This is quite a cool service: imgred.com

I often like to add pictures to my blog posts, but copying them out of somewhere else and hosting them on LJ is somewhat of a pain, especially when they’re generally not central to the post. Using an off-site URL is considered a bad practice online, plus some sites will block it. Imgred makes it really easy to include offsite images. If I want to include an image from http://www.a.com/b/c.png, all I do is put an image in my post with the source: http://www.imgred.com/http://www.a.com/b/c.png. It automatically fetches and caches the image for me, transparently. Granted, I can’t be sure that the site will be up forever, but for non-critical images, this is definitely worth it.

Billionaire and now newspaper owner Samuel Zell wants newspapers to fight online news aggregators. Probably not the best way to make it to the future, in my opinion. The best quote is:

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”

Apparently he’s never used google news, since there are NO ADS on it.

Full article here, worth a read, even though it’s really bad reporting. See this for a point-by-point refutation of most of it.

If these are the types of people doing decision-making for newspapers, they’re in more trouble than I thought. In the refutation piece, Jason makes a good point that most newspapers are acting as aggregators anyway.. taking news stories, photos, columns and comics from national sources and combining them into one document. Of course, there is a reasonable collection of original content, but since the Internet can provide aggregation so much more efficiently, the value of the paper has decreased.

It seems like in 5 years the newspaper industry will look very different or will be largely irrelevant for public discourse. I’ll probably write more about this later..

Note:
I haven’t been writing any sort of disclaimer about obvious conflict-of-interest on these, since the people who read are mostly people who know me anyway, so it seems unnecessarily formal. Maybe that’ll change, though.