March 2005 Archives

Ole Venob had a call from someone who said a copy of the News Sentinel Pat Summitt edition was selling for 41 bucks.

Yep, sure thing. Here's the link.

Another seller has same paper up to $15.

Nora Paul has some good reading at OJR with 'New News' retrospective: Is online news reaching its potential?.

Yes, 10 years ago -- and even recently -- the selling point was "Web as bottomless newshole" which turns out to be exactly what people don't need.

And newspaper news sites still don't provide the convenience and utilitarian features that readers want. It may be that services like Google News and Findory do provide that utilitarian usefulness while using the content from mainstream media.

What a lost opportunity: Aggregators become primary news sources because mainstream news media sites failed to provide the tools readers wanted.

New forms of story telling haven't moved far from "gee-whiz that looks cool" -- yet. Hopefully, we'll learn!

Nora nails the state of online news. Hopefully, in Boom 2.0 our promises will better match our readers' wants and the reality will be a little closer to the promise. They had better.

Online Publisher Ken Sands in Spokane has good good points in this Online News post that the indefatigable Susan Mernit posted to her blog.

"If you think about it, posting a newspaper online is giving people a snapshot of yesterday's news. We should instead, give them today's news and a bit of tomorrow's news, as well as making full use of the unique attributes of the web, including: immediacy, interactivity, utility, multimedia, entertainment, archiving, aggregation and community publishing."

-- Ken Sands

From Images on Gizoogle...

Lauren passed this one along as a fun site ... and it is: www.gizoogle.com (language warning).

Course it was created by a guy -- John Beatty -- who's from the hinterlands of York, Pa., not exactly Snoop Dog song territory, but he calls it a tribute to the Snoop Dog. See story in his local paper.

And in the sad but true department: Google had the York Daily Record article index, but the paper's Web site didn't. Who ate our lunch?

The Knox Sox were in a tournament in Farragut this weekend. Friday, there were snow flurries and a cold game. Satruday was a much better day: sunny, mild and two wins. (click on the photo to see a larger version)

I was playing with Google's SMS feature. You can search yellow pages, residential listings, weather, movie times and definitions simply by entering some text and sending a text message to 46645.

It works really fast -- and well. It found my telephone white pages listing with all the correct info, told me the weather and gave me a definition for the word "parse".

Fixed some brain errors that hosed the Post Card program that sends "plate cards." Send a photo of one of these beautiful Westmoore Pottery plates to someone! Send one now.

The Lady Vols beat No. 1-ranked LSU to win their first SEC title in five years. Here's what Coach Pat Head Summitt said:

"I'm glad to get up on the ladder and do something other than wash windows. I got to cut down the nets."

A very beautiful March Saturday in Knoxville. Sunny, 60 or so breezy.

Jogging (I call it jogging ... a fast walker could pass me, no doubt) at Lakeshore, I could hear:

* The yells from the soccer fields.
* The ping of aluminum bats at the batting cage.
* Walkers on their cell phones.

A wonderful hint of spring in early March. The forecast looks equally splendid.

This photo of newsroom managers was taken by photographer Saul Young for associate editor Georgiana Vines, who retired last week. George came to the News Sentinel in 1968 and only left for a couple of years to edit the Scripps paper in El Paso. I'm sure she'll be as busy as ever.

Noticed an item about BrightCove on John Battelle's blog.

TV over the Internet? Jeremy Allaire (who brought us Cold Fusion) thinks so and he's got $5.5 million in VC money to burn.

Allaire envisions a future where:

"a creative spark, a camera and a computer were are all it takes to put television programming before the eyes of consumers."

Sounds like blogs for TV? And I thought newspapers had problems.

Yahoo is a decade old tomorrow, March 2. Hard to believe, revenues of $3.57 billion, net income of $834 million, a market cap of $44.41 billion. ... Hey, maybe there is real money in this Internet thing.

In the early years, it was the site with the funny name where you found stuff. It survived the Bubble. So far, it has survived Microsoft and Google.

Here's an article with Jerry Yang and Wired's take "The UnGoogle (Yes, Yahoo!)"

Happy Birthday Yahoo!