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Kevin: Ryan Thornburg has a pretty gloomy take on a recent survey of online journalists. "I think the survey we did here at UNC does a much better job showing us the future of news… which is bright if you dream of a future of inexperienced, homogeneous copyeditors shuffling text around a Web page." Frankly, the industry would have more experience if they hadn't shut down so many online divisions in a bout of schadenfreude after the dot.com crash. I have more than a decade of experience in online journalism, but only because I was one of the few to survive the post dot.com crash decimation of online news departments by executive editors who believed – quite wrongly – that the crash vindicated their belief that the internet is a fad. The lack of experience is the industry's fault. The mass cull of digital journalists in 2000-2001 now means a crippling lack of digital experience for the industry.
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Kevin: "Surfing the net at work for pleasure actually increases our concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce, according to a new University of Melbourne study."
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Kevin: A simple wizard to create a map based on location data in a Google Spreadsheet.
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Kevin: Christkian Spanring has a great how-to showing how to use Google Docs (in this case spreadsheets), Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps to create a simple map-based mash-up. Mashups are now getting to the point of being doable by those with limited technical skill, not saying that Christian has limited skills. That comment is more directed to cut-and-paste coding journalists like myself.
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Kevin: The Guardian API tracks the use of swear words (well, a cross section of profane terms) used on the Guardian in the last decade. Way to go Tom Hume for an intriguing use of Guardian API.
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Kevin: The Knight Citizen News Network has a great directory of free and low-cost digital tools for journalists and citizens.
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Kevin: Steve Buttry has a great list of links to Twitter resources for journalists including primers on how to use Twitter, journalists and editors on Twitter and other resources.
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Kevin: Steve Buttry gives a great set of tips to editors who want to lead their newsrooms into the Twitterverse. I think journalists are increasingly realising that they should use Twitter to monitor their beat, but I think it is less well appreciated how much traffic Twitter can drive to your site. Even less well appreciated is how this can connect journalists with their colleagues and more important communities around their content.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
links for 2009-04-03
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis referred to this as the 'heavy metal' rendition of Clay Shirky's post on the death of newspapers. Syracuse University communications photography and political science student Joey Baker has some pretty blunt comments for newspaper journalists. Charging for 'basic content' is just asinine. (And I'd say that most journalists are rather expansive in their definition of exclusive content.) He believes that news sites could actually use a great user experience or great UI to differentiate in a market where the content is rarely that different. Discuss.
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Kevin: The Guardian Media Group has asked the British government to investigate Google News and other content aggregators as it prepares its Digital Britain report. From the submission: "We welcome the interim report's focus on respect for IP and copyright, but believe there is a glaring omission from its examination of such issues: the negative effects of aggregators and search engines on the ability of and incentives for UK content providers to invest in quality content."
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Kevin: Dave Chase highlights something very important in terms of securing the future of professional journalism. No business can cut its way to success. While most discussions of new business models talk about ways to cut production costs or new ways to fund journalism. "While those items help, it's clear the only path to long-term economic viability is to directly address the revenue piece of the equation." Dave outlines 10 mistakes newspapers going all digital must avoid.
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Kevin: Matthew Ingram has uploaded his presentation on Twitter that he gave to his colleagues at the Globe and Mail. He took out some slides on traffic data but otherwise its all there. Twitter is becoming a big traffic driver, especially to specialist areas with engaged journalists (think the Guardian Technology section for a not so random example).
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How to Embed and Play 720p HD (High Definition) YouTube Videos (&fmt=22 Code Hack) » My Digital LifeKevin: How to embed high definition YouTube videos.
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Kevin: At least 121 members of Congress (out of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 Senators) are using Twitter.
Saving Newspapers: The Musical
A tip of the hat to Harvard University’s Neiman Journalism Lab (a must follow for journalists on Twitter) for this gem.
Let’s all sing along: “In the name of name of digital ubiquity, where you can get the news anytime for free, is there any room for dinosaurs like us, journalists who are already extinct.” New business models: Offer businesses good reviews on Yelp? Sell Marijuana when it’s legalised?
Well, it looks like their solution is a little behind the British tabloids in their plan to save newspapers. But I’ll leave you to watch it. I may have already ahem…revealed too much.
Technorati Tags: newspapers, business models, future, revenue, musical
links for 2009-04-02
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Kevin: Tony Hirst of Open University shows how to do an easy map-based mashup using Yahoo! Pipes and Google Maps. Tony is worth adding to your RSS feeds. He has some great, simple guides for representing data.
Proofreading the Public Domain
This is cross-posted from Chocolate and Vodka, but I’ve included different invite codes in this post.
For the last few months I’ve been working with Book Oven, a Canadian start-up whose aim is to make it easier to prepare long texts for publishing by making it a simple, collaborative process.
The first thing we’ve focused on is how to proofread a manuscript for typos. The problem with reading a whole book all at once and looking for typos is that you can get so caught up in reading that your brain starts to skip the mistakes, seeing what it thinks should be there instead of what actually is. But what if you were presented with just one sentence at a time? You’d lack some context, it’s true, but you don’t really need a lot of context to know if “teh” is a misspelling of “the” or that “their” should be “there”.
That’s what we’ve built at Book Oven, and we’ve called it “Bite-Size Edits”. It presents you with a random snippet of text, with a sentence above and below for limited context, and if you spot a typo you can suggest a correction by editing the sentence and clicking “Suggest changes” (click on the images for a closer look or visit our complete How To).
You can also tell us that the snippet is OK as it is by clicking “No changes”, or that there’s something confusing about it by clicking “Skip”.
If our calculations are correct, it will take 100 people just 10 minutes to proofread a 100,000 word book, and we want to bring that collaborative power to bear on on the public domain. Thousands of texts have been uploaded to Project Gutenberg, but although they have been very carefully proofread some still have a small number of errors. Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg’s founder, called for help in removing these errors, so we’ve set up a version of Bite-Size Edits, which we’ve called the Gutenberg Rally, to focus just on texts from Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders (Gutenberg’s proofreading site).
If you’d like to pitch in, all you need to do is pick an invitation code from the list below and visit the Book Oven Gutenberg Rally site to create a new account. When you’ve successfully signed up, please leave a comment with the code you used and I’ll cross it off the list.
Now, just a little word of warning. The site is in alpha, which means that you will almost certainly find things that are broken! We have a feedback form that you can use to let us know and a forum to discuss things (which, is itself something that’s not entirely finished, as it’s not yet fully integrated – just sign in with the same username and password that you create when you join the main site). We’d love your feedback, so don’t spare the horses!
If you explore the site, you’ll find that you can start your own projects, upload your own text (.txt files only at the moment) and can send it to Bite-Size for the community to proof. Please feel free to experiment, but be aware we’re still ironing out bugs and that we have a lot more social functionality still to unveil!
So, for the love proof-reading, get cracking! Oh, but be warned. Bite-Size Edits has been described by one usability tester as “evilly addictive”. Don’t say we didn’t tell you…
(Obviously I can’t update the list whilst I’m asleep, so if you pick a code that doesn’t work, list it in the comments and try another!)
Invite Codes
64sBhU00
9cmRd303
2SZWT4VN
CMIMAPxN
DnZ8idpk
2wAcreZV
INuDo0QJ
Ea4Cx9G3
XHLEILQl
O6yuVrkM
pRZXtN20
t9FQdS3F
o9B2I7T4
eOGMdeK7
gBj9Aqad
bApjyzOw
dZ2OzmLD
dIAgKFHH
MBr9KcfD
amc60MoK
8Mq2UzGd
WiK1TR3U
rCvYJ23b
ysSRF0ig
ZUiOzf5l