Sour Alba

There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers well. But if you actually look [...]

Just spent ages trying to get a panel of my picks from Amazon to appear on the blog. No matter what I did, nothing would appear. Wracked my brains for ages and then remembered: I browse with an ad blocker.

Duh!

So if you don’t browse with an ad blocker and are interested in some journo reading, here y’are:

I have just read Arthur MacMillan’s excellent autopsy of the corpse of Scottish newspapers in the British Journalism Review. It is a forensic examination of what’s gone wrong and why there is no hope. And it rightly fingers the muppets and Johnston Press and Gannet who have brought what we laughingly call Scotland’s quality papers to their knees.

However, the article falls into the trap of by implication exonerating Andrew Neil, who is as responsible for the demise of the Hootsmon as the overpromoted local newspaper crowd. While JP has had a massively detrimental effect on the paper and the website, Neil cannot escape blame. Here’s why:

Ah, what a tangled web we we weave when we practise to write silly season stories about things we know little about.

A key danger of being a journalist is writing about a topic when sections of your audience know far more about it than you. This danger is multiplied when you’re flamming up a total non-story.

Sun and Mail hackette Julie Moult knows all about this after scribbling up some desperate nonsense about a photoshopped image of a politician. (Incidentally, the paper used the image without permission despite repeated request by the creator to stop lifting his work). She made several basic errors in the piece - such as describing what had happened as Googlebombing. (My favourite is the fact-box that says the practice of Googlebombing began in the “early 1990s” - a good trick as the Google.com domain was not registered until 1997.)

God bless Biffy Clyro. And may He also bless the audience who watched them at a recent BBC Introducing set at the Reading and Leeds Festival.

The Ayrshire rockers performed a really sweet acoustic cover of Rage Against The Machines “Killing in the name of”. Perhaps due to it being on TV ‘n’ that, the group sang the famed repeating chorus at the end thus: “Ooo-oooo I won’t do you what you tell me.”

Today, in a surprisingly botched announcement, Google announced Chrome, their upcoming open source web browser. The subject of a Google browser is something I’ve opined on a few times over the years, but Jason Kottke’s compiled an even more comprehensive overview of the conversations a few of us have been having for almost seven years.

If that’s up your alley, you might want to check out:

• Stories and Tools, which at six years old is a little dated, but offered up some thoughts on the presentation of web applications that I thought connected nicely with the Google Chrome comic book.
• Google and Theory of Mind, about Google’s great weakness in the insularity of the company’s culture.
• Google Web History - Good and Scary, which at the launch of Google’s Web History feature examined some of the implications of the new tracking system.
• The Circle of (Web) Life, which described a cycle of web businesses supporting each other, based on Google’s support for Mozilla.
• How Matt Haughey Beat Google, challenging the inevitability of Google’s domination of markets by pointing out how they weren’t able to compete with a self-funded, passionate person and his community.
• Google Office: Google Apps for Your Domain, which put the launch of Google Apps in the context of both the office suite competition and Google’s other offerings.
• The Microcontent Client, an outline of ideas about the evolution of browsers and information management applications from 2002.
• Finally, Google’s First Mistake, my rumination on Google’s acquisition of Pyra Labs, a post whose accuracy has both increased and decreased in the years since I wrote it.