Like a mafia bosses up for territory grabs, Steve Jobs arranged a secret meeting with 50 most important people from the New York Times. Even a blind man could see that this is an obvious move to grab up more contents for iPad and subsequently allowable leaks onto iPhone and iPod Touch — if applicable. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Sony may very well arrange secret meetings with top news companies and content providers just like Apple to compete in content war; eventually the hardware may get to be almost like twin when technology slows down on innovation, and the difference may have to come down to contents. Exclusive contents are the two words that we all could meditate on! Who is a flashier tech mafia boss, Steve Jobs or __blank__? Source.
Three companies and only one is not a news organization which is Google. The guys at News York Times and Washington Post are collaborating with the guys at Google in a project called Living Stories. OK, so you say what on earth is this that requires 3 companies to pool their resources together? Living Stories is probably just one of the new ways for Google to keep good faith with news organizations and news fans. News organizations’ big bosses such as Rupert Murdoch and others have been complaining about Google is not playing fair when news contents are at stake. For an example, Google indexes news contents from news organizations, place relevant advertisements next to the contents, and making not just good but a whole lot of money without sharing any of those to the news organizations. OK, Google knows where Mr. Murdoch is heading, and so lately, Google has launched several things to keep the news organizations at ease. For an example, Google also has announced new rule for search engine users which limits how many news articles that can be shown in full lengths in a day, the rest will only show a summary of the news contents and there are links to direct users to the news sources. Living Stories is something fun for news readers, but it is here to make a point that by being constructive, news contents are going to be the stuffs of the future and benefiting the news publishers.
Google and the two news organizations are constructing (on going process as in testing stage) Living Stories in a unique way to benefit news readers. For examples, there is a time-line where news readers can click on to dwell down to a specific time for time relevant news contents; Living Stories grayed out news that perused by you, displays longer summaries for more important stories; and so on. News readers will find Living Stories look very much like a newspaper as the format of displaying news are very similar to a physical newspapers, but with a tangible paper, you cannot interact with it, but on the Living Stories, you can interact with news with some limitations. There is a part where Google announces Living Stories are a work for all publishers to use, although right now, it’s not for everyone but only for News York Times and Washington Post. This means Google may have planning an open source software project (open source Living Stories) that will be released for all publishers to take on in the future.
In my opinion, Living Stories are for the people that want news to be like the old day, but in an electronic format with modern ways to ease the news reading process. After all, Google and the two news organizations are trying to make a point that news in the brave new world — it can be done! Just not in the format where ink and trees need to be wasted (one could argue that more energy of all types needs to be wasted). You can check out Living Stories from Google Lab, or you can go directly to here to start your news reading in a new way. For your information, at first you will see a very bland page with links, click on those will lead you to news contents that are formed in Living Stories format. Check out the YouTube video on Linving Stories after the jump! Source.
Google is going to roll out a new rule where users can only be able to access five full contents of paid news websites in a day. Google is going to use a separate crawler to specifically index news contents, and in this way Google allows paid content publishers to have more control over their contents. Before, if you access paid news websites directly, you have to be a paid member to read the whole news articles, but by entering the news articles’ titles in Google’s search box, you can pull out the full articles that were indexed by Google’s crawler. Can we say, news publishers need to use robot.txt better? Anyway, Google is helping paid content publishers to have one less thing to worry about, and this means it’s the end for whoever wants to access full contents from paid news websites and the likes. What do you think about Google’s decision? I bet this move has something to do with trying to appease all paid content publishers, and especially to appease Mr. Rupert Murdoch who has been loudly protested! Source.
Mr. Rupert Murdoch knows a lot of things about the news business, but lately, things aren’t going his way. He’s arguing that a lot of people are stolen news contents from news websites, from his and others. As of now, he is going through legal route to make his point, and Google is one of those he’s targeting. It’s understandably, that Mr. Rupert Murdoch is going to charge everyone for his contents over the Internet, because he is from the traditional media which has failed somewhat to co-exist with the Internet. For an example, people are expecting contents over the Internet are mostly free, and we can use YouTube as a perfect example for this.
Mr. Rupert Murdoch argues that it’s a lot more expensive for him to get good contents to his audience nowadays, and so he may have to stop them (i.e., Google, Bing, etc.) from indexing his websites and remove all links that point to his websites. His point is that his contents become so cheap that in a sense, the contents worth nothing. Mr. Rupert Murdoch shows frustration for search engines make a lot of money by not creating the contents, but just by indexing the contents, especially his. In the same sweep, Mr. Rupert Murdoch will also make people pay for his contents, particularly on the Wall Street Journal.
In recent interview with Sky News, Mr. Rupert Murdoch points out that most news websites and blog websites aren’t making any serious money, because there aren’t enough advertisers around to pay for that many heavy traffic websites on the web. I’m disagreeing with his point of view, because Internet is a much different beast from the past media, and so new approach should be taken when Internet is in play. Although it’s perfectly sane for Mr. Rupert Murdoch to cry foul, I think he and other smart people should come up with a better model than just simply making people pay, because kids nowadays are born into a world where most contents over the Internet expect to be free!
