E-Media Tidbits

BlogHer.com This new widget from BlogHer makes it easy to find relevant female political bloggers. News orgs could do a lot with this approach. (Click image to get widget)

The press becomes the press-sphere. Jeff Jarvis explains that in the press-sphere: "Any of many sources can, thanks to links, add up a story and to fulfilling the need or desire for news and information. The press may be involved and may create a news story. But we might have found that via links from our peers who tell us it's news. ("If the news is important, it will find me.") Either of those might have linked to source material from a company or government site -- which now plays a press role in adding to the whole of a story. Witnesses can join in the process directly. Background might come via links to archives. Commentary from observers may add perspective. An accumulation of data may alert us to news or augment it. All of these elements add up to news."

Searchable political blogger widget. Yesterday the women of BlogHer debuted a surprisingly useful widget to help people find relevant political bloggers authored by women. It's a distributed interface to BlogHer's Guide to Political Bloggers. This approach is something news orgs could use to build bridges with local bloggers and communities. (Thanks to Jill Miller Zimon for the tip.)

Atlantic Media Fellowship. "Paid fellowship program for 5-10 emerging media talents from fall 2008 through spring 2009. Intensive nine-month gig conceiving new web concepts, developing their structure, design and voice, and writing and editing the daily content after launch." Application deadline: May 8.

Change ad model and be more like Google, report advises newspapers (Journalism.co.uk). About a month old, but still worth noting: "If top news sites generated the same revenue per UK unique user in 2007 as Google, under a cost-per-click (CPC) ad model, they could have gotten ad revenues between £120-250 million each from domestic traffic." Instead, they got only 20 percent as much revenue by selling online ads on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. Release and full report.

Meeting Scheduling: Twitpitch Me! (Stowe Boyd). Here's an intriguing use of Twitter: "I am hereby posting a schedule of the times that I will make available for meetings with companies at the Web 2.0 Expo, and I am not going to accept e-mail-based proposals to meet, only Twitpitches." The more I see applications like this, the less I think Twitter can be characterized as a "microblogging" tool.

Russell Beattie Throws In The Towel On Mowser; And Doesn't Believe In The Mobile Web Anymore (mocoNews.net). About the founder of Mowser, a mobile browser that would render Web sites better for the mobile phone: "He doesn't really believe people aren't interested in getting info on the go, but that they want an identical experience to the Web, not a re-formated abbreviated one. That doesn't mean the mobile Internet is dead. It means full browsers may succeed."