Even a bad news aggregator is better than none at all
In the face of defeat, America's news outlets continue to find ways to innovate. Mind you, they aren't ground-breaking innovations. But they're innovations none-the-less.
This week online news magazine Slate launched a new aggregator called Slatest. It's not great, but at least it's something. I just wish I could say the same for British media.
Is RSS dead?
Yesterday, ZDNet's Sam Diaz called RSS a "Web 1.0 tool" and voiced the opinion that "there are better ways now". He noted a Forrester Research study showing that only 9% of adults in the US use an RSS reader monthly -- a 2% drop from 2008.
Diaz's comments were in response to a Google blog post announcing the release of the second annual Google Reader Power Readers, a collection of the sites various influential individuals call their favorites.
Q&A: Broadersheet.com CEO Peter Clark
Earlier today I wrote about whether a news aggregator could be a success in the UK. Prospects are not good, and even Briton Nick Denton, founder of Gawker.com, says he wouldn't dare do it.
However, despite the pessimism, there exists an interest in giving it a try. The first major entrant into the UK news aggregation scene looks to be Cambridge-based Broadersheet.com.
Aggregation in the UK: Can it work?
Americans and the British are quite similar, but also quite different. Jokes that make Americans laugh may not make a British person laugh; food that a Brit might love could repulse an American; and so on. It seems the way the two nations consume news online is different, too.
Mobile site review: Newsnow.co.uk
News aggregator Newsnow has recently released a version of its website optimised for mobile users.
Newsnow uses a wide range of sources, I find it useful for keeping up with football news for instance, so how well has it translated to mobile?
Crowdsourcing with Amazon Mechanical Turk
There are some tasks that computers and software programs just can't perform. Sometimes, these tasks are tedious or the 'resources' required to complete them require more man-power than you have.
To link or not to link?
Recently, Tim O'Reilly asked "Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?"
In his post, he observed that many online properties are linking to themselves more than they're linking out, oftentimes by building aggregators of some form or another to do so.
Reputation monitoring on the cheap
Online reputation monitoring is a growing market and there are a number of companies offering such solutions.
Yet some are overkill for most businesses and many firms simply can't justify the costs.
Yahoo promises big things with APT
2008 has not been a good year for Yahoo. Microsoft's failed acquisition of the company was a royal mess and led to a showdown with shareholders.
CEO Jerry Yang and other board members aren't very popular. And in what essentially amounts to an admission that it simply can't compete in certain areas, Yahoo is planning to turn over part of its search advertising business to Google.
BusinessWeek's Business Exchange: putting Web 2.0 in its proper place
In a post more than a year ago, I discussed the commoditization of social networks.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
