links for 2011-03-28

"In the digital realm, there is infinite space, but somehow this hasn't resulted in a flowering of long-form content"

"The search function on most news websites is terrible, and mostly fails at the core task of helping people find the best stories about a topic of interest. If you doubt this, try going to your favorite news site and searching for that good story that you read there last month. Partially this is technical neglect. But at root this problem is about newsroom culture: the primary product is seen to be getting the news out, not helping people find what is there."

"Compared with the grinning [Michelin man] character that we are accustomed to, early versions depict an almost sinister figure, bespectacled and chomping permanently on a cigar. For a while, he was even known as the 'road drunkard'". I like the idea of a corporate logo being the 'road drunkard'

"Thanks Dave. So, rather than backing the design sector that your government so frequently claims to support, your big initiative to encourage hundreds of new businesses funnels commissions to an American website that systematically undermines the values of the very industry you claim to find so important."

"The reality is that most viewers/readers won't distinguish between some Brighton art student giving a poetry reading in Fortnums with an over-excited Trot throwing a dustbin through plate glass". Some interesting, and self-described on Twitter as premature, thoughts on how the weekend's various demonstrations were covered live on TV.

Interesting post from Suw about how the drive to "now" is making research of the recent past on the web deceptively hard to do. It reminded me of...

...my presentation about the "The tyranny of chronology" in news

"10.57 GMT: Hello and welcome to an article about live blogging, a discussion of a format that has been derided as murdering traditional reporting but is almost certainly the most important journalistic development of the past year. Unfortunately, it's impossible to sustain the live blog format beyond that opening conceit. Because that is the key point; live blogging is a uniquely digital format that has evolved in a way that is native to the web."