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Now playing: Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road via FoxyTunes
The Lines Are Open
The usual collection of digital communication channels, a veritable arsenal, if you will. Choose your weapon, and we'll meet on the lawns at dawn (or something):
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Now playing: Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road via FoxyTunes
But the UK government (which clearly has too much free time) studied five celebrity chefs for literacy standards, readability, style and layout, and concluded that Ms. Lawson and Delia Smith are too chatty, use too many adjectives and are impossible to understand for over 5 million Brits.
Like most of those people watch Nigella for the food. And read Playboy for the articles.
The men - Nigel Slater, Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver - are much easier to understand apparently. Figures, since you're probably not staring at Nigella's juicy bits when you're cooking the, er, edible bits in the pan before you. No, perv, stop.
But look at the image accompanying the article, that carries Lawson's recipe alongside Oliver's, and decide for yourself.
Alternatively, you can look at how Quentin Letts fared. If you can get past that rather fetching picture of Nigella Lawson that decorates the top-of-fold section of the article.
Links from the delectable Slashfood
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Now playing: The Rolling Stones - Satisfaction
via FoxyTunes
Given the opportunity to monetize a lot more content much more effectively, this move to make the content access free is basically a nod to the power of online advertising. Of course, my professional bias makes me more excited about this than the layman, but I think it's a great step towards making more information and data available to many, many more people than ever before.
If there's one thing that the last five years, and particularly Google, has demonstrated, it is that there is a large population out there that is willing to not just tolerate intelligently-placed, and preferably contextually-targeted, ads, but are actually willing to consume them with an eye for value. So, exposing all this amazing content accumulated over more than a century, and marrying them with ads that talk a very similar language leads to a win-win situation: the reader gets the content he's looking for, and maybe a hint at something more concrete (in the form of an ad), and the publisher makes his money from the ad-based user action. Multiply a few million times for all the pages and the users, and the result is a few million dollars in the pot. More beer all round!
If only the Wall Street Journal would follow suit.
Now for something a little less business-like:
I rather like this nifty thing that shows up what's playing on my computer when I'm typing this post. Get the Firefox extension. Oh, and why on earth would you not be using Firefox?
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Now playing: Queen - You and I via FoxyTunes
