Can we stop acting like selling advertising into a network is some big radical shift? It's not. It naturally falls out of the NewspaperNext project, which is a couple of years old now.

Mohamed Nanabhay's new-media crew at Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic satellite TV network, has launched a citizen-journalism upload portal, seeking eyewitness news reports from its vast international audience.

This is another of the many times when I wish I had fluency in a foreign language so I could follow the unfolding of the project. Conventional journalism is difficult enough amid the complex tensions of the Arabic-speaking world. Al-Jazeera will have quite a challenge protecting itself from fraud and manipulation.

I tripped over a reference to "artificial intelligence" the other day. I guess I tripped because it's not a term I hear very much any more. Maybe it's because I hang around with a lot of geeky people, but it seems quaint and maybe a little pretentious.

Instead, I hear about a lot of very specific techniques: Bayesian networks, collaborative filtering and the slope-one algorithm. I guess those fall under the "artificial intelligence" umbrella, but often it's really a matter of harvesting human intelligence and then acting on the results.

Yesterday I began listing assumptions and assertions that are part of our thinking about our evolving website management system. Here's another: It's everybody's game now.

While we're treading water pending the rollout of our Drupal-based site management project, I thought it might be worth mentioning some of the principles and assumptions behind it. Here's one: No editions, please.

I've seen developers put a great deal of effort into creating Web content managment systems that are intended to reflect the edition structure -- daily, weekly, monthly, whatever -- of a legacy (print) product.

Don't do it. We live in a 24x7 world. The Internet is always on. Information should be available when it makes sense.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter lists a series of reasons why newspapers won't see any of the bailout money that's being passed around by the Treasury. Here's one more: Diversity in media ownership is one of the incoming Obama administration's agenda items, and consolidation of ownership -- generally funded by heavy borrowing -- is very much a part of the newspaper industry's problem. New-media folk don't like to admit it, but it's not all about the Internet. We have an ownership crisis.

Editor and Publisher reports  'Time Spent' at Top Sites Still Declining." This is another case where numbers can fool you.The Nielsen Online data "tracks the average time spent per person at a site during October." As the story notes, unique users "soared.""Average time spent" is calculated by dividing the total online time by the number of unique visitors.