Media - Internet

The RSS buttons may seem ubuquitous these days, but that's just what they are. RSS feeds are still far away from giving subscribers the news people want and need, a study has concluded. "RSS feeds work best for breaking-news headlines — President Bush’s veto of the Iraq spending bill or the death of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin," says researcher Susan D Moeller, a journalism professor at...

It used to be that news-media outlets competed for the best stories or the most compelling photographs. Nowadays, though, some of the most furious competition in the news business is over the best Internet search words for a big story. With the Web assuming an increasingly vital role for print and television news outlets, and online competition intensifying, more outlets are turning to search...

BANGALORE, India (AFP) - America Online, the Internet arm of media giant Time Warner, said it will expand "aggressively" worldwide after stepping into Asia for the first time with the launch of an India portal. AOL, which has 238 million users in the United States, neighbouring nations and parts of Europe, is seeking to compete with rivals Google and Yahoo! in tapping the billion-strong and...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Faced with declining circulation, many U.S. newspapers are trying to engage readers by allowing them to respond to news stories online. But the anonymity of the Internet lets readers post obscenities and racist hate speech that would never be allowed in the printed paper. Consider one reader comment this month on the Web site of Nashville's daily newspaper, The Tennessean...

April 25 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. passed Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. to become the owner of the world's most-visited group of Web sites for the first time, a research firm said. Google's sites had 528 million visitors worldwide in March, a 13 percent gain from the same month a year ago, ComScore Inc. said today. Microsoft had 527 million, while Yahoo had 476.3 million, the researcher said...

The world's biggest and best-known online encyclopedia is going offline for its latest offering. The Wikimedia Foundation, the group behind user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia, has announced it intends to produce a CD of about 2,000 of its articles. The CD will bear the moniker "Wikipedia Version 0.5" and cover areas such as the arts and sciences and subjects such as geography. It will come with...

Think of the time and cost of establishing a successful restaurant. Then picture yourself as a regular customer who goes to your favourite table, enjoys the meal, settles the bill and then spots on the way out a notice that if you'd eaten on the terrace everything would have been for free. The assumption must be that the restaurateur has gone mad. Yet that was the analogy drawn by multimedia...

The controversy over NBC's decision to broadcast the thoughts of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-hui illustrates the daily dilemmas faced by news journalists. Most of their British counterparts would find it difficult to justify withholding the tapes. 'We are not censors,' says John Ryley, Sky's head of news, succinctly summing up the consensus on this side of the Atlantic. But once the controversy...

Website server logs that count unique cookies to measure unique visitors are likely to be exaggerating the size of the site’s audience by a factor as high as 2.5, or an overstatement of 150 per cent, a study has found. comScore released the results Tuesday of a study analysing the validity of using cookie-based data to measure the number of unique visitors to individual websites or to gauge the...

Sky News' website will relaunch on Thursday with a renewed emphasis on breaking news. The new-look site's aesthetic will be brought into line with the March revamp to the rolling news channel's on-air graphics. "Three separate home page templates will aid news delivery, with one ensuring a large proportion of the page is devoted to major breaking news stories," according to a statement, which said...