newspapers Archive

The NY Times is hosting a developer day in NYC on February 20th. Tim O’Reilly will provide a keynote during the event. It looks like the Times is attempting to create a developer platform and wants to introduce developers to their suite of tools.

They announcement notes, "The Times Developer Network invites you to our first-ever API seminar. Come spend the day with industry leaders, learning about applications, data resources and the trends that will shape the way you work. There will be a special focus on NYTimes.com’s new API releases and development tools."

I signed up but was told that registering is just a reservation not a ticket. They will let me (and I assume everyone else) know if we are confirmed by January 30th. Leave a comment if you signup – perhaps we can get a group together for lunch.

The NY Post and Zootoo have announced a new partnership today which will allow the NY Post to have a dedicated pets content section. The new pets content will live at: http://zootoo.nypost.com/.

The new "pet pages" will include local resource information for pet owners and you can also post reviews of local resources. In addition, the site offers photo and video uploads along with information on pet adoption. 

Chris Shaw, New York Post VP of Digital Media said: "The Post is thrilled to be partnering with Zootoo and bringing pets pages to nypost.com. New York City is filled with animal lovers and nobody is more animal friendly than Zootoo."

I wonder if early-adopter favorite Dogster will also begin to offer a white-labeled version of their community and also partner with local newspapers.

Yesterday Wall Street Journal writer Jessica Vascellaro wrote a piece titled, "Twitter Goes Mainstream". The lengthy article talks about how the short messaging service has moved into the mainstream because companies are starting to use it like Zappos and Comcast. The biggest note that Ms. Vascellaro fails to point out is that the people receiving the messages aren’t mainstream. It’s the same early adopter crowd for the most part. A followup column might look at who the average Twitter recipient is. Most importantly, let’s hope they implement a revenue plan before they hit mainstream!

Funny enough, while I was watching Fox News this past weekend, host Clayton Morris pimped Twitter as he does so often. The other host had some remarks that had me questioning whether Twitter really has moved into the mainstream. Here’s a quick video of the discussion:

London-based Hubdub is a predictive marketplace for news. The basic idea is that Hubdub posts questions, you predict which answer will win and then if you are correct, you receive credits that help you reach the leaderboard. Hubdub launched at DEMO earlier this year and SomewhatFrank and TechnicallySpeaking have good overviews of how the service works. Hubdub CEO Nigel Eccles noted that over 2 million "Hubdub dollars" are traded daily within the network.

This morning Hubdub is announcing a new partnership with Reuters. Eccles tells me that the Reuters question section is one of the most popular within Hubdub. Hubdub has created a special section for Reuters which highlights the latest news and events. On the community site, interested members can friend other members and the Reuters account as well. There’s also a widget option so visitors can take the latest Reuters predictions and place them around the Web.

When Hubdub launched, I told Eccles that in a year I wanted a percentage of accuracy with the questions and answers listed on Hubdub. We are getting close to the one-year mark and I look forward to some analysis of how well the Hubdub community did with their predictions.

NewsCred is a new cross-web newspaper site launching today in beta. What makes NewsCred different from the other "breaking news" sites like Digg, Slashdot, Techmeme, etc. is that NewsCred uses a credibility algorithm for indexing the sources and determining what should rise to the top. Currently the site lists about 100 news sources.

I spoke with NewsCred co-founder Shafqat and I asked him how he describes NewsCred. He replied, "NewsCred is a digital newspaper that will give you all the world’s credible news in one place. We aggregate news from hundreds of mainstream media sources, as well as established blogs, and let our users personalize their digital newspaper within seconds, without any fuss. Our community votes on the credibility of articles, authors and news sources. Our algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, we use the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity. The credibility data that we collects is an essential metric for measuring the quality of a new source, and the journalistic credibility and integrity of its writers. We are also  building an online track record for journalists. So in summary, we give news readers a platform to voice their opinions about the quality of news and the people writing about the news."

