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Kevin: This looks very handy for data journalism. Paste in CSV or tab-delimited data into a form, and it will output the data in common web data formats such as JSON, XML, Actionscript or Ruby.
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Kevin: Ellie Behling at eMedia Vitals writes: "Despite slow adoption rates, media brands should pay attention to location-based services. Localized information is probably the next frontier for information; it's just catching on slowly. As the technology evolves and smartphones become more popular, adoption will increase."
The entrance of Facebook, with its 500 million users, could certainly quicken the pace of adoption.
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Kevin: In July, Matt Brian of The Next Web reports about recent successes enjoyed by location-based network Foursquare: "Just days after securing $20 million series B round of capital, the location service has announced another big milestone – 1 million check-ins in one day."
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Kevin: A look at the competition heating up in the location space with the launch of Facebook Places. "While some of you might think this trend marks the moment when social media jumped the shark, major media outlets and other businesses are looking to cash in on the impulse people have to overshare." I spotted this, and I think that news organisations need to pay attention to this. Geolocation has potential for news organizations, too, as demonstrated earlier this year after the foiled Times Square attack. In the days that followed, there was more than one false alarm, and the Wall Street Journal used a Times Square "check in" on Foursquare to alert others in the area that there was an evacuation.
Editors can also use geolocation to help confirm eyewitness tips from the scenes of news events. That doesn't mean there won't be hoaxes or that the systems can't be fooled, but it's a step up from the e-mails and SMS tips we have now."
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Kevin: Jonathan Stray of the Nieman Journalism Lab interviews my friend and former colleague Simon Rogers, the editor of The Guardian's Datablog, on the data journalism efforts at the newspaper. As Jonathan points out, most of the tools that The Guardian uses are free. Mostly free. The Guardian uses Google Docs and Google mail for much of office applications, but, of course, to use those at a business, there is a fee. However, it's less than traditional office applications. However, they also IBM's Many Eyes and time visualisation tool Timetric, both, which are free.
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Kevin: Most location-based services in 2010 focus on retail and restaurants, but Zillow is one of a several location applications the focuses on real estate. They have iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Mobile apps. Their CEO says that the app generates much better leads for real estate agents because people are actively out looking at homes. "Zillow’s competitors, such as Redfin, ZipRealty, Century 21, Realtor.com, have apps, as well."
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Kevin: MG Siegler reports: "Future Checkin is an app that allows you to check-in to your favorite Foursquare venues automatically when you’re near them. You don’t have to do a thing besides simply have your phone on you and this app will check you in while running in the background with iOS 4."
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Kevin: Shopkick uses the API of location-based network Foursquare to reward you for walking into a retail store in the US. The app knows when you walk into the store and gives you a reward, presumably a special offer of some sort. They also have a virtual currency called "kickbucks". They say the check-in method can't be faked. In the future, their app will know not only when you walk into a store but also where you are in the store. I suppose this would be of interest to the store because if the phone was sensitive enough it might know not only that you're in the store but also what department you were in. I think to achieve that they'll have to use Skyhook using hotspots because the GPS signal wouldn't be available in the store, but it's possible.
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Kevin: An interesting development for anyone interested in 'transmedia' and stories. With the rise of social media, there has been a focus on interactivity, which I really enjoy. However, I think we pressed pause on story innovation during this time. The rise of social media and the dot.com crash before it, led to some stagnation in thinking about how we tell stories. Fortunately, I think with data visualisations and the mass appeal of the digital content, we're seeing a revival of exploration. This is a project to watch in that vein
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Kevin: Carrington Malon of Spot On PR writes: "Facebook has become a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East and North Africa and the platform can now claim 15 million users as of May 2010. Whilst Facebook saw strong early growth in 2008/2009 from English and French speaking users across the region, Facebook’s decision to add an Arabic interface in March 2009 has opened up access to a whole new demographic of Internet users and added 3.5 million Arabic users over the past year."
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Kevin: An interesting post by Alastair Leithead about coverage of the protests in Thailand. Alastair says that the international media were pilloried by not only Thais but ex-pats for their coverage of the protests in Bangkok. He said that some of the criticism was particularly harsh on Twitter. He expressed frustration at having to explain a complex story not only on television but also in 140-characters on Twitter. He asked some of his critics on Twitter how to succinctly explain the crisis and actually got some useful insights. An example example of how engagement can help diffuse criticism.
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Kevin: An interesting post by We Media author Dan Gillmor on Salon talking about his upcoming book Mediactive. The goal of the book is to persuade people to become much more active users of media instead of simply being passive consumers. As he says, part of this is about improved media literacy. However, as digital technology allows more people to become creators of media, he also asks questions about who is a journalist in this new age and whether or how such protections afforded in the past only to professional journalists.
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Kevin: An interesting view that the first-person decentralised expert (in this case venture capitalist Fred Wilson) has replaced the third-person centralised expert quoted by traditional media. It's worth a read. The one issue with decentralisation is that it requires more effort from the person seeking information. Decentralisation does not work passive audiences. The post is specifically talking about Fred Wilson in the context of Inc magazine. It might make more sense that niche content, especially business content, has a more active audience than for general news.
