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Kevin: Benji Lanyado, travel journalist and one of the journalistic innovators here at the Guardian, answers some of the questions that I posed in a post on the Guardian's digital content blog about augmented reality – applications that layer information over the physical environment that you're in. IBM is getting a lot of attention for its Wimbledon AR application, the Wimbledon Seer, which layers over match and venue information over the camera view from a Google Android phone. Very clever. Benji and I have talked about the possible applications for AR in travel. He expands on his ideas on his new blog. Worth a read.
Yearly Archives: 2009
links for 2009-06-24
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Kevin: "German publishers have united behind demands that the government pass legislation
shielding their intellectual property from "ongoing theft" over the Internet."
links for 2009-06-23
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Kevin: Every newspaper wants to be The Economist. Even during the recession, the magazine's revenues and circulation are growing. Jeff Jarvis compares The Economist to Apple. Both companies break all of the 40 rules Jarvis laid out in his book What Would Google Do?. They succeed because they are uniquely good. "The problem for the rest of the industry is that they can’t all break the rules as The Economist does because they’re just not that good. You have to be great to the The Economist or Apple and if you fall short, you fall all the way. And staying great is constant work."
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Kevin: The Washington Post decided to publish a 7,000 word, two-part series only on their website. "The Post cited the financial pressures facing the company as the reason for publishing the feature exclusively online. Is this something that you would consider? Why or why not?"
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Kevin: Todd Ziegler at The Bivings Group, a digital consultancy in Washington DC, finds "Traffic from Twitter and Facebook is increasing by 20-30% per month on the sites I manage that (1) produce content on a consistent basis and (2) are working to promote themselves on these platforms." But they don't drive much traffic on sites that 'aren't actively engaged on those platforms".
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Kevin: A new blog about Facebook has launched. To get some buzz, they revealed a hack that could expose crucial profile data. Facebook quickly plugged the hole. Memo to self: Don't rely on privacy settings to keep data private.
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Kevin: Google has greatly improved their maps of Iran through their Mapmaker programme, which allows users to add details to Google maps. O'Reilly looks at the improvement in mapping in just a couple of Iranian cities.
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Kevin: Steve Outing is sceptical of news organisations demanding that users pay for content, but he says that news organisations need to investigate ways that effortlessly allow people to pay for content. He was one of first to write about Kachingle, which has an intriguing model that allows people to support the sites they love, and other companies are starting to provide similar services.
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Kevin: How not to use Twitter. Habitat, an up-scale furniture company in the UK, is accused of using spamming popular hashtags with offers, including using hashtags related to the Iranian election protests.
The future of civil society and social technology
I’ve been working on this section of my report for Carnegie Uk Trust pretty solidly for the last few weeks, and I finally have something to show for all of the brainstorming, mindmapping, matrices and post-it notes stuck to my office wall! The section is 7,500 words long, so quite a decent chunk of the final report (although also 1,500 words over its allocation!).
You can, if you wish, read the section here and leave your comments as per usual at the bottom. I am, however, also putting it into BookOven for paragraph by paragraph annotation. (That’s a nice collisions of clients!) If you want to be able to comment at a paragraph level, please email me and I will send you an invitation to the site (we’re still in private alpha).
I’m particularly interested in any references you have that either support or rebut my points – many of these were arrived at through interview and workshop, and if there’s something that it’s hard to do, it’s to reference stuff that’s come out of other people’s brains like this whilst simultaneously being imaginative and trying to guess what might happen in 15 years! My schedule makes it a tough job to fully reference everything, so any help you can give would be much appreciated.
I look forward to your comments.
Continue reading
links for 2009-06-22
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Kevin: From a Dow Jones report: "Axel Springer AG (SPR.XE) expects consumers will pay for high quality online content in time, although the publisher of Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper, already has a successful online business model, according to chief executive Mathias Doepfner."
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Kevin: Reuters Global Community Editor Mark Jones looks at how different news organisations including the Huffington Post have handled running web coverage of the post election protests in Iran. Mark wondered why the HuffPo might have a large number of private emails, more than the Guardian, the BBC and the NYTimes. I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the HuffPo's southern California roots, home to a large Iranian ex-pat community. But that's just a guess.
Mark also made this observation: "CNN via its iReport, and the BBC via its Have Your Say service, all had rich seams of user-submitted pictures and videos. But they didn’t appear to be able to weave such material into their running commentary on the Web — perhaps a case of being overwhelmed with material and being forced to keep it in silos."
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Kevin: The French government is to give all 18 to 24-year-olds a free newspaper once a week for a year as part of 600 million euro aid package for the press.
links for 2009-06-20
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Kevin: "What information on Twitter is fair game for a journalist to report? There needs to be further discussion between media professionals, their employers, journalism academics and social media experts to help navigate this complex territory."
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Kevin: Nicolas Rapp who has created this list of the best infographic RSS feeds.
links for 2009-06-19
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Kevin: AP is cutting fees for newspapers and broadcasters, but it is looking to renegotiate its deals with internet giants such as Yahoo, AOL, Google and Microsoft.
