Inquirer: Dan Rubin: “Sharing the Blinq”
Tag Archives: newspapers
A new CMS to watch?
Armstrong is a new open source CMS in development, based upon Django, and funded by the Knight Foundation.
There is a recent piece about Armstrong posted at The Nieman Journalism Lab with a good thread questioning the need and the backing technology since other options exist. I think the more experimentation in this space the better because as Rafe Colburn has rightly said, “Content management is still an unsolved problem”. Rafe ruminates that, “For some reason, finding an adequate balance between usability, flexibility, and performance is nearly impossible.”, and it can seem that way if you are shooting at a fixed target. Anyone who has worked on a CMS project has felt this way. I certainly have from time to time. The trick is to have a solution that not only meets your needs, but can evolve as those targets shift, and educating those involved that it is a part of a larger ecosystem where evolution is a feature and not a bug.
MSM Blog Networks Aren’t All That Bad
I hate the term “MSM” (Mainstream Media) that we bloggers use to describe older media and news organizations, but sometimes you need to acquiesce.
Lots of folks thought that members of traditional media couldn’t ‘do blogging’ for various reasons. They were wrong. Take a look around and you will find some of the best blogs are being produced in places once thought unlikely.
Wired Magazine’s Wired Blogs have some of the most interesting technology/geek focused blogs you could subscribe to.
For politics there are those hosted at The Atlantic.
And, at least in Philly, local newspapers have fully embraced them at Philly.com (The Inquirer and Daily News), philadelphia weekly, and Philadelphia City Paper.
Shoot, even local TV News shows have gotten in the act at NBC 10 and Fox 29.
Yahoo! and Google Move to Squeeze Newspapers Further
Yahoo! has relaunched it’s local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.
Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.
They still haven’t gone as far as I expect them to one day do – integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.
On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.
Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.