1. Hyperlinking the Real World – ReadWriteWeb: “Welcome the dawn of the age of ubiquitous computing! Just wait until everything is rfid tagged so you can google search for your socks.”
2. $200 Laptops Break a Business Model – NYTimes.com
3. Five fatal flaws in local Internet ad sales
4. Web Usability Blunders That Still Piss Me Off
5. You Will Probably Fail in a Boring and Project-specific Way

Get these links delivered via twitter here, or subscribe to this online journalism link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week) via rss / web feeds here.

1. Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With Your Twitter ID
2. CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspapers – NYTimes.com
3. The Media Equation – A New Jersey Newspaper Shuns the Web, and Thrives – NYTimes.com
4. Traditional News Sites Dominate, But The Small Can Survive: This is a write-up of a paper Lauren Rich Fine published for the PaidContent folk (and that you can buy for $200)
5. With Twitter, a desperate need for context: “And that’s when I realized that the future of media is being split into two streams: one that consists of raw news that comes like a torrent from sources such as Twitter, mobile messages and photos, the other, from old media. The eyewitness dispatches (and photos) via social media are an adjunct to the more established media — which needs to focus on providing analysis, context, and crucially, intelligence — in real time. And yet it is old media — and their next-generation counterparts, the blogs and other Internet outlets — that will have to adapt to this. Of course, the biggest adaption will need to come from the public, those of us who aren’t there ourselves.”

Subscribe to this online journalism link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week) via rss / web feeds here.

1. Free our data: Plenty of ideas for freeing government data
2. Community-funded news launches at Spot.Us
3. the evolution of the front page: “These diagrams were a study related to my Masters thesis project, Movable Parts: The Retooling of the Los Angeles Times. In developing an understanding of newspaper culture I decided mapping the evolution of the front page would be a beneficial exercise. The below images tracks the front page of the Los Angeles Times over the entire history of the daily.”
4. Memo to newspaper bloggers: Be human
5. Local TV Stations Are Facing Severe Cost Pressures—Here’s How They Should Cut
5. Newspapers Jettisoning Top Talent to Cut Costs – NYTimes.com: “But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.”

Subscribe to this online journalism link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week) via rss / web feeds here.

1. Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets
2. Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don’t
3. That’s the Press, Baby: What Copy Editors Do: Good prose in the blog post — interesting anti-copy-editor points in the comments too: “The problem for copy editors is that their job consists of catching other people’s slipups — because to err is human — and thus it seems unseemly to go around pointing out what we do. It makes others look bad, and it’s a lot more fun to talk about investigations we want to do. But then owners and business managers look at pages and headlines and say, oh, that’s all that copy editors do. The Times of India has pages and headlines too. Hey, let’s save money!”
3. Looking ahead, local will be the big media winner
3. Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites – NYTimes.com: Well how ’bout that.
3. “The article is not the story”
3. The building block of journalism is no longer the article: “The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.”
3. Let’s Be Serious: Online Display Ads Will Fall Sharply In 2009
3. The New AP

Subscribe to this link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week) here.

1. Inflation-adjusted newspaper revenues approaching 1982 levels: “According to The Newsosaur, Alan Mutter, the first-half 2008 newspaper revenue details, released by the Newspaper Association of America, represent the worst numbers in a dozen years. But that’s comparing 1996 dollars to 2008 dollars. If you look at print revenue performance in constant 2008 dollars, the industry hasn’t seen numbers this grim since 1982 (click to see the chart in full size)”
2. Google News Archive Adds Many Scanned Newspapers
3. 10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers: “The biggest problem for newspapers is not falling readerships, it is falling advertising revenue. It is the move from local monopolies to a global platform where competition is everywhere, and advertising less lucrative. For all the talk of how journalists can get a grip on new media, there’s been far too little on how ad sales people can do the same. So here I present ten ways ad sales people (and their managers) can save their jobs.”
4. Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers: Fifty percent true.
5. Daily Show: The Best F**king News Team On The Planet – DNC: F**kin’ hilarious. “What do you look forward to not accomplishing this year in congress?”

Subscribe to this link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week), you can do that here…

1. How Newsrooms Throw Away Value By Not Linking To Sources On The Web: “How can newsrooms, in an age of swiftly declining editorial resources, afford to throw valuable material away? And this is material that they PAID FOR by paying a journalist to research a story. Editors should be demanding that journalists provide links to source material to include with the web version of a story.”
2. Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet (The Onion): “In a statement made to reporters earlier this afternoon, local idiot Brandon Mylenek, 26, announced that at approximately 2:30 a.m. tonight, he plans to post an idiotic comment beneath a video on an Internet website.”
3. Do we really need 15,000 journalists at the upcoming DNC / RNC?: …makes me wish I was in Beijing right now…
4. Google interview questions – fun brain teasers!
5. Special Report: Publishers Rethink Third-Party Pacts: “Over the past seven years—as old-line media companies have spun off a proliferation of digital products and the supply of unsold online ads has grown—the number of networks has also ballooned, from fewer than 50 to more than 300, per investment bank ThinkEquity Partners. While ad networks and their cousins, ad exchanges, offer an efficient way to unload inventory that would otherwise go unsold, common complaints are that networks amount to paltry ad rates, low-rent ads and, ultimately, the threat of undermining a brand’s value.”

Subscribe to this link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week), you can do that here…

1. Computational Journalism: “Readers take these sort of technologies for granted in their daily Web experience, and it’s vital that newspaper sites break out of the traditional words/photo/graphics paradigm to start thinking in similar ways and adopting computational journalism. You can do that by making your smart programmers equal partners in thinking about how news should be covered on a daily basis. They’re going to have ideas you never even dreamed of. And that’s a good thing.”
2. 4 Steps to Create A Modern News Story: “The database-driven Web has ushered in a new form of storytelling, one that has several components to it and involves something more than any one person — or one team — could ever hope to do.”
3. 17 Mistakes Start-Ups Make
4. Finally: the answer to hyper-local coverage
5. MediaShift Idea Lab . Cheap, But Not Free: “So there’s a wealth of social benefits that come along with citizen journalism. And it’s hard work. And yes, it’s cheaper than paying reporters. But not as cheap as you thought.”

Subscribe to this link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week), you can do that here…

1. Dean Singleton’s Speech In Sweden: 19 Of The Top 50 US Newspapers Are Losing Money: “Last week Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group (which owns the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News, and 55 other American dailies) gave a remarkably candid speech on the state of the American newspaper to the World Newspaper Congress in Sweden.”
2. 32 of the best real world career and life tips for new journalism graduates entering the newspaper industry: “Spring is upon us! And with it, another crop of enthusiastic, bight-eyed, bushy-tailed journalism graduates hatch from their cocoon of schooling and flutter to the market. For all of you students out there (and anyone else looking for advice), let me save you some bumps and give you some of my career advice that they didn’t really tell me in journalism school.”
3. What is the Ideal Post Frequency for a Blog?
4. 10 Tips for Working with the Not-So-Tech-Savvy
5. 2008 Email [Newsletter] Design Guidelines

If you want to subscribe to this link feed, you can do that here…

1. Let’s not forget what was killing us before the Internet
2. User Assistance: Writing for a High-Context Culture
3. More notes on AngryJournalist.com
4. BBC NEWS | Technology | Luminaries look to the future web: “Exactly 15 years ago the directors at the lab where the web was first developed signed a document which said the technology could be used by anyone free of charge. That decision was instrumental in making the web truly world wide. BBC News talks to some of the leading figures in the web community about their hopes for the future of the web.”
5. ESPN jumps into high school sports – Lost Remote: “While local media companies across the country have aggressively ramped up their high school sports initiatives with new sites and products, ESPN announced that it’s planning to launch a social networking site built around high school sports. ESPN Rise, which is the brand dedicated to the new effort, will also include a good deal of television coverage of high school sports — even in SportsCenter. ESPNRise.com will launch in August.”

If you want to subscribe to this link feed, you can do that here…

That said, this is what people were clicking on off my reading list from April 2008.

1. 8 reasons why your new special section is doomed to underwhelming traffic
2. How Strategic Imagination Happens – Harvard Business Online’s Umair Haque: This guy, Umair Haque, has consistently smart-smart-smart insight into the way the internet economy works, and where it’s going.
3. But who owns Javascript? (front-end vs. back-end development): “In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally speaking, we’re split into these two camps. For the most part, our technical responsibilities are split up as such: “designers” do the client-side things (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc.), and “developers” do the server-side things (PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, etc.). Somewhere along the line, we decided the gap between front-end and back-end would be a good place to divide up our responsibilities. But is it?”
4. How We Use Twitter for Journalism – ReadWriteWeb
5. The Long Tail: Of Fly Eyes And Newspaper Revenues

If you want to subscribe to this link feed, you can do that here…