MailOnline catches eye of NYT

I know it´s been a while but just had to post this totally on the money article from the New York Times:

British Newspaper Finds Readers Flocking Online

For daily, or even hourly, updates on the life of Cheryl Cole, a British television talent-show judge and sometime pop singer who used to be married to a soccer star, there may be no better resource than the Web site of The Daily Mail.

Is the comely Ms. Cole headed to America to join the U.S. version of “The X Factor”? Is she scouting around for real estate in Los Angeles? Will a seven-year-old assault conviction deny her a U.S. visa? Mail Online is on the case.

...

Online, the emphasis has been on celebrity news, featuring Ms. Cole and other A-, B- and C-list figures whose every facial wrinkle or fashion choice is scoured for the possibility of extracting a headline. According to comScore, the site’s show business and television coverage drew 15.3 million visitors in October, compared with 14.9 million for the news sections.

Analysts say Mail Online’s traffic growth has been fueled by particularly adept use of the art of crafting headlines so that the Web page on which they appear secures a high ranking from Google. Google’s methodology was written by engineers rather than poets, so a straightforward approach to such search engine optimization of headlines generally works best.

Google Operators

This is a really useful slideshow. I thought I had a fairly sound grasp of Google operators but it turns out there's a lot more to it than I thought!

To find case studies from official government sites about outbreaks of swine flu in UK schools try this:

site:.gov.uk "swine flu*schools"~outbreak

The asterisk acts as a wildcard for any words in between 'swine flu' and 'schools' and the ~ symbol searches for synonyms of 'outbreak'




View at EasyCaptures.com

Google Mining

View more Microsoft Word documents from ardessie.

Google Search Options

"Google are upping the stakes in search with a roll out of new ways to slice and dice your search results. The most interesting and useful for me, as a journalist, is the ability to limit the search to the last 24 hours. I can imagine using this frequently. See Google's blog post here.

"We were told that the hardest problems in search were:

- Finding the most recent information
- Expressing that you want just one type of result
- Assessing which results are best
- Knowing what you’re looking for
- Expressing your searches in keywords

"By allowing you to search the last 24 hours only, Google is getting to real-time search but is not there yet. The only place at the moment where this is a reality is Twitter. Its search function allows you to find out what people are saying now about the latest film release, earthquake, whatever. This real-time discovery can be incredibly useful."

Source: "Google searches fo the perfect answer" Mike Harvey, Tech Central, TimesOnline

A decade of Google

Thank you Google Operating System

Old newspapers

It is almost one month since my last blog post, which is shameful. I handed my MA dissertation in one week ago and now no longer have an excuse for not resuming where I left off.

Noticed this on the Google blog:

Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let's say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon], and you'll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we'll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online.

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Several months ago I progressed from intern to freelancer but, now that I am no longer studying, I am on the lookout for a permanent position. I don't enjoy job-hunting and wish I was being paid enough to stay where I am!

Also slightly worrying is the fact that all the positions I have found so far are for web developers. My html is pretty hopeless and I am clueless about Javascript.

My Plan B is to write a bestseller and never work at all.