I’ve had an interesting day online today (much of it spent as classic work avoidance behaviour, of course). But here are a few highlights:
Primedia’s iafrica.com has redesigned its site. Who knew? No song-and-dance routine, just a complete reworking of the site. A few interesting little features, but nothing too surprising. Unique users: 450 000 per month. Page impressions: 5,7-million per month. Who knew?
Then there’s Matthew Buckland, who has already begun to wind up their launch machine by twittering about their upcoming redesign and posting a few trade-marked teasers on his blog about their overdue overhaul. IOL and News24, which have never had beauty or elegance on their side, are beginning to look really, really ugly and out of date. IOL has looked more or less the same since I left there in 2000, I think.
I’ve been enjoying some rediscovered online favourites too, including Roy Greenslade, a columnist for the Guardian. In a WAN wrap, titled Publishers and editors clash over illusion and reality, he describes Gavin O’Reilly and Timothy Balding as industry “propagandists”:
Of course, I realise that Balding and O’Reilly are acting as propagandists for the industry. They genuinely believe that digital missionaries, like me, have helped to influence investors and advertisers to turn their backs on newsprint. (I just wish we had that kind of power). They are right to say that newsprint is still the most profitable media sector, as it will be for at least the next five years. But the trend, the future, is online. Editors know that, which is why so much of the forum was taken up with presentations about multi-media journalism.
Given my, er, strong feelings towards Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media, I’ve also been really interested in the spat between the company and a “dissident shareholder”, Denis O’Brien. In an analysis after the latest shareholder meeting, Greenslade outlines the “real problems” facing the company, brought on by being a “digital ostrich”, making it especially vulnerable to the downturn in print advertising. This elicited a very long, very passionate, response from Gavin O’Reilly as a comment. Now this is one thing we all know, Gav. Print is dead. Get over it already…
Then clearing out my Bloglines account, I stumbled and stopped at old Jack Shafer at Slate. Did you know that there’s a $275 entrance fee for the Webby Awards? While there, I discovered that 80-year-old women still desire men enough to please them (“She was 82. He was 95. They had dementia. They fell in love. And then they started having sex.”) and that perhaps ADHD was a evolutionary asset. Who knew?
Finally, who knew that the blogging platform you choose to publish on determines your content and your audience? The mind boggles.
And now, time to finish the bloody article I’ve been working on all day…
This is a great idea: Boston.com uses a blog to showcase great photography. With the tagline, ‘News Stories in Photographs’, the Big Picture doesn’t compress and resize photos as added extras or eye candy; the photos are the point. I pulled away at first when confronted by such big images on my laptop screen. But it’s a great, great idea which definitely brings home the power of an image. Pulled off the wire, the photos are accompanied by a short explanation.
