links for 2009-01-09

  • Over at NPR, Andy Carvin is leading a project to extend what we learned from Twitter Vote Report, launched by a humble blog post here on techPresident, to cover the upcoming inauguration weekend, January 17th through 20th, in DC.
  • Kevin: Mindy McAdams, cutting edge multimedia journalism professor. has these observations about video based on a recent study:
    1. A shorter, extremely tight and fascinating video has more chance of being watched; it is more likely to succeed in communicating its message, because more people would finish watching it.
    2. News sites need to put more effort into facilitation of this sampling behavior, and production of long items (videos or text) is counterproductive to that effort.
  • Kevin: This is one of those things that will take a little lateral thinking from journalists, but I hope that computer-assisted reporting vets will see, or possibly even be using something like R. When we're talking about ever increasing amounts of data, helping journalists help our readers make sense of it becomes even more important, and with this open-source language and the myriad of packages to developed by the community, it deserves further investigation by journalists.
  • Kevin: TV is still in a mass media, big money mode, and here is why it's ripe for disruption. "That's the problem with current web programming. On the one hand, you have old-school TV thinking: throw buckets of money at a slick production with huge names and then hope for millions of viewers so you can earn that money back. On the other, you have crazy shut-ins with access to video equipment. Neither, so far, is a very effective money-making scheme. (Leo) Laporte, I think, is the happy medium between "slick production" and "crazy shut-in." "

links for 2009-01-08

links for 2009-01-07

“OK open systems beat great closed systems every time”

The title of this post is a quote, via Steve Yelvington, from Prodigy’s Vice President of marketing around the time that the Web arrived and changed the online game. Usually I just reference links like this in Delicious, but Steve’s post Early to the game but late to learn how to play needs a little more attention.

In the current business climate for newspapers, Steve brings a wealth of experience and history that few folks in the industry have and, as he points out, it is not that newspaper didn’t try to adapt but that they tried to adapt the web to their existing business rather than adapting for the web. Newspapers tried to keep their closed systems as they moved online, locking their content in online services. The web might have arrived ‘pathetic and weak’ but it was ‘open and extensible’, says Steve, and it eventually buried online services like Prodigy, Compuserve and even AOL. He quotes Jack Schafer from a Slate piece titled “How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web:”

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions.

I’ve long fought against the re-purposing reflex of shovelware, mindlessly slapping content from another medium onto the web. As we move to integrated newsrooms, we’re often still treating the web as just another distribution channel that simply has to be optimised for Google. Here is why it isn’t. To quote Steve:

Many of us who were there at the time knew that human interaction, not newspaper reading, would be the most powerful motivator of online usage. Certainly I knew it; I had run a dialup bulletin board for years as a hobby. But as hundreds of newspapers rushed to “go online,” few even bothered to ask basic questions about content strategy. It was, many declared as of they were saying something wise, “just another edition.”

But it’s not.

If human interaction is the ‘killer app’ of the internet, which I agree with Steve it is, how would this make a news site different? It is only in the so-called Web 2.0 era that we finally started adding social elements into our news web sites. And if human interaction is primary motivator of online usage, can we as journalists fail to interact and still hope to remain relevant? Open systems are not just about a choice of technology. The philosophy of open systems is also about how we use technology. Open is a philosophy that drives us to use technology to bolster human interaction. It is why Steve talks about the mission statement of his news site as being to increase the social capital in the communities Morris serves.

Jay Rosen has been doing a lot of thinking about closed versus open editorial systems, and he characterised this comment as one of his clearest comparisons yet of the two systems:

The strength of a closed system is that it has controls, in same sense that an accounting system puts controls in place. Stories are assigned, reported, edited and checked (copy edited) by a team using a protocol, or newsroom standard. These are the hallmarks of the closed system. The controls create the reliability, right?

Versus:

Open systems take advantage of cheap production tools and the magic distribution system of the Web. This leads to a flood of “cheap” production in the blogosphere, some of which is valuable and worth distributing in wider rings, much of which is not. Thus, a characteristic means of creating value online is what I called the intelligent filter to do that sorting and choosing.

If you look at successful open systems, they don’t try to prevent “bad,” unreliable or low quality stories from being created or published. They don’t try to prevent the scurrilous. But the Los Angeles Times would. Typically, successful sites within open systems “filter the best stuff to the front page.” And this is how they try to become reliable, despite the fact that anyone can sign up and post rants.

That way of creating trust (or reliability) is different than the way a closed system–like the health team at Time magazine–does it. Therefore the ethics will be different.

