Findings: further fragmentation

Dave Morgan at Online Spin suggests newspaper companies should break apart to focus on different services: local news, distribution, printing, and ads and marketing. (Found via the Future of Newspapers blog.)

My friend David Cohn has earlier suggested that newspapers become less “products” and more “services.” Somewhat related is a post from ReadWriteWeb that suggested that turn around to some extent. They would help people not just find information, but also help them be found, such as with advice on attracting an audience for their videos.

Findings: BBC customization, and Knight job

Via ReadWriteWeb: The BBC is testing a customizable version of its home page. You can move things around and add and delete certain types of news.

Also, the Knight Foundation is looking for an online community manager.

Findings: Crowd funds for open-source

Via Read/Write Web: Cofundos.org open-sources open-source software. Micropledge is similar.

These could affect my Knight grant proposal for a mass tech collaboration for the news industry.

Findings: to whom to pass the torch

From Hal Crowther at the Independent Weekly, via Philip Meyer:

“But the key point of understanding is that while the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not. The evolution from Gutenberg to Gates may be irreversible, but as new media replace old ones there’s no official passing of the torch of responsibility, no automatic transfer of the sacred trust the First Amendment placed upon the free press and its proprietors. In fact the handoff, such as it is, has been fumbled very badly. As newspapers are eviscerated, marginalized and abandoned, they leave a vacuum that nothing and no one is prepared to fill—a crisis on its way to becoming a tragedy. When railroads and riverboats began to go the way of the passenger pigeon, no one was harmed except the workforce and a few big investors who had failed to diversify. If professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic.”

Read/Write Web gives an example of who could inherit the torch. Josh Catone writes that stories by the Fake Steve Jobs were spread through a number of blogs as if they were real.

Findings: appointment ads, and Twine

Via the Bivings Report: A more sophisticated, and more useful, ad.

An ad on Yahoo e-mail for a a TV show “gave me the ability to add the show times of the show’s entire first season to my Yahoo! calendar with a button at the very bottom, which means that I can set up reminders of each episode.”

This kind of ad could be great at newspaper site. Or maybe the same function could be added to the news matter. We do have a lot of dated information.

From Read/Write Web: I only glanced at this info about Twine, from Radar Networks, but it seems like it has a lot of potential for, or competition for, news operations.

It’s described as “aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems - but its defining feature is that it’s built with Semantic Web technologies.” And ” ‘knowledge networking’ — i.e. it aims to connect people with each ‘for a purpose’.”

Findings: E-Paper, BBC, etc.

Via Read/Write Web: The BBC plans a streaming version of its online video player. The Beeb also made a deal with a wi-fi hotspot vendor for free access to its site.

Via e-mail from the Media Giraffe Project: video on “The State of Citizen Journalism,” the opening session of Journalism That Matters — The DC Sessions.

Via Slashdot: the first in a series of interviews about e-paper. Nick Sheridon worked on e-paper at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, and he says Xerox flopped with innovation because it had little vision past its core business.

“Much has been written about the incredible myopia of Xerox executives of the time,” Sheridon said, ”so I won’t go into that except to say that there were numerous other opportunities to enormously expand Xerox’s business that were similarly fumbled. Xerox had enough money to create an incredible research lab with top-notch people, but Xerox management could not shake off the copier mentality.”

Findings: venture capital, and rewarding ideas

Via Romenesko: Gatehouse is offering $1 million to employees with ideas that will make the company $50 million.

Via Read/Write Web: Paul Graham of YCombinator, among others, about how the venture capital industry needs to adapt to lower barriers of entry.

Graham says about new businesses, “Now the only threshold is courage.”

Findings

At Read/Write Web: How to Create a Web App, second in a series aout starting a Web company. This follows How to Bootstrap Your Startup. These are just about one model, sending the initial work overseas, but some of these instructions would likely apply in other circumstances.

Linked from RWW: The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, by venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki.