On Wednesday, the newspaper began blanking out, for some users, a percentage of words in articles symbolizing the percentage of the company’s revenue that comes from advertising.
The proportion of words blocked isn’t scientific, and the Financial Times doesn’t break out the exact chunk of revenue that comes from ads, said global advertising sales director Dominic Good. “It’s more illustrative than specific,” he said.
The test group comprises registered desktop computer visitors who don’t pay for a subscription, about .075% of the company’s desktop traffic. Some ad-blocking members of this group won’t see any new messaging, some will be asked to whitelist the website’s ads but can still read regardless, some will see articles with many words blanked out if they won’t whitelist the site, and some will be blocked outright if they don’t whitelist the site.
The company will evaulate the results after three or four weeks.
I wonder if this is a potential move to open up the gates, allow visitors through the paywall who agree to accept advertising. Interesting to see how this plays out.
There has been some speculation today that Apple purchased cloud-based music provider, Omnifone. According to my sources, that’s not the case.
Clearly with my interest in music, and Apple Music in particular, I began checking around as soon as I saw the report. While the report indicates a “mystery buyer” did purchase Omnifone’s tech business and assets, that buyer is not Apple, my sources said.
Omnifone worked with a number of companies, including LG, Samsung, Vodafone, BlackBerry, and Sony, to launch music services. However, it appears the company has not been doing well financially of late.
It’s not often you can say the pretty woman in the bikini is the second most beautiful and graceful thing in a video but I can honestly say it’s true in this case. I’d love to go diving with these amazing creatures.
Rebroadcast of Cronkite’s coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing starts in 10 minutes here.
If you are too young to have seen it live, watch it here. Or, relive the incredible memories of this day, 47 years ago, when mankind first stepped on the moon.
UPDATE: “it was originally posted in 2009”. Dammit. Never mind.
Sometimes, displaying our most beloved books on a shelf just doesn’t cut it. And when it comes to doing justice to the extent of our bookwormery, loud and proud is the way forward.
Pippa Branham of Liverpool, UK, decided to go all out with her love of books and paint her staircase with her and her husband’s preferred reads.
This is really cool. If I had any painting or design skills or even stairs, I’d give this a try.
ChefSteps recently introduced Joule, a small and easy-to-use sous vide tool, the first of many of the products planned by Young and his team of over 50 chefs, scientists, photographers, writers and engineers.
It’s not often you hear of a person with this combination of attributes. Interesting interview.
One of the two oldest methods of applying color to web pages, named colors remain very useful in web design and development today. Consisting of 149 distinct keywords (shown above, with their hexadecimal equivalents) CSS named colors have a few special features
The decision to drop a paywall can provide insight into how a news organization’s “values intersect with its commodification strategy, its technology design, and its brand identity” as outlets of all stripes are still deciding how much their reporting should cost.
This discussion has been going on for two decades.
Modi’s cabinet on Wednesday is likely to approve a three-year exemption on local-sourcing requirements for foreign single-brand retail companies with “cutting-edge technology,” according to the people, who asked not to be identified due to rules for speaking with the media.
This is great news, although I’m not sure what happens after the three-year exemption.
Jim Papadopoulos has spent much of his life fascinated by bikes, often to the exclusion of everything else. He competed in amateur races while a teenager and at university, but his obsession ran deeper. He could never ride a bike without pondering the mathematical mysteries that it contained. Chief among them: What unseen forces allow a rider to balance while pedalling? Why must one initially steer right in order to lean and turn left? And how does a bike stabilize itself when propelled without a rider?
As kids, we “counterbalanced” by instinct. When I was learning to ride a motorcycle, the explanation of “steer right, go left” confused the living daylights out of me.
There’s no shortage of word processing software in the world, but few have the cult following that Scrivener does. Long available for OS X and Windows, it’s finally ready to be downloaded by anyone who owns an iOS device for $20.
