Want to read all about it online? It may cost you With their advertising revenue drying up, newspaper publishers spent much of the spring and summer debating whether to cut off free online access to some of the material they run in their shrinking print editions.
Tracking the life and death of news As more and more news appears on the Internet as well as in print, it becomes possible to map the global flow of news by observing it online. Using this strategy, Cornell computer scientists have managed to track and analyse the "news cycle" -- the way stories rise and fall in popularity.
The digital revolution threatens the quality and commercial viability of British journalism, according to a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The report What's Happening to Our News?, launched today at the Oxford Media Convention at the Said Business School, says advertisers are deserting newspapers and television news programmes for the web, draining resources away from newsgathering. Quality is also threatened by the arrival of what is termed the 'clickstream': some editors admit they consult web data during the day and channel greater resources to the stories that are likely to attract more hits and therefore more advertising. To improve the visibility of digital news content, particularly on search engines, publishers are altering the tone and focus of news, for example by linking to celebrities or using emotive language, the report says.
KickYouTube: Get Any Youtube Video on Your Computer Get any YouTube video on your computer with KickYouTube without the need to install aything or going to another site first. It works directly from Youtube. KickYouTube lets you download YouTube videos in an amazingly easy way, all you need to do is to insert the word "kick" inside the URL of any YouTube video and hit "Enter". Add it right after the "http://www." part.
Why would anybody want to blog under a pseudonym? There are certainly ways to violate trust while blogging under a pseudonym, but people blogging under their real names can break trust with their readers, too. Trust is a tricky issue, on both the giving and receiving side. There's no guarantee if you're blogging under a pseudonym that your real-life identity will stay secret. Technology makes the leg-work to out someone do-able (and sometimes bloggers themselves provide all too many of the necessary clues). However, I doubt that being outed is inevitable. Read more
Videos Removed for Copyright Complaint YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.
YouTube now offers some videos in multiple resolutions. If you're watching a multiformat video on the YouTube site itself, you can call up different resolutions by adding a format code to the end of the URL. Adding "&fmt=6" bumps the resolution from 320x240 to 448x336 and doubles the audio sample rate from 22.05 to 44.1kHz. And adding "&fmt=18" (iPod mode) raises it to 480x360 with stereo sound. This mode also uses h.264 encoding for better video quality.
YouTube Insight, is a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. YouTube uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time.