Wednesday squibs

Much stuff early:

• U.C. Berkeley student’s Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt. Definitely the most interesting news story of the day. A reminder that our social tools are significant factors in fighting authority.
• Condemned Afghan journalist wins right to appeal death sentence. Another piece of good news. One of the reason has to be the huge amount of international pressure brought to bear.
• A slide show before dinner, a video in an hour. Anyone doing multimedia as part of the print reporting job really needs to read Ron Sylvester, at very least for the light he sheds on the end of the starting-out tunnel.
• Drive-by surfers peril news sites. The metrics from the latest study of newspaper web visits do not look good, Alan Mutter writes. He’s right: more visitors, but the overall time spent at the site drops and so do the number of page views per viewer. Oh, and the rate of visitor growth is slowing.
• videocast pixel#0 : portugaldiário makeover. Even if you don’t understand spoken Portuguese (and I don’t claim to, beyond catching a phrase or two here and there), Alexandre Gamela’s first vidcast is worth watching as he shows off the new look and features of the very impressive looking Portugal Díario. There’s enough untranslated English tech-speak in there to keep you on track. (Speaking of Portugal, I’m jealous of Jeff Jarvis who is currently in Lisbon, one of my very favourite cities.)
• Tremor Media Launches Killer Video Ad Platform. People who are much smarter than I am can figure out whether this is truly killer or not. It does seem to have some significance.
• Taxed to death?. Governments may have trouble getting their heads around a number of aspects of the ‘net (‘net neutrality, copyright, etc.) but they sure know taxes. Two stories: Analysis: Is the taxman eyeing iTunes? and N.Y. to tax goods bought on Amazon. The NY lawmakers are apparently arguing that the Amazon affiliate program is enough to give the company a physical presence in NY state.