A few weeks ago I wrote ‘Newspaper paywall panic’ where I gave my thoughts on The Times’ doomed paywall scheme. Well in the last week or so the results have started to be released and as expected they don’t make good reading, well not for Murdoch anyway!
While checking my Twitter feed I came across a post from Smashing Magazine that said ‘DuckDuckGo: a nice new search engine, useful for programmers and designers’, so I checked it out, ran a few searches and was pleasantly surprised with the results, it was that good I may consider making it my search engine of choice.
I recently read Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook written by Dan Yoder, and as with all articles I read it thoroughly before passing judgement, though it did feel paranoid and biased even with the little disclaimer at the beginning. So after taking some time to absorb his opinion I realised mine hadn’t changed, I didn’t disagree with all the points but did feel it certainly wasn’t a balanced view.
Now is it just me, or has the Newspaper Industry gone stark raving mad! For some reason Newspapers all over the world are trying to monetise their online products with the ‘Paywall’ fad, yet even though this particular web model continues to fail, more-and-more newspapers are adopting it.
The European Competition Commission have forced Microsoft to offer alternative web browsers with their operating systems, which will be available from March 2010 in Europe. This will obviously confuse some of the less techy users but it may also achieve something I think we all want – the accelerated demise of Internet Explorer 6!