You gotta be damn good to make people pay for what you put onto the web, because not everyone is in sync with you Mr. Rupert Murdoch. Some prominent news organizations have already denounced that they are going to charge people for contents, instead they take the new route by providing excellent free contents. On a second thought, new comers may not mind so much, because the new journalistic startups then becoming the alternatives, that’s the alternative of pay. In the end, I think everything will play out as if an invisible hand was there to direct the market. The free enterprise will dictate which model will be the best for contents on the net, free versus pay. Only the future could tell if Mr. Rupert Murdoch is right. Source.
Why cry so loudly? Don’t they all know that because of search engines, there will be more traffic for their online news websites? Search engines are where everyone nowadays goes to for exploring the web, and without search engines, it will be very hard for everyone to find new websites and information. Yet, Rupert Murdoch acts as if he doesn’t need a search engine to bring web traffic to his online news websites. Perhaps, Mr. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need, but all other small online magazine websites are surely do need those search engines’ web traffics.
Microsoft is striking a deal with Rupert Murdoch to buy exclusive right for indexing Rupert Murdoch’s online contents in an attempt to boast Bing’s online present over Google. It’s hard to say even talking to many others well known brands of newspapers and magazines besides Rupert Murdoch, can Bing really do some hurt to Google? The Google brand is so strong that its loyal users are in a habit of open up Google’s search box even though they know how to type a website’s address directly into a browser’s address bar. It shows that Google is a very strong brand that will be around for years to come, and search engine technology is keep on getting better. Whether Mr. Rupert Murdoch knows or not, his online news contents are just a grain of sand among a dune of sand, and perhaps, many other online news magazines and news organizations love to take over Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s spot within Google’s search results.
For your information, legitimate search engines allow website owners to use robot.txt file to code in a way that tell what contents on their website are allowed to be indexed. Some not so well-known search engines do not follow the robot.txt’s rules, and so these crawl for everything on all websites. Many website owners do not like this, and so they block’s the IP addresses of these unorthodox search engines. The search engines that aren’t follow the robot.txt’s rules can sometimes create a denial of service attack effect and bandwidth overload effect.
Whether Mr. Rupert Murdoch likes it or not, his websites will get crawl by the search engines that do not follow the rules within robot.txt file. It’s hard to know it’s legal or illegal, and probably it’s perfectly legal to link to another website without the need of asking for a permission of a website owner. People can always shortly refer to the contents on Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s news websites, and linking to Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s news websites as the sources; Google then has the ability to crawl for those referrer contents, and in a way this is another way for Google to index Rupert Murdoch’s contents. Exclusive contents do not belong on the web! Unfortunately for Mr. Rupert Murdoch, nowadays, the web carries the information that people spend most of their times on. Source.
Three letter word CMS is on everyone’s lips since 2003, and you know what I’m talking about if you are one of those computer/content geeks. CMS stands for Content Management System. What is it? CMS is a tool that you can access through web browsers, and from there you can edit, add, delete, update, content versioning (versions), and a whole lot more. But why? A team of writers, small companies, and large corporations use CMS to separate content from design. It’s easier for content writers to just worry about being creative with their contents (means come up with new contents), and the design process of making a website looks pretty has to be rested on the shoulders of web designers. Also, the administrative process can be extremely light when using CMS correctly!
So those big boys are using CMS, but how about you? Even if you’re one man army, CMS can still do wonder! Let play an imaginary game. You want to start an one man company that is concentrating in providing online news. So how do you gonna start this? You have way too many choices to begin with, but let assume you have couple choices in your mind, and it’s time to compare which choice is the best choice to make. You can start this project by creating a website from scratch, coding HTML/XHTML, write out your CSS, find the right thumbnails and photos, put up some contents, upload all of these files and folders to your web server, and you have an online news website going. Then again, what about those extra features such as Tags, RSS, Comments, Recent Posts, Feature Posts, and so on? Going this route you have to use third party services to serve up the codes that help you add extra features to your website, and sometimes you have to code extra features yourself. For one man company, this is way too much work right? In addition, your whole intention is to have an online news website going, and so your main focus is all about contents. It’s bad for you since you have to waste a whole lot of time to design your website, but you don’t have a fast start on getting contents going. What if you don’t know how to code HTML/XHTML, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, CSS, and so on? It’s not looking good for you then!
Another way to start an online news website is to pick out a CMS from hundreds of CMS that are available online. Here, you still have to make a choice between commercial CMS or Open Source CMS. Why? Commercial CMS will cost you some money, but you will have a team that helps you customize and configures your CMS. Open Source CMS is completely free, and you have to deal with the customization yourself. Fortunately, if you pick the right Open Source CMS that has a huge online community, then whenever you need help with managing your CMS, you can ask the community for tips and advices.
