Personal newspaper survey (again)

Dissertation deadline is now only one month away and it's time for another survey.

If you would like to fill it out, it will only take a couple of minutes, please click here.

Thanks!

Summer Travel

Please check out the smarter travel week over at the TravelRants blog

For the next seven days, Travel Rants will be rant free. I know, it’s shocking, but it’s that time of the year where the schools will soon be closing and everyone will be heading off on their summer holiday. So next week we will be promoting healthy and smarter travel.

Wordle word cloud

Guardian buys paidContent for $30 million

It was announced this morning.

Jeff Jarvis flagged it up here and directed us to Kara Swisher's scoop here.

Jarvis, whot writes for the Guardian, couldn't be happier:

I can say from firsthand experience that the Guardian people are just great to work with: brilliant, challenging, civlized, witty, strategic. (And they don’t pay me enough to suck up to them.) Rafat has always been my premier example of what web journalism and entrepreneurism can product. I know no staff that is more dogged in its pursuit of the story than Paid Content’s.

Incidentally, Jeff wrote this cracking piece on his Buzz Machine blog the other day that really got me thinking:

Whether it’s Google or someone else, the idea is right: Newspapers should concentrate on what the are supposed to do and stop trying to differentiate themselves with technology.

Part of the problem is institutional ego. Newspapers have long thought they are — in your head, hear Dana Carvey as SNL’s Church Lady saying this — special. When publishing systems arrived in the ’70s, papers wasted millions of dollars each specing and sometimes building their own customized systems, refusing to admit that what they did — typing, hooking graphs, fitting heads — was no different from any other paper. After I left the Chicago Tribune in the late ’70s, they created a one-of-a-kind CMS that was such a disaster the company dispatched its own vaunted Task Force investigative journalists to probe the failure.

So take the advice, papers: Get out of the manufacturing and distribution and technology businesses as soon as possible. Turn off the press. Outsource the computers. Outsource the copyediting to India or to the readers. Collaborate with the reporting public. And then ask what you really are. The answer matters dearly.

And a note to others — Google, the AP, et al: There is an opportunity here to be the platform for news. Takers?

Bob Wyner's comments are illuminating and hats off to Edward Roussel from the Telegraph for such insight. Edward Roussel from the Telegraph for such insight.

State of the Web 2008

Great illustration by Matthew Inman depicting the state of the Web in Summer 08. Click here for the full thing.

Red Head

This could be what my hair looks like . . . time to rinse and find out