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Suw: Fun and quite accurate decision-making tool. It's a bit limited at the moment, but it shows real promise.
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Suw: Fabulous bit of work that it's hard to stop playing with!
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Suw: I know a ton of people who should read this, and make very careful notes.
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Kevin: Craig McGill reports: "Now, here’s an interesting one, passed on to me by someone we shall call CIPRMole where basically the NLA (the Newspaper Licensing Association) want to charge organisations – starting with cuttings services then moving on to others by 2010 – for including links to newspaper stories:"
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Kevin: Beijing will seek to employ at least 10,000 "internet volunteers" before the end of this year to monitor "harmful" websites and content, said an official at the municipal authority's information office.
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Kevin: Joshua Micah Marshall describes Talking Points Memo as a hybrid of collaborative reporting with readers and traditional reporting.
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Kevin: A look at the internet filtering being used in Iran and how technology is being used to organise protests. Ethan Zuckerman "senses that the technology isn't helping opposition supporters as much as are traditional organizing methods like phone calls and word of mouth".
links for 2009-06-18
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Kevin: A test project from Nokia that allows you to find friends via WiFi location technology and send them a text message to see if they want to meet up. Location-based services like this will move into the mainstream in the next few years, but what will move this out of the realm of early adopters?
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Kevin: Software industry group blasts Digital Britain recommendations as "nothing more than hot air, promises of future action against copyright infringers and a legislative let down".
links for 2009-06-17
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Kevin: Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, writes about coverage of the Iranian election protests with what I call social media journalism. It's a hybrid of traditional media and newsgathering process and standards to filter social media and use social media as a source of contacts. There is a lot of opportunity here, and we're just scratching the surface.
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Kevin: Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, tries to answer the question being asked by many in the media of whether Iran could shut down Twitter. He first describes Iran's control over the internet. Iran is "able to treat its Internet-using public the way a school can filter what its kids see on their PCs". But could they shut down Twitter, which is being used to report in real-time the events on Twitter. "So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block access to Twitter as it could to any particular Web site, and it could even block access to some Twitter user’s feeds there while leaving others open, by simply configuring its filters to allow some Twitter urls through while filtering others. But Twitter isn’t just any particular Web site. It’s an atom designed to be built into other molecules. "
links for 2009-06-16
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Kevin: Marc Ambinder says that this is how a CIA Analyst would look at the events in Iran, but I suggest that it's also the way that journalists should. "Watch for disinformation. … Don't assume. … Look for sources that disprove your thesis. Go outside the country and outside your comfort zone. See what, say, China's news agency reports about the protests."
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Kevin: Like many projects, I spotted this in the flow of links via Twitter. It's a fascinating look at '12 different voter communities' in the United States. The map is fascinating, but I'm curious about the journalism that the Christian Science Monitor and US public television's News Hour will be doing. I need to investigate how they came up with 12 different voter communities. The political parties and their models often slice the US electorate into often twice as many demographic groups in terms of targeting, but it's interesting to see news outlets do this kind of coverage. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this project to see how it evolves.
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Kevin: Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC Global News division and a friend from the BBC, compaired Twitter to mainstream media coverage of the outcome of the 2009 Iranian elections. His conclusion:
"Result? Mixed.
If you, as an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn't, running a high risk of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn't have thought Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all.
But if you had a reasonable understanding of social media, how to set up and assess feeds, how to compare and contrast information, if you had a reasonable understanding of news flows, a developed sense of scepticism, and an above average understanding of the political situation in Iran, you would have emerged much better informed than the lay viewer relying on TV or Radio news." -
Kevin: Vin Crosbie writes: "Ask most people who think of themselves as new media experts what the greatest change in the media has been in the past 35 years, and you'll hear such answers as "the Internet," "social media," "search engines," or "iPhones."
They're wrong.
The greatest change has been that people's access to media has changed from scarcity to surfeit. It's an even bigger change than Gutenberg's invention of a practical printing press, the invention of writing, or even the first Neolithic cave paintings. It's the greatest change in all of media history. And it occurred in only 35 years — half a human lifespan."
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis writes: "The question is whether the legacy press – for the benefit of its staff even more than its audience – can issue enough caveats to enable it to work real-time. Forget blogs in this discussion. Will The New York Times ever be comfortable working on the standards and practices of 24-hour cable news? Can it afford to? Don’t they have to?"
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Kevin: This is a succinct outline of social media journalism from Jeff Jarvis: "I emphasized to a reporter today that Twitter is not the news source. It's a source of tips & temperature & sources. Reporting follows."
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Kevin: Dougald Hine, former BBC journalist and co-founder of the School of Everything writes about why journalists write a lot of ill informed nonsense about Twitter. Like a lot of things, they focus on celebrities that use Twitter, or bands that use MySpace or campaigners who use Facebook. They don't get under the skin of social media. Also with Twitter, they don't spend the time necessary to really understand what is going on. "So unless a reporter has been using the service personally for long enough to get a feel for it, they are very likely to pick up the wrong end of the stick. Or mistake the stick for a snake."