links for 2011-07-25

"The paper version is beautiful. It uses great typography and layout to focus your attention, drag your eyes down the columns, and pull you into the stories. The website is a hideous abomination barely worthy of dignified evaluation. What happened here, in the transition from the print newspaper to the digital one? It is a perplexing regression, but it is absolutely not unique to the Chronicle. The print industry, given vastly better display and distribution technologies, has responded by making its products worse."

Mark Pack in the comments pointing out how gracious the Standard were when Paul Waugh left

*cough* one of my first ever websites in the 90s used to have a section devoted to the league tables of our Subbuteo tournament, or as we called it "Flicky-Flacky" *cough*

"The only future a news organisation can plan for is a future of flexibility."

"Last week I published an inverted pyramid of data journalism which attempted to map processes from initial compilation of data through cleaning, contextualising, and combining that. The final stage – communication – needed a post of its own, so here it is."

"As far as Mashable itself is concerned, is it now merely a tabloid? Will recent increases in this kind of content affect their reputation and credibility as a ‘tech blog’? Especially given that initially, there was no attempt even to add a ‘tech angle’ to the story – it was a case of simply getting the story out for a cheap and nasty traffic boost. Are they this despite for traffic in order to please advertisers and keep their analytics data artificially high through repeated short term traffic spikes, jumping on stories related to seemingly irrelevant high traffic topics or keywords – just like vultures?"

"More than eight million adults in the UK - around 16% of the adult population - have downloaded a podcast, with almost half listening to one at least once a week. This figure is echoed in the US. As a comparison, this is still a greater percentage of people than use Twitter."

"Nothing ruins a good LAN party like uncomfortable guests or lots of tension, both of which can result from mixing immature, misogynistic male-gamers with female counterparts. Though we’ve done our best to avoid these situations in years past, we’ve certainly had our share of problems. As a result, we no longer allow women to attend this event". The mind literally boggles at how you process that logic

"Self -publishers learn from other self-publishers. They learn quicker than writers who have agents or publishers."

"Wonderful RT @meropemills: Little piece by me about the time Lucian Freud tried to get into my knickers: http://bit.ly/niYI3r" - not entirely clear in 140 characters whether Ian is praising in piece...or the attempt? ;-)