March 2009
2 posts
The Shocking State of Online News
Newspaper Web sites are attracting lots of visitors, but aren’t keeping them around for long. The typical visitor to nytimes.com, which attracts more than 10 percent of the entire newspaper industry’s traffic online, spent an average of just 34 minutes and 53 seconds browsing its richly detailed offerings in October. That’s 34 minutes and 53 seconds per month, or about 68...
December 2008
5 posts
Seth's Blog: Warning: The internet is almost full →
“its not information overload, its filter failure”
“Automated news doesn’t quite work.”
– Techmeme
Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work. -... →
As if by magic from my last post Techmeme shot itself down.
The world doesn’t need more news sites that are editorial based.
Last.FM top 10 →
I keep trying to click the #10, #09, #08 … numbers on the left side of the page to take me to the relevant entry.
Techmeme - Brief review →
Techmeme is an awesome way to view the “top” stories for the tech sector. I’d love to know how they group their stories. Manually, I assume?
The user interface screams of Slashdot circa 2000 — not a bad thing.
I wish there was a way to hide stories once I’d read them - I find the site is very gradually updated and I often come back to the site an hour later and...
November 2008
15 posts
2 tags
Mapping the World's Fastest Supercomputers →
NYTimes does it again with a gorgeous flash visualization.
The size of the circles represent the processing power, it makes it amazingly quick to see which installations are the fastest.
I’m curious how they choose the grey/green/blue for continents. I might contact the creators “Elaine He and Kevin Quealy” (?) and see if they want a brief interview
You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About... →
How will this affect news sites? Does it bother you that services know what news you look out for, what you spend the most time reading and emailing to friends?
We’d love to hear your thoughts.
“Our approach is not to set a goal. Our approach has been to create the best...”
– Jeff Bezos on the Future of Amazon.com
The weeks news in review
Great interview with Redditor-In-Chief
Snippet on how to measure social activity on social sites
How News is Made
Arrington still insists twitter is a news source
did we miss anything?
5 Things to do between coding your blog and...
Not technically news, but we encountered these “D’oh!” moments and I’m sure you have too. They’re a real pest if you have to chance these once you have traffic coming into your site.
Analytics Google Analytics are your friend, it skews all your figures and sources if you dont know where your visitors are coming from right away.
Feedburner RSS Same as above,...
3 tags
How to test Social News sites
Step 1: Find a blog article that you find interesting and insightful
Step 2: Submit it to reddit/digg/newsYC (the title of the submission should probably just be the blog title)
Step 3: Wait 24 hours, has it been upvoted more than a dozen times?
The submission is almost always ignored entirely. Because there are just too many submissions. They can’t all be on the front page, so readers...
2 tags
Where is Kevin Rose taking Digg?
Kevin Rose gave a fascinating talk about where Digg is headed at The Future of Web Apps.
He clearly believes the future of news is in its recommendation engine. They’ve had some serious growth thanks to their engine:
Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch.
The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the...
3 tags
Recommended News Sites Recommended by news.YC
After our first post about news recommendation engines, we got some amazing feedback. Firstly a list of all the recommended sites to look at:
http://jaanix.com
http://windycitizen.com
http://www.newscrawler.it
http://www.buzzup.com
http://techmeme.com
http://newsbrane.com
http://outside.in
http://meehive.com
on a side note: its weird this service won’t alphabetize (is that a word?)...
“The most valuable asset at a newspaper is still the journalist - this is even...”
– Jack Riley - A word from the Redditor-in-chief
Olympic Medal Count Map →
I know its old, but its so so gorgeous.
NYTimes at its finest.
Google Reader and its Recommendation Engine
Isn’t very good, frankly.
Rather than offering entire feeds - it needs to offer stories that appeal to the user.
If I’m given a recommended feed “I may like” I’ll probably add it to my reader and never look at it — partly because I have over 1000 feeds — however, I do want stories that appeal to me. I’m not going to filter through my RSS feeds - my...
Why aren't there any decent news recommendation...
For what its worth I don’t mean social news sharing sites like Digg and Reddit. They rock.
I mean services where users should go every day for their actual news. The web2.0 of BBC News. Where your average joe will go instead of reading the newspaper.
I remember reading this article and thinking “cool, but not good enough”. Two years on - where are we? Reddit
Well, reddit was...
Award-Winning Newspaper Designs →