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NPR: the perfect promo video?

OK, so it’s a little stiff-kneed, but this is actually a perfect promo video for its audience – honest, well-edited and informative. I’ll live without the tricksy cuts and in jokes: I wanted to go try and site at the end of watching the flick.

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Best 404 page ever

Only the NPR would turn a goof into a 15-min read.

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The little trio of journalists that could

I work in an industry that’s obsessed with its own demise. The newspaper business spends its days planning its own funeral party (crisps, anyone?), while ironically enjoying an online gold rush (in traffic, anyway). My Google Reader feed is a river of contradictory figures and silver bullets. Snake oil salesmen? The web wrote the book. [...]

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CoverItLive: blogging goes real time

God knows how many people will use it, but huge credit to the Einsteins behind CoverItLive.

Sign up for an account (which is free, by the way), and you have instant access to a turbo-charged blogging tool that blurs the line between blog and instant messaging.
All you do is add a line of code to your [...]

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Gliffy: share those boxes and arrows

Now this is cool. Just spent the day brain-souping a new site with a few colleagues, and reached the point where we needed to work on individual sections. Problem is, we also needed to see what each of us were up to.
A quick Google, and up pops Gliffy. For years, I’ve been an OmniGraffle addict [...]

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Multimap reborn: Google Maps now has rival

One from the Mediocre Coincidence Dept. I’m boring a colleague senseless today on the sheer awfulness of Multimaps compared to Google Maps (yep, I’m that dull). Hey presto, I open a browser this evening to find a brand new Multimap.
And… it’s excellent. In fact, it actually looks as though they’ve spoken to people who use [...]

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AOL relaunches picky YouTube rival

I’d mentioned the Mullet Strategy a while back. Its principle is simple: business up front, party at the back.
In practical terms, it means letting the world lose on contributing to your site (the party), but making sure you have a gang of crack editors ensuring that only the mavellous makes it to the top-level pages.

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Musicovery: lose hours just playing

Just stumbled across this, and lost the next 30 minutes. I suspect it’s not that new (I seem to remember a develop buddy mentioning it a while back), but what the hell – it’s shockingly addictive.

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fav.or.it: the news reader goes social

Now this is a nice idea. Like many people without better things to do in their lives, I’m a Google Reader addict. It does a finer job of allowing you to swallow vast dollops of information in single sitting than any other tool out there. It has even given birth to a new term – [...]

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USAToday records massive traffic hike

File this one under ‘What The Hell Do I Know, Anyway’.
I admit to hating this year’s re-launch of USAToday. In particular, I hated the panel from hell that dominated the home page – 30 seconds to load in the early days of the re-launch, and determined to hide a good headline behind a small picture. [...]

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