote a series of articles on how major publishers are using social media bookmarking tools to drive traffic, I mentioned that ‘share this‘ buttons had descended like a plague on web design in recent years. It seems that at the foot of every story, we are being urged to dig this, stumble upon that, and buzz up the other.

We very carefully control the user experience around sharing on our sites. We make choices about where to place the icons on the page, and whether to show all of them at once, or to hide them behind a universal ‘share this’ icon. A lot of news sites also provide contextual help around their share functionality, with links like the BBC’s “What are these?” pages.

However, one area where we don’t control the user experience is the welcome that users get from the third party site. I was particularly intrigued to see how these services treat users who hit a ‘share’ button when they are not logged in or registered for a service – the ‘share-curious’ user if you will.

Deeply impressed that Martin made the time to do this and document it so diligently.

Also glad he pointed to the annoying anomoly where you click on ‘share this’, get routed to a registration process that can be several screens long, and quite often get spat out the other end without being able to bookmark or share the page that started you on the journey in the first place.

However, something has been lost in translation during this process. I may be a fully-fledged and verified Digg member now, but somehow along the way I never actually got to register my Digg for The Telegraph’s Michael Jackson story, which is what started me on the journey in the first place.

In four posts, he looks at Digg, Stumbleupon, Yahoo, Delicious, Newsvine, Reddit, Facebook, Google Bookmark, Fark and Mixx.