Zoo Weekly reaches new heights of good taste. An eagle-eyed Crikey reader sent us this delightful snippet from Zoo Weekly’s special 3-D spread. It doesn’t feature boobs, just references to September 11 …
The caption reads: “9/11. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … er, no it’s two planes actually.”
For those that can’t read the speech bubble with their 3-D glasses, it reads: “Man, real estate is really dropping around here.” Boom boom tish.
Headline of the day, care of NT News:
Palin to get the Oprah treatment. Sarah Palin on Oprah Winfrey? You betcha. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is headed for the Oprah Winfrey show next month. Harpo productions proudly announced this morning that this will not only be the “very first time” the two women will meet but that this marks Palin’s “first interview to discuss her upcoming book”. — Christian Science Monitor
A writing revolution Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a Tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter):
Google’s server mass nears its moniker. Google never says how many servers are running in its data centres. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. — Data Center Knowledge
Twitter gets grapey. Twitter is launching its own wine label. And that took only 41 characters. Now for the story behind it all. In an effort to help make a positive impact, Twitter says, they’ve teamed with San Francisco-based non-profit Room to Read, which helps brings libraries and literacy to the world’s poorest countries. Each case of Twitter wine sold will supply books and education to children in need. — Lost at E Minor
How do we fund the modern newsroom? The current advertising model won’t continue to support so-called accountability journalism. “Some of the advertising is going to come back as the economy does, but I think we all know that much of what has taken place is secular and not cyclical,” (Leonard) Downie said in a phone call on Friday. “And the internet philosophers who suggest that individuals posting on the web are going to replace what newsrooms have been doing are not being realistic. We have to find new ways to maintain professional news-gathering capacity.” — The New York Times
Online advertising not working for you? Blame the creative. It’s bad creative that makes online advertising ineffective, so stop obsessing over targeting and placements, according to a study from online ad research group Dynamic Logic. After analysing the highest and lowest performers from its database of more than 170,000 online ads, the Millward Brown company determined that creative factors such as persistent branding, strong calls to action and even human faces — and not super-targeted or high-profile ad placements — make for better ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent. — AdAge
Washington Post redesign. The Washington Post is introducing a larger typeface and more graphics in its bid to make the print edition easier to read and navigate. The newspaper also is adding star ratings to movie reviews, new Local Living and Health & Science sections and another page of opinion. — Yahoo news
Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009. Since 2004, our annual study has followed the growth and trends in the blogosphere. For 2009, we took a deeper dive into the entire blogosphere, with a focus on professional bloggers. This year’s topics include: professional blogging activities, brands in the blogosphere, monetisation, Twitter and micro-blogging and bloggers’ impact on US and world events. — Technorati
The colourful promises of electronic paper. E-Ink has yet to deliver on its promise of colour displays that retain the fine resolution of its monochrome ones, never mind video. So could other e-paper displays achieve good-quality colour and video while also maintaining the low energy demands and high resolution of monochrome electrophoretic displays? — New Scientist
It wasn’t just NT News with the tacky headline. ABC News yesterday had Stiff penalty for erectile drug importer. Not happy.
Re: “Funding the Modern Newsroom” – perhaps it is time to look back to the early days of IT (I’m talking BW, or ‘Before Windows’ in the early 1990s) when open source ruled and hackers were Internet Buskers. Some of the most widely used software applications evolved from wide-eyed geeks whipping off a program and making it available on Usenet groups for a voluntary donation (if you like this program send me ten dollars … – if you can afford it). Sure, you don’t become a multinational corporation, but you make a living and the internet becomes an extremely efficient medium. In fact ‘Sausage software’ web page editor started off this way – the guy (can’t remember his name now) was touted to be potentially ‘Australia’s Bill Gates’ – maybe that is when a University student, suddenly making $3000 a week from donations, went bottom up – when he was snaffled up by the business community.
What I am suggesting is that this might not be such a bad model for ‘Internet journalism’ (maybe with a few ads for backup and keeping the site alive … )
Hey … busking ain’t so bad – all the best artists have done it at some time in their lives. Isn’t that what ‘market forces’ are *really* about ? What the world needs now is a bit of ‘frictionless socialism’ 🙂