The Sun will introduce various mobile services in 2007 including mobile news and Sun Me TV, a user-generated video feature on the Sun website. So that's the ultimate online destination should you ever need mobile video clips of, well, stuff that Sun readers can post straight from their mobiles. Also: Openserving, jailed web journalists and RSS. Oh, and something for the tea break.
• Sun launching user-generated video service
Media Week covered the story this morning (but haven't put the story online yet - weird) and say the service is like 3's See Me TV where users get paid a squiddly amount for stuff they upload. The piece also says the payment details aren't known yet, though it could be that users pay a small charge to upload (which is easy to implement on mobile, unlike online) and pay contributors when their stuff is downloaded.
News of the World, meanwhile, is going down the route of the bar code scanner tool you can find hidden away in the games section of a few mobiles (ask a ten-year-old). This is based on technology by Qode that means rather than faff around entering a URL in your mobile's web browser, you can 'scan' a bar code and it will take you straight there. Now that is neat. Unfortunately NOTW is planning to use this mainly for Premier League football clips, which is about as useful to me as soap-on-a-rope at Christmas.
News Group's newspaper readers aren't big on broadband but are heavy mobile users. We reported recently when it replaced the phone and text numbers for its "get cash for your stories" thing with a mobile short code. Those codes take forever to get and News Group is the only news org outside the BBC to have one yet, I believe.
• New wiki project launched The Wikipedia guys have created Openserving, a tool for collaborative blogging projects. Wikia provides the hosting, the bandwidth and the software, and users create the content. And get to keep the ad revenue.
These will be community-focused sites that are being pitched somewhere between blogs, and Wikia's well-known collaborative "social software" tools like Wikipedia, Wikinews and Wikiversity.
Wikia's CEO Gil Penchina said thousands of volunteers work on open-source projects every day, according to Digital Media Europe.
"OpenServing is a call-to-action for developers that want to take open source to the next level and we are looking for volunteers to help us install and maintain other open-source software at OpenServing.com."
• Jailed web journalists There's a daily drip, drip of news on journalists, writers and activists around the world that are threatened, jailed and sentenced for the work they do online. Reporters without Borders publishes updates pretty much every day and the excellent Online Journalism Review has just reported on the Committee to Protect Journalists' latest study.
CPJ claims that of 134 journalists in prison globally, 49 work online - the highest proportion since CPJ began monitoring nine years ago. China, Cuba and Eritrea have the worst records for jailing journalists but the US has also imprisoned two men without charge and is holding them at Guantanamo Bay. The treatment of journalists by the US puts it alongside that of Croatia, Tonga and Botswana, according to RSF.
• Tea break Quick! Before there's will be some headline-grabbing shock share buy-out/executive poaching episode/Presidential wife-swapping YouTube extravaganza, ask your nearest serving wench to put the kettle on and check out theSpectacle.co.uk. I'm particularly enjoying Fiends Reunited, and the man jailed for abusing himself after grooming himself online. Oh, how we laugh when our knuckles are so near.
• A word on RSS Roughly around the dawn of time, I remember when a 'doink' from my RSS reader would indicate a new post to be leapt upon with glee. But the doink became more like a heartbeat throughout the day - more distracting than useful.
I've just purged my RSS feeds and managed to reduce the number of headlines I have to skim to below 3,000. I have subscriptions to 85 sites, plus various Guardian feeds and feeds from my own blogs.
Having said all that, I realise most of you probably couldn't give two hoots for my feeds. Pah.
A minority will, however, feel my pain and some may even offer a few organisational tips for feeds. To them I say desktop, not web based, Newsfire over all the others I've tried and groups a-plenty. A widget to synchronise different the same Newsfire account on different computers would be ace.
