Media - Internet

Most Americans believe bloggers should not be allowed to publish sensitive personal information about individuals, according to a new survey. Web hosting company Hostway this week released the results of its poll of 2,500 Americans on blogging. Eighty percent of respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private...

Most freelance writers wait in dread for The Call -- their equivalent of the "Dear John" letter from an editor who is calling (or sometimes e-mailing) to say they're no longer needed. A number of years ago, The Call came to me from my editor at CNET, but with a twist. They were killing my humor column because it didn't get enough page views. I even got a rundown of the numbers, though they were...

"There are actually 7 million blogs being watched on this one site called Technorati. And it gives you an idea of what is going on. And there's so much out there. And it's so hard to keep track of it all. But if you take a look at a site like this it will break it down for you." -- Jacki Schechner, CNN's blog reporter, talking on "Inside Politics" Nothing could be weirder than the first time you...

There are two ways to view Yahoo News. One is to dismiss it as simply a collection of other people's journalism, slapped together and considered just another feature of a big Internet portal. The other is to sit in awe of a site that includes some of the best journalism created, packages it in a simple way with links to outside sources and balances human judgment with technological innovation. For...

Red Blogs, which AOL unveiled Tuesday, allows teenagers and parents to select the level of privacy they want for their online diaries; a private blog can be kept locked. A semiprivate blog is locked to all but those who are invited to read it. And a public blog allows access to anybody on the Net. However, blogs of younger teenagers, those between 13 and 15, will be locked from general public...

Ten years ago, at the first ?New News? seminar held at the Poynter Institute, a group of digital pioneers brainstormed what would be new about online news. They listed what it was that newspapers were not providing that the new digital news space would enable and how the new medium might change news reporting and writing. Many of the predictions were based on the idea of the ?limitless newshole...

(RSF/IFEX) - In a letter to the head of the Times of India press group, RSF has expressed concern over the harassment of journalist Pradyuman Maheshwari by the group's lawyers. Maheshwari, who operates the weblog http://www.mediaah.com, felt compelled to close the blog as a result of the harassment. "At a time when bloggers are being harassed and imprisoned in all four corners of the world, such a...

Google's stated mission is "to make all the world's information available online." Agence France Presse (AFP) calls that copyright infringement. The French counterpart to the Associated Press or Reuters sued Internet search leader Google on Thursday, claiming that Google News cuts into its subscription business. Google News is a beta service launched in September 2002 that aggregates news by topic...

The internet investment firm headed by US media mogul Barry Diller is to buy web search engine Ask Jeeves for $1.85bn (£970m). Ask Jeeves is the fifth most-queried search engine in the US and has a market value of $1.43bn, one tenth the size of Mr Diller's IAC/InterActive. Mr Diller said Ask Jeeves "has the potential to become one of the great brands on the internet". The deal reflects rising...

Syndication feeds continue to gain more mainstream support as major online services experiment with ways to integrate RSS into their offerings. Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division has started an early test of a Web-based RSS (Really Simple Syndication) aggregator, while Yahoo Inc. has expanded into mobile access to the news feeds gathered on its My Yahoo personalized home page service. Both moves...