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Kevin: A great post on Poynter E-Media Tidbits by Megan Taylor that builds on ideas about computational thinking by Greg Linch. Megan breaks down Greg's ideas into three simple concepts: Automation, algorithms and abstraction. She flags up a great example of how APIs at the New York Times allow them to cut down on repetitive work, according to Derek Willis.
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Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick writes that Hunch, founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and angel investor Chris Dixon, has relaunched as a "taste-graph recommendation engine". Answer 20 quick questions and get recommendations for movies, books, magazines, computers, meals, vacation destinations, etc.
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Kevin: Edward Boches lists four lessons to learn from the New York Times, which now looks like it is starting to turn a corner in terms of their business. Just to highlight the first of his four points. "Get over the not invented here syndrome." Edward highlights their willingness to syndicate content from other niche sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. I'd also highlight not only their use but also investment in WordPress. Definitely worth checking out the four other points.
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Kevin: My friend Andy Carvin with NPR highlights some results they found from canvasing opinion from some of the US public radio network's 1m fans on Facebook. More than 40,000 people responded. They have a compiled the results and shared them on their blog and also on Slideshare. Some highlights, almost all, 96% use Facebook at least once a day. The majority of the respondents listen between 1-3 hrs a day, while the average listener listens about 4.25 hrs a week. Almost three-quarters agreed that Facebook was a major way for them to receive news and information from NPR.
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Kevin: Check-in service Gowalla has launched a service tied to political campaigns in the US. Campaigns can create events on Gowalla that supporters can check in at. As with many check-in services, they will get a badge related to the campaign. Supporters will also be able to register their own events. Gowalla also says that advocacy groups can use the service to "highlight their causes".
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Kevin: This is a frank and brave post-mortem of a project created for the 2008 US elections. An associate professor had the idea to create a site that would bring together coverage from a few outlets in Missouri, where the project was based. However, she candidly lists her incorrect assumptions and also lessons she learned in promotion and community building.
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Kevin: The DBpedia data set and some examples of how to access it including use cases. DBpedia has created a set of linked data derived from Wikipedia.
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Kevin: DocumentCloud program manager Amanda Hickman looks at recent uses of the document hosting tool including an annotated version of the controversial Arizona immigration law. The annotations highlight and explain what parts of the law were subject to a judges injunction.
Daily Archives: August 5, 2010
APIs helping journalism “scale up”
A couple of days ago, I quoted AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on developing tools to help journalists “scale up” what they do. ?In a post on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, Megan Garber has a highlighted a good practical example of what I meant .
One thing that computers and other technology can help journalists to work more efficiently is to cut down or eliminate frequent, repetitive tasks. Derek Willis at the New York Times talks about APIs (as Derek describes APIs as “just a Web application delivering data). Derek says:
The flexibility and convenience that the APIs provide make it easier to cut down on repetitive manual work and bring new ideas to fruition. Other news organizations can do the same.
Derek also points how savvy use of data is not just good for data visualisations and infographics, but it is also an excellent resource for New York Times’ journalists.
So if you have a big local election coming up, having an API for candidate summary data makes it easier to do a quick-and-dirty internal site for reporters and editors to browse, but also gives graphics folks a way to pull in the latest data without having to ask for a spreadsheet.
And as he said, the biggest consumer of New York Times APIs is the New York Times itself.
Projects such as building an API can be quite large (although new companies and also organisations like the Sunlight Foundation in the US and MySociety in the UK have great public service APIs and data projects), but with the benefits to both audiences, designers, developers and journalists, it makes it easier to justify the time and effort.