Final squibs, 2007

Tonight I plan to party like it’s 1953 — suck on a bottle, cry a little and conk out early. But then I was only five weeks old on New Years Eve 1953.

• Kevin Kelly’s free book experiment. What makes the updated version of True Films, a guide to documentaries, an experiment is that the PDF contains contextual ads served by Adobe, from the Yahoo ad network. It took a bit, but I finally found the download link at the bottom of this post. The ads are not intrusive nor, at the moment, very interesting, but there’s some promise here.
• Seattle Times faces ‘difficult and painful downsizing’. Faced with a $33-million loss over this year and next, publisher Frank Blethen writes, in a memo to employees, “with the company at bare bones, these cuts will hurt deeply going into 2008 and the remainder of the decade.”
• Sound Studio 3. File under tools: yet another Mac-based, low-cost, high-value audio editor. Macworld has a mostly positive review.
• Journalist deaths total 171 for the year. Sixty-five of those journalists and media workers died in Iraq. A full report on the journalist who were killed is coming from the International Federation of Journalists next month.
• How hacks and geeks can work together to create web specials. Cynthia O’Murchu of FT.com on the process behind comprehensive, mixed media story packages. Not surprisingly, they rely heavily on planning and communication. Via Martin Stabe.
• 2007 Photos of the Year. Seth Gitner is using the comments to collect links to newspapers’ best-of-the-year packages. Two links so far.