There’s a great post by Alison Gow detailing how much different the act of creating a news story is in a web 2.0 world (thanks to the Online Journalism Blog for the pointer). It’s a great checklist for journalists and their editors and shows just how much has been added by the recent slew of new online tools. As Alison says:

I had no idea when I started doing this how thin the ‘old’ opportunities for investigating stories would look compared to the tools at our disposal now; it’s quite stark really. It drives home just how important mastering these tools is for journalists as our industry continues to develop and change.

Technorati Tags: 101, journalism, newspapers, online

I’ve spent the day at d.construct 08, the quirky web design conference in Brighton which I have been going to for the part few years. In previous years I’ve blogged the experience but I’ve tended to find that distracting and it has reduced the experience for me. This year I’m trying something different: recording the conference in URLs – all relevant in some way – to the speaker, or the speech. Treat it like an eclectic detective story!

http://2008.dconstruct.org/schedule

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Map-Street-Epidemic-Networks/dp/0141029366/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220641721&sr=8-1

http://outside.in/Boston_MA

http://www.yelp.com/

http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

http://pacmanhattan.com/

http://www.findsatoshi.com/

http://toastkid.com/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Designing-Social-Voices-That-Matter/dp/0321534921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220641991&sr=1-1

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/914321/elevator_candid_must_see/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Judgment-under-Uncertainty-Heuristics-Biases/dp/0521284147/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220642094&sr=8-2

http://www.freshbooks.com/

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=4516

http://www.slide.com/

http://www.geni.com/

http://www.silverorange.com/

http://digg.com/

http://www.last.fm/

http://pownce.com/

http://getsatisfaction.com/

http://bokardo.com/archives/diggs-design-dliemma-redux

http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?lang=en&page=1&q=burka+&type=listview

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106

http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability

http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

http://oauth.net/

http://tantek.com/presentations/2008/08/microformats/

http://www.dopplr.com/

http://recreating-movement.com/

http://plasticbag.org/files/native/

http://schulzeandwebb.com/2008/movement/

http://github.com/

http://www.dopplr.com/group/dconstruct/public

Hope you enjoy the journey…

BTW – the Flickr feed is here.

Technorati Tags: d.construct2007

Google will announce today the launch of its own browser called Chrome. The browser has been built from the ground up to be robust enough to run applications of all sorts, as the company intensifies its challenge to Microsoft’s desktop model. The browsers features are ingeniously described in this online comic from the development team.

There’s a really interesting project from Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity which aims to allow users to build simple personal mash-ups for themselves. It’s hard to explain but the video below does a really good job.

The Times Educational Supplement site has relaunched as TES Connect, focussing on jobs (as ever), community and resource sharing. It’s a great looking site with some nice functionality. Well worth a browse.

Paul Bradshaw on the Online Journalism Blog posts some interesting advice to newspaper publishers about how to increase the traction in online advertising.

He lists 10 ways publishers can improve the offering, working from the basic premise that the web is different from print.

Among the more thought-provoking are:

• sell ads against dynamic content like most popular story at that particular moment,  or next to breaking news, or against exclusives
• developing tools so long-tail advertisers can advertise for themselves (like Rick Waghorn has with Addiply )
• getting creative with ads (email this ad to a friend, widgets based on the advertisers’ interest etc)

It is interesting that it is a journalist posting these thoughts about advertising. It’s well worth a read.

In the UK many will have missed the furore over Senator John McCain’s “celebrity” ad which suggested Obama was more interested in celebrity than the big issues of the day such as high oil prices. (It’s here if you did).

Paris Hilton, featured unwillingly in the ad, hits back in this spoof courtesy of Funny or Die

There was a great and simply explanatory piece in Saturday’s Guardian. Read it here, but in brief:

• project demand has been scaled back because of economic worries in the US, EU and even China
• supply has been picking up as OPEC members beefed up production to capitalise on the high price
• Geo-political worries (like Nigerian unrest) have eased
• The dollar is rising again which helps: oil is priced in dollars so companies selling in other companies push the price higher to compensate for the slide in the currency’s value
• Hedge funds are getting out because of the above

Simple, no?

Technorati Tags: puppy

Groundswell meets Will it Blend… Blendtec was one of the companies profiled in Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff’s book Groundswell. They persuaded Blendtec to collaborate in a viral video to promote the book. This was the result.

Adaptive Path has been doing some work for the Mozilla Foundation on the future of the browser. There are four videos, highlighted by Lifehacker, which show various ways in which a potential browser could work in a future where the internet of things is a reality. Worth a watch, even if you don’t buy all the suggestions.

Technorati Tags: browser, innovation, future