Is it all over for bloggers? asks Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, in his Lubbock Lecture at the Said Business School in Oxford on June 8th. It’s well worth a read. The Guardian is probably doing more than any other major newspaper in the worth to embrace the “new media” so its interesting to get Rusbridger’s perspective, which I think is slightly more old school than you might have expected. Jeff Jarvis critiques bits of it here.

A blog doesn’t need a clever name has a piece on the increasing influence of the popular urban environment game SimCity’s role in educating tomorrow’s town planners. “Because of the widespread use of SimCity in schools and homes, it is easy to make a case, as Paul Starr of The American Prospect has, that SimCity provides a more influential introduction to city planning than any book on the subject,” it says.

There’s been a lot of comment about the Guardian’s decision to publish its stories first on the web. MediaGuardian.co.uk New media Guardian to offer news online first shouted Guardian Unlimited, which went on: “The Guardian will become the first British national newspaper to offer a ‘web first’ service that will see major news by foreign correspondents and business journalists put online before it appears in the paper.

The shift in strategy marks a significant departure from the established routine of newspaper publishing where stories are held for ‘once-a-day’ publishing.

The move aims to strengthen and complement the strong track record that has been built up through Guardian Unlimited’s own breaking news content.

By putting the main elements of the Guardian’s news online first, the paper aims to widen and deepen coverage online to benefit the Guardian’s expanding global readership.

However, copy from agency and news wires services will continue to be re-purposed or run as normal.

The system will give reporters and writers on the paper the opportunity to produce more copy of greater scope outside of the limitations of the daily paper.

Some exclusive stories will continue to be held back for the newspaper to maintain the quality levels of the print version. The object is to not remain beholden to a 24-hour printing cycle and be beaten to important news by print and new media rivals.”

Jeff Jarvis makes a lot of the announcement.

But as Kieran Daly, Group Editor of Flight, points out in an email to me:

From our perspective, this is the key bit:

Rusbridger said: “Nearly all City information is now available on the day, and it seems to me a bit old-fashioned waiting for an artificial print deadline in order to put up City stories.”
According to Rusbridger, the intention is for 95 per cent of stories to go straight up on the internet. He said: “If we had a world exclusive interview with George Bush that everyone was going to follow up, we might hold that back for the print edition.”
The Guardian gets next to no city or foreign exclusives, so this is a logical move. But as Rusbridger acknowledges, if your material is exclusive then the situation is different.

And that, strangely enough, is the view taken by The Telegraph. According, again, to Jeff Jarvis, despite rumours to the contrary, Telegraph journalists are free to publish whatever they like of the web as and when they like in order, just as the Guardian has said, not to be scooped by online rivals.

The New York Times reports on a ring tone which rings at a frequency too high for adults to hear. This is in the category of amazing but true – the technology, as the article says, was developed in Britain and my kids have in fact been experimenting with it at school with near-perfect results and much hilarity to boot.

Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, lists eight usability problems that haven’t changed in a piece for Wired’s Webmonkey site.

What would the world’s largest commercial airliner look like as a private jet? This video from Lufthansa Technik shows you.

Steve Rubel lists a few sites which have visual tools that help map out the influence of sites. They are fun to play with…

eBay Blogs are live. More from Steve Rubel, who has been digging around for the details, here.