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Kevin: A way to automatically generate calls to US National Public Radio's API. It makes API calls easy.
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Suw: Despite a silly headline, this is actually a very good opinion piece by Mike Altendorf, questioning the kneejerk reactions of HR and boardrooms towards social media in the business.
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Kevin: Yahoo's Barcelona research lab has created a tool that will not only puts past articles on a timeline, but it also looks at predictions made in those past articles. For instance, Tom Simonite in the MIT Technology Review gives the example of a 2004 opinion piece that predicted that North Korea would have some 200 warheads. It's a clever use of semantic technology that extracts dates from articles and delivers more information to the reader. It's a clever riff on the idea of a timeline, and it's a great discovery tool for a news organisations archives.
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Kevin: "Statistics can make or break a story. Used correctly they add weight and conviction, but it’s easy to be seduced by cherry-picked data and meaningless surveys." A talk at the Centre for Investigative Journalism by Nigel Hawkes on how to become savvy about data.
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Kevin: "Polymaps is a free, open-source JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps. It is the result of a collaboration between Stamen Design and SimpleGeo. … Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps."
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Kevin: Scott Rosenberg has written a very thoughtful post on the risks of trusting Facebook with the future's past. He write: "In fact, Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web." I think the issue of memory and archive in the digital age is a really interesting one, and it becomes even more important when we outsource digital memory to closed systems that have their own priorities.
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Kevin: A good howto post by Tony Hirst of Open University on how to screen scrape data from Wikipedia. Tony has a number of excellent tutorials on his blog on how to do this. One thing to note is that a lot of the data in Wikipedia is now available on DBPedia so you might not have to go through this process.
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Kevin: A nice brief look at a new visualisation project from the BBC called HowBigReally.com that puts news events in a physical context. For instance, with floods currently covering a fifth of Pakistan, how does that translate on a map of the United States, allowing readers in the US to appreciate the sense of scale. Really good thinking.
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Kevin: Alan Mutter writes about how major metro newspapers in the US are finding some success in creating niche print products. "(F)oresighted publishers are creating niche products to try to capture readers who historically were unlikely to buy the legacy newspaper – and, of course, the advertisers who covet them as customers." This is smart. As Philip Meyer wrote in 2004 with The Vanishing Newspaper, whenever a new medium has challenged an existing one, it has always pushed the legacy media towards greater specialisation. Some newspapers are focusing on this not only with digital products but also with new targeted print products.
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Kevin: Caroline McCarthy at CNET has written one of the best pieces on the roll out of Facebook places. With Facebook Places, there was not just a shift from location as a standalone feature but also in how location was being talked about. "Facebook Places' debut marks a shift in the rhetoric of the location-based services market because of the company's vocal connection of geolocation to permanence and memory, rather than the language of exciting immediacy (see what your friends are doing right now! In real time!) touted by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla." I wonder if this is simply a rhetorical shift for the purpose of marketing and differentiation or if it actually speaks fundamentally to how location will work on Facebook. They cynic in me thinks it's probably just a bit of marketing.
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Kevin: Poynter has a great interview with Tiffany Campbell, a six-year veteran of the paper and a lead producer for SeattleTimes.com. She describes how mobile tools such as Twitter and live video service Qik are changing how they report news and interact with audiences. She talks about how they use Twitter not only as a distribution mechanism but also as a content creation platform. "By using Twitter as a mobile platform, we were able to give real-time updates and maintain users' interest in an event." They always see a spike in traffic when they go live with video or tweet a live event. She sees that this is not only changing reporting but also how audiences interact with journalism. People can interact with reporters in real time as they are reporting.
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Kevin: Om Malik has a very plausible explanation of Foursquare's business strategy. "Foursquare wants more folks to use its application-programming interface (API), and thus build an ecosystem around Foursquare’s data." The more people who build apps using its API, the faster it will grow and the easier it will be start monetising its business. "Foursquare (and others like it) can essentially bring a cost-per-action business model to the real world, perhaps either supplanting or complementing traditional forms of advertising." Very intriguing idea.
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Kevin: Larry Magid has some good thoughts about how location sharing is going mainstream with the release of Facebook places. Key to this will be easy systems that users can use to protect their location from being used in ways that they don't want or don't intend. I think this is where Facebook might be in some difficulty because they have shifted how they use and expose personal data over time.
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Kevin: Air New Zealand rewards 'mayors' on Foursquare with access to its airport loungs. This is a good way use location-based technology to reward loyalty.
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Kevin: AllAboutSymbian.com has a detailed tutorial on how to publish audio using the mobile audio recording and publishing app Audioboo using a Nokia Symbian-based smartphone. Audioboo has brilliant apps for the iPhone and Android, but Nokia users have to use a dialup service, which doesn't have the same level of clarity. This detailed tutorial shows you how to use a service called Pixelpipe, which looks like it has the ability to publish content to a number of services. This is a very detailed tutorial, well worth bookmarking.
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Kevin: Location-based network Foursquare announced its first editorial partnership with Canadian free daily nwspaper, Metro News, in early 2010. Metro's Foursquare presence will include restaurant reviews, tips, to-dos and "even articles that mobile app users can stumble upon as they traverse Canadian points of interest".