I’m not much of a writer so I’ve never used Scrivener but many of the writers I know swear by it and have been waiting impatiently for this app for their iPads.
This is a bit hard to follow, but it is a pretty ingenious scheme. In a nutshell, the scammer sets up a pay phone line, a phone number that people have to pay to use. They then use that number as a verification number with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. and take an action which causes that number to be called.
By automating the process, they bring in a nice little wave of money. That’s the theory, anyway. This was pieced together by a security researcher who raised the issue to get companies to put barriers in place to prevent this hack.
This sounds like an exaggeration, I know, but take a look at this resume. Not effective in a traditional sense, since it can’t be printed and won’t fit in with most job search engines, but still, great job.
Just call 917-ASK-NYPL, and a live librarian will try to answer your question, using vast archives collected over 120 years.
And:
Set up in the 1960s, the line is manned by nine librarians and information assistants. The team gets a lot of calls from people who want to fact-check things they’ve heard on the news, says Caballero-Li.
What I find amazing is that this service still exists, has not been overwhelmed with demand. Fascinating read.
Garry Marshall, who created some of the 1970s’ most iconic sitcoms including “Happy Days,” “The Odd Couple,” “Laverne and Shirley” and “Mork and Mindy” and went on to direct hit movies including “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries,” died Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. of complications from pneumonia following a stroke. He was 81.
Marshall went from being TV writer to creating sitcoms that touched the funny bones of the 1970s generation and directing films that were watched over and over: “Happy Days” helped start a nostalgia craze that has arguably never abated, while “Mork and Mindy” had a psychedelically goofy quality that catapulted Robin Williams to fame and made rainbow suspenders an icon of their era. “Pretty Woman” likewise cemented Julia Roberts’ stardom, while “The Princess Diaries” made Anne Hathaway a teen favorite.
“Happy Days” star Henry Winkler credited him for launching his career, tweeting “Thank you for my professional life.”
Garry Marshall was a huge influence, sending out waves far beyond the specific content he created.
The new episodes of Making A Murderer will provide an in-depth look at the post-conviction process of convicted murderer Steven Avery, and his co-defendant, Brendan Dassey, as their respective investigative and legal teams challenge their convictions and the State fights to have their life sentences upheld.
Like many people, I was glued to the TV set watching this series.
Gawker Media LLC founder Nick Denton faces personal bankruptcy after a U.S. judge refused on Tuesday to extend protections shielding him from liabilities resulting from a lawsuit over the invasion of privacy of former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Version 2 sports the world class, professional photo editing that you users of Camera+ for iPhone have been enjoying via The Lab. But the iPad version takes photo editing to a new level by supporting selective brushing of the various edits and filters. And those of you who own an Apple Pencil will appreciate it even more because we’ve also added Pencil support, enabling you to get very fine, precise control over brushing with it.
Camera+ has a lot of tools and is certainly worth a look if you are into photography on your iPad.
Twitter Inc said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with the NBA to stream exclusive non-game programing, pushing deeper into sports streaming as it seeks new ways to attract users.
Twitter also signed a deal with the NFL this year. I’ll have to wait and see what kind of content comes out of this deal, but on the surface, I’m not sure this appeals to me.
“Due to the wide array of available Android devices, we are targeting our support to a select number of Android devices to continue improving our overall Salesforce1 for Android user experience,” the company said in the support document.
Translation: Android is so fucked up, we were forced to take steps to make it work for us.
There will be a day where some of my old machines will stop working. There will be a day where none of them work anymore.
As sad as that will be from a hardware perspective, it’s devastating in terms of preserving software. Old operating systems are sealed inside these machines. A dead Mac is really just a beige — or Bondi Blue — sarcophagus for the software stranded on its internal disk.
Preserving the textual contents of a document is one thing, but how do we preserve the experience? How do we save the applications and the non-textual data?
Great piece by Stephen Hackett. Absolutely worth reading.
