Everybody loves online quizzes. Click a few buttons, hit return and get your answers. Unless, that is, you are doing a quiz on The Guardian. It has an enticing quiz entitled “Test your geek credentials“. However, the quiz is a disappointment, not because of the content but because it is a static, traditional newspaper quiz, cut and pasted onto a web page. No clicking of answers here. Instead you have

It’s the time of the year when news editors will be thinking about their priorities for the coming year. For online news sites, is it going to be video, user-generated content or social media? For at least one UK newspaper website, The Telegraph, 2008 is going to be all about video. Edward Roussel, the digital editor at Telegraph Media Group says this is the site’s biggest priority for next year,

The BBC has been marking 10 years of bbc.co.uk with a series of posts on the BBC Internet blog. They offer an insight into the creation of what has become a new arm of the corporation, and the third most visited site in Britain, behind only Google and MSN, with 17m regular users in the UK, and many more globally. Usually we tend to hear only from the bosses about

The release by Nielsen of the total minutes spent by users on the top 30 newspaper websites in the US has reignited the debate over how to measure success online. According to this way of judging popularity, the top 10 are: 1 – NYTimes.com — 550,035 2 – USATODAY.com — 136,603 3 – washingtonpost.com — 145,083 4 – Wall Street Journal Online — 72,110 5 – Newsday — 28,203 6

The BBC homepage is getting what Richard Titus, the man leading the project, humbly describes as a “lick of paint”. In a post on the BBC Internet blog, he outlines the thinking behind the “cleaner, more open and more easily readable” site. The page is up in beta already, and looks and feels like a massive improvement over the existing homepage. As Titus explains, it draws heavily from the “ongoing

This year’s choice for the word of 2007 by dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster may cause many to say “what”? Or in this case, w00t? The word, w00t, a mashup of letters and numbers used by gamers to express triumph, emerged victorious in the online poll for the word that best sums up the year. According to Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse: It shows a really interesting thing that’s going on in language.

This cartoon from Rob Cottingham, president of a web community consultancy, Social Signal, says it all: (Via Inside the CBC)

Could the stickiness of social sites such as Digg, Facebook or YouTube be explained by the notion that they function as hidden games? The Read/WriteWeb blog points to an ebook by C. Weng on this very idea. In The Web: Hidden Games, available for free on Lulu, Weng argues that: Officially, they are social networks, news aggregators, etc. and not designed as game sites like Second Life is. However, these

I wanted to share our experiences at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism in creating a student journalism website on a tight budget. As most journalism educators will know, there are often few resources or the technical support to develop multimedia websites. TheThunderbird.ca showcases the work of the students on the core Multiplatform Journalism course that I lead at the J-school. The site is run on an installation of WordPress

The NUJ has published its report on multimedia working in the UK, looking at impact of new technologies on journalists. Among its key conclusions is that: The quality of journalism is being threatened in the multimedia age because of the increasing demands placed on reporters, who are working longer hours and taking on more responsibility for no extra pay This is not news to anyone working in multimedia newsroom, where