Laura Carlson is a familiar name in my inbox. I’ve been reading the Web Design Update for at least five years, and Laura’s the one that puts that email together every week. She works for the Information Technology Systems and Services at University of Minnesota Duluth. The email keeps me up with what’s going on […]
The Bivings Report ranked the top ten newspaper web sites in the United States. The Denver Post’s site (which I work hard on most every day) came in at number five. Five! Only the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Houston Chronicle ranked higher. Check out what they wrote (I added links to […]
Google announced this week it would allow people mentioned in news articles to address misquotes and add information to those articles. I wouldn’t call this a shot across the bow of newspapers, because Google’s been firing at local papers for a while. This would probably affect mid- and large-market newspapers the most (according to […]
I added a category to JoeThink just now, “Cool Jobs,” spurred by this posting from www.ThisAmericanLife.org. It’s not an awesome gig, but they tell great stories and you can work it from home.
We’re looking for someone to run ThisAmericanLife.org along with other aspects of our web presence, including our MySpace and Facebook profiles. It’s […]
Newspapers have a significant opportunity to enhance their coverage. It’s called context, and it’s information that helps readers make better decisions and observations about the news and their community. The internet makes it possible to dynamically build context for the news that newspaper-dot-coms publish, which can make news matter more.
Much of news aims at the […]
It’s cute that the Post wrote a story about its new ‘hyperlocal’ effort (
In Push for Local Readers, Post Unleashes LoudounExtra.com). But, in an article clouded by links on a page cluttered with them, nowhere is there a link to the site-in-mention, LoudounExtra.com.
Now I’m not saying everybody oughta be perfect. But, with one of the […]
Backfence, the hyperlocal startup that couldn’t, is closing its doors. Some newspapers continue testing the interactive online-community waters. What’s the big picture here? “Action.” The action-oriented internet. One thing the internet does well is make previously difficult actions much easier. Newspaper-dot-coms haven’t quite clued into this, which is why articles are still the primary way […]
Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan has a quality point in his post about measuring online actions (”Metrics that Matter“):
Take the “click-through,” for example. Everyone in online advertising, particularly in branded display advertising, knows that it is a stupid metric to base campaigns and budgets and success on. As deep tracking in online advertising has gotten more […]
Hi spring. It’s a new season, and heck if that doesn’t open the doors to a new stable of online poll ideas. This page uses Creative Commons license 123, which means “steal these polls.”
Spring: At the beginning
How many times have you been to the park this month? ( I’m allergic to parks / 0 / […]
It took me about a year to turn “transparency” from a word with nasty connotations to a word with positive ones. The internet gives a great new landscape for transparency. Here are a few places newspapers could start:
Create an index of your corrections that include the correction made and a link to the original article […]