By Shannon Rupp The Toronto Star just announced that you can’t trust a thing you read on their website — although that’s not quite the way they phrased it. Canada’s largest daily has joined forces with TheMarkNews.com, one of those free blogger sites, to acquire a small army of unpaid “community correspondents” to cover Ontario’s […]
online media
No WikiLove for Canada Day
Wikipedia is working on a new feature to allow visitors to express appreciation for its poor beleaguered editors by clicking on a Wikilove icon (a heart) and sending a message of appreciation. Seems that editors get a lot of negative criticism for some reason — perhaps for assuming authority even over experts by virtue of […]
Potter too much
By Rachel Krueger As though the tenterhooks weren’t tight enough for Harry Potter 7.2: The One Where It Actually Ends, the Rowling megalith taunted its fans last week with the mysterious offer of . . . Pottermore. Pottermore, the powers promised, was a Thing That Was Not A Book But Was Still Very Great And […]
Canada AWOL at eG8
By Frank Moher PARIS – It is a curious thing, to host the lions of the digital world in a series of tents in a public park. But that is what French President Nicolas Sarkozy did this week in Paris, for the so-called eG8 forum, a prelude to the G8 forum 173 km to the […]
In 2011, less tech is more
By Mark Evans In 2011, less is going to be more . . . and that’s a good thing. It’s a decision that comes on the heels of a happily hectic 2010 in which my business surged ahead, and a number of other projects (including the mesh conference) consumed time. It was a great year […]
Sorry, Rupert, I already have Twitter
By Frank Moher The Times shut down its old website on Tuesday and started directing all traffic to two new ones: thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk. These are the ones that they propose, at sometime in the indeterminate future, to start charging for. I was interested to see how Rupert Murdoch, wily media titan that he is, […]
9/11 honour and dishonour
By Frank Moher As it becomes increasingly clear that the official explanation of 9/11 is insupportable and won’t stand the test of time, I thought it might be apropos to establish a media “Honour” and “Dishonour” roll, recording those news organizations who have or haven’t done their job in reporting the story. The idea here […]
What would Jesus do (if he were on a website and it had ads)?
By Eric Pettifor J.D. Frazer’s book Money for Content and Your Clicks for Free is more interesting for the insight it provides into the business side of the online comic strip User Friendly than as a putative how-to book. (Frazer has written User Friendly under the pen name Illiad since 1997.) As a how-to book, […]
Another “national” publishing award
By Frank Moher A number of years ago I proposed a story to Saturday Night magazine on the journalist Barry Broadfoot, veteran western Canadian newspaperman and pioneer in Canada of oral histories (Ten Lost Years, Six War Years), who had a new book coming out. Over the phone, I extolled his virtues to my editor […]
What I’ve learned as an online publisher
By Frank Moher backofthebook.ca turned three a few weeks ago. We launched on October 16, 2006, and I would have marked the occasion back then, but I’ve been busy piecing our archives back together after our recent redesign. I’m almost done; I’ve got the photos loading in on old stories again, and pretty soon all […]
