NYT joins Mozilla and Knight Foundation to open innovation in news

The New York Times and three other leading global news organizations are joining “Knight-Mozilla OpenNews,” a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news. The announcement will be made at SXSW on Saturday, alongside a series of exhibits showcasing how Mozilla and other open source projects are leading innovation in news, in areas like real-time visualizations, augmented video, data-journalism and HTML5 web tools. Read more

The AP Unveils Its First New Logo In 30 Years

The Associated Press is getting a makeover with a new website and its first new logo in 30 years… Read more

The 100 Most Influential Arabs on Twitter

Twitter is one of the hottest social networks around, a place where you go to engage with thought leaders, top officials and celebrities. I once read that “Facebook is for people you went to school with. Twitter is for people you wish you went to school with.” Read more

Expo Notes: iFlashDrive USB drive works on both iPad and Mac

When Wi-Fi’s not available, it’d be nice if there were a simple and easy way to share files between your iPad and Mac without using a physical connection between the two… Read more

THE IECONOMY: How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Apple once bragged that its products were made in America. But it has since shifted its immense manufacturing work overseas, posing questions about what corporate America owes Americans… Read more

Project Argo is a collection of tools and best practices for building topic-focused sites in WordPress

On this site you’ll find tools and best practices developed by our team of bloggers, editors and technologists over more than a year of daily, full-time blogging on twelve websites… Read more

Nick Kristof On Journalism In A Digital World And The Age Of Activism

Nicholas Kristof has been writing for The New York Times for more than a quarter century and has appeared on that paper’s op-ed page since 2001, often penning articles about the struggles of people in distant parts of the world… Read more

Harvard’s Nieman Foundation Offers E-book on “Writing the Book”

Dovetailing nicely with our story today about a publisher which re-puroposes journalists’ blogs into books, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University has published a free report entitled “Writing the Book” (PDF download), which offers more than 30 essays that examine different aspects of e-publishing… Read more

Inside The Atlantic: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First’

The Atlantic’s James Bennet, Scott Havens, Bob Cohn and Justin Smith. Photo courtesy of Richard A. Bloom.

With consecutive quarterly growth in both print and digital advertising sales, The Atlantic has emerged as a vanguard in an industry harassed by declining ad revenues and falling circulations. And the credit, its executives say, belongs to the “digital first” strategy it embraced four years ago… Read more

BITS BLOG: With iPad Boost, Apple Set to Become Top PC Vendor

Is the iPad a PC?

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive officer, has said, in no uncertain terms, that it is. The late Steven P. Jobs said no, the iPad is part of the “post-PC era.”

What’s funny is that if you take Mr. Ballmer’s position and lump the iPad in with traditional computers, Apple looks stronger in the PC market than it has in decades. A new report from the British research firm Canalys predicts Apple will become the No. 1 PC maker in the world in the second half of next year, when iPad sales are included as part of the equation, bumping Hewlett Packard from the top spot… Read more

ADVERTISING: Redefining Public Relations in the Age of Social Media

THE public relations industry has decided that it may be a good time for, well, a public relations initiative. The industry’s largest organization, the Public Relations Society of America, is embarking on an effort to develop a better definition of “public relations,” one more appropriate for the 21st century. The effort, to begin on Monday, will solicit suggestions from the public along with public relations professionals, academics and students.

The effort, of course, has a catchy name, Public Relations Defined, and a logo, too, that proclaims its goal: “A modern definition for the new era of public relations.” The effort is being spurred by the profound changes in public relations since the last time the organization updated its definition, in 1982… Read more

Twitterology: A New Science?

DENIZENS of the Twitter-verse, please be advised: Whether you are a Libyan celebrating the demise of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a New Zealand office worker sleepily starting your day or a California teenager trying out the latest slang, your words are being analyzed.Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language data to analyze… Read more

Being Handcuffed? Press Send

There is a strong technological strain running through Occupy Wall Street, and software developers have been gathering at events in several cities to develop such tools for the demonstrators. One mobile app being developed, Shouty, would allow people to use their phones as radios, amplifying the human microphone at meetings in Zuccotti Park.But the app that has gained the most attention is called I’m Getting Arrested. It allows users to write a message and identify recipients — friends, family, a lawyer — in advance. Then, if they are about to be taken into custody, they can push a button to send a text message blast. Its developer, Jason Van Anden, created it in two days after an acquaintance narrowly avoided an arrest at a demonstration several weeks ago… Read more

