What caught my attention was the way this New York Times story began: “I’m a reporter and I write about the Internet.” And its author, Jenna Wortham, goes on to write in some detail about staying informed without drowning in data. (I will write about my favourite tool towards the end of this post).
There are [...]

OJR had an article recently on an eyetracking study involving young people; here I will touch upon some points that I thought were interesting. The study had to do with a comparison of San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times sites.
An interesting finding was that sidebar and related story material boxes drew the attention [...]

A new set of accessibility guidelines, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, have been brought out by the W3C, the global web standards defining body. While sites in some countries are mandatorily required to meet accessibility norms under certain circumstances, there are plenty of good reasons for news sites to try to meet these, [...]

I don’t know if this is just one great toy or a fascinating way of presenting news. Its a browser plugin that converts screen content into one long 3D image wall for sites that are tailored to work with it. And when you enable it on a news site what you get is a [...]

“Once we know what people are searching for should we write stories to meet that demand? Will search engines end up dictating our news agenda as well as the way we format our stories? If we write stories simply to chase traffic, where do we find the resources to write the specialist stories, the ones [...]

W3C, the organisation that defines web standards, has come up with a useful ‘mobile OK checker’ that reveals whether a site is mobile friendly. It is pretty easy to use; one has to enter the URL and just hit the check button. And the checker then generates its evaluation of the page. You don’t have [...]

Links to exertnal sites are being offered beneath each story.
The New York Times has made a bold, maybe daring, move to link up news stories from other sites to its stories on the home page. Some news sites do provide links to news from third party sources on individual story pages but to do it [...]

Mathematical models for the prediction of website user behaviour can prove useful to news sites too. Take this recent example of HP Labs researchers publishing a paper on predicting the popularity of online content. Their study dealt with content on Digg and YouTube, and came up with different ways of predicting how popular submissions were [...]

Much has been written about how Twitter added a new and rich dimension to tracking and breaking news on the Internet during the terror attacks in Mumbai, including this recent post in a Los Angeles Times blog.
It quoted the Twitter co-founder Biz Stone as saying that he was “fairly comfortable saying that this is the [...]