And he talks about hybrid systems, which is where I think some of the most interesting work is going on. We live in an AND world not an OR world, and I fear sometimes journalists’ tendency to paint the world in black and white infects our approach to our own way of working.

For me, I don’t use technology simply because I’m neophilic. I use it because it helps me do better journalism, in a way that is more useful to people in my network, or as Dan Gillmor says, the people formerly known as the audience. The internet as an open system means that my methods aren’t a fixed destination but an ever evolving, extensible process that adapts as the network changes, whether I conceive of the network in terms of the technology or the people I’m interacting with. Through all this my core journalistic values and ethics haven’t changed. That’s the constant.

I’m feeling a little philosophical at the start of the New Year. I am an online journalist. If the road trip I took for the US elections reminded me of anything, it reminded me of the power of networked journalism, which in terms of both the technology and the human connectedness increases almost constantly. Let’s just look at the expanding reach of mobile phones and data. In 1999, I got my first mobile modem and started to be freed from my desk. It ran at 9600 baud, slow even then. In 2009, I used a DSL-class mobile network card, and when I was on the move, I used a Nokia N82, which like the iPhone and Blackberry, allowed me to continue to use key internet services like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. The network is not only mobile, it is on my mobile.

Open systems are a huge opportunity for journalists, not a threat to our professional livelihoods. We journalists don’t have to limit ourselves to closed systems, we have a vast range of open systems that can support and improve our work. I know that 2008 ended with a lot of anxiety for many journalists, much of it from a sense that our professional lives were out of our control. But by embracing the network, you can start taking back control of your professional destiny.

Join me on Ada Lovelace Day

I’ve mainly stayed away from the discussion of gender issues in technology. I didn’t think that I had any real expertise to share. But over the last six months, after many conversations, it has become clear that many of my female friends in tech really do feel disempowered. They feel invisible, lacking in confidence, and unsure how to compete for attention with the men around them.

Then I see the stupid puerile misogynistic manner with which some of the more powerful voices in the tech community – some of them repeat offenders – treat women, and it makes me very cross indeed. The objectification of women is bad enough when it’s done by the media, but when it’s done by a conference organiser or tech commentator or famous tech publication, what message does it send? Nothing but “You will never be taken seriously, but we might take notice of you if you’re hot.”

But what to do? Well, let’s pull back from the anger a little, and start to look instead at why it might be that women feel less secure in their abilities than most men, and what might help change that. Undoubtedly it’s a complex issue, but recent research may shed some light: Psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones.

Well, that’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Thus was born Ada Lovelace Day, and this pledge:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

— Suw Charman-Anderson (contact)

Deadline to sign up by: 24th March 2009

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

You’ll notice that I’ve asked for 1,000 people to sign the pledge, which is an ambitious number. Indeed, PledgeBank makes a pretty strong point during the pledge creation process of asking people to limit their requests to 20 people, but I am sure that over the next 77 days we’ll be able to find another 989 people to join us!

What can you do?
Obviously, and most importantly, please sign the pledge. If you already have a blog, then it will be easy for you to take part. If you don’t have a blog, this might be a great reason to start one! It’ll take you about five minutes to get yourself set up on WordPress and then you’ll be up and running!

Please also consider putting a pledge badge on your blog now or writing a short post about the project to help spread the word. You can also use the “Share This” link on the pledge itself to send the pledge to your favourite social bookmarking or news site, or to email it to a friend. The more people who send this link to Delicious or Digg and the like, the more likely we are to hit our target!

Also, if you’re on Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Identi.ca or any other microconversation tool, please ping a message to all your friends about Ada Lovelace Day, and don’t forget the link! If you’re on LinkedIn, you could also add it as your temporary status for a while.

It is going to be a challenge to hit 1,000 people – we’ll need an average of 13 people signing each day – but if we all tell our friends about it, I think we can do it!

Keep up with Ada Lovelace Day news
I’ve got a Twitter account, mailing list and blog set up, so feel free to follow, subscribe and add to your RSS reader, as you wish!

What will happen next?
If Ada Lovelace Day is a success I’d like to make it an annual event. And, once the economy is in a better position, I’d like to put together a one day conference called Finding Ada. We would cover presentation skills and would introduce women to tech conference organisers, with the aim of getting more women up on stage at tech conferences. At the moment, I’m short of money to get Finding Ada moving, so if you’d like to be a sponsor please get in touch and I’ll tell you more about it.

