Online News Squared ™

Squared’s been largely MIA for a few weeks with too many plates spinning; trying to get back in the groove.

• AllTop, The “Online Magazine Rack”

News from Guy Kawasaki about alltop.com: “We announced a website that is a collection of “single-page aggregations” organized by topics such as Fashion, Celebrities, Sports, Gaming, Macintosh, Science, Green, and Autos. . . . Here people can find odd news from dozens of sites, side-by-side, at a glance–think of it as an “online magazine rack.”

Squared delighted to be included, here.

• Dusting Off the Archive for the Web (NYT)

  NYT, which last Fall knocked the pay wall from most of its archives, says “archives now represent 10 percent of the page views on NYTimes.com.”

• CBS to bloggers: Install our widgets, and we’ll split the profits (CNET)
  

  “CBS Television Stations has launched a new program to get its local news headlines onto blogs and social-media sites . . . It’s a way for participating region-focused blogs to pull in extra cash by embedding CBS news widgets on their sites and splitting the ad revenue.”

• Spanish-Language Newspapers Combining Their Websites (AdAge)

  “ImpreMedia Pulls Together Its Chain’s Grab-Bag of Online Offerings Into a Single Platform.”

• A Map To Find Your Online Staff? (Will Hartnett)

  Funny map. But Palm Beach Post print newsroom folks really don’t need a map to find the online staff in 2008, do they? It’s just a joke? Right?

• A Moratlity Tale From The ‘Scorecard’ Database (Poynter)

  “No database was or is easy enough for the public to make much use of by themselves. What’s really needed is for good journalists to make heavy and productive use of existing data resources. Good journalists, good programmers, and good funders.”

• Court Upholds Tossing Craigslist Lawsuit (AP)

  “Craigslist should not be held liable for discriminatory housing ads posted on the popular Web site, federal appeals court ruled Friday. . . .It is also a triumph for Internet sites that depend on user-generated content . . .”

• There is no transition for newspapers, just constant, never ending change (Howard Owens)

  “If there was a transition, the inflection point passed four or five years ago. We can’t keep calling it a transition hoping someday soon all this turbulance will end. It won’t. The fundamentals of the media business are altered radically. . .”

• An easy guide to search engine optimization for blogs (Journalistopia)

  “If you’re wanting to gain a better understanding of how to optimize blogs for search engines (or what some, like myself, like to call “getting some Google Juice”), look no further than SEOBook’s free Blogger’s Guide to SEO.”

• The State of the News Media 2008 (Project for Excellence in Journalism)

  “More significant, as a category, news Web sites appear to be falling behind financially. They are not growing in advertising revenue as quickly as other kinds of Internet destinations. And these figures do not include the most important revenue source . . .”

• The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites (MicroPersuasion)

  “[E]veryone – including marketers – will need to think of their online brands not as sites but as portable services that can go anywhere and everywhere the consumer wants.”

• Google’s Schmidt Fearmongers Over Yahoo-MSFT Deal (paidContent)

  “Google has started playing the “evil empire” card over the very real possibility Microsoft will succeed in its bid for Yahoo.”

• Open-Source Troubles in Wiki World (NYT)

  Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales once joked “that he saw himself as the queen of England, waving to the crowd.” “Unfortunately for him, the news media love a good royalty scandal and, in the last few weeks, he has been getting the royal treatment.”

• The Post’s plan to drag the editing process into the 21st century (Slate)

  In part to help online, WaPost skinnies down its A-section editing process, which now has six — and sometimes 12(!?!) — sets of fingers and eyeballs per piece of inside copy.

• World’s Publishers v. Google: The Fight Continues (Poynter)

  “Newspapers and online publishers appear to be heading back into battle against search engine behemoth Google.”