Nothing frustrates me more than watching journalists who’ve lost their newsroom jobs entering the blogosphere… with no clue as to what they should be doing online. Too few emerging online journalists understand that the function of news publishing has changed in the Internet era. Simply reporting the news, however you might define that, is no longer enough, not when you are publishing in such a competitive environment. The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters… they’ve become community organizers.
Before the holidays, I had lunch with a local journalist who is making the transition from a print staff job to online entrepreneur. He wanted to pick my brain for ideas on how to make the switch, and I was happy to talk. But whatever he asked, my answer kept resolving to the same point: you have to have a community that supports you, if you want to make a living online.

Despite what years of local monopoly may have taught many veteran journalists, readers don’t automatically show up for whatever you publish. I’ve seen too many journalists react in shock when they put up their first blog post, only to end up with fewer readers than they have clean socks in their dresser drawer.

“But thousands of people read me in the paper,” they stammer.

Well, the paper might have sold thousands of copies each day, but as any newspaper-dot-com staffers who’s looked at the traffic data can tell you, few subscribers actually read any given writer’s work. And those who did usually did so out of habit – they’d grown up reading the paper and fell into the custom of reading specific sections, pages or features.

That habit does not extend to reading those writers online, just to whoever happens to be in that slot in print. Perhaps a few might accept an invitation to connect with a familiar writer on the Web, but you have to extend that invitation before it can be accepted.

So, your past earns you nothing online. Whatever audience you will have there, you must build yourself.

Now you’re a community organizer.

(Click for the rest of the story)

Un-adulterated

BULL-SHIT!

When did Dave Winer and Adam Curry develop the idea of Podcasting? 2001 and VoloMedia had nothing to do with inventing podcasting.

See here

The government patent office appears to not be doing their own research and most likely was asleep at the switch. WTF!

How do you amend a patent?

A visual treat!

NEW YORK — The author of The Four Hour Work Week certainly works hard. In his keynote speech at the Mediabistro Circus here today, he showed audience members how to promote themselves and their business by using social media and other Web tools.

Ferriss’ current career started with the book. He’s big on data, so when his publisher objected to the original title of the book — ‘Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit’ — he tested several possible titles using Google AdWords.

He bid on key words like ‘world travel,’ ‘retire,’ and ‘learning languages.’ With the bids, he posted various links, each containing the text of one of more than a dozen possible book titles. The data said that The Four Hour Work Week was the best title.

The rest of the story

(Via Internet News.)

Sharp Develops Five-Primary-Color LCD That Faithfully Reproduces Real Surface Colors

Sharp Corporation has developed a five-primary-color display that faithfully reproduces the real surface colors that humans are capable of perceiving. A prototype of this display will be exhibited at the international symposium of the Society for Information Display (SID) to be held in San Antonio, Texas, US from May 31 through June 5, 2009.

Demand for displays that can render colors in a manner faithful to the appearances of naturally occurring surface colors or designed colors is growing stronger in fields such as industrial design, digital archiving, network-based remote medical care, and electronic commerce. Thus various efforts to satisfy these requests are intensifying, prompting, for example, the development of natural vision technology.

This five-primary-color display comprises “Multi-Primary-Color Technology” that features special image processing circuitry, in addition to the display panel whose pixel structure is based on five-color filters that add the colors C (cyan) and Y (yellow) to the three colors of R (red), G (green), and B (blue).

This combination expands the color gamut (range of reproducible colors) that can be rendered within the color spectrum that humans can discern with the unaided eye, and enables the display to reproduce more than 99% of real surface colors. Nearly all real surface colors can be rendered faithfully, including colors that have been difficult to render using conventional LCD monitors—the color of the sea (emerald blue), brass instruments (golden yellow), and roses (crimson red), for example. As adoption of this technology will enable more efficient use of light energy produced by the backlight, this display will also provide greater energy savings.

First, Red, Green, Blue are the additive primaries used in monitors, projectors, and TV’s. Cyan, Yellow, Magenta are the subtractive primaries used in printing ink on paper. Adding two LED’s of the subtractive primaries with the RGB additive primaries LED’s will add a higher contrast ratio to the display and perhaps a wider color gamut. It will also mean 5 LED’s instead of 3 unless the LED’s have been reduced in size I suspect this will be a lower resolution display.

My bet is this display is an effort to combat the approaching OLED tsunami in displays. My money stays on the OLED.

Taking Off The Training Wheels

Where Animoto and Stupeflix completely diverge is in their approach and business model. Stupeflix has effectively come up with an API which describes video, text, using and pictures in flash video based on an XML description. So instead of actually editing the video you edit the XML. That means you can edit video just by changing a tag, or by telling their engine to run a different kind of effect for every video you wants to generate. iMovie would create just one video, and requires a meaty package to edit how it’s presented. With Stupiflix you just edit the XML, with tags like “rotate” or “fade left”. Today Stupeflix launches the web interface to its video editing web application.

Because Stupeflix was built first as an API service, it is designed to create videos from any kind of content on the fly. The API was developed in a similar way to how video games are programmed – as much of the prgramming took place directly on GPUs. As a demostration of its power, they’ve generated over 1,000 videos direct from Wikipedia content, automatically, in under 60 minutes.

Full post on TechCrunch

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