Finally, who was Ada?
Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built.

links for 2009-01-06

A new web discipline: Social Functionality Design

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes a website social, and how different types of social functionality could fit together to create a satisfying experience for the people who use the website. Partly this is because I’m working closely with a Canadian publishing start-up called Book Oven to do just that – design their social functionality. We are still at the very early stages of website development, with a very small pre-alpha test going on at the moment which should lead into a fuller-featured alpha in the next few months.

What is interesting and, to my mind admirable too, is that they started thinking holistically about the social aspects of the site from the very beginning, so that sociability is built right into its fabric, rather than being treated as a bolt-on afterwards. So often I see otherwise promising sites fail to reach their potential because they’ve simply tacked on some forums, and maybe a half-baked messaging system, and leave their social functionality at that. Communities will still form, but they miss out on lots of interaction that could otherwise really enrich the user’s experience.

So what sort of things are we thinking through when we’re considering social functionality design? My first focus was to think about the social objects around which people might want to communicate, and what implications that would have for different modes of communication. Obviously, members’ activities (and I’m being deliberately vague about what they are for now!) are one set of social objects, but so are the members themselves, so the tools have to allow people to aggregate conversations around each object separately – I don’t just want one big bucket with all the conversations in, but will need to have multiple ways to slice and dice the conversation so that it makes sense for me at that moment, in that context.

I have also been considering the way in which people develop relationships with each other, and the effect that the architecture of the site may have on the way people build trust. This is all intimately related to privacy gradients, understanding the way that people can move through a site, and what access to different areas of the site signifies. People have different ways of forming relationships online. Some like to watch and learn what someone is like from observation, others jump straight into conversation, and yet others will plunge into intimate relationships at what might seem like an alarming speed! How does the site design facilitate (or hinder) these behaviour patterns?

And what about people’s motivations for using the site? Why will they visit us? What will they want to do there? How will they do it? Understanding the different ways that people may wish to interact with the site and each other is essential to understanding how to structure it, and it’s not just about traditional information architecture or user experience, but also about understanding the possible influences of human cognitive biases.

Once we start looking more deeply at people’s motivations, the dark side of human nature reveals itself, and we have to consider conflict resolution. The community can do a lot to self-police, if you give them the tools to do so, but there is always a need to understand what the worst case scenario might be. What you could do to prevent your site or tool being used by one user as a big stick to beat another user with? My personal feeling here is that the site should remain as neutral as possible, and let users sort out their problems off-site, but there are design and functionality implications even in that solution that should not be ignored.

And then there’s reputation management. Hierarchies emerge in all communities – it’s human nature to rank oneself against one’s peers, and to rank them against each other. How explicit does one make reputational tools? How could the reputation system be gamed? And how do you keep people honest? After all, whenever there is a reputation system, us humans do so love to game it.

I think there’s a new web discipline here, that of Social Functionality Design, that should sit alongside User Experience, Accessibility, and Information Architecture as key issues that website and application designers need to understand and apply. People are getting much more sophisticated in the way that they use the internet and their expectations of the social experience of being online are getting more and more nuanced. It’s just not enough anymore to only have forums or a messaging system.

When I look at the web, I am constantly disappointed that sites I love and use regularly seem to have put so little thought into just how their members are going to interact. Supporting sociability isn’t optional anymore. Sites need to think very hard about what they are doing and how, and they need to crack this nut sooner rather than later, because otherwise they are leaving their lunch out for someone else to eat.

Wish list for better tools for journalism

I still like Twhirl for my personal Twitter-ing and Twibble for my mobile Twitter-ing, but I think TweetDeck is a stellar tool for Twitter power users including journalists. I keep it open on my desktop and occasionally look at the tag cloud from TwitScoop. Recently, I saw ‘Bethesda’ pop up in huge type on the tag cloud, and I was baffled as to why this Washington DC suburb should be spiking on Twitter. But the tweets linked to the story about a huge water main break in Bethesda 20 minutes before it aired on British TV news networks.

When I showed TweetDeck to one of our news bloggers here at the Guardian, he said he wished that the news wires worked like that.

  • Why don’t we have a tag cloud showing rising stories in wire feeds?
  • Why don’t we create our own in house Adobe Air apps that automatically aggregate based on those tags from social media sources?
  • Why aren’t our publishing tools as fast and user-friendly as blogging tools?

In 2009, I see almost endless opportunities to use third party sites, applications and services to do social media journalism. My wish list will drive the apps and services I use. What’s your wish list for 2009? What tool do you use outside of your office that you wish you had inside your newsroom to do journalism?

links for 2009-01-04

links for 2009-01-03