The Paris Cluster
16 March, 2007
Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune's tech blog Metamedia reckons he's on to something: How come so many French high-tech and VC companies have their offices in the 8th arrondisement of Paris?
Have we discovered the existence of France's Silicon Valley? Someone's even come up with a Google Maps mash-up of the quartier, posting some of the company offices.
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Guided By Voices
01 June, 2006
It might just be the biggest citizens journalism project you've never heard of. While US-based startups are striving to recreate Korea's OhmyNews, Europe's Agoravox is well on its way to becoming the first continent-wide citizen's news service.
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Tipping Point
24 April, 2006
Hard to imagine we know, but for some commentators, online media hasn't yet reached its tipping point. It's coming soon, at least according to ITworld, which lists ten reasons why 2006 will see the online media dominate the mainstream.
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"Unimagine The Paper"
03 April, 2006
"One of the challenges of thinking about this future in the context of the internet is to unimagine the paper. What if there were no set story lengths? What if stories could be filed at any time of the day or night? What if the story were not a story but a sentence describing a breaking event, followed by a series of short, updating bulletins?"
Guardian Unlimited's editor in chief Emily Bell gets to grips with the concept of redefining what a newspaper is - and how they'll look a decade or two from now.
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Voyage Of Discovery
17 March, 2006
Following on from our report of Rupert Murdoch's latest important speech on the new media revolution, The Times has published a full transcript of its proprietor's speech.
Covering history from man's harnessing of fire to the mapping of DNA via the Battle of Trafalgar and the American Revolution, the News Corp chief makes a case for technological innovation at the service of information dissemination as the driving force behind human progress. It's clear he relishes his new role as revolutionary tech visionary - but what clues does he give to the future of his media empire?
Click 'Open' for some highlights.
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A Place In MySun
16 March, 2006
At last some hint from News Corp as to how Rupert Murdoch plans to exploit his new half-a-billion acquisition MySpace.
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Spinning On Blogs
07 March, 2006
The New York Times reports that US retail giant Wal-Mart's PR company has been seeking to make links with bloggers to combat negative publicity against the firm.
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Spinning A Web?
21 February, 2006
Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former director of communications and right-hand man, writes in The Guardian on the impact the internet is likely to make on political campaigning.
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Power To The People
20 February, 2006
Bloggers embody the wisdom of crowds, says Tim Montogomerie of Conservativehome.com:
"Forward-thinking leaders will seek to benefit from the wisdom of the online crowds. Businesses should create online communities of customers and seek their opinions on product improvement. News programmes should ask viewers for the best questions for that night’s interviewees. Politicians should invite voters to help them develop policies and roadtest how they can best be sold.
"The successful businesses, broadcasters and politicians of tomorrow won’t fear bloggers. They’ll embrace them."
From The Business.
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Paper Chase
26 January, 2006
Are newspapers doomed? Most media commentators these days think so. Our angle is that for a business that's suddenly found itself in competition with the internet, the relative decline in newspaper sales isn't too bad. We happen to think that journalists who are paid for their time have the potential to be more reliable interlocutors than volunteers, too.
But there are serious problems both in publishing business models and in how journalism has been performing in recent years. In the current edition of Commentary Magazine, Joseph Epstein has a fairly subjective account of the reasons behind the decline.
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Democracy Direct
15 December, 2005
The Washington Post has come up with a new way to bring digital democracy to its readers. It's a RSS feed of votes in the US Congress, so you can have your congressman's latest vote delivered to your desktop as it happens.
Via JD Lasica's New Media Musings.
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Reader Trouble
07 December, 2005
Online encyclopedia and Web 2.0 darling Wikipedia was in the news this week - for once, not as the subject of another profile on how "democratic media" is going to change the news industry.
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Kicking Up A Lunarstorm
30 November, 2005
As the International Herald Tribune reports, if Lunarstorm was a city, its 1.2 million citizens would make it Sweden's biggest. One in ten of the country's population is a member of the online community - a figure that includes an estimated 90 percent of its students and schoolchildren.
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Mociology Bites
14 November, 2005
Can blogging change political systems? According to Joe Trippi, former campaign boss for Democrat candidacy challenger Howard Dean, it can and it will. Trippi reckons there's a good chance that the 2008 US presidential election will see the emergence of a powerful, blog-backed candidate who could shake up the traditional party machine system for good.
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Blog Politics
12 September, 2005
Two long features on how weblogs are changing the way we gather and distribute news in this weekend's UK papers.
The first, in the Sunday Times, looks at war correspondents, terror alerts, citizen journalists, cyber-warfare and conspiracy propaganda. The second, in the Observer, worries that the frontier spirit of the internet is threatened by big business, media and goverment's growing interest in the medium. It even comes complete with a quote from Noam Chomsky.
The extent of, for example, Rupert Murdoch's new-found interest in online media is discussed in more detail (and rather less hysteria) here.
All are worth reading, even if one can hear political axes grinding in the background, particularly in the Observer's story.
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