A reading list
A quasi-annotated list of some of the articles that caught my eye over the past few days:
Three once-trend-setting companies who have now lost their way: Kodak, Sony (which is making paper DVDs), and Real.
Some people like dial-up (others, like my parents live in “rural” areas without high-speed access) — I’m not one. Since switching almost five years ago, I could never go back.
It was subtle, so subtle, I didn’t even notice it happening, but like many others google.com also replaced yahoo.com as my ping site of choice.
MSN’s version of Google News is now imitating A9.com by tracking your own personal searches. Despite the tone of that last sentence, this is actually a very smart move and one that BBC News has experimented with: make the news relevant to me by tracking the stories I click. (No implementation is yet as thorough as hypergene’s 2001 idea of “amazoning the news.”) Not only that it explains why the stories are appearing in your “Daily Me” section. The only downside to this: I rarely follow the news links, prefering to scan the items to get a sense of the pulse of the news at that time.
Increase the number of Canadian shops selling online, and is it any surprise that online sales will climb?
In my years of editing and publishing personal finance articles, I could never have fathomed running one about what to do when one’s spouse is fighting in a war.
The $420-million Canada Public Safety Information Network — a massive extranet to be used by the RCMP, Correctional Services Canada, National Parole Board, Justice Department and the Canada Border Services Agency — has run in to problems, including those caused by the pesky privacy regulations.
Wired News covers the beating of a dead horse: BloggerCon’s participants raving about how blogging has affected journalism. There was no mention as to whether Google was used in the creation of the story.
A List Apart has a must-read article on controlling scope creep.
Rob Galbraith has a great article about photojournalism in today’s digital world.
Blame it on the easy availability of copy via the Web, deadline pressures, or laziness but this story of plagiarism at the Toronto Star will probably be repeated throughout the industry. I’m seeing more and more borderline stories being published every week.
Despite my personal interest in organ donation, this package is an incredible example of how to present informative content online.
On this day, one-hundred years ago, Toronto burned — if you want to help the city now, send a message: enough of not enough.