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Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Follow along. Or contribute. Or both. Whatever. Welcome to DIY journalism, folks. 
| | Here's another suggestion for the Big Papers. Approach Google and Overture (whose advertising business is running in the $billion/year range, all on the Web) with exactly the problem we've been describing thorugh this whole Printwash thread. Tell them you're willing to consider opening the archives if it makes economic sense, and want to explore advertising deals involving shared revenues. See what happens. |
| | I'm betting it will make Dialog and Lexis-Nexis very unhappy, and the Web a much less noisy place. |
| | [Later...] And the above, by the way, is my answer to Sheila's challenge. (Which includes this revelation: Archive sales pay for the papers' Web sites.) |
| | By the way, I would love to see a Google search where the top results for "Printwash" are all stories in major papers. Wouldn't bother me a bit to see my part in the whole memefest relegated to someplace far below the fold. Where, speaking of noise, it currently is anyway. In fact, it's so deeply washed that Google doesn't seem to know a damn thing about the subject. Howzat for A-list influence? |
Your kid is not an empty storage container, ready to be filled with curricular content
| | Stories like this creep me out, even if they say Primary school testing and targets are to be streamlined to make exams for seven-year-olds less formal and part of a wider teacher-led assessment yada yada. |
| | Testing programs are not about educating kids. They're about perpetuating the bell curve. As a kid who spent most of his formative years at the back ends of nearly every bell curve the system could throw at him, and who regarded his school experience as a 13-year prison sentence that commenced at age 5, I can tell you there isn't a damn thing in any top-down government-mandated educational testing program that answers any kind of market demand from kids themselves — who are born with extravagantly unique souls, each with its own agenda and an endless series of questions (there's your real demand) for the purposes of its own education. Few of those questions are addressed by official curricula, testing programs, or even compulsory school attendance. |
It's positive example time
| | The blog train has been delivering clues to the newspaper publishing business for several days now, but we don't have a sign that the biz is taking delivery. Not that I'm aware of anyway. |
| | Better yet, can we name any papers (other than the Guardian) with CMS (content management systems) that publish stories with their final URLs and expose them to search engine crawlers? Let's give those papers their props. And do the same for any others who come forward and say "Hey, it's a purely economic choice, and we are fully aware that walling off our old stories washes them out of search engine results." |
| | Maybe we should urge some organization to start giving out awards for Cluefulness Above And Beyond the Call of Habit. And maybe we should start by coming up with some candidates. Got any? |
| | Meanwhile, here's an inventory of fresh clue sources on the matter: Jon, Richard, Bernie (with a huge pile of links here), Ed, Lawrence, Micah, Flemming, Adam, Tim, Adam (wickedly pointing to the NYTimes.com robots.txt file)... |
| | On the economics front, Tim says ear in mind that these are businesses. They'll make the move when, and only when, the money says to. Abstractions like Web Citizenship are not part of the equation. |
| | That's why I've tried to limit the argument to the real trade-offs involved. This has nothing to do with "citizenship." It has everything to do with the facts of publishing life, where the Web is a larger and larger context. Newspapers and magazines make some money by selling old stories through Lexis-Nexis and Dialog. But they make most of their money from advertising and subscriptions, which might both increase if archives are exposed to the Web. |
| | So sure: Make it a bottom-line choice. Just factor in all the variables, one of which is the cost of blowing off search engines — which pretty much amounts to blowing off the Web. |
| | [Later...] Okay, some results: St. Petersburg Times. (Thanks to Derek for that one.) Also Reuters, Yahoo News, CNN... (Although I've noticed that old links to some of those often tend to reach 404s.) |
Celeblogging
| | Adam reports Our italian wedding made all 4 major gossip mags! |
| | In case ya'll don't think we have Beautiful People around here, go look. Yikes. |
| | Here's the more sedate moblog. |
| | Meanwhile, congratulations to Adam and Patricia. |
PhiloJo
| | Or not quite. Because, at this point, "stunt philosophy" is still a Googasm or whatever the fuck we called it (awhile back, when it was all the rage) when a search for two words brings one result. Let's see how long that lasts. |
Earth to Earth! Come in, Earth!
There are responses to this message:Googasms, Matthew Thomas, 5/22/03; 3:06:57 AM Re: Tuesday, May 20, 2003, Rick Ellis, 5/21/03; 4:37:11 PM Re: Monday, May 19, 2003, lou josephs, 5/20/03; 3:30:14 PM How a Story Gets Started, Hanan Cohen, 5/20/03; 2:15:01 PM Re: Monday, May 19, 2003, Peter Schweitzer, 5/20/03; 9:58:20 AM
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