From Newspaper to Newsonline

Every morning I read the newspaper first before I opened my computer, but this day I do the opposite. Strange feeling… It seems like I lost some features.

It’s a common that nowadays if you found something interesting, you want tho share it through your Twitter or Facebook. If I opened the online version there are share buttons available, but hey, this is a paper, where is the share button?

I noticed that newspaper business (the printed one) must be shifted into an online media business, some benefit that the reader will get are:

1. Read on Demand

You can choose to read the article or not, see the list of the title and go to the page if you want to see it. Yeah, it’s like skipping the rest of the article you don’t want in the paper, but this one gave you more control, just buy the article you need without buying a bundle of newspaper (if the publisher have this feature of course).

2. Faster Search

You can search the article just based on single word, without exploring your dusty bookshelf.

3. Explore the Other Interesting Article

Sometimes there’s other article related to the topic or the article is continued in the other one. Just click and the other article will appear without any pain to find the missing newspaper.

4. Not Just Text and Picture

Sometimes video media is attached too.

5. Share It (and Everyone can Read)

As I mentioned before, you can share it in social media, yes the social media is online matter, copy the link or push the share button, the post maybe like this for example:

I have read the nice article!! http://……

Now everyone can go to the link you mentioned and read the rest of the article. Imagine if you share the newspaper article:

I have read the nice article!! on the XXX Post Sunday, November 27^th 2011, page 11 Column 3

Not nice huh? And not everyone who has the newspaper.

But the transition from newspaper to online media will be painful to the newspaper maker because:

1. Need to Build The Infrastructure

For the old player, they must forget the billion big press machine and convert it to the billion gigabyte server, the user interface (sites) is the next consideration, the site must be good enough in design both to user and to customer.

2. Digitalization

The old articles must be digitized in order to maintain continuity, it’s painful because you need to browse the old edition and rewrite article by article to the digital format.

3. Hacker

This is the unwanted one, you need to consider the security factor, and who says that was costless?

—
Anton Hermansyah

About This Blog

I’ve told you that this is my second blog, because I never expect that UI would provide a blog for each student.

Actually this is my first time of using WordPress, i have practiced blogging but at the Blogspot, and I’m having some difficulties to do the same thing as I did on my first blog. I’m talking about how far you could customize your blog, adding the widgets, embed some videos and other things you could do to differentiate your blog from the others.

Honestly I was almost desperate to decorate this blog in order to have a better look. This blog is lack of widget, and the way you could add the widgets is totally different from Blogspot. Then I realized that I couldn’t add any widget on my own.

Is that because of the WordPress? At first I do think so. But if the WordPress doesn’t have the customizing ability like the others, it would be at one big leap behind the others at the blogging service war. Then, why WordPress bloggers whom I visited still could install the widgets (including the ones that I want)?

The reason why they could and I couldn’t is because I’m using the WordPress MU, I go browse for some information, and here’s what I got :

WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU) is a fork of WordPress created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. WordPress MU makes it possible for anyone with a website to host their own blogging community, control, and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

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Source from Wikipedia

So, it means that I’m not using an ordinary WordPress, and all the things related with widgets, java scripts and HTML scripts of this blog are depend on the Administrator, means I don’t have a privilege to fully customize my blog.

Well. I”ll keep on trying to make this blog as beautiful as I could. All I need to do is to find another way.

—
Anton Hermansyah