The Newspaper Society’s annual New Media Awards took place this week and The Scotsman (www.scotsman.com) scooped the award for best daily newspaper website. The Bucks Free Press (www.bucksfreepress.
co.uk) won the best weekly category and the Wolverhampton-
based Express & Star (www.expressandstar.com) picked up the award for best design. The awards were part of a two-day conference exploring new media and the opportunities still available to publishers. The Newspaper Society released Investing Media Brand Equity Online, a report in which publishers reveal that an online presence has not had an adverse effect on print. Instead, it claims websites support circulations.
In the US, the Online Journalism Awards (onlinejournalismawards.org) has announced the shortlist for its third annual event. The awards were launched in 2000 by the Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. They are open to any website using English, but this year’s shortlist consists mainly of US-based sites and there are no UK entries. The organisers received 728 entries from 10 countries. In 2001, the BBC won the General Excellence category. It’s a shame that in 2002, UK sites either didn’t enter or were not appreciated by the judges. The winners will be announced on October 18.
If you want to create your own portal but don’t want to spend a fortune on outside developers, a nifty piece of software that costs £10 could help you out. Monopro Link System (www.monopro.com) allows you to create your own links directory and offers a host of other features, including opinion polls. Links SQL (www.
gossamer-threads.com) is still the best portal developer around, but it costs £300, so Monopro is a cheaper option that could prove very popular in the coming months.
What’s the best way to deal with spam? Get a Spamcop account (www.spamcop.net). It costs £20 a year – a small price to pay for a Web-based system that filters nearly every piece of spam-related e-mail. The basic service can be used by almost any small business, while bigger businesses can buy bespoke solutions for more advanced filtering. Once the system detects something it thinks is spam, it is sent to a special inbox that you can access via the web, where you can choose to read, keep or delete it.
How bad a problem is spam for you? Let me know how much spam and junk e-mail you get and how you usually deal with it.
Leslie Bunder
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