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Ep. 3! From this week forth we give a quick shout-out of events nearby and around in the web-field that we consider interesting and potentially worth attending on top of the normal bag of news. Otherwise we have a quick chat about the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, the new Google Search (beta!) and a brief mention of this week’s über ‘wankism’: a website dedicated to chairs titled ‘chair whore’.

Pascal mentions a short update: his site is live — check it out at klepas.org — and notes he wants to write a howto/review/info article on using Jekyll from a designer’s perspective.

The main feature this week concerns the recent lively topic of online news media, particularly revolving around Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch’s decision to alter his media conglomerate’s business online model from ad-driven to a pay-subscription model. We discuss more in-depth the problems that print media and online media outlets are running into as of late, particular in monetising an online dissemination model somehow, and whether or not that will fly with today’s web-tuned audiences.

This week’s ‘fuck you’ goes to Sydney Morning Herald (who get no link from me! -Andy) for including advertisements that play music upon page load. Meanwhile, our ‘tip-of-the-cap’ to Mark Pesce, Pia Waugh and Senator Kate Lundy who we are planning an interview with to discuss the awesome work the two are doing in the open government arena.

Other links in order of mention: * as always mail us feedback via arcwhite@arcwhite.org and klepas@klepas.org — we’d love to start a mailbag. * Casual WSG Sydney meeting on 18:30, 13. August, Pumphouse, Darling Harbour, Sydney: http://webstandardsgroup.org/event/177. * WSG Sydney meeting on 19. August http://webstandardsgroup.org/event/176 — 82 peeps already registered (free). * Vision Au. are running two workshops on web accessibility 19–20., August, Melbourne: http://bit.ly/vision-au-a11y-1 & http://bit.ly/vision-au-a11y-2. * Web Directions South ’09, Sydney: http://south09.webdirections.org/. * Edge of the Web, Perth: http://www.edgeoftheweb.org.au/. * Usability evaluation and training workshop in Canberra, 01–02., December : http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/evaluation-and-testing.html & http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/web-usability.html. * For other web, design, and tech-related events in Australasian region subscribe to the WSG Announce mailing list: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/. * Facebook acquires FriendFeed: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/. * New Google Search: http://www2.sandbox.google.com. * For your weekly dose of über wank: http://chairwhore.blogspot.com. * Pascal’s new site: http://klepas.org. [You’re such an attention whore! -Andy] * Again, Jekyll: http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/. * Jason Santa Maria’s beautiful website: http://jasonsantamaria.com.

This show is licensed as usual under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

OAO.