Guardian takes the plunge

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From today’s paper.

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as “epochal” by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter’s brief text messages, known as ‘tweets’, which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity ‘twitterers’, such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter’s profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

That’s the stuff. Pity about the date.

Google ventures forth

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From the New York Times.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google, which has invested in many startups over the years, will announce on Tuesday that it is creating a venture capital arm whose main objective will be to turn a profit.

The group, called Google Ventures, is expected to invest up to $100 million over the next 12 months. It will be overseen by David Drummond, who will continue in his role as senior vice president of corporate developing and chief legal officer at Google. Investments will be vetted by William Maris, who joined Google about a year ago, and Rich Miner, a co-founder of Android, a mobile software startup that Google acquired in 2005.

Mr. Maris said in an interview that Google will tap the connections of its employees and its ties to the venture capital world to find promising startups in areas like the Internet, clean technology and life sciences…

Interesting that its objective is “to turn a profit”. I’m wondering what other options were considered. It’s probably a good time to be getting in the the VC market, though — given that many other investment firms are getting rather strapped for cash.

Twitter comes of age

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Yep. Early indication here.

Courtrooms have already begun dealing with jurors Googling, Facebooking, and Twittering their way through the case. Now, some courtrooms are starting to set regulations ahead of time. The Associated Press is reporting that the Idaho Supreme Court’s criminal jury instruction committee is discussing guidelines that would prevent jurors from using electronic devices to post their thoughts or do research on cases that are in progress.

While nothing has yet been approved, if instructions for jurors are approved, they would be recommended for use in both magistrate and district courts throughout Idaho, the AP said.

Meanwhile, the National Basketball Association has fined Mark Cuban — who has a reputation for complaining — $25,000 for comments he made in Twitter about the officials…

Thanks to Glyn Moody for spotting it.

The Celtic tig…, er, donkey

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Front page of this morning’s Irish Times. Junk bond status coming soon. Reminds me of a nice joke that’s been circulating for months in Ireland.

Q: What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland?
A: One letter and six months.

Microsoft Encarta succumbs to Wikipedia

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Well, it was a long time coming, but here it is.

Do you remember what came in between printed encyclopedias and Wikipedia Wikipedia reviews? For many, the answer is Microsoft Encarta, which was distributed starting in the 90s via CD-ROM and more recently on the Web via MSN. Today, Microsoft announced that it’s discontinuing Encarta later this year, offering symbolic confirmation that Wikipedia is the world’s definitive reference guide.

Microsoft acknowledges as such in an FAQ they’ve setup explaining the move and what existing Encarta customers can expect. The company writes, “Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.”

That’s quite the understatement. As PaidContent points out, the crowd-edited Wikipedia boasts 2.7 million entries in English versus just 42,000 for Encarta. Need further confirmation of why Wikipedia is simply a better model? News of Encarta’s discontinuation has already reached the product’s entry on Wikipedia.

Increasing online giving by intelligent design

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I’m not an unqualified admirer of Jakob Neilsen’s work, but this Alertbox post makes a lot of sense. What he was trying to find out is what affects online donors’ decisions

We asked participants what information they want to see on non-profit websites before they decide whether to donate. Their answers fell into 4 broad categories, 2 of which were the most heavily requested:

* The organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work.

* How it uses donations and contributions.

That is: What are you trying to achieve, and how will you spend my money?

Sadly, only 43% of the sites we studied answered the first question on their homepage. Further, only a ridiculously low 4% answered the second question on the homepage. Although organizations typically provided these answers somewhere within the site, users often had problems finding this crucial information.

As we’ve long known, what people say they want is one thing. How they actually behave when they’re on websites is another. Of the two, we put more credence in the latter. We therefore analyzed users’ decision-making processes as they decided which organizations to support.

In choosing between 2 charities, people referred to 5 categories of information. However, an organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work was by far the most important. Indeed, it was 3.6 times as important as the runner-up issue, which was the organization’s presence in the user’s own community.

(Information about how organizations used donations did impact decision-making, but it was far down the list relative to its second-place ranking among things that people claimed that they'd be looking for.)

People want to know what a non-profit stands for, because they want to contribute to causes that share their ideals and values. Most people probably agree that, for example, it’s good to help impoverished residents of developing countries or patients suffering from nasty diseases. Many organizations claim to do these very things. The question in a potential donor’s mind is how the organization proposes to help. Often, sites we studied failed to answer this question clearly — and lost out on donations as a result…

See evolution at work…at a snail’s pace

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Hooray! The OU’s evolution megalab project is up and running. Press Release says:

Snails, often the unloved blight of gardeners, are being put under the microscope with a new public science project being launched today (Monday 30 March) by The Open University. The Evolution MegaLab is a mass public research programme which is investigating how ordinary banded snails – found in back gardens, river banks and parks – have evolved over the last 40 years, by comparing data supplied by members of the public with a database of more than 8,000 historical records.

The project runs from April to October 2009, spanning Europe, and relies on members of the public doing their own snail hunts and submitting their findings to the website at www.evolutionmegalab.org. When data is received, people will get personalised interpretations of their observations. At the end of the year the results will be analysed by a group of leading evolutionary biologists, co-ordinated by scientists from The Open University.

Scientists believe that climate change and predators may have caused the banded snail population to shift habitat and even change their appearance. Professor Jonathan Silvertown of The Open University explains: “Banded snails wear their genes on their backs. Their colours and banding patterns are marvellously varied – but the darker shell types are more common in woodland, where the background colour is brown, while in grass banded snails tend to be lighter-coloured, yellow and stripier. These differences are thought to have evolved over time because they provide camouflage from thrushes, which like to eat the snails.”

Hmmm… We have snails in our garden at home, where they are regarded (at least by the Head Gardener) with unmitigated distaste. Various remedies are proposed by helpful friends — e.g. drowning them in beer. Somehow I can’t see her (the Head Gardener) taking kindly to the idea of them as evolutionary witnesses.

Credits: The Evolution Megalab is one of Doug Clow’s projects. See his blog entry about it.

802.11n blues

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As his fellow-Twitterers know, Rory Cellan-Jones has been grappling all week with getting 802.11n networking to work in his home. He’s now written an entertaining blog post on his experiences. Sample:

So then I got in touch with a real expert – a man who works for one of the big router firms. He immediately diagnosed my problem – I’d put the wrong kind of security on. It turns out that WEP just doesn’t work with ‘n’ routers – or rather it does but it throttles them back to ‘g’ speeds. It only works at full speed if you have no encryption or use one of the WPA options.

So why on earth does the router company allow you to choose WEP? He explained that they’d originally shipped the shiny new routers without it but there had been a consumer backlash. My router man also confirmed that the 802.11n standard hasn't been finalised yet, so there’s the possibility that some bits of kit won’t work with others, even if theoretically they are both using 802.11n.

He got it to work btw — eventually.