Lots of long, deep reading on the future of journalism collected by and commented on by Charles Arthur.
- Why paywalls might or might not work
- The past and future of journalism
- If journalism is the process, what is the business?
Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
Monthly Archive for June, 2009
Fair points from Nielsen: how easy is it for someone to look over my shoulder when I’m tapping in my password into SplashID on my phone? Not very: which is why it has a show password option. Why shouldn’t this be the default on the web. To work effectively, it should be a per site setting that the sites remember for me. Then again, how many people have four standard passwords that they use for different things (with the most secure having the least commonly used and hardest to remember passwords)? If someone catches you logging in to Facebook and you use the same password for your bank, then you might have a problem.
Well, you couldn’t be one just by reading this article, but there are some great pointers for those who have to help others design or develop software.
There’s a whole raft of ways of further securing your machine against malware. At present, I go for Avast and the PSI software inspector. Dave has a pile of useful applications, as does Windows Secrets.
If the current Twitter isn’t the right Twitter, what is? Is it in a bubble (I think yes)? Is it killable by Google (certainly)? Does the Suggested User List cause it problems (yes)? What is the right length for a Tweet (summary: 2x the length of a NYT or BBC description in their feeds)?
I have a growing fondness for experimental economics (feels more like science to me) and the fact that Google considers most of its search operations as an auction and can alter results to perform economic trials is heartening. Let’s just hope they publish some of it.
Interesting that Google uses a substantial number of human searchers to ensure that its results continue to be of high quality. How could you open source the data deriving from this kind of process? Not part of Google’s business model, but good for anyone else who wants to get value from crowdsourcing / ensure their crowdsourcing is not just for one company.
NY schools find a substantial jump in grades after they pay school kids for results. I can see why this might seem shocking to some (”learning should be its own reward”) but if it works and is cost-effective (better engagement, lower drop outs and delinquency, say) then why not do it?
Interesting graph plotting followers vs Tweet volume. Looks like there are three clear phases: 1) use it to tweet a "what is this for" message and then nothing, 2) put a few updates a day on (from a blog maybe) and 3) a fairly steady ramp up after 800 followers. It looks tantalisingly like it steadies off at about 10 per day, but that´s not scientific in the slightest. PS in the comments, it´s clear to see that the old waz business model is still working (summary: send a market share table to people that´s slightly guesswork and have them respond with anger giving the correct numbers).
Nice article from Charles Arthur helping to shine some light on a number of debates. Journalism is a process, nothing more. There is a business wrapper around it called publishing which makes it profitable and sustainable (or not). We shouldn´t confuse or conflate the two. (In his Amazon analogy: wrapping books in parcels is the process. What is the future of this? More automation, most likely. Being a shop front and shipping them for profit is the business, hence so many