Year: 2006

Great traveler’s tip back at Digital Photography School:

I know of one photographer who has locked an image in his camera’s internal memory with his contact details. This image is never deleted as it’s locked and will be the first image anyone turning on his camera sees.

I’ve told you many times that I am proud of my mother. Not that she needs to do anything for this, but today she made yet another step in her studies of technology. She started on the RSS concept. I’ve given her a little overview of what that thing is, how it (roughly) works, and also, introduced her to Bloglines. She created an account and is already adding some of her favourite feed sources.

Eat that you technofobic whiners. RSS in less than a day for a non-technology person. That’s completely possible. And you know what? I think I’ll start a blog for people like my mother, explaining modern technologies (RSS, social networks, blogging, etc) in the practical way and simple language. I’m sure that can come in handy. Now, do you know if any such resources already exist or if anyone has already tried that? (I’m sure someone must be out there doing it nicely).

Oh, and good luck, ma! Let me know if you have any questions. I’m here for you (on the blog, in Skype, over at GMail, and on the phone).

Don Dodge asks this question in his “Are newspapers and magazines dying?

How about you? Do you still subscribe to magazines and newspapers?

Nope, I don’t. Mostly.

I was never an active subscriber to any printed media. My parents used to read some newspapers, but that was way too long ago.

Linux Journal is one of my recent choices. We used to subscribe to it from the office. Sometimes it was useful and informative, other times not. But, I guess, I am from the generation of people who see it as a personal achievement (rightly so or not) every time the word “Linux” is printed on a colorful glance page. I am getting over it now.

Also, I have to say that during the last two or three years I’ve been buying magazines. It was because of my fascination with photography. And since we live in the place where photo exhibition is something noone have heard about, I used other means of feeding my artistic hunger. Photography magazines and books with loads of images. This stage is passing now too, because most of my appetites can be dealt with online.

So, to sum it all up – I am over the printed media. It’s just too expensive, out-of-date, and inconvenient. And to answer that question of Don’s – yes, I believe newspapers and magazines are dying. That won’t happen tomorrow or in one week. It will take time. But it will happen eventually. Those who will survive, will change so dramatically – both in content and format – that they won’t fit the definition of today’s newspapers and magazines.

Newspapers have to change. That’s something so obvious that it’s silly to even talk about it. Unfortunately, not all of them even realize that (and why) they need a website. Those of them who do, rarely have any idea of how to do it properly. To help them out, here are the 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites. Here are the points, with my comments.

1. Start Using Tags. Yes, please. Even small newspapers cover so many different topics that organizing articles into categories only is very inefficient. Categories are good, but tags are better. They can work together with each other, but if you are to choose one – choose tags.
2. Provide Full Text RSS Feeds. Yes, indeed. This will increase the readership, and it will increase newspaper’s exposure. It will also make integrating news and cross linking with newspaper easier on the other sites. Plus all the benefits of RSS search engines picking up the content and indexing it properly.
3. Work with External “Social” Websites. Sharing images via Flickr and easy bookmarking via Delicious and the like are just the beginning. Make it easier for me to blog about your articles, and I will gladly do so.
4. Link to Relevant Blog Entries. Yes again. Blogs are an excellent source of alternative opinions and details. And there is no good reason not to help your readers build an informed opinion on their own. Or is there?
5. Get Rid of All Registration. Disagreed. There are several ways to make registration work and improve the experience. This ranges from building quality comments to providing extra features to registered (and, optionally, commercial) users. One example of where registration works and helps in Linux Weekly News. But at the end of the day, of course, content of the articles must be available in full and without registration, even if with some time delay. I won’t make a link to protected article from my blog. And newspaper will suffer for that.
6. Partner with Local Bloggers. Nothing to add here.
7. Offer Alternative Views of Your Content. This can be tricky for the newspaper to figure out, especially given the quality of IT staff in many of them. But by making the website as open as possible (API anyone?), newspaper can give the tools to people who care. And they will do the rest. In short: open up.
8. Modernize Your Site’s Graphic Design. Once in a while. A while being at least five years. I mean – at least once in five years or so improve something. You’ll be thanked for the next five years. And maybe, just maybe, people will start coming to your website to read articles, intead of using ugly interfaces of RSS aggregators.
9. Learn from Craigslist. I’d say simplier – learn. Look around and try noticing things that you like and dislike about your website and others’ websites.
10. Make your content work on cell phones and PDAs. Yes, this is important. But, on the other hand, if full article RSS feeds will be available, people will fix this issue for you. As well as many others.

Also, I’d add this one:

• Implement comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Let people have a discussion about your articles. Let them link back to you. Let your readers get more opinions on the topic.

I know that now it sounds like all newspaper websites must look like blogs, but it’s not necessarily so. It just sounds that way. Really.

LifeHacker featured a number of posts with GMail tricks and tips over the time. Now they’ve done this one last effort into combining links to all those articles in one single post. This is your bookmark of the year – Gmail Tips and Tricks Monster Roundup

The Cyber-Knowledge weblog has a pretty good roundup of cool ways you can take advantage of your Gmail account.

Since we’ve covered most of Cyber-Knowledge’s tips here before, I decided it was time to put together our own Gmail roundup.