"newspapers" entries

Four short links: 17 July 2012

Four short links: 17 July 2012

Studying Newspapers, Explaining Psychology, Pathology of Stuff, and Petite Javascript

  1. What’s Next for Newspapers?three approaches: Farm it […] Milk it […] Feed it. (via Stijn Debrouwere)
  2. Why The Fundamental Attribution Error Exists (MindHacks) — assuming causation, rather than luck or invisible effects, is how we learn.
  3. Stuff Makes Us Sad (Boston.com) — The scientists working with UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families studied the dual-income families the same way they would animal subjects. They videotaped the activities of family members, tracked their moves with position-locating devices, and documented their homes, yards, and activities with thousands of photographs. They even took saliva samples to measure stress hormones. Studying our lives with an eye to understanding and improving it: the qualified self. (Long story short, as Cory Doctorow summarized: Stuff makes us sad)
  4. chibi (GitHub) — A tiny JavaScript micro-framework.
Four short links: 16 May 2012

Four short links: 16 May 2012

Old Periodicals, Learning to Code, Substituting for Newspapers, and Charty Font

  1. Many Old Periodicals — I’m working my way through the back issues of “Thrilling Love”. Sample story, Moonmist for Mary by Dorothy Daniels, from Feb 1950. Filing clerk Mary wins the heart of her secret coworker romance AND closes the sale AND is promised stock. It’s torn from the pages of real life, I tell ya!
  2. Please Don’t Learn to Code (Jeff Atwood) — my take: everyone who is a “knowledge worker” should learn to program (who of us has not seen people wasting time with something we could automate in 10 lines of code?). It’s hard to justify an adult like Bloomberg to take the time to learn to code, because he’s already powerful and can hire other people to code. For this reason, I think kids should routinely be taught computational thinking (decomposition, pattern matching, etc.) and programming as a useful application of these skills. (via Jim Stogdill)
  3. Fungible NewsHere’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? […] The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against. (via Phil Lindsay)
  4. FF-Chartwell, a Graph-Making Font — brilliant! Font uses ligatures to show graphs. This is an elegant hack in so many ways, for example: copy and paste and you get the bare numbers! (via Chris Spurgeon)

Publishing News: The threat of censorship, from a non-government entity

PayPal is censoring, pirates are opportunities, and newspapers are doomed.

PayPal's demand on Smashwords is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Elsewhere, proposals to get publishers past piracy and a newspaper study reports grim results.

Publishing News: Amazon's Kindle Format 8 dashes hopes for EPUB3 compatibility

Amazon launches KF8, The Guardian becomes more engaging, and tablet users don't discriminate between print and digital.

Any hopes of EPUB3 becoming an across-the-board publishing format standard were dashed by Amazon's new KF8 format. Also, The Guardian launched two new features and a Pew study looked at tablet user behavior.

Publishing News: The news is free but the API will cost you

New revenue streams for news orgs, Amazon gnaws away at the publishing industry, and Kobo launches Vox.

News organizations look to commercial endeavors for unorthodox revenue. Also, Amazon continues to extend its reach into publishing and Kobo jumps on the tablet bandwagon.

Publishing News: Amazon fires up B&N and BAM

An Amazon deal starts a bookseller war, content tidbits from conferences, and the application of Wikipedia's success.

In this week’s publishing news: B&N and BAM pulled DC Comics graphic novels off the shelves in a huff. Also, interesting data points surface at book conferences, and what newspapers can learn from Wikipedia.

Publishing News: Amazon vs barrier to entry

Amazon breaks through the two-digit price point, a new map misses the mark, and readers peg newspapers as largely irrelevant.

With a $79 price point, Amazon makes ereaders mass market. Also, indie bookstores in London release a map guide (on paper?), and a Pew survey shows newspapers at the tipping point — and not in a good way.

For local news, TV is dominant but the Internet is our digital future

A Pew survey of local news sources reveals the influence of social and mobile trends, along with a generation gap.

A new Pew report on local news reveals reasons to be hopeful about digital platforms as information sources. But it's not all positive: The decline of local newspapers will leave a civic gap for local government accountability.

Publishing News: Survey says publishers continue to miss out on digital opportunities

Aptara’s latest survey is out, news organizations as ebook publishers, and a recipe site that works like Instapaper.

The Third Annual eBook Survey of Publishers was released this week. Also, news organizations continue to venture into ebook publishing, and the KeepRecipes site may be the most useful online recipe organizer yet.

Publishing News: Goodreads chases the recommendation Holy Grail

A new kind of book recommendation appears at Goodreads and HTML5 had a very big week in the media world.

Goodreads put its Discovereads purchase to good use. Also, Hearst and The Boston Globe are doubling down on HTML5.