Claims that pressure from media companies forced the temporary shutdown of the controversial Bugmenot anti-registration site are utterly false, the site’s former hosting company told ClickZ. Bugmenot lets users share user IDs & passwords and therefore bypass compulsory registration at many many…
What if the crime of Breaking & Entering into your home were illegal only if the perpetrator wore a mask? Imagine if Breaking & Entering into your home were legal if the perpetrator didn’t wear a mask. Now imagine that we’re not…
The American Press Institute’s Cyberjournalist.net picked up our item last week about the woeful circulation of newspaper digital editions. Cyberjournalist’s lead sentence, although well-intentioned, made a conclusion that we didn’t: “In case there was any doubt that digital editions of newspapers were…
Two changes to report about news trade journals: The ownership of Folio: and Circulation Management magazines has changed. Both were wholly-owned by Primedia, a company that during the Internet Boom both overgorged on dot.coms (for example, purchasing About.com for spending USD800 million)…
Between 1999 and 2003, the time Britons spent online increased by eightfold, according to a report today in netimperative. Text messaging has increased fifteen-fold. People in the UK now spend more money on mobile phones than fixed-line telephony. By contrast, the growth…
SEE AN UPDATE TO THIS POSTING Here are a few circulation figures for some U.S. newspapers’ digital editions: USA Today – 900 self-reported (0.05 percent of the total weekday print circulation of 2,154,539). The New York Times – 3,172 ABC-audited (0.28 percent…
A Mobinet report says that 49% petrcent of mobile phone users worldwide have Internet access (eMarketer has a story about it). Mobile Internet access is 80 percent in Japan, 47 percent in Europe, and 37 percent in North America. Mobinet is a…
ClickZ.com today published the first of a two-part article I’ve written about the future of paid content. During the past two years at that site, I’ve written 36 columns about free-to-fee publishing, but none until now about what I firmly think the…
I’m in Lawrence, Kansas, today through Thursday for a two-day conference in which The World Company shows how it’s operating the successful LJWorld.com newspaper site, Lawrence.com community site, and KUSports.com site. The World Company operates the newspaper, a TV station, and the…
We’re pleased to have accepted some speaking engagements during the next ten months: September 23 — at the Segon Seminari Internacional de Periodisme Digital (Second International Seminar of Digital Journalism). The event is being organized by el Grup de Periodistes Digitals and…
Here’s another typical example (click the illustration above) of Google News‘ odd choices of news sources. It’s a snapshot from about 2000 hours UTC on 3 August 2004. Google chose the Chinese government news agency Xinhua as the most relevant source of…
Nielsen//NetRatings believes that usage of the Internet from homes actually shrunk worldwide during the past year. The auditing firm estimates that 3.5 million fewer people worldwide used the Internet at home from May 2004 to June 2004. In the U.S. alone, 3.6…
The TowerGroup research consultancy in Massachusetts forecasts that U.S. micropayments revenues will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 23% from 2003 to 2009. e-Marketer today describes some of that forecast. The TowerGroup sees new microtransactive softwares and infrastructures being developed…
Anne Holland of ContentBiz alerted us to Copyscape, a site designed to show you who on the Internet might be publishing your content without your permission. Copyscape is currently in beta tests.
[UPDATE: Many of the Google’s senior engineers were attending the Search Engine World conference in San Jose, California when his posting appeared. Within ten days of this posting, Google appeared to have adjusted its news algorithm. Was that a coincidence or a…