≈ Relations

Very interesting stats on the sources used in the news from Daily Kos:.

Shameless promotion: Now if all this source would have been linked with rel=”source”. How easy and transparent would all this have been.

Whenever we debate the future of newspapers, inevitably someone asks, “if they go out of business, where will blogs get their stories?” That’s a companion argument to “who will conduct investigative journalism”? Well, just as a wide range of journalistic enterprises are conducting investigative reporting (including online news outlets, television stations, and advocacy groups), so too will we get our news from a variety of different sources. In fact, we already do.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see where the news we discuss on this site came from the past week, from Monday, April 6, to Sunday, April 12. If we linked to a source that got its information from another site, we followed the links until we got to the original source of the reporting (“secondary” source). In other words, I wanted to categorize the original source of information for every (front page) post on the site. Here’s the results of that link inventory:

Newspapers: 102 primary, 21 secondary

Blogs: 83 primary, 19 secondary

Advocacy organizations: 77 primary, 9 secondary

Television network: 69 primary, 14 secondary

Online news organizations: 54 primary, 5 secondary

Magazines and journals: 36 primary

Political trade press: 28 primary

Research/polling: 20 primary

Wikipedia: 21 primary, 8 secondary

Educational (.edu): 15 primary

Government: 14 primary, 5 secondary

Campaigns: 13 primary

Books: 6 primary

AP and other Wire: 5 secondary

Radio: 4 primary

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

Latency Facts from a Data Mining Study at Stanford

A quote from Radar Theme: Web Ops – O’Reilly Radar :

It has been reported that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit. Every company whose web site drives their business is in the same situation, they just don’t know it yet.

You can find the presentation reporting this fact over here (.ppt).

A quote from Sam Zell via SAM ZELL’S NEW THINKING at WHAT’S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS:

“I don’t believe it’s fair to hold me to the sentence that I expressed six months ago.

I don’t know that anybody has a frame of reference on advertising revenue destruction that, in effect, is as bad as this, going all the way back to the Depression.

So I think the circumstances are dramatically worse than anyone could have possibly predicted.”

Some quotes from How Good Is The Mainstream Media At Linking Out? (via The Exploding Newsroom ):

We believe that linking to useful websites doesn’t “leak” traffic – quite the opposite in fact. Offering useful links actually makes visitors more likely to return to see what other interesting websites they might find in the future, a model that sites such as Digg and Fark are built around.

Of course as a blogger it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the fact that mainstream media websites are, with the exception of the BBC, business entities with shareholders and an obligation to maximise profits. It’s understandable that they are reluctant to send valuable page views elsewhere. We spent some time researching the issue to see if there was a correlation between the frequency a site links out and the number of links it gets in return.

…

The resulting figure of 0.842733801 shows that in general there is a strong relationship between news websites linking out and getting links in return.

Today is a big announcement day :-) A quote from Django | Weblog | Django 1.0 alpha released! :

In accordance with the Django 1.0 release roadmap, tonight we’ve released the first “alpha” testing version of Django 1.0. This release includes all of the major features due for inclusion in the final Django 1.0, though some lower-priority items are still scheduled to be included before the 1.0 feature freeze, which will occur with the first beta release next month.