Lee Han-ki, editor-in-chief of South Korea’s citizen journalism news organisation Oh My News, has said the proposed legislation to clampdown on online news in the country could stunt the ‘democratic development’ of the Korean press.

In an interview with the Guardian, Han-ki said the proposals are aimed at controlling public opinion of news media and repressing free speech.

Under the legislation proposed by newly-elected government leader Lee Myung-bak:

• Internet companies would have to make their search algorithms public
• Internet companies publishing news would be subject to the same regulation as media organisations
• Forum users would have to register under their real names
• The government would have the power to suspend publishing of articles found to be ‘fraudulent or slanderous’ for at least 30 days

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Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.

I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).

Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).

Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.

External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.

The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.

As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.

This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.

In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog – like the Times’ sub-site – draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.

Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.

The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.

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The Bolton News is directing readers to the site’s forum area after closing commenting features on its news stories.

The site suspended the comments last month because of abusive posters, according to How-Do, but is now urging readers to contribute to the site’s forums.

A welcome post from David Crookes, part of the internet operations team at the paper, said the move would ‘bring reader reaction together in one place’.

“The changes have been made because of a minority of people who have insisted on spoiling our previous comment facilities,” wrote Crookes.

“That will leave the majority free to discuss topics, safe in the knowledge that their opinions will be respected.”

Anyone posting offensive or abusive messages will be immediately banned from the site, with persistent offenders reported to Internet Service Providers, Crookes added.

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Today is the 15th birthday of the World Wide Web, marked by the CERN announcement on April 30 1993 that the web would be free to all.

It’s a cue to sit back and marvel at how much has changed in a relatively small amount of time and post screen shots that may induce the same feeling as mum fetching the baby photos.

After the WWW age was born, online news and journalism was swift to follow: The Tech – an online version of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology newspaper, went live in May 1993; closely followed by the first journalism site from the University of Florida that October.

By 1994 there were already more than 20 online newspaper and journalism services. The Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph were the first British papers to enter the online world in 1994 with the Beeb taking slightly longer to catch up, launching its news website in 1997.

1999 saw the launch of Journalism.co.uk in its first form and my haven’t we grown…

With web technology advancing daily, the slick news sites of today will surely be drawing fond smiles in another 15 years.

Happy birthday Web, here’s to many more…

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The Online News Association has made changes to the 2008 Online Journalism Awards, including the introduction of two new categories.

General Excellence in Online Journalism – Non English and Online Video Presentation have been introduced as award categories in response to the many developments within online news since 2000, when the awards began.

The former applies to non-English sites anywhere in the world to expand the scope of the awards, and the latter rewards excellence in video journalism original to the web.

There is now be a total of 12 awards covering a wide range of categories from niche sites to investigative journalism.

The deadline for all entries is May 31.

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The team of developers responsible for Google Earth and Maps have launched a new feature to show Embedded YouTube videos in Google Maps.

Geotagged YouTube videos have been available in Google Earth since last year – the service has now been extended to Maps.

Newspapers in the UK have been increasingly drawn to the use of interactive maps on their websites as a new way of displaying news to their users.

In the US, where the availability of public data has made mapping a common part of online news reporting, several new innovative news-mapping experiments have recently launched.

In particular, new service Everyblock has been charting a vast range of public information across city maps for Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

The Google Maps developers have pointed out examples of how this new function might work for business – but the application being used for news videos looks like it could be just a step away.

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While the majority of online news continues to be produced or edited by professionals, online journalism teacher Bill Thompson says journalists should not ignore the benefits of closer collaboration with citizens – in particular when reporting outside the western world.

“The idea of the “foreign correspondent”, sent off to a strange land to report on the activities of the “natives” for the benefit of those who require their strange customs to be interpreted and sanitised is a relic of a pre-network age.”

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Readers and editors’ views on journalists participating in online discussions on local news websites are split, according to new research from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME).

When questioned on the benefits of ‘journalists joining the conversation online and giving personal views’, 50% of the 500 readers surveyed said this would be ’somewhat or very beneficial to good journalism online’.

In comparison only 27% of the 1,250 newsroom editors interviewed felt the same way.

Figures from the study suggest, however, that both groups support of local news sites opening up stories to user comments. Editors were more in favour than readers of users contributing under their real name.

The two groups also agreed when asked whether the same standards applied to online news written by journalists should be applied to citizen journalism content with 74% of the readers and 69% of the editors saying this would benefit online journalism.

The complete findings of the survey can be read on the APME website.

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Chinese government officials have been told to ‘orientate online opinion’ in the build up to and during this year’s Olympic Games in Beijing, press freedom campaign group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has said.

According to RSF a confidential memo seen by the group ‘confirms that the authorities have an active policy towards online information content’.

In the memo, guidelines on how government officials should behave towards foreign media before and during the games are set out.

The instructions, which are intended for provincial officials in the country, asks recipients to “reinforce the work of commenting on the Internet and increase the level of opinion orientation on the Internet.”

“There is a need to reinforce management of news websites and to guarantee appropriate opinion behaviour as regards online news and information,” the memo states.

In a press statement, RSF said the plan contained some positive features, such as instructions on training officials and holding news conferences for foreign journalists, but contained ’serious obstructions to the free flow of news and information’.

“While introducing more flexible rules for foreign journalists in January 2007, the Chinese authorities also established a nationwide policy for supervising and influencing the international media,” said RSF.

“Parts of this classified memo show there is a real concern to provide better information to foreign journalists, but it also reveals that the authorities never abandoned their intention to censor the news.”

Full details of the memo can be viewed on the RSF Asia website.

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Current TV, the peer-to-peer online news and information site, will later this month launch its investigative journalism program, Vanguard, on its cable TV channel in the UK.

(watch the trailer here…)

Vanguard is a youth-orientated weekly show focusing on behind-the-headlines stories from across the globe.

The show, which already runs on Current’s US cable TV channel and online, will feature reports from China on the trade in e-waste, the rise in organised attacks on migrants in Russia and the lawlessness of the oil-rich Niger Delta, when it launches.

“Lots of news organisations are scaling back their productions of international reports that go beyond the immediate headlines,” Laura Ling, vice president of Vanguard told Journalism.co.uk.

“I think that’s unfortunate. We are trying to look beyond the headlines, trying to be out in front of events so that we can have a better understanding of what’s going on [in the world].”

This latest move is an extension of the journalism already carried on the integrated web and TV platform. Last month, Guardian reporters began submitting vlog for broadcast on its TV channel.

The Vanguard launch precedes Current TV rolling out a bilingual version of the service in Italy, in May.

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