June 2006 Archives
Morris DigitalWorks has reborn FanaticZone.com (once in another incarnation a site we were involved in with the GoVols.com Web site) as a Digg.com-like sports metasite.
It's certainly not the FanaticZone of yore. As Morris' Steve Yelvington says: "Times change. Ideas change."
I have always thought the only good purpose of the red "message waiting" light is as a night light for the phone so I particularly enjoyed Gina Trapani's little post on "The inefficiency of voicemail."
The Guardian's Charles Arthur got her cranked up and he has a great rant on one of the truly evil manifestations of technology:
That's the real killer about voicemail: it takes much longer to deal with the voicemail than the original message. People ramble. They say their phone number veryquicklyindeedinonebreath. They mumble. They use phones that seem to be located underwater. It's all wasted time.
And I agree, forget the voicemail, just send me an email.
Tags: voice mail | telephony | voice mail
Seems fashionable to dish "old" newspapers as an ongoing enterprise. One of the latest came just last week when New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell, on a panel as part of the celebration of Slate's 10th anniversary bash, said newspapers were a lot like airlines:
"The airline itself never makes any money, but everyone else connected with flying makes tons of money."
I hadn't heard the airline compassion to newspapers before and I don't think it flies even if we have baggage. It is true that for the most part content from traditional media stokes the fires of the blogsphere.
Tags: Newspapers | Media | Advertising
Marsha Mercer, Media General's Washington Bureau chief, has a nice piece on a "mug quest" to one of the places I grew up in -- and like to return to often.
Apparently, it drew her back, too, for it wasn't her first trip. She says she detoured to Seagrove, NC, while on a work assignment. She captures the flavor of the rural town and tells its story in visits with several area potters (buying pottery in Seagrove is more like visiting relatives and taking something home than shopping at the mall), including Jugtown, Turn and Burn and Dirtworks.
Tags: Pottery | Travel | North Carolina
Eric Thomas, who created the L-Soft listserver software that's called LISTSERV, noted on the LISTSERV list owners' forum that today is the software's 20th anniversary and his 40th birthday. A history of the ubiquitous software is here.
If you subscribe to many mailing lists, you're probalby a LISTSERV user. The stuff runs like a tank!
Happy birthday to both. And thanks Eric for developing LISTSERV.
Dave Morgan of Tacoda tells newspapers to wake up:
. . two things that most newspaper companies lack these days, and if they don't get them fast, they are most certainly dead--a vision and a plan for their own future.
-- Dave Morgan in Online Spin
Tags: Newspapers | New Media | Media
The number one thing that newspapers have is that a newspaper throws away more content in a day than Yahoo makes in a year.
-- Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, a Chicago-based media buying firm
Riegsecker was speaking Tuesday at the Newspaper Association of America conference for newspaper investors. The quote was in a story in Online Media Daily from MediaPost Communications
His point was the biggest advantage newspaper Web sites have over competitors like portal sites is a large amount of quality content that advertisers want to be placed alongside, the article said.
Another notable comment in the story was that Tribune Co. said interactive revenues will be $225 million or 6 percent of publishing revenues this year and will be 12 to 15 percent within four years.
Tags: Newspapers | New Media | Advertising
The interactive arm of E.W. Scripps' newspaper division (which is housed here in Knoxville) is experimenting with a new band-and-bar scene site called knoxville520.
In my internal shorthand, I call it an "Innosite," a play on the name of the consulting firm Scripps has been working with, Innosight, LLC.
It's an interesting experiment in trying to innovate to serve a much-needed market niche locally; see what you think. Congrats to Sara Schwabe, Jay Small, Rich Lacy and all the folks at Northshore working on the project.
Tags: Food and Drink | Web | Entertainment
I think the new Netscape (beta.netscape.com for now) is a good move for the portal site owned by AOL.
It's combination of user-submitted story links and human editors playing the good stuff on section fronts is effective to me. It an interesting model for newspaper and other traditional media news sites to study because it plays to our greatest strength -- organizing information -- while at the same time leveraging the collective interests of users. For me at least, it's a lot more coherent than Digg. And the angst from the Digg.com faithful about the new Netscape site is a bit misplaced. The Netscape developers borrowed some Digg-like features, but the Netscape site is no mere knock-off.
Tags: Journalist | Tom Chester | Newspapers | Knoxville | SPJ | Media
One of the finest journalists in the business was honored Saturday night at the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists' Front Page Follies.
Tom Chester, a co-worker at the Knoxville News Sentinel and deputy managing editor, is passionate about his job, is exceptionally good at it and thrives on the breaking story. Being the honoree at the Follies, an annual event that raises money for a journalism scholarship, is well-deserved. (On right is a cell phone shot of Tom before the dinner began at the Knoxville Convention Center.)
Colleague Michael Silence has a posting here. And here's an article from the local SPJ chapter's newsletter.
Tags: Newspapers | Media | Advertising
Peter Krasilovksy, Jay Small, and Steve Yelvington had some thoughtful comments late this week about when online ad revenues will intersect with print ad revenues.
Whether it's five years, 10, 12 or more, it's interesting that people are beginning to stake out a date instead of just "sometime in the future" and "someday."
Tags: Entrepreneurship | Brands
Sometimes I say it’s good to be a dumb blond.
-- Sharelle Klaus of Dry Soda in an interview with Gregory Galant.
Klaus was talking about how not knowing the rules allowed her to successfully break a lot of rules in launching her luxury soda company Dry Soda that has flavors kumquat, lemon grass, lavender, and rhubarb.
In less than a year, she's creating a splash in a essentially a new food and beverage category: premium sodas.
Definitely, not a dumb blond.
Wow this site, Stoned.com, is using Lauren's photo with no credit to her or The Knoxville News Sentinel.
It's one thing to just steal our photo, but not even give us credit for it. Whew.
Tags: Bonnaroo | Outdoor Festivals
The KnoxNews online team is gearing up for complete and innovative -- and even off-the-wall -- coverage of this weekend's Bonnaroo festival led by audacious Lauren Spuhler, the online producer who will be reporting from the scene. Check it out.
We will have (and already have posted) some lively, fun and interesting content.
The question I have is even with the mostly sunny forecast, will the Manchester farm yet again become a sea of mud?
Tags: Photos | Palm Beach
Here's a link to my vacation photos.
Tags: Newspapers | New Media | Web Design | Scripps
There should be a bit of well-deserved buzz today about the redesign of another Scripps paper Web site, The Evansville Courier-Press.
Lost Remote has already said: "Give them this - it's unlike any newspaper-based site you've probably seen." Postings have already begun on the Online News list.
Tags: Video | Media | Newspapers
InlandPress.org mentioned our RandomThis video feature here in a June, 5, 2006 article.
It includes some tips for newsroom video training from the folks at Florida Today.
Our son Eric and I went parasailing on Thursday. It was remarkably quiet up 500 feet or so and the ocean is very clear.
Tags: Photo | Palm Beach | Vacation
One of a series of photos I took of sunrise on Wednesday while on vacation on Singer Island in the Palm Beach, Fl., area.
Tags: Photo | Palm Beach | Vacation
We went on a fishing charter during vacation and Mark caught a fish, a Bontia that weighted maybe 12 pounds.
I broke a reel and several got away when they went under the boat and cut the line. I did a catch a couple, but there are no photos. Only Mark has any evidence we caught anything! We released our catches.
Tags: Music | Rap | Celebrity Sightings | vanilla Ice
We were eating breakfast Sunday morning in the Popeye’s in Concourse B of the Atlanta airport when all of a sudden people started noticing that Rob Van Winkle was sitting at the counter eating breakfast as well.
It wasn’t a big mob – it wasn’t a “mob” at all -- but people started asking him for his autograph (some seemed to be asking who he was after they got it), there were cell phone camera photos, and one large, gray-haired lady that got also seemed to the need to call someone while she was getting an autograph.
Tags: New Media | Online Advertising | Newspapers | Marketing
The results of a study done on 10 newspaper sites late last year, including the KnoxNews.com site I work on, are beginning to come out.
The study was done for the Newspaper Association of America by MORI Research. I haven't seen the local site data and analysis, but the national overview is interesting (a Powerpoint presentation is here).
Here's some takeaways on newspaper site heavy users the NAA's Melinda Gipson noted in a Presstime magazine piece:
Tags: NASCAR | East Carolina | ECU
A little late on this one, but as an East Carolina alum it's nice to see former ECU linebacker Jeff Kerr is doing well in NASCAR
He is jackman for Martin Truex's Nextel Cup team. At the pit crew competition in Charlotte in mid-May, he won the jackman competition and the team was the surprise winner of the competition
Tags: Blogosphere | News | Media | Tagging
Scripps Howard News Service is giving it's new "for the public" Web site a higher profile.
According to the site, Scrippsnews.com has moved into the "live beta" stage. We added a link to it at the bottom of knoxnews.com yesterday, but the Web site quietly went up in February ... so quietly I hadn't seen it until yesterday.
Tags: New Media | Web Usability
A great line ....
"Unfortunately, much of the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD"
