Either the Telewag have come up with an interesting way of using a picture based story without the image rights, or someone hit publish when they weren’t meant to.
My off-beat news site NewsLite has been named as a ‘Top 100 Essential Website‘ by The Guardian newspaper — which is nice.
Launched in January, 2008 it’s my home for funny, odd and off-beat news stories. Recent articles have included a woman who paints with espresso coffee, the boom in popularity of micro-pigs as pets and the world’s largest gummy bear (and to think I used to do ‘real’ news).
It has grown considerably over the past two years and is currently accessed by around 150,000 unique users per month.
Articles from NewsLite are syndicated to dozens of websites including Time Warner, USA Today and Chicago Sun-Times – where they are currently viewed around 800,000 times per day. Selected articles are also syndicated to national UK newspapers including the Telegraph, The Daily Mirror, The Sun and the Daily Mail.
So if you haven’t seen it yet, go have a look. Just don’t expect anything too highbrow.
It’s been a couple of weeks since an intrigued UPS guy delivered my shiny white Kindle “What are these things?” he asked, “I’ve been delivering loads of them all morning.”
When I told him, he instantly lost interest, “So it’s just for reading books” he muttered as he disappeared down the corridor, carrying another two familiar brown Amazon boxes — I couldn’t tell if he’d recognised this meant he wouldn’t be carrying any more heavy books to these addresses.
Okay so first things first. Yes Amazon should have released it in the UK far earlier. Yes it is beginning to look like dated technology and yes they have crippled the ‘international’ version by removing features like the albeit rather crappy web browser (unless you are addicted reading dubious facts).
It’s also annoying buying everything in dollars, especially when you are as mathematically challenged as me and the pound is doing belly flops off the high-diving board.
If that wasn’t enough Amazon have obviously noticed the little ’sucker’ stickers we Brits have on our foreheads and added 30% onto the price of the books they are willing to sell us. By which I mean the measly selection of the ones US customers get to pick from.
While this can be navigated by a proxy server, downloading to your computer and transferring by USB, you will be hard pushed to do that in the magic 60 seconds a certain Mr Bezos keeps going on about.
You might think you can tell where this review is going… but no, I am loving my Kindle.
While I have only bought one book from Amazon, I uploaded 50 classics I have been meaning to read, (easily downloaded from Feedbooks) and anyway, for me the killer feature is getting newspapers delivered to me each morning.
I love newspapers, but I rarely buy them. For years (while working as news editor at NTI) I had every national sat on my desk when I got to work. Since then I have grown to begrudge handing over cash for a paper filled with content which is free online.
But the idea of getting them on the Kindle kindle appealed to me. Each morning I could have a newspaper sat on my bedside table waiting for me to wake up (add a coffee machine and I could marry it). To an extent this is what I got, though annoyingly the international version means newspapers are stripped of pictures.
Either way I have spent more money on newspapers in the past few week than the past 12 months — and as a hack that can’t be a bad thing.
It lasted longer than many thought it would, but it looks like the Printed Blog is no more.. after just 16 issues.
The idea was that the freesheet – which brought together the best of the web – and would be distributed at major urban locations across America with local advertising spots being sold in each region.
When the project began in January The Printed Blog was only handed out in Chicago but that soon grew to include cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Despite being backed by founder Joshua Karp (and several credit cards) he says they were unable to reach the next stage of development.
Speaking on blog.printedblog he said: “16 issues, 80,000 print copies distributed, another 100,000 or so copies downloaded, and countless new friends, fans, and collaborators all around the world later, I may still be nuts, but I have zero regrets.”
Disclosure: Despise claims from The Printed Blog that that brought together the best of the web they also included a number of my articles.
My off-beat news site NewsLite has been named as a ‘Top 100 Essential Website‘ by The Guardian newspaper — which is nice.
It lasted longer than many thought it would, but it looks like the Printed Blog is no more.. after just 16 issues.
