Media - Internet

The earthquake and tsunamis that swept across South Asia nearly two weeks ago have killed almost 150,000 people, by the latest estimate. But with each passing day, fresh numbers of the dead and displaced continue to emerge. The television screens showed footage of water-logged coastal cities and towns along the Indian Ocean and there was talk of thousands of people, vehicles and furniture swept...

Opera Software ASA unveiled Thursday a beta test version of its next Web browser release that features speech recognition, discovery of news feeds and automatic Web-page resizing. While the next release had been on track to be Version 7.60, the Oslo, Norway, company announced a change in plans. It is retooling the version to be more than an update, which will include a yet-to-be-determined name...

There's something inherently fun about playing God. How else to explain the popularity of the third-person "God games" that have ruled the videogame charts? And when I got my two-year-old son the Little People farm scene and garage, he would play for hours, choosing the fates of those cute little plastic figures. For way too long, it has been the mainstream media (MSM) that's played God with the...

Monopolies might be bad for consumers, but for Web designers, the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser made their lives easier to some extent. When it came to testing site content for the various browsers of the past -- Netscape, AOL, et al -- the pre-eminence of IE meant that designing and testing was simplified. Now along comes the exploding growth of the open-source Firefox...

Yahoo confirmed Friday that it has hired newspaper veteran Neil Budde to run its news operations. Budde, who will begin his position at Yahoo on Nov. 15, was the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online edition. Budde ran the majority of the operations for WSJ.com and was behind the decision to turn it into a subscription-only site. Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens declined...

Midway through the first breakout session of BloggerCon III -- "podcasting" led by pied piper Adam Curry -- I realized that covering this "unconference" would be akin to trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Five days later I'm still trying to sort through the myriad ideas, the intense emotions and the amazing flow of information. I'll probably be at it five weeks from now and even five...

The dirty secret of most news Web sites is that their biggest viewership comes during the day, when people are at work and should be working. On Election Day in the U.S., you can't blame people for spending their work hours hunting around online for exit poll numbers, the supposedly closely guarded numbers that came this year from the National Election Pool, a group effort created by ABC, the...

Among the many changes the Internet has brought to the production and consumption of media has been the growth of a new group of strong and vital voices that have significantly expanded reader options for getting information. Independent publishers of newsletters and Web logs have been able to inexpensively distribute their knowledge, research and reporting, and even to gain a following. And the...

When Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher founded the Village Voice in 1955, they probably envisioned their alternative publication as the voice of the people. Yeah, right. Nearly 50 years later, the American revolution in people -- ordinary citizens -- having their voices heard in the media is taking place in what big-city folk call the flyover zones, with hyperlocal online publications that...

When political bloggers bay in the blogosphere, do political reporters hear them? The answer, I quickly learned, depends on four factors: how you define "political blog"; which political bloggers you mean; which political reporters you mean; and--not to go all Bill Clinton on you--what the meaning of "hear" is. Blog, for the uninitiated, is shorthand for "Web log," online journals of thought and...