Independent Publishing - Articles Archive
from August 10, 2004 to July 17, 2004

"Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. Not content to accept the news as reported, these readers-turned-reporters are publishing in real time to a worldwide audience via the Internet. The impact of their work is ... read more

Real-time blogging was my yesterday experiment. I set-up to cover in real-time the live online conference "State of the E-conferencing Industry: Today's Issues and Tomorrow's Solution" organized and presented/moderated by Stephanie Downs of ConferZone. The challenge I had posed to myself was: how do I blog a ... read more

Steve Outing points to his ideal news site profile. While acknowledging ideas coming from other journalists, opinion leaders and bloggers, Mr Outing pulls together an interesting set of traits that would bring the stale boredom of many present-day online newspapers to the age of breaking news, ... read more

How do you measure the success of your Web site? As more and more people ask me this question, I have learned that the answer is never the same. Though there are some effective public indicators of your site success, it is evident that unless the ... read more

Transparency and credibility are probably among the hardest assets to build online. The lack of a physical presence greatly diminishes our normal ability to assess an organization/company credibility by looking at visual clues and by having direct communications with its staff. On the Web all of ... read more

Freenet, the brainchild of Ian Clarke while a student at the University of Edinburgh, is a free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning that the system is not vulnerable ... read more

JD Lasica reports from the BlogOn Conference: "Influence is moving from big media to the edges. Users are becoming as influential as big media in certain areas, especially in specialized niches. What are the metrics of influence on the Internet?" Usefulness, trustworthiness and attention are the ... read more

Technorati has just launched a brand new look online. It finally sports the lines and profiles of a serious, online professional service and gets finally rid of the several links to sections forever under construction and to those others not always clear Technorati trend-spotting sections. Now ... read more

Even technical authors are waking up to the possibility that self-publishing may be the way to go in the very near future. Now that "Print-on-demand" services have refined their tools and list prices, there are many compelling reasons to look at personal publishing rather than going ... read more

PRX is a "frenetically successful nonprofit web-based service that helps public radio stations put good programming on the air. Four guys with attachment issues to our laptops. Grant-funded and working with hundreds of independent producers and stations across the country. Located in Harvard Square, Boston USA. ... read more

"Participatory journalism, or citizen journalism -- the idea of people in the community actually gathering and porting information to other people -- is a new and evolving concept that increasingly is becoming more common with the rise of the Internet and, in particular, the rise of ... read more

Moneybookers is a new online service that promises to be able to deliver payments in real-time to anyone having an email address on the Internet. Moneybrokers supports many international currencies (over 25), from the British Pound to the Thai Baht and allows full cross-borders payments via ... read more

In a television network the end devices are stupid, while the network itself is sophisticated. Control is exercised within the TV network itself. On the Internet, the opposite is actually true: an end-to-end deliberately dumb network with all of the intelligence concentrated at the periphery. "To ... read more

Over ten years ago, Tim Leary was already fantasizing of uploading a person's "consciousness" into an electronic virtual reality realm, something like what the radical theologian Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. New trends, emerging from the innovative use of personal media technologies may start the ... read more

Though this is not a typical area I cover, I see more and more the need for independent publishers to become skilled communicators at large. Audio, information design, data visualization and video are increasingly playing important roles in the online publishing ecology. Especially for those would-be ... read more

Steve Gillmor well captures some of the important issues that need to be addressed in order for news publishing tools to become more useful, and, for independent publishers, bloggers, news reporters to further improve their "disintermediating" role as direct providers of vertical commentary, news reporting, analysis ... read more

In his latest Alertbox column/newsletter usability guru Jakob Nielsen shares best practices and ideal numbers of participants for effective card sorting in contet (re)organization processes. "A classic mistake is to structure the information space based on how you view the content -- which often results in ... read more

BlogCatalog is the newest kid on the block when it comes to blog directories. BlogCatalog meets two primary goals: a) Supply blog creators with greater exposure and b) provide visitors searching for unique blogs with a growing selection of well-organized blog-generated content. At BlogCatalog anyone can ... read more

Why are companies reluctant to redesign their websites? Here is an interesting interview covering the of why companies and organizations have so much trouble when deciding to improve the look and accessibility fo their Web sites. The article highlights the importance of getting everyone on the ... read more

"No doubt you have seen those small orange 'XML' or 'RSS' buttons beginning to spread across some of your favourite web sites. Perhaps you have clicked on one out of curiosity, only to be faced with a barrage of angle brackets and undecipherable code, seemingly designed ... read more