Tim Burden RSS

I'm one of the founders of NewsFIX and its current webmaster. I enjoy web programming, writing, and playing guitar. Sometimes I do all three at once.

  • Revival of the webmaster key to newspapers’ future

    Published at 2:29 pm on February 20, 2010
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    This is part two of a two-part post which started here. To recap, we said news companies should get better at predicting web trends. One way to do that is to watch what Google is aiming at and try to figure out its plan. One of those things is IPv6. Google wants to build apps that push information to your devices. Let’s look at some more Google trends, and at the end we’ll make some suggestions about what news companies should plan for.

    HTML5

    I talked earlier about how Google is pushing for HTML5, and web standards in general. I suggested a reason: Google wants you to be able to use its web-based applications from whatever device you happen to be on. It wants to replace your desktop (or your mobile interface, etc.) with a browser. You’ll do everything, in Google’s vision, on the open web, rather than in walled-off applications on various devices that may or may not talk to each other.

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  • News organizations: less reaction, more prediction

    Published at 4:01 pm on February 10, 2010
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    Some of you coming to a blog called NewsBIZ might expect talk about the news business, and you’d be right.

    So why have I spent my first two posts talking about gibberish like web standards, HTML5, Google, Apple and all that jazz?

    I hinted at it near the end of my last post, where I said news companies should not bother to invest in Flash for the time being: news organizations need to get better at predicting trends and investing accordingly. Notoriously, newspapers pretty much missed the Internet revolution, allowing once-profitable classifieds businesses to disappear almost overnight and generally just not getting the whole thing.

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  • 11 reasons to like HTML5

    Published at 3:23 pm on February 7, 2010
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    The other day I tweeted out 11 reasons to like HTML5, the next step in the evolution of the language that powers the web. But that was a little off the cuff, and though it wasn’t bad, here’s a revised and expanded version.

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  • Apple and Google go to war, Adobe takes collateral damage

    Published at 11:50 pm on February 3, 2010
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    Back in 2003, when we webmasters got together in online forums to discuss our trade, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was our constant lament. Internet Explorer didn’t render our websites correctly. IE didn’t do JavaScript right. IE didn’t follow web standards. IE bad. IE sucks.

    Microsoft’s market-dominating web browser made a developer’s life harder when, after coding a website according to accepted standards, he had to turn around and throw in seemingly endless hacks and tricks to make the thing work for what was then the other 95 per cent of web users.

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