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

Back to the drawing board

Several weeks without a blog entry is pretty poor going. My hard drive crashed and the ever imminent dissertation deadline have kept me from Carly's Blog. Now, however, I have a new laptop and I am once again online and clicking away.

The story that I just keep coming back to is ony by Nick Carr in the current issue of The Atlantic. With the brilliant title Is Google Making Us Stupid? it was bound to cause a stir. Responses have come thick and fast and it's been a struggle to keep up with all the conflicting views that have emerged.

My favourite has to be from Scott Karp who is responsible for the great Publishing 2.0 blog.

Also worth checking out is the piece by John Battelle: Google Making Nick Carr Stupid, But it's made this Guy Smarter

Bill Thompson: Changing the Way We Think

And for fairness' sake, Andre Sullivan in The Times: Google is giving Us Pond Skater Minds

There are more, but the WiFi connection on my train is a bit dodgy so I'm not going to list any more now.

As part of my dissertation I've made up a survey about online news and the way that people access it, which anyone reading this should feel free to complete - I'd be grateful for your thoughts.

As I made up the questions quite a while ago and have already received quite a few replies, I can now see that it's far from perfect so apologies if any questions are confusing!

Click Here to take survey

Unicorn sighting

How wonderful is this:

ROME — A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

"This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. "The unicorn has always been a mythological animal."

Sadly, it's not a real unicorn but a genetically flawed deer that was born in captivity in the research centre's park.

Speaking to a reporter from USA Today, Tozzi goes on to say that this could explain reports of unicorn sightings in the past. One-horned deer are not unheard of, but the central positioning of the horn is very unusal.

[Source]

[Image courtesy of Yahoo News/AP]

Cracking!

Saw this in the Independent website, had to share it.