Friday reading #11

Welcome to “Friday reading #11” - my weekly round-up of long reads and things on the intertubes I’ve found of interest over the last seven days, and which I think you might enjoy if you use them to load up your Kindle, Instapaper or Pocket app for entertainment over the weekend...

Friday reading

“Newspaper industry is running out of time to adapt to digital future” - David Carr, New York Times
“Those of us who work inside the racket like to think of our business as unique, but with underfunded pension plans, unserviceable debt and legacy manufacturing processes and union agreements, the newspaper industry looks a lot like, well, steel, autos and textiles.”
Read the full article

“On Journatic, and why journalists should listen to their hearts instead of techies” - Stuart Thomson, Edmonton Journal
Worth reading, but Anna Tarkov nails it in the comments: “Techie” and “Journalist” are not mutually exclusive, but those hybrid people are rarely put in charge of the decisions to use services like Journatic. That’s a business decision, not a technical one.
Read the full article

“Transfer of Value” - Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note
“Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashion publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo’s clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will make tens or hundred times better traffic-wise. Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world?”
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“Two guys made a web site, and this is what they got” - David Carr, NYT Media Decoder
“By putting tasty headlines on nutritious subjects — chocolate sauce on brussels sprouts, as it were — Upworthy can make the sharing impulse work on topics beyond LOLCats and fashion disasters.”
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“How the BBC is building the first social Olympic Games” - Meg Carter, Co.Create
“Comprehensive, social, interactive, personal--the BBC is promising all this and more for coverage of what it says will be ‘the first truly digital Olympic Games’ when London 2012 opens on July 27. As important, however, will be the digital and social legacy the network hopes to create.”
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“An Event Apart: On Web Typography” - Luke Wroblewski’s notes on Jason Santa Maria’s talk
“Originally, on the Web we couldn’t specify fonts. In 2008, we had 18 fonts to use. But now things are very exciting. Today fonts have exploded we have a lot of choice again. People don’t know what to do! They are warily getting into fonts because they don’t want to make bad stuff.”
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“Matt Cutts and Eric Talk About What Makes a Quality Site” - Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting
SEO truth, 2012 style.
Read the full article

“The SEO war – fighting the good fight in search” - Lana Gibson, Government Digital Service
“Think of web search logs as a repository of the planet’s needs and desires – they give a fascinating psychological insight into what people want.”
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“Talis “Refocusing” – What does this Tell Us?” - Eric J. Hoffer, AXONomics
“The Semantic Web and Linked Data are not going away. It is all just getting more usable (though there’s quite a ways to go), and the the concept of linkages does not stop at the firewall – but rather at whatever limit is set by those deciding to expose.”
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“Reading between the lines of today’s Talis Systems Linked Data Announcement” - Carl Grant
“Does this announcement mean that linked data as a business will fail or that it doesn’t make sense or that the business models surrounding it won’t work? Does it mean the people working in this area missed an important indicator? Not really. My view would be that this is simply affirmation of what I said in my blog post a year ago. Which is that it is too early in the technology life cycle of Linked Data to make money on it.”
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“Talis” - Dan Brickley
“Regardless of the business story, we ought to appreciate on a personal level all the hard work that the team (past and present) at Talis have put into popularising the ideas and technology around Linked Data.”
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Future Drama
“Taking another look at yesterday’s future” with old tech promo videos [via @tomcoates]
Visit the site

Things you might have missed...

By me on currybetdotnet this week:

• “This wretched Communications Data Bill” - Duncan Campbell at Hacks/Hackers London
• “Tight-fitting dresses and data-viz” - Anna Powell-Smith at Hacks/Hackers London
• I “Agree/Disagree” with reaction buttons in Facebook apps

And a reminder...

Forthcoming training and talks:

• 18 July: “Facebook Marketing 2012” - London
• 27/28 July: “Design Jam London #5”
• 28 August: “So you think you want to be a UXer?” - evening course, London
• 27 September: “Responsive IA” - half-day workshop, Rome
• 28/29 September: “IA in the touchscreen era” - EuroIA, Rome