A few days after writing the post “10 ways to make remembering to read your feeds easier“, a couple of other thoughts have come to mind that I wanted to share in a new post as well.
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Cross-posted from the SplashCast blog because I thought it would be of interest to readers here as well.
One of the promises of the internet is to democratize access to both information and publishing. That democratization, in theory, makes voices outside of the halls of power more capable of changing the world than they would be otherwise. The jury is still out as to how real all of that is. There are lots of people and organizations giving it a try. Good deeds alone rarely pay the rent, though, and a relatively small number of people online want to watch often-depressing investigative journalism when there’s so much fun to be had in other media sectors.
Liz Gannes wrote a good article last week about the monetization challenges faced by Alive in Baghdad, a project she called “arguably the best-positioned citizen news video outfit in the world.” AiB is pursuing licensing deals with major media outlets but advertising doesn’t seem to be a very viable option for sustaining this fantastic project.
Who else is doing great investigative journalism in video on the web? I spent a fair chunk of time looking, and asking other people for their favorites. Here’s the best projects that I’ve found so far. Please leave more in comments so we can all be inspired.
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After building a rockin’ good OPML file for a client last month a classic problem has come up that I want to write about here: how do you stay motivated to read your feeds regularly? I subscribe to far more feeds than most people (3,000+) and am able to stay on top of them well enough. Here are some ways I do it, as well as some thoughts from some friends. Some of these are pretty standard but I hope that at least some are new to you. Please leave a comment if you can suggest other methods – I’d really like to be able to articulate ways we can prevent the all-too-common “info overload” backlash that’s leading many people to lose out on a lot of the potential offered by new web tools.
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A long weekend after catching some bad PR (ZDNet) for selling user data to third party companies, reputation management startup Rapleaf now appears to be spamming the emails of long-ago registered users. It looks like a case study of what not to do from a company I’ve been hoping would prove a success.
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