The Bivings Group, an American company that offers turnkey services including media monitoring and digital solutions for newspaper companies, has posted a list which it calls the Top 10 Best Newspaper Websites on it’s blog. While the top 10 list is exclusively American and pretty anecdotal with no defined criteria for how they were ranked, it gives some good insight into who the leaders are in terms of news site innovation and what the benchmark currently is for sites looking at relaunching or interested in a bit of a make-over.
What is immediately evident is the equal presence of large and small newspapers on the list and the fact that the Net is a medium where even small community papers who don’t come close in terms of brand recognition, budget or circulation can innovate and crack a top 10 list.
Rob Curley from the Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive extends on this point and gives a few personal favourites which the Bivings list omitted.
This may be a bit of a provocative statement (or not), but the low opinion of the South African Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, continues to endure in both the mainstream press and the public sphere. The minister, who became the laughing stock of the medical profession and an embarrassment for those dedicated to the fight against HIV/Aids when she first recommended vegetables as a cure for the pandemic years ago, continues to prove that fact is often stranger than fiction in South Africa.
The minister can’t seem to stay out of the news, no matter how hard she tries, as speculation of firing critics, liver transplants due to “chronic alcoholism”, and more recently, that she was convicted of stealing a watch from an unconscious patient and equipment from a hospital in Botswana where she was employed in the 1970s.
Whatever happens in the next Manto soap opera installment, 90% of our readers want her to resign according to a poll on The Times web site, and she is definitely as newsworthy as Paris Hilton based on the fact that we had our best web traffic day ever (yes on a Sunday) since The Times launched with over 30 000 people visiting the site yesterday. Go Manto!
I’ve really enjoyed listening to the “Everything is Miscellaneous” podcast series by David Weinberger who recently authored a book of the same name.
In this 8-part series, which he admittedly uses to promote his new book, Weinberger interviews some well-known personalities from a range of diverse disciplines to discuss how they prefer to collect, classify and organise information in their respective fields.
I particularly enjoyed his final interview (Ep 8) with Richard Sambrook, Director of the BBC’s Global News division, about his views on how news and information are processed at the BBC and his thoughts on Web 2.0 and social media and what the future prospects are for the mainstream media. Definitely a must listen from anyone interested or involved in the media at large!
Viddler is a new video sharing service which I came across the other day and I would go so far as to say that it could become a serious challenger to Youtube in the online video space. Why you ask?
The first noticeable reason is it’s very clever and intuitive video interface which allows you to comment, reply to other comments and tag specific parts of the video instead of just the entire video clip. The time slider turns into a green plus sign when you hover over it whilst the video is playing and allows you to perform these functions and more. I think this is a very innovative feature and something that works extremely well with audio and video content. I’m sure we’ll see this implemented into more video players in the future.
Another great feature, depending on which side of the DRM fence you sit, is the ability to upload multiple videos simultaneously, with the only restriction being that each upload is kept under 500 MB – a movie pirates dream!
You can also record directly from a Webcam for example, which not only means that live streaming becomes possible, but also that it cancels out the need for third-party software such as Windows Movie Maker to edit and package your clips.
All in all I think Viddler is a step above the myriad video sharing services out there currently in both functionality and innovation. Of course what Viddler doesn’t have is Google backing and enormous critical mass…
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