links for 2010-03-05

  • "In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken."
  • "The point of the matter is this: user-centered design isn’t simply a luck of the draw; its an iterative process that involves a complex interplay between designers and the users for which they design."
  • "Horling – a developer with Google's personalized search team – said that up to one in five searches are tailored to the user's particular location, web history, or online contacts. "As it stands today," Horling explained, "between these three techniques, just about every user who's engaging with Google search today is affected.""
  • "On the other hand, the politics of the paper's owner seem to matter much less. For example, once one controls for geographic factors, there is no statistically significant correlation between the newspaper's own slant (horizontal axis below) and average slant of papers in other communities owned by the same owner (vertical axis)."
  • “How slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way they’ve chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. "
  • "It turns out that those stories that indicated they contained videos were shared more than the average story on Facebook, while they were actually shared less than the average story on Twitter. This is likely because the Facebook platform makes it easy to embed multimedia content into updates while Twitter does not."
  • ""Advertising alone is not going to sustain scale of newsrooms," he says. But growing a subscription base allows advertisers to know exactly who it is that they are selling to, which increases its value. "If you have an audience that is paying for your journalism they are engaged and that is an important message for advertisers.""
  • ""We are not planning to close any further titles," said Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror. "The major activity [in terms of cost cutting] was at the begining of the year [2009 when the ad slump hit hardest] and while I won't say we won't close anything in the future ever, we have no plans. There is [also] no redundancy programme planned"."
  • ""We certainly don't believe throwing up a paywall is the right strategy," she said. "It won't be possible to charge for general content, I can't see why people would pay for high quality content when it is free elsewhere … the BBC is an obvious one here.""
  • "If social sites, including Twitter, are a new center — Nick Negroponte’s “Daily Me” morphed — that’s a new challenge, and maybe opportunity, for the news industry. The challenge: getting the news to where the readers are hanging out, and figuring out to monetize there. The opportunity: If properly seeded in the social sites, the readers themselves do the (free) marketing and distribution of the content…"
  • "Right now we don’t have any sort of immediate plans [to charge for web content], but we’re definitely thinking about what new products we can create, including on the web,” Sheikholeslami told me. “If it makes sense to charge for it, we would.”"
    (tags: business)
  • "The BBC? Paying for advertising on Google?"
  • "Reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber have created a guide that reverse-engineers how they reported a year-and-a-half-long investigation on how states handle disciplinary action against nurses. The results of their work were alarming, and its consequences were swift…"

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *