Today is: Wednesday, 10th March 2010
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Technology, Web Development and Saltwater Fly Fishing, not in that order.
Death of Newspapers – RIP Editor and Publisher
When I worked in the Atex marketing department, we lived and died by what we could get published in Editor and Publisher. The once vaunted trade journal was the place you wanted to get mentioned, the measure of your having “made it” in the print world. Those days are now gone – from E&P themselves:
Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.
An announcement, made by parent company The Nielsen Co., was made Thursday morning as staffers were informed that E&P, in both print and online, was shutting down.
The expressions of surprise and outpouring of strong support for E&P that has followed across the Web — Editor & Publisher has even hit No. 4 as a Twitter trending topic — raises the notion that the publication might yet continue in some form.
Its sad to see an industry that was once so much a part of my life now unable to even sustain a trade journal. In my youth, it was impossible to imagine a world without newspapers. Increasingly, it is becoming hard to visualize a future with them…
I could ruminate for hours on the subject, but I think the point is already made. Even the journal of the print publication industry can’t make print work and is looking for a way “continue in some form.”
Wordpress 2.8.6 Released and a 2.9 Preview
I got the notice last night that Wordpress 2.8.6 was released to fix a pair of security holes. So I hopped right into the admin console from my Iphone and in 2 minutes, it was updated. If you have a Wordpress installation, I urge you to update right away as well.
This will almost certainly be the last release prior to the much anticipated release of 2.9 which is our next major (feature related) release. Aaron Brazell had a great preview on his site yesterday, and since I’m not currently running the beta, I’ll leave the full on feature review to him. Here are the major bits to expect:
- Enhanced image handling – scaling, cropping, and thumbnail sizing on a per picture basis.
- Trash Can – this really goes back to the old notion we saw in newspaper editorial systems, delete doesn’t really delete, it just hides. This will come in handy.
- The_post_image – if you’ve ever tried to add an image to an excerpt of a post you will know why this is important.
- oEmbed – video support, which I’ve had for years using Vipers Video Tag Plugin.
- Custom Post Type – this is one of those CMS type functions. It’ll make my life easier, although honestly in the past I’ve been able to make categories do my bidding with little trouble in Wordpress CMS settings.
- Comment Meta – I have no idea what to think about this one.
- Metadata API – Another feature I’m sure I’ll use, but currently I can’t think of anything I’d use it for. I guess this is like custom fields for everything, not just limited to posts.
- Theme System Modification – this will allow developers to work on one theme, while real users look at another. This has been needed for some time.
- Rel=Canonical Optimization – seems like a little thing, but it will help a lot with SEO.
Check out the preview at Technosailor.com for the full scoop.
Tags: Automattic, Wordpress
A Few Coherent Thoughts on Murdoch Blocking Google
Yesterday Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp, said that he was going to have Google blocked from all New Corp. websites. That means something
From EditorandPublisher.com:
The Chairman of News Corp. said in an interview with Sky News Australia (reported here in MediaWeek U.K.) that once the newspapers get their paywalls, News Corp. plans to pull its content from the likes of Google and others.
Murdoch said: “We’d rather have fewer people come to the Web site and pay. Consumers shouldn’t have had free news all the time — I think we’ve been asleep. It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content. No news Web sites anywhere in the world are making large amounts of money.”
Immediately the web went all a flutter, myself included, predicting that that Murdoch would rue the day. Joe Mandese at Mediapost.com noted:
According to an analysis of Google-generated traffic released late Monday by Experian’s Hitwise service, Google and Google News currently account for more than 25% of the daily traffic to the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com site.
That’s an awful lot of traffic to put at risk. Now the other side of the coin is that Murdoch knows that showing tons of traffic low cost network ads begging them to Punch the Monkey or telling them they just won a lottery is the absolute path of least resistence. You go there when you have nothing else to possibly do… (more…)
A few Wordpress sites you might not have seen…
I’ve had a few launches recently and a few of them are worth mentioning.
The Afternic Domainer’s Advantage – this is a knowledge center for use by Domainers, which is fully integrated with the AfternicDLS.com site. For those who aren’t aware, Afternic is the world’s largest premium domain marketplace with over three million domains available for sale. The Domainer’s Advantage site is a fairly standard Wordpress installation that makes use of several fairly standard plugins. Special features:
- Integrated news feed of domain news
- Slide Share integration
- Homepage featured content block
- Single sign on integration with Afternic
- Full design integration with the parent site
- Design by Mark Hentschel – a real design rock star.
Blog.Photo.Net – photo.net is a site for serious photographers to connect with other photographers, explore photo galleries, discuss photography, share and critique photos, and learn about photography. The blog is maintained by Josh Root, the community director for the site, and is used to provide a taste of the vast content available around the site as well as to post industry news, events, etc.
- Full design integration with the photo.net site
- Standard Wordpress installation
- Twitter feed
Has the Public Library Killed Book Publishers?
As I was in the local public library picking up a little something to read on Saturday, I realized there was an interesting parallel between that and Internet file sharing.
What does the library do after all; it loans books for free to people. The same books which both publishers and authors base their entire commercial livelihood. Thus if the picture the music industry draws of the dire future for music if file sharing is allowed continue were really a concern, every book publisher and author in the country would have gone bankrupt long ago.
Instead, the public library is a place where publishers want their books to be. They realize that by having them there, people will read them, then talk about them, thus causing other people to want to read them. And some of those folks will actually buy the book…or even people who read the book at the library may decide they want to own a copy (yes, I have done this…). Why would the recording industry or movie industry expect anything different for them?
In fact, many libraries also carry dvds of the same albums and movie which the recording industry is trying to protect, and loan them, for free…
Let’s here what you have to say on the issue…comment away!
Newspaper Tipping Point: Current Events
My 11 yo daughter called me while I was driving home last night, to ask me to pick up a newspaper so she could start her weekly current events assignment for school. Without thinking, I told her “you don’t want a newspaper for that, you need to get the information of the web where it’s up to date.”
Now I’ve worked with newspapers on and off since my days atthe University of Vermont, and I worked for Atex where we engineered newspaper publishing software for close to a decade. My grandfather was a linotype operator. For me to tell her that the print edition of newspapers weren’t the place to go for current events was a huge step.
The revelation: the print edition is all old news, yesterday’s news, in fact.
However, it was also particially incorrect. She’s certainly be getting newspaper content for her current events brief. It just won’t be from the print edition.
Strangely enough, I realized as I drove to the office today that the best way for her to put together her little weekly assignment would be to do the whole thing electronically. That way she could link back to the original content, using only a summary so as not to violate copyright and run afoul of the AP and their army of revenue enhancement lawyers. Now that would truly be a skill that all kids should be learning in school today.
So there it is, the point at which I realize I have no use save bird cage liner for the print edition…it is now as useful as would be one of those old linotype machines that were once state of the art in type setting.
22 Feb 10 | 



Look at the fiasco a few weeks back when Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, and EIC of Wired Magazine









