Odd Content: site of the week

Thanks to popbitch for this week's link to Cool to be Real.

A site for young women, brought to you by the caring souls at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, aims to make eating beef 'cool' to turn the tide against girls becoming vegetarian.

"Girls face so many issues today, and an important one is body image. Developing healthy attitudes toward nutrition, fitness and general wellness is a particular goal of "Cool To Be Real." America's beef producers think that helping girls during this important part of their development is the right thing to do".

Sparkling copy and a social conscience! Visit now to vote in their 'What type of beef do you most like to eat with your friends?' poll (steak is currently the winner, with the taco hot on its hooves).

e-consultancy to charge for content

E-business information site e-consultancy has launched a paid subscription service for access to its premium business content.

Subscribers will pay £99 + VAT (individual) or £875 + VAT (5-user corporate rate) to access over 100,000 pages of information from the organisation, supplemented by pieces from netimperative, Sourcewire and MarketingSherpa, plus special reports and white papers. e-consultancy have also made available to State of Content their subscription case study which briefly details their research, rationale and method in moving to a paid model.

CEO Ashley Friedlein says that as an aggregator of other paid content services, the e-consultancy subscription will save readers money: "if you were to pay for each individually it would cost an awful lot more".

Web and content issues for museums

Papers are being made available online by an international conference focusing on content and usability issues for cultural organisations, held in the US this week.

Topics discussed at Museums and the web were wide-ranging and include issues like:

• Using cinematic techniques in a multimedia museum guide
  
• How learning theory can guide development of online educational activities
  
• Usability for kids' sections on museum websites
  
• Natural language interfaces for cultural institutions
  

Content industry growth expected this year says Outsell

Reported in EContent xtra, US company Outsell predicts an information content industry growth rate of 8.3% in 2003 after tracking 60 representative companies for its forecast.

The financial health of companies like Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Gartner Group, Yahoo! and CBS MarketWatch has been analysed, following their path from the boom of 1995, through the downturn of 2001, to the start of an industry recovery in late 2002.

Trends and market valuations are available from Outsell via its new TrendAlert briefing.

Iraq coverage - how are the news sites doing?

In an article on the standard of online war coverage, Iraq: How the news sites performed on the night, mbites editor Mike Butcher suggests that the Sky News site had the best response on the night of the expiration of Bush's ultimatum to Hussein. In Day 2: How the news sites are fairing, Mike says full coverage within special sections on both the Guardian and BBC sites has shown the most comprehensive information, with a wealth of links, maps and blogs from war correspondents on the ground.

Once the war really gets underway, it will be interesting to see if other newspaper sites such as The Independent, which covers the war only in its Middle East section, will develop a special area to focus on stories about the conflict.

Thursday's E-Media Tidbits from Poynter also has an excellent online war coverage special from a number of vantage points throughout the Americas and Europe. Steve Outing thinks that the BBC has it right, but also suggests that TV in the US is still number one for war coverage.

In the segment TV Knocks Out Online in War-Coverage Round 1, Steve quotes MJ Bear's column on US war coverage that "for now, we must give credit where it's due -- to the broadcasters in our crowd. Even in this digital age, they beat out the techies. Round one coverage of the Iraq war goes to the broadcasters in a knockout".

No Napster for mobile content

Securing against mobile content being 'napsterized' is the aim of the Mobile DRM Accelerator Initiative from Norwegian digital rights company Beep Science.

Supported by media companies like Mtv, IMG and Tiscali, the initiative aims to prevent unauthorised sharing of subscription-only content via mobile devices and plans to drive the development of effective mobile digital rights management services.

Beep Science says that the 'Darknet...a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content without paying any charges to the content rights holder' is responsible for more than half of internet traffic volumes and wants to avoid this situation in the mobile arena.

Who's blocking your content?

Wired News reports on the University of Toronto's Internet Censorship Explorer which allows anyone to check on a URL's censorship levels within a specified country via a browser.

The process uses port-scanning technology and due to this, is described as unethical and even likened to hacking by some computer security professionals. Director of the project Ronald Diebert knows this but believes that using open ports as a proxy to derive censorship information isn't malicious in itself, as it's only a means to gaining research information.

Unsurprisingly the project team have discovered that pornographic content and sites containing criticism of governments are the most often blocked.

Telegraph to launch digital edition

The UK's Daily Telegraph is set to launch a digital version of the paper, retaining the print paper's layout and appearance. Reported in newmediazero, Hugh Drayton, MD of Hollinger Telegraph New Media says the project could open up new possibilities "such as creating digital supplements for the group".

Drayton also indicated that the access cost for the digital edition would be "significantly more" than the current print edition price of 55p. In an article on the pending launch, PaidContent.org editor Rafat Ali sees this pricing plan as a mistake.

In a comment to State of Content on his article, Rafat said, "there is hardly extra cost involved in converting the print edition into the digital one. PDF is the de facto standard in paper publishing, or at least should be, so the newsprint costs are cut down to, well, zero".

Business blogging - the mainstream?

Asks Mike Butcher in this newmediazero article.

After Google buying Blogger there's been a lot of discussion about the power of blogs. Their power, as Mike notes, is in their ability to churn out fresh and usually extremely targeted content - with the good ones often written by experts in the field.

There's been two opposing stories recently on business use of blogs. The first was the Raging Cow issue - apparently a new soft drink from the makers of Dr Pepper (with one of the most horrible names for a beverage ever), Raging Cow's marketing people thought it would be a good idea to enlist bloggers to post about the drink in return for some merchandise. There's been a lot of disgruntled bloggers and suggestions in marketing circles that the company and agency are either touched with madness or genius depending on whether they subscribe to the 'all publicity is good publicity' maxim.

An example of blogging well-used by a business is the Developer Weblogs section of book publisher O'Reilly's site. According to an article at El.Pub, the blogs account for over one-tenth of O'Reilly's overall traffic - including forums and search results. The network has more than 80 bloggers at work to keep new content coming every day.

UK digital preservation project

The Copyright and Licensing for Digital Preservation project is investigating current copyright law's effects on long-term public access to digital content, and looks to make recommendations on changes to current legislation.

Funded by the UKs Arts and Humanities Research Board, the project focuses on circulating questionnaires to assess content provision by UK publishers.

Pay for content Swiss style

Swiss newspaper Le Temps (site in French only it appears) is to offer pay-per-view access to its archives via mobile micropayment.

Using the EchoPay system, readers receive an access code after registering their purchase via the EchoPay operator, with payments made via their normal mobile phone bill.

Mobile or landline payments have long been mooted as potentially succesful ways of implementing micropayment schemes, and it will be interesting to see how successful this project is.