:: Future of Journalism

On (Adobe) Air Tonight

I'm not always on, but yes, I would like to be connected to the information of interest and importance to me even if I'm on tour driving from my home near the Alps to the office in the center of Munich.
Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use mature web technologies to build rich Internet applications (RIA) that run outside the browser e.g. on your desktop and despite of the operating system you're using.

Fox News for example offers a live desktop player which streams video of news. Users can keep up to date on important breaking events with currently twelve exclusive live streams. The application uses the Adobe® AIR™ runtime to launch manually or automatically at startup and to receive desktop notifications of events.

More details: Adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Digg.com In Realtime - More Relevancy?

Digg.com is "a place for people to discover and share content across the web, from the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog. Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users." as we can read on their website. Today they come up with an announcement of substantial change.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch.com tells his readers, that Kevin Rose, founder of Digg has announced a "completely new direction" of Digg. No details have been given yet besides of that it will be "a little bit more real-time in nature".

More realtime? - I wonder if it would produce more relevancy. Indeed tipps from users are always quite a good source and starting point to digg deeper into an topic of interest. But 50,000 votes for a top story might not necessarily mean that the story is really relevant to the majority of people. Diggers will add their bias as heavy online user group to the votes.

And: Digg.com is not alone. Since Google has added feedback and voting functionality to its iGoogle product as well, we can easily recognize where search engines are trying to move in the future - at least the current market leader: more user interaction and votes as built-in feature. Digg.com might be a candidate for M&A.

"No Follow" Follows Ads In Tweets

  One of the reasons why I think Tweeter was a useful invention is, that writers post quite useful information in form of hints combined with links. With a myriad of information outside in the Internet world, posting and sharing information of interest is such a value for me as a user and writer on Tweeter as well. (Follow "StKonrath" if you like to follow up on my posts).
Unfortunately today it was the first time, I found an interesting tweet but which included an ad link instead of relevant information. The link lead me to RevTwt.com an online startup with focus on selling ads in Tweeter feeds. That's a no-go for me, to be honest.