Last month, Google News made a small and mysterious change to the way it displays some news sources: “We’re now visibly marking articles published on a news blog with a ‘(blog)’ label attached to the publication’s name,” Google explained, attributing the switch to user feedback. The label, a spokesman later told me, applies to any [...]

Planning his Knight News Challenge entry, Joe Boydston followed his own advice: think small. He won a modest $10,000 to develop a desktop application that will allow web-challenged journalists to drag text files into a folder and have them automatically published online. “Someone at the conference asked me if I regretted not requesting more money,” [...]

Nothing spreads faster than a good link. We’ve posted more than 80 links related to new media on our Twitter feed this week, and here’s a roundup of the most popular, interesting, and/or important ones:
— Technorati released a list of websites to which blogs most frequently link, and it’s dominated by traditional news media. The [...]

I want to quickly highlight one exchange in that Aron Pilhofer interview I linked the other day:
Q: Are there any free or open-source products out there that small-town newspapers can use?
A: Everything we use is free and open-source. Our platform is Ruby on Rails backed by Mysql databases running on Ubuntu servers. The cost here [...]

Here’s a 30-minute presentation from Stephan Spencer on how to improve your blog’s SEO. (That’s search engine optimization — a fancy term for “ensuring Google likes your site and ranks it high in search results.”) His advice is most directly tuned to users of WordPress blogging software, like The New York Times. (That’s WordPress founder [...]