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Kevin: Mark Potts looks at the community interaction on the new site Civil Beat in Hawaii. Only subscribers can comment. The site has already tackled the issue of civil unions, which usually would be a cue for a god awful fight on most sites. However, the discussion is polite. It's an interesting model where anyone can read comments but only subscribers can contribute to them.
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Kevin: Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi talks about using the platform for non-political purposes. "How do we inspire active participation in a project that is non-political, and not related to a crisis?" The key? "To make it work, however, this kind of application requires aggressive marketing and online awareness campaigns, and mixing and matching online and offline initiatives."
Monthly Archives: May 2010
links for 2010-05-14
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Kevin: CEO John Paton of the Journal Register Company is letting his actions speak for themselves. He has adopted a digital first strategy, and he's just announced the appointment of three digital execs to seniors posts.
"The Journal Register Company has adopted a strategy of Digital First,” CEO John Paton said in a statement. “The appointments of Dan, Adam and Jon to these important roles with a focus on digital rather than print are indicative of our commitment to that strategy."
Where are your Facebook privacy settings?
Just in case you have lost track of where all Facebook’s privacy settings are hidden, the New York Times has crated an awesome infographic to shows just how well they are squirrelled away in different corners of the site. It illustrates beautifully just how difficult it has become to manage your privacy in Facebook, showing all 50 settings – which have over 170 options – spread over 10 different pages. Apparently, the company has had an emergency company-wide meeting to discuss the problem. Fingers crossed that some common sense prevails.
links for 2010-05-13
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Kevin: Brian Casel at Mashable has a look at five most important features in WordPress 3.0, set for release in June 2010. Those features include custom post types, menu management and multi-site capabilities. WordPress already was a very powerful blog CMS, and now it's starting to get sophisticated features that will appeal to a much wider range of online publishers.
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Kevin: A Firefox plug-in to scrape data from websites.
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Kevin: Some very interesting numbers if a very brief piece. What's unclear to me is where the table with the revenue and costs comes from. Is this a national average for US newspapers? However, what is really stunning is the fact that subscription revenue is only 3% of total revenue. That is utterly shocking. The other figure that is totally gob-smacking is that in print 52% of the costs come from production, distribution and raw materials. _52%_ That begs the question of when print will be completely economically unworkable. That day is not long off.
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Kevin: Michelle Minkoff at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits highlights a great new tool for scraping data from websites. What is scraping data? Before the days of APIs, developers and hackers would often 'scrape' data from websites. This would take data, often from an HTML table, and output the data in a useful format such as CSV that could be more easily manipulated using data tools such as spreadsheet or database software.
Minkoff writes: "It often takes a lot of time and effort to produce programs that extract the information, so this is a specialty. But what if there were a tool that didn't require programming?Enter OutWit Hub, a downloadable Firefox extension that allows you to point and click your way through different options to extract information from Web pages."
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Kevin: The New York Times asked followers of its Lens blog: "Attention: everyone with a camera, amateur or pro. Please join us on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 (U.T.C./G.M.T.), as thousands of photographers simultaneously record “A Moment in Time.” The idea is to create an international mosaic, an astonishingly varied gallery of images that are cemented together by the common element of time." It's a beautiful, simple call to action with a stunning result. As Flickr has shown, digital cameras have made amateur photo enthusiasts of us all, and we love to share our images both with friends, family and complete strangers.
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Kevin: JESSICA E. VASCELLARO writes: "Overall, Facebook.com served 176.3 billion display ads on its website over the first three months of 2010, or 16.2% of the total, said comScore. Yahoo served 131.6 billion banner ads to Yahoo users, and Microsoft served 60.2 billion, according to comScore. The data don't include ads that Yahoo and Microsoft delivered to other Web sites through their networks, a major source of revenue for each."
I'm curious whether the well documented competitive advantage in dwell time on Facebook is helping them sell advertising at premium rates, premium CPMs, or whether the dwell time is offset by low click through rates. Some people have posited that selling advertising on social networks is difficult due to people not wanting their social interactions interrupted by commercial messages.
The Wiki-fication of News: Topic Pages and collaboration
The concept of topic pages, living stories and the wiki-fication of news has been discussed for a few years now in journalism circles. However, now we’re starting to see this movement gain pace with not only examples on major news sites like the New York Times and the Spokesman-Review, a very pioneering local newspaper in Spokane Washington in the US, but also in a new breed of digital journalism start-ups.
For instance, Honolulu Hawaii-based Civil Beat (formerly Peer News), a start-up with support from the Omidyar? Foundation (of Pierre Omidyar founder of online auction site eBay)?, has recently launched with a focus five specific news beats: Hawaii, Honolulu, Education, Land and Money?. Omidyar wants to use the site to create a new kind of civic square for the 21st Century, and one of the features of the site is topic pages. For instance, they have in-depth pages on Honolulu Planning, Hawaii Student Achievement and Hawaii State Government Deficit. These topic pages are explainers that I would assume grow over time with new information. It’s not clear because much of the content is behind a paywall.
The paywall, or ‘membership’ model gives members full access to the site for $19.99 a month. I use the quotes, not necessarily to sneer, but because most people will see membership as a subscription. I suspect that the branding of it as membership is meant to highlight the community and engagement aspirations of the site. The journalists are referred to as reporter-hosts.
I might pay for a 15-day pass to explore the site a little further, but I do notice that the site has a lot of internal links but not many external links, at least from the content that isn’t behind the paywall. That might because of the very local nature of the content, it might be a strategic editorial choice or it might be the lack of internet proficiency by the reporter-hosts. It definitely is an interesting experiment, and it’s one that I will be watching closely.
Another context and community led experiment, Toronto-based OpenFile launched this week:
Structurally and editorially, the site is centered, as its name suggests, around files: topic pages-meet-news articles, focused on a particular problem or issue, that combine text, photos, video, and links — “sort of a multimedia package,” Craig Silverman (digital journalism director)? says.?
OpenFile has six core principles: Local first, always collaborate, keep tools handy, stay open, be useful and curate the conversation. They are good principles, and as Megan Garber says at Harvard’s Nieman Lab, it will be fascinating to see new media journalism maxims finally put into practice and tested. One thing that is very interesting is how editorially led this project is. The technology doesn’t appear ground breaking, although the design is pleasant and clean, but the editorial thinking is very forward looking. The key thing will be to see how this is put into practice. Not everyone take to this type of reporter-host, journalism as curation mentality natively. It isn’t something that most journalists were trained to do, and engagement is a difficult skill to train. The write up at the Nieman Lab is very comprehensive, well worth reading the full article.
Last week, I was at the European Alliance of News Agencies conference in Budapest, speaking about blogging and social media journalism. With news agencies suffering because their primary customers, newspapers, are suffering, many of the conversations had some element of revenue streams or new business models. It’s very interesting to see with OpenFile that they will be geo-tagging all of their content, something that I’ve advocated for a few years. Why would they make the effort? Wilf Dinnick, founding editor and CEO of OpenFile says:?
Because all our stories are geotagged, and we’re still focusing on local news, we will be able to deliver the major brands the opportunity to deliver advertising to very local levels?
Geo-tagging is available in many open-source content-management systems. With geo-tagging built into many camera phones and increasingly easy in digital cameras, it is now easier than ever to geo-tag content. It takes some thinking up front, but it’s a wise investment for the long term.
Designing social websites
Christian Crumlish talks to O’Reilly Media about designing social websites and the importance of play and game-