PRACTICAL TRAVELER: Personalizing Your Hotel Search

SEARCHING for a hotel online has long been limited to plugging in your travel dates and destination and then sifting through star ratings and prices. But there are other factors involved. Is the hotel in a convenient location? Is it child friendly? Will the room have a view of a brick wall or the sea? Read more

Barriers to Failure

I’ve always been a big fan of failure. I think journalism should hold a “fail camp” (inspired by Ethan Zuckerman). When I restarted the blog carnival, a site that I’ve organized where bloggers can convene to all write about the same topic, I dedicated a month toward failure. I’m working on a new project (details to come soon, promise) and I think/hope failure will be a big part of it… Read more

GADGETWISE BLOG: 7 Ways to Automate Your Life With ifttt

Ever wish you could get a text message every time someone tagged you in a Facebook photo? Or that you could record notes to yourself that are transcribed and sent to your e-mail account? A nifty new Web service called ifttt (pronounced “lift” but minus the l) offers a way to automate tasks involving a bevy of services like Instagram, Craiglist, Dropbox and Instapaper, among others… Read more

All the News You Want, When You Want It

Each morning, bleary-eyed, I retrieve the newspaper, glance at the headlines and toss it on the coffee table to read later.I know I shouldn’t admit to that — in a newspaper — but I’m an avid newshound. I want to know what’s happening right now, so I reach for the iPad instead and dive into the news of the day.At first, that meant visiting a handful of Web sites on Safari, Apple’s Web browser that comes installed on the iPad. It hit the usual suspects — my local paper, the Weather Channel, ESPN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN — before checking … Read more

BITS BLOG: A Web Tool That Lets You Automate the Internet

The phrase “if this, then that” is a bit of programming-speak: you tell the computer that if this happens, it should perform this action. Now, a simple new Web service called ifttt — pronounced like “lift” without the l — aims to take that concept to the mainstream. It provides a way for people to easily automate interactions between Web services, like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist and Tumblr … Read more

How Digital Magazines are Transforming the Old Media World

Newspapers have gone the way of the stone tablet. As a former newspaper journalist, I say good riddance. Technology moves on. News editors may cry themselves to sleep at night as they contemplate new careers in the car sales industry, but what’s done is done. The world has changed, thanks to the vast amount of interactive content available on digital magazines. Think about it. With an Android Magazine, I can hold the entire Web, literally, in the palm of my hand, and read practically anything, from the New York Times to out of print Nancy Drew murder mysteries in Google’s library…. Read more

How Digital Subscriptions Are Altering Our Relationships with Media

A recent article in Filmmaker Magazine covered Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) and Factory 25’s partnership to distribute Swanberg’s films on an annual subscription basis. For $99.95, subscribers receive a DVD and other related materials each quarter. According … >Read more

The University of Wherever

FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and “distributed” learning. They imagine a business model in which online… Read more

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

Steve Jobs is dead. One big question is whether the unbelievably innovative culture he forged will live. Jobs was not a great human being, but he was a great, transformative, and historical figure. Many books were dashed off describing what a tyrannical person Jobs could be… Read more

Google Changes Search Algorithm, Trying to Make Results More Timely

Acknowledging that some searches were giving people stale results, Google revised its methods on Thursday to make the answers timelier. It is one of the biggest tweaks to Google’s search algorithm, affecting about 35 percent of all searches.The new algorithm is a recognition that Google, whose dominance depends on providing the most useful results, is being increasingly challenged by services like Twitter and Facebook, which have trained people to expect constant updates with seconds-old news… Read more

Infographic Reveals What Makes An Effective Social Video Campaign…And What Doesn’t

These days, as online video campaigns are becoming more and more popular for advertising, everyone wants to go viral. But what works and what doesn’t? Social video platform Jun Group has just released a new infographic that provides some insight into the emerging trends and usage patterns n social video. Some of the findings may surprise you.Last month I had the opportunity to chat with Jun Group CEO and founder Mitchell Reichgut about viral video and social video. Reichgut sees social video, or providing viewers with rewards like virtual currency for watching and sharing videos via Facebook and other social channels, as one of the keys to a successful online video advertising campaign…Read more

Disney and YouTube Make a Video Deal

LOS ANGELES — Two powerful media companies, the Walt Disney Company and YouTube, are betting that a new partnership will help them surmount separate but equally worrisome hurdles as they each strive for greater Web dominance.The deal, set to be announced on Monday, is small on its surface: Disney Interactive Media and YouTube, a division of Google, will spend a combined $10 million to $15 million on original video series; those shorts will be produced by Disney and distributed on a co-branded channel on Disney.com and YouTube. The channel will also include amateur video culled from the torrent uploaded to YouTube daily… Read more