AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

New Tee VeeHere’s one take on the Webby nominees announced this week. Follow the links in the post to see the enormous array of sites.

Maybe it’s really old media of me to say this, but if the New York Times says you’re the “Oscars of the Internet,” that’s probably what you are. (Of course, the [...]

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Fortune Magazine.
The Nielsen Company, best known for measuring television audiences, hasn’t been immune from technology’s bulldozing of the media landscape. In a key step aimed at staying competitive, the company announced Monday that it would acquire IAG Research for $225 million.
The move is aimed at helping Nielsen’s advertising customers to better assess the effectiveness of [...]

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Venture Beat
Attributor is showing online publishers how to use plagiarism of their content by other sites to their advantage.
It offers a service that a publisher track how its articles, images and videos are being used on other sites, without its permission. Then, it offers ways for these publishers to contact the offending parties and [...]

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Reed Elsevier Ankles Variety, Other U.S. Titles - Advertising Age
Media Giant Looks for Stable Coin Away From Wide Swings of Blurb Biz
Variety, that showbiz bible known for writing in its own slanguage, is up for grabs. Reed Elsevier wants someone else to take over the responsibility of providing the coin, or financing, for the unit [...]

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Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, February 19, 2008

Summary:
Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both.
It’s hard to write a general article about application design mistakes because the very worst mistakes are domain-specific and idiosyncratic. Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve [...]

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Variety
In partnership with Filmmaker magazine and publishing houses Faber and Faber and Random House, Focus Features has launched the website FilmInFocus.
The company calls the venture “a destination point and a haven for film lovers around the world.”
The site is aiming to go beyond promos and trailers, cultivating a community of cinephiles through original content and [...]

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Times of London
Google is to go head-to-head with Wikipedia, the web’s largest reference work, in a clash of two of the internet’s most powerful brands.
A new Google service, dubbed knol, will invite “people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it”, Udi Manber, a Google engineer, said.
Like Wikipedia, articles in knol [...]

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An easy way to find that book –LA Times
PITTSBURGH — Nearly a decade ago, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a project with an astonishingly lofty goal: Digitize the published works of humankind and make them freely available online.
The architects of the project said this week they have surpassed their latest target, having [...]

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Koones stepping down from Variety post

In a surprise move, Charlie Koones will step down as president and publisher at Reed Elsevier-owned industry trade paper Variety on March 1.
He will be replaced by Neil Stiles, managing director of the Reed Business Information unit in the U.K. since April 2001. Koones also will leave to Stiles [...]

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Domains: Jimmy Wales…The Encyclopedist’s Lair — NY Times Sunday Magazine
Enjoy these bon-bons about the founder of Wikipedia:
Idea of a perfect day: Spend about 10 hours online getting lots of things done. Then go out for a drink.
Greatest misconception about Wikipedia: We aren’t democratic. Our readers edit the entries, but we’re actually quite snobby. The core [...]

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