With a CMS, you don’t have to worry about the web design process from the beginning stage as each CMS comes with a theme, and most CMSs have many more themes that you can switch to. Though I advice you that after your website is picking up, it’s best to get a custom theme. You still have to code some codes and create a unique website design to get a custom theme, but you can always hire someone within your CMS community to do this for you. Hiring someone is another whole topic that I won’t go into here. In addition to the look, CMS offers a plethora of features for you to activate, and when you activate the right features, your website can look really professional. Each CMS has its own features, and so I cannot talk about each specific feature, but expect that CMS provides you the general features such as RSS, Tags, Comments, Add, Edit, Delete, Update, social network type of features, and so on.
CMSs’ strong point is to allow many people or just one person to manage their contents with ease. Imagine without CMS, whenever you create a new content, you have to create a new web-page to deliver your content. This means that you have to copy and paste the website’s HTML/XHTML codes and other necessary codes of your website’s template to a new web-page, and then adding content into that new web-page. If you’re smart, you use CSS, but even with CSS, you still need to create the general HTML’s codes such as HEAD, TITLE, BODY, HREF, and other HTML’s elements. With CMS, you only need to fire up your web browser, sign into your CMS portal (admin section), create new content, hit publish or save as draft button/link, and you are done. A team of content writers love CMS as it allows writers to work on the same piece of content without worrying about constant changes of one content. There may be a lock mechanism for each CMS that allows content versioning to happen. Each writer will be able to find a saved version of the same content that was edited by another writer, open up that and edit away. Within a single click, the authorized publisher can switch a web content to whatever versions he or she wants to. Locking and versioning allow many authors/writers to edit the same web contents at the same time without the risk of ruining the data (that’s web contents).
Adding Tags to web contents within CMS is so easy that my grandma can do it too. RSS is already enabling by default, and so you don’t even have to worry about RSS. Each CMS has its own method that allows you to moderate contents’ comments that were written by your website visitors.
Another awesome thing about CMS is that it allows you to quickly change your web contents’ URL (web address), but not all CMS may have this feature. Nice and easy to the eyes URLs can also be a good thing as search engine crawlers love uncomplicated URLs, too. Though this don’t matter much anymore if you know about SEO (Search engine optimization), but nice URL is helpful to humans as website visitors may need to remember a specific web content’s URL. This is why many CMSs allow your website visitors to search your website’s contents easily by enabling a search feature by default, if not you have to activate this feature.
Not all but many CMSs allow you to ban or block specific users from using your website. This is an option that you can get custom to whenever your website receives a plethora of comment spams. There is an archive feature that most CMSs carry, and this feature allows your website visitors to browse through the content history. This means what you published years ago are still available for easy browsing through a format that is using dates as a sorting mechanism or whatever formats that each CMS carries.
There are so many features that CMSs provide, and not all CMSs provide the same features, and so I won’t bother to go into specialize features that each CMS provides. Even if I want to, I know that I won’t be able to do so as there are hundreds of CMSs out there. Last I heard there are thousands of CMS though! What I can do is to list couple CMSs that I highly recommend you to take a look at. For other CMSs, there is Google waiting to serve you. I think you should check out Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Frog CMS, SilverStripe, Liferay, miaCMS, MoinMoin, ImpressCMS, Textpattern, Radiant, CMS Made Simple, TYPO3, Plone, MediaWiki, Jaws, BrowserCMS, and so much more. Apparently, I had only tried few of those, but I highly recommend them as many people are creating huge buzzes about these. This is only a small sample of wide variety of choices out there, and so you should follow your heart and intellectual decisions to pick the right CMS for your project. The best way to figure out which CMS to use is Google for other people’s comments on specific CMSs. Also, you can try to install the CMSs that you want to use and have a test run at it. It’s also best that you pick the CMS that has a very active community (users), and in this way that CMS won’t be stagnant anytime soon.
In summary, no matter how you look at, starting an online website the right way is going to be a lot of work for you, but with a good CMS, it may help you handle a lot of things in the long run. CMS is especially good when you have a team of writers that are working on the same contents. CMS is also good for website designers as they don’t have to worry about the website contents, but all they do is to make sure that a website’s features and functionalities are working correctly. Website designers could be splitting into two teams, one team worries about the appearance of a website, the other team worries about the programming part where coding is necessary. Fortunately, most CMSs carry useful features and extra features that heavy coding or programming won’t be necessary, but creating a custom theme is a must — this is where website designers come in. CMSs help you manage content easily; publish, edit, add, and delete content are a breeze. Picking the right CMS for your project requires you to do some research as there are way too many CMSs out there. I recommend you to use Open Source CMSs as these are free to use. Free CMSs versus commercial CMSs, how do you know what to use? It’s not only about the prices, but it’s also about the features, functionality, ease of use, the supports from the community or commercial team, and so on. In my opinion Open Source CMSs and commercial CMSs are equal, because it’s up to you to see the benefits of each CMS when you draw up a project. Have fun CMSing…
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