fighting highlighting

I recently got some feedback on the way I highlight words or expressions throughout my posts. Most if not all of them were negative, and informed me that my highlighted words were mistaken for hyperlinks, or just making it hard to read the text.

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 Epic 2014

In the year2014, The New York Times has gone offline.
The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned.
What happened to the news?
And what is Epic?

 Listen To The People

[csmonitor.com] In Chile, instant Web feedback creates the next day's paper. This revolution has occurred, says the paper's publisher Augustine Edwards, thanks to his decision to listen to "the people." Three years ago, under Mr. Edwards's guidance, LUN installed a system whereby all clicks onto its website (www.lun.com) were recorded for all in the newsroom to see. Those clicks - and the changing tastes and desires they represent - drive the entire print content of LUN. If a certain story gets a lot of clicks, for example, that is a signal to Edwards and his team that the story should be followed up, and similar ones should be sought for the next day. If a story gets only a few clicks, it is killed. The system offers a direct barometer of public opinion, much like the TV rating system - but unique to print media.

 The disorder in the RSS

[rodcorp] There are now a few websites that took books from eg Project Gutenberg and re-presented them in a page-a-day format on a weblog or via RSS. Examples: Joyce's Ulysses (from Jason White), Joyce's Finnegans Wake (from Michael Brewster), The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (from Matt Webb), and what's perhaps the grand-daddy of the form, Samuel Pepys's Diary (from Phil Gyford, which now has 13,000+ annotations). There's something interesting about seeing pages placed next to each other in a newsreader. This next to that, here and now: random correspondences, connections, comparisons.
There will obviously be a huge number of these "correspondences" (particularly if you're looking for them), but perhaps there's mileage in going further, in remixing people's books and notebooks, or at least in providing a pick-any-X-books service to make a DIY RSS page-a-day feed.

 British Library newspaper archive planned

[I.T. Vibe] The British Library, in collaboration with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) are planning to make available online some one million pages of searchable content from old out-of-copyright 19th century newspapers, a press release shows.

The plan is for the British Library and the JISC to work together to make available online a large 50,000+ newspaper strong searchable archive, intended as a fast convenient resource for further and higher education students as well as research communities.

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 More QR codes

More photos of QR-codes found on everyday items in Japan.
Starting with 2 magazine adverts for mobile phones featuring barcodes linking to the mobile site of the maker; a graphics-softwares tutorial book that has a barcode on its cover including all the details about the book so you can come back later and ask for it precisely for example; a mini-guide to Tokyo areas and streets featuring a different barcode on each spread that if scanned takes you to a mobile site page giving you more precise information on Gourmet or Lodging informations for that very area delimited by the spread's contour; and finally an ink-stamp made by Sachihata with a barcode that could include all your contact details to then be printable on some of your belongings, letters, business cards.
I think that it is safe to say that more than 60% of all new mobile camera phones sold in Japan now have a QR barcode reader included in their system. I will get back to you as soon as I can get more precise numbers for the 3 main makers AU, DoCoMo and Vodafone.

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 Fujitsu's Invisible Cameraphone Hyperlinks

[NEAsiaOnline] Fujitsu has developed a method for invisibly embedding information into printed images as small as one centimeter square. By printing a series of imperceptible yellow dots into an image, up to 12 digits of numeric information can be hidden, allowing a company to embed a phone number or encoded URL. Then, by taking a picture of the image with a cameraphone or PDA, special software can decode the numbers and call the company's phone number or look up their webpage. [via]

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 The Responsive Octopus

[aether architecture] A virtual structure designed through physical modelling, by informing the virtual with qualities of a physical model. The structure is responsive, it is aware of the visitors presence and redefines its geometry dependent on the visitors position. This structure functions as a navigation system for the website Allende Arquitectos in Madrid.

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 Newsmap launches My friend Marcos Weskamp has finally released his Newsmap application, an amazing information visualising tool. Here is how he presents it:

Newsmap is an application that visualizes the totality of the GoogleNews aggregator. The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you - no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, get's filed as one single entry.

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 Barcodes linking to online content IV In May 2000, The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., USA started delivering newspapers that had tiny barcodes on articles, allowing readers to use a pen-like wand to scan and pull up related information on the Web. The barcodes were called GoCodes and had an advantage: they could fit on a line of text and therefore didn't need a dedicated space in the layout of the page.
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 From Web to Print for TV2 Nettavisen

[E-Media Tidbits] In a one-time marketing ploy, the online newspaper TV2 Nettavisen in Norway published 20,000 copies of a print version of the website on Friday (19/04/2004), with a resounding success: all media in Norway and many media outlets around the world have been talking about it. The paper was printed in tabloid format and distributed to commuters in Bergen and Oslo. "A very smart move, and a perfect way to visualize the broad content of a news site," a high-profile Norway media executive told me.

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 The print audience pushes back

[E-Media Tidbits] A couple of trends in newspapering seem obvious and inevitable to me: [1] Local newspapers will play local news more strongly on their front pages, relegating national/international news to inside sections. (With so many better online sources of non-local news, what's the point of putting day-old national/international news on the front page? Readers have already seen it online or on TV.) [2] More previously-printed content will be published only online, and print editions will promote more content that's exclusively online -- with printed references to web addresses for this content.

 Barcodes linking to online content III In Japan, more than 68 million people can access internet from their mobile phones; book trains, airplanes, cinema, you name it, you can probably do it from your keitai (mobile in Japanese). However, some web URLs can be quite tedious to enter on the limited keyboard of a mobile phone. Enters the QR-code.
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 Books24x7 announces book nominations

[PR Newswire] Books24x7, a subsidiary of SkillSoft PLC and the developer of online Referenceware(TM) for IT and business professionals, today announced the nominations of its third annual Referenceware Excellence Awards. The awards will recognize the most widely used computer technology and business books available through Books24x7, which offers subscription clients detailed online searches to more than 5,000 unabridged IT and business books.

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 Barcodes linking to online content II In late 2000, the US company Digital:Convergence released a bar code scanner profiled like a cat and appropriately called the Cue:Cat. Their dream was to link the physical world to the digital world by enabling us to scan bar codes on newspapers articles or any objects and be automatically taken to a corresponding website.
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 Barcodes linking to online content I

[WAN] While the "Metro" phenomenon of successful free newspapers is well known, News.nl adds a new twist. Stories and advertisements carry a barcode, which commuters who want more information can scan with a purpose-built pen which they insert in their computers when they return home. The pen, which can hold up to 150 web addresses, will automatically direct the web browser to a specified page. "Traffic on the News.nl site doubled because of this system. There was really a lot of interest from readers who want more information," said Mr Volmer. (12 October 2000)

I will try to collect as many references to this as possible. I have a few more lined up, coming really soon.

If you know of other examples, or have pictures of those barcodes, please send them our way using the Contact Us link at the top left of this site. Thank you.