Newswatch

What have we been up to, you ask? Oh, a little song, a little dance. But not quite enough seltzer down the pants, if you get our meaning.

En tout cas (is that our favourite French phrase of all?), here are some semi-interesting content-related links of note:

“Latino Portals a Narrow Space”: Well, no kidding. You’re dealing with second-world countries (read: poverty, low computer use, expensive online time) or immigrants who, if they stick with the Spanish language, may not earn a lot of money or, if they assimilate into the AngloBorg, have little reason to frequent a Spanish-language site. And isn’t Brazil barely a Latin American country, being gigantic, heterogeneous (a million Japanese!), and Portuguese-speaking?
U.S. Latinos read mainstream sites such as Yahoo and America Online over Latino portals such as Quepasa.com, StarMedia and Yupi.com.... [T]hey just don’t know about the Spanish-speaking resources available to them on the Internet. [... A]n analyst at the Yankee Group who tracks the Brazilian Internet market [says] it’s all about your ties to traditional media.... Brazilians preferred regional and local content rather than general Latin American news.... “Having the Latin American strategy for Brazil that one size fits all doesn’t work.”
“Making a Case for Selling Online Content”: According to the author, getting away with charging for content online only works if you fit into one of these categories: Accreditation (training; universities), very strong market power (big old-media names), lack of available advertising (porn), specialized information (science; law), archival information (back issues). “[T]he more competitive a sector is, the more difficult it is to sell content online. In contrast, the more unique one’s position and the more one can tap into corporate or expense account spending, the higher the chances for success. Selling general information to consumers, no matter how good or what the subject is, has been an uphill struggle.” Am I Hot or Not, come on down!
A very crusty, trenchant, borderline bitchy dissection of E-books from an old-timer: “The Ghost of E-Books Past.” We respect the old-timers, even though these days you could fit all of us into a small soup kitchen, which indeed is where you would be most likely to find us, since we are too smart, seasoned, opinionated, and old to work for the nose-ring kids. “Hundreds and hundreds of phrases in Kerouac’s text were linked to pop-up annotations in various media: photographs of people, places, memorabilia from the author’s estate, and pages from his notebooks; audio readings of various texts; clips from films; original interviews videotaped for the project. All these years later, it still looks great. Unfortunately, you can’t see it, because it’s no longer available. When we started the project, no one had ever heard the word Netscape. When we finished it, the word Netscape was everywhere, and before long the World Wide Web helped kill the CD-ROM publishing business and in the process set multimedia production back at least five years.... Most people in established book-publishing houses use the phrase ‘CD-ROM’ as if it were interchangeable with the phrase ‘Richard Nixon.’ They had a bad experience and, like the rest of humanity, they want to forget it.”
“Who are you calling sister?”: Wymmyn don’t all agree on wymmynz sites. Jeez, we coulda told you that. (In fact, we did: What does Hissyfit have to do with ChickClick, its slush fund?) And don’t cry for Webgrrls, Argentina. The truth is, we never needed you.

Posted on 2001-01-08