Here’s my take – NewsCred looks nice and could be a good start page for breaking news across the Web. But it’s another full-feed scraper and if they even so much as attempt to put an ad next to the content, all bets are off. What is with these sites scraping full feeds lately? Same thing with fav.or.it. There’s no reason why NewsCred needs to scrape full feeds – they can easily link out to the sites that they are indexing. The scraped stories on NewsCred don’t pull in any formatting so they are very difficult to read.

The other concern I have is similar to one I have with the Outbrain rating widget we have installed on CN. With NewsCred, what makes a story "credible"? There are so many rumors that float around blogs everyday, do people really care what’s credible? From my conversations over the past year, the answer is no. In fact, if you look at some of the more popular blogs, stories that are factually inaccurate or biased have done very well for those blogs. What really makes a story credible?

I like the concept of NewsCred but they need to stop the full-feed scraping and define for their users specifically what makes a story credible.

Svetlana believes NewsCred has potential but the 100 sources will need to grow for the site to work at a broad level. Jason notes that the site has a better ranking algorithm than when it launched in private alpha last year.

Update: in a further conversation with Shafqat he notes, "Just wanted to give you an update on our policy. We do NOT believe in full feed scraping and actually took the view opposing Fav.or.it‘s policies. We strongly believe in protecting the intellectual property of the content provider and respecting the copyrights. With that said, 95% of the sources on our site are set up so we only display the first sentence or a brief excerpt (usually the first paragraph at most!). There are a handful of blog feeds where the feed owner has chosen to provide the full feed. We are individually reaching out to every single one of them to get their feedback on how we should proceed. We didnt have time to set up a automated script that will only store the first paragraph but will happily do that. For now, we simply display what we receive in the feed for those and hence the formatting hasn’t been improved. Most likely we will do away with the full feed or agree on a rev-share and then format the feeds. You bring up an important point and I just want to reiterate that we really don’t believe in taking your content for free and making money of it. As you have noticed, because we did not have time to reach out to everyone yet, there are NO ads being displayed"

Yahoo is out with a marketing release that they have driven over 100 million links to local news and newspaper sites through the Yahoo network. The partnership brings Yahoo together with 779 newspaper Web sites in the Newspaper Consortium. On several Yahoo properties, users are provided with a set of local news headlines from their local newspaper.

The NY Daily News is one of the most popular of the linked sites — probably due to its entertainment content. Yahoo also noted that Yahoo Buzz has been a big driver to the newspaper Web sites as well. This also makes sense as Yahoo Buzz is big with entertainment, celebrity and general business news.

Dallasnews.com reports that when featured on the Yahoo home page, it has driven over 800,000 visits in a day.

Yahoo News goes head-to-head with Google News. Google News is a favorite for techies. Some of the newspapers involved in the program include: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Rocky Mountain News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and The Tampa Tribune.

Over the past couple of weeks, I am noticing a trend on Digg even more than normal. Mainstream newspaper sites are making it to the frontpage more than ever before. The Engadget, Ars Technica and Gizmodo trifecta haven’t owned the frontpage as they did previously. The Guardian newspaper Web site (and a few other UK daily papers) are regularly making it to the frontpage more than once a day. In fact, as I write this, the Guardian has 2 stories on the first page of the frontpage currently. I’ve written before that Digg has been trying to move away from the tech sector to attempt to grow past the fanboy set that attends their diggnation shows.

Could this lead to discussion about potential buyers for the news aggregator? I have no source for the following comment, it’s my view and speculation. Would the Guardian Media Group be a good home for Digg? Many blogs have discussed Google, CurrentTV, Yahoo, Microsoft and Fox as buyers. I haven’t seen anyone look across the pond for suitors. The Guardian acquired PaidContent last week for $30 million and is looking to grow their Internet presence. Could all of these frontpage stories be a test?

SAI says Digg is worth $125 million, I think it’s worth less. Last year Digg hired a bank to help find a buyer. Could Digg be the next acquisition for the Guardian? It would be a smart CPM ad play on both sides. Our research says 52% of Digg’ers block ads.

On a side note, I am also noticing that stories can now sit in upcoming for more than the previous 24-hour time period. And the trifecta blogs are well represented in the top tier of upcoming. My Apple battery story has 120 well diversified Diggs but didn’t make the frontpage. Is the upcoming section the new home for blogs?