As part of its expansion, Skooiz Interactive Agency that is working on a community website has just acquired Yulnews Blog.

Dans le cadre de son expansion, l’agence interactive Skooiz, qui travaille sur un projet de site communautaire, vient de faire l’acquisition du blog Yulnews.

Automattic, the company behind Wordpress just announced a financing round of $29M. It’s very interesting as Wordpress’ model is not very clear for most people. They provide a free service for a lot of people and a paid service to some customers. This is a lot of money and I’m very happy to see that this kind of model attracts funding.

YulNews will be showcasing at StartupCamp Montreal tomorrow January 22nd 2008 at the SAT. StartupCamp Montreal is an event where 5 participating companies were selected from a pool of about 30 companies. Other non-presenting companies will be allowed to showcase their product and discuss with potential investors. StartupCamp was also done in Toronto a few weeks ago and was a huge success. I hope tomorrow’s event will be as great, if not better!

I was interviewed during the last BarCamp where I presented my view on the current state of news. Laurent Maisonnave from Intruders.tv put the montage online and it’s now available here. It’s in French though but the slides are available on SlideShare (in English) here.

This was a great opportunity and I thank the Intruders team for the excellent coverage!

YulNews is a pre-financing startup whose goal is to offer a new and very innovative breed of web-based social news platform. YulNews is looking for a partner to become the CTO. As a CTO, your first task will consist of developing an initial version of the product from actual specifications.

We’re looking for someone who believes in user created content (blogs, videos and pictures) and strongly believes that the current news system must be changed.

Did you miss your chance with Google or Facebook? Do you want to own a lottery ticket where you control the odds? Now is the time to prove yourself while staying in Montreal!

Skills:
Expert knowledge of PHP.
Very good knowledge of JavaScript / AJAX / CSS / XML
Very good knowledge of MySQL (stored procedures, triggers, indexes, table normalization and database design).
Very good knowledge of secure coding practices.
Very good knowledge of scalable development.
Working knowledge of a Linux scripting language (Perl, Python).
Good web design / user interface skills.
Good Linux system administrator skills (installing, configuring and maintaining Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP packages).
Basic graphics skills (must be able to do basic graphic manipulations).

Your profile:
You were ideally a lead developer on a medium/large project.
You are able to work in a “LAMP” environment.
You have a good sense of humor but you’re able to “crunch” when needed.
You “work and live” on the Internet.
You know what “startup life” is and at minimum, you’ve read this article: dotcom.monster.com/articles/startup
You can afford NOT to get paid until angel/venture capital financing is obtained.

Extra points:
Proven ability to excel in fast paced start-up environments.
You enjoy solving those Facebook/Google puzzles.
You found, and fixed, bugs in PHP or any other software.

Benefits:
Be part in a team who wants to change the world of news.
Be part of an exciting startup right here in Montreal.
Be employee #2.
Get the most flexible work schedule ever (you work when and where you want)
Important: No salary will be given until angel/venture capital financing is obtained (You will be given stocks and stock options)

We set the barrier high but we also want to hear from fast learners who aren’t afraid of trying to climb it.

Interested? Send any pertinent information (resume, portfolio, Linkedin/Facebook profiles, etc.) to info@yulnews.com

ReadWrite Web writes:

Research firm Borrell Associates predicts that 2008 online spending for local advertisements will jump 48% to $12.6 billion driven by a demand for paid search and video ads, according to a report on NewsFactor. Search ads will make up the brunt of the local online ad spend in 2008, says Borrell, doubling to $5 billion. Locally targeted video ads are also expected to experience massive growth and rake in up to $1.3 billion.

That’s great news for local oriented sites!

Doug McGill, AKA the local man wrote an interesting article explaining why we can trust citizen journalists. This is an old article (over 1 year old ) but I think everything he said last year still applies now. Some (especially number 3 and 4) have an American touch but I think they still apply to most citizen around the world even if someone lives where the government controls the media.

Here are the 8 reasons:

1. Because there are sets of communication skills that have evolved over time to ensure the accuracy and fairness of public reports, which skills are by no means beyond the capacity of ordinary people to understand and to master;

2. Because putting journalism solely in the hands of a professional elite by definition, and by the example of actual history, divorces journalism from its primary purpose which is to serve everyone in society equally;

3. Because our form of government, which views freedom of speech as a foundation of democracy, demands it;

4. Because freedom of the press as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution applies equally to all people, including those who are professionally trained and sanctioned communicators and those who are not;

5. Because there are indeed certain kinds of skills required to create efficient and responsible journalism for a mass audience, such as computer and technological skills and some higher-level communication skills, which could be called “professional” skills in a loose sense, not referring to journalism as a practice in need of social licensing; and that in the form of journalism as we envision it, amateurs and professionals would work together to make this “citizen journalism;”

6. Because the national experiment in graduate journalism training programs has effectively eroded journalism’s critical place in our democracy instead of strengthening it, and has weakened the vibrancy and integrity of journalistic writing as surely as graduate programs in fiction writing and poetry have debilitated those verbal arts;

7. Because all human experiments in imposing strong government or social controls on the press, such as by censorship or according special filtering privileges to elite “professional” journalists, have been utterly calamitous to individual people and to society;

8. Because human communication through public language is a practice that is so deeply ingrained in human nature, indeed is virtually co-equal with human culture itself, that attempting to limit its practice to an elite few is from a common-sense standpoint simply a waste of effort and doomed to fail.

The BBC has a free training section for future / would-be journalists. Social journalist, aka crowdsourcers, aka citizen journalists can use these techniques to improve their skills. This is an interesting move. It suggests that they truly believe in this next generation of journalists.

Great article by Doug McGill where he taught the basics of journalistic story structure, ethics and practices to about a hundred people like you and I (school teachers, government workers, not-for-profit types, retired people, students and many others). I think that he’s now a strong believer in social journalists.

Here’s what he learned:

1. Citizens are an untapped source of expertise and positive civic energy that journalists can help unlock.

2. There is no substitute for a strong, independent, institutional journalism.

3. Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the wellsprings of their craft.

4. Journalists need to learn citizenship skills, as much as citizens need to learn journalism.

5. A good citizen journalism class, like a great newspaper, allows for all types of expression — artistic, poetic, literary, photographic, musical, comical and fun.

6. Citizens create vital community consciousness through the discipline of writing journalistically.

7. I’m the one who needs to change. (Change is welcome, adapting smartly is the challenge).

Doug Fisher reports on top American newspapers’ circulation. As expected, numbers are mostly down. Some newspapers are going up but those lucky few have less than 1% increase. The unlucky ones face 7-13% losses.