More consolidation for Trinity Mirror as it seeks to reduce costs and staff for its various online offerings (see story, left). With hindsight, publishers like Trinity Mirror made a big mistake in separating its online division from the newspapers and magazines. By not including editorial staff from these "core" publications, the websites alienated their biggest allies in terms of encouraging readers to turn to the online offerings? Let’s hope for the sake of the future of online publishing that the expensive lessons being learnt today will be put in place for the future. The culling of websites means the culling of people’s jobs and there is a real fear that online careers may be short-lived when working for big publishers.
While there may be doom and gloom for the big publishers and their online ventures, there is plenty of opportunity for smaller players to carve out their own niche on the internet. No doubt that is the thinking behind a new site funded by the Department of Trade and Industry, BeyondBricks.com. This neat site provides plenty of helpful advice and support for anyone thinking of launching their own venture
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Never assume that just because something is being sold online it will be cheaper to buy it on the web. Well, not in the case of an Iomega Clik PC Card Drive that
I bought recently. This clever piece of kit plugs into a notebook computer’s PC card area and each Pocket Zip that slots into the device can store up to 40MB of data. PC World sold me one for £50, while online they are going for around £75. For anyone needing to back up their data who doesn’t want to have a big and cumbersome device attached to their notebook, the Clik PC Card is worth considering. The only downside is that each Pocket Zip costs around £10 which can make it an expensive way of saving data compared to a CD.
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After much waiting, .info, the first of the new top-level domains, has now gone live from registrar Afilias (www.afilias.info). This means anyone can now register a domain name ending .info. The cost to own a .info domain varies depending on who you use, but the cheapest deal seems to be 123-reg (www.123-reg.co.uk) which is offering them at £9.99 a year plus VAT. However, you need to move quickly, as did the BBC, Granada and Skynews who snapped theirs up before some cybersquatter took them. Don’t expect to see a Carlton.info site as that name went to a Carlton Brewery in Australia.
Leslie Bunder
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