links for 2009-04-09

"Time and time again I have heard members of the traditional media cry that bloggers and others who get their news out via the internet do not check their facts, are unreliable and prone to simply write whatever they like irrespective of what the truth of the matter is. And yet these same media professionals are just as likely to let stories like the Tomlinson case ride rather than do their job. They'd much rather simply copy and paste the official line and settle for a quite life than ask awkward questions that might get them in trouble with the editor/owner. In such a situation what exactly is the advantage of their much vaunted professionalism and supposedly superior insight in the world of reporting?"

I wonder if this means that I need a licence for regularly sending match update SMS messages to my mates? Or Twittering from the pub whilst using football related hashtags?

"I read enough newspaper Web sites to have noticed over the past several months a trend was spreading among the other Gannett papers using the corporate template. Specifically, those GO4 sites now (or if they don’t already, will) sport a “Next Page” link at the bottom, just above the comments. I would be annoyed by this anyway because it requires more work on my (the reader’s) part. It also tends to have the same effect on me as on John Gruber: 'I must have some weird strain of dyslexia. Whenever I see a link named 'Next Page', I think it says 'Stop Reading and Close This Tab'. As a writer, I’m bothered that beyond about 350 words now my stories will likely not be read."

"I used to work for the BBC. We were often told not to run London stories, meaning – precisely – that we were not to bore the nation with stories about how badly the London underground compares with the Moscow, Kiev or Paris metros. This is an important issue so let’s be clear. The idea of not reporting London stories means this: The vast majority of BBC staff live in London but we were not supposed to let our daily concerns bore the rest of the country."

"Really, it seems to be a bad cure for the serious disease: if the site architecture is screwed by lots of (partially) identical pages, it should be fixed - applying tags to show crawlers what’s more important is not a way out."

"A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website. You cannot make this stuff up. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos". [Caveat: TechCruch has a poor recent record in fact-checking sensational claims]

Matt McGee puts some Hitwise traffic data into the current round of the 'traditional media' vs 'search and aggregators' debate

It is the little things you notice. Last year on Dopplr: Miami, Macau, Amsterdam, Gelsenkirchen. This year on Dopplr: Richmond, Leicester, Manchester, Cardiff

"I read the NYT (website) on a regular basis, but until now I never stopped to think about what exactly pulls me in about the design of this site."