Mobile telephony, news monetization, and community development are recurring themes in the 16 projects funded by this year’s Knight News Challenge (John S. and James L. Knight Foundation). Total funding: $5.5 million.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Craigslist Advertisers Game The System
Anecdotal evidence suggests that some black-hat advertisers are using automated tools to fool Craigslist into thinking that multiple site visitors are complaining about “offensive” or “false ads”…. as a way to drum the competition out of the free space.
NYT Follows Google Footsteps
The NY Times is developing an API, a la Google, which will empower “mash-ups” of NYT content, according to MediaBistro. (tip) It also sounds like the NYT is drinking semantic web kool-aid (not a bad thing, IMO): “Everything we produce should be organized data.” They’re starting with entertainment (no surprise there).
More from the ReadWriteWeb. Also, what’s an API and why should you care? (also from ReadWriteWeb)
MSFT Buys Another Start-Up
I went looking for Farecast today, only to discover that it’s now part of MicrosoftLive.I missed that April announcement; no need to buy tickets and I wasn’t regularly reading Todd Bishop (shame on me!). Maureen Dowd wrote about the company, which was launched by a professor at the University of Washington, in July 2006.
From April’s SeatlePI article:
Farecast is an online travel search engine that attempts to predict whether airfares will rise or fall on domestic and international routes. For example, Farecast recommended Thursday that travelers purchase now a Seattle to Cleveland flight for early July because prices will be rising over the next week. It offers a confidence level of 71 percent on that prediction… The acquisition follows the merger of Kayak.com and SideStep, the market leader in next-generation travel search.
Interface Ugliness
Forget, for a moment, that the design of the above-the-fold portion of this website is ugly as sin, crowded with ads and “junk” (hat tip, Edward Tufte). Look at the ad, sitting front and center!
It’s blocking the copy — the only reason we’ve come to this page. Yes, I know that lots of publishers are doing this these days. That doesn’t make it right — it makes it intrusive, in the same manner as television ads. And people like these just as little as they like TV ads (in general, Super Bowl excepted!).
