Announcing Marryawrestler.com

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise UK has pub­lished some inter­esting figures based on what young com­muters do online. Her hope is to be able to offer some guidance to our ailing news­pa­pers on what topics to cover more fully. People in this age group appar­ently have little loyalty to tra­di­tional news­pa­pers and are turning to

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Google’s Book Statistics

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise UK reports an inter­esting phe­nomena on Google’s book search. The company may have started to offer PDF versions of out-​​​​of-​​​​print books, a very encour­aging move to be sure. But a sig­ni­ficant pro­por­tion of users go from directly from book search to book shops. Heather reports: “Last week, 15.93% of

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Paper People

Douglas Fisher, who has helped set up the online com­munity news­paper Hartsville Today over the last year, has pub­lished a 75-​​​​page guide (PDF File) to citizen journ­alism and running a com­munity paper online.

It’s well worth a read. Perhaps of especial interest is what he says about training for these new journalists:

Other sites have done

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The most interesting woman in the world

This is the most inter­esting woman in the world.

I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by inter­est­ing­ness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon.

The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe.

What makes for

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The newspaper story, UK edition

Updated stat­istics. Following the Bivings Group report into US news­pa­pers’ adoption of Web 2.0 approaches such as blogging and podcasts, which I wrote about here, BBC English Regions Community Producer Robin Hamman has compiled a similar survey for the top eleven UK dailies. The results are as follows (click for bigger):

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instant messaging don’t break your grammar

While most teen­agers use short­hand expres­sions in their instant messages, it’s not actually lowering stand­ards of grammar. That’s according to a University of Toronto study by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis. Detailed analysis found that while the words and phrases differed from the registers that would be expected by parents and teachers, the struc­tures of

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