Interesting links for 2009-06-26

'Journalism Online's online fee expectations are more optimistic than some other industry studies that have assumed newspapers and magazines probably shouldn't count on more than 2 percent of their online audiences to pay for coverage that has been given away for years.'

'Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are a very easy way to display lot of things on your blog posts by inserting a very simple code.'

'Many designers and creatives utilize actual illustrations and images that will attract the viewers’ attention. By capturing a reader’s imagination in the process, illustrative backgrounds will most likely remain within their memory for a longer period of time.'

'With reporters restricted on the ground, that left the main reporting on demonstrations and violence to the citizens of Iran, who spread stories, photos and video through blogs and social networks. That made services such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube crucial to following the story as it unfolded the past couple weeks. But it also made it difficult to verify the information on all those sources.'

'…the most contentious element in the new policy, which the union also decried as “vague,” gives this instruction to employees using Facebook: “Monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards: any such material should be deleted.” '

'GIMP is a an attempt at answering the call for freely distributed image editing software.'

'I’ve been diligently reporting some of the more annoying spam I see. Despite this, none of the reported accounts have been closed. So, it’s time for a public spam report — and some education along the way.'

'There are three services that do a much better job than Twitter Search, and several others are also worth looking at for special cases. Here are the top three…'

'To me, this whole thing just proves that mainstream media are justifiably freaking out with their eyes shut to what’s happening instead of learning and adapting to the new age of journalism.'

'As the news of Michael Jackson's fate unfolded, sites around the Web felt the strain of spiking interest.'

'I am not arguing that newspapers and magazines and news services will die.
No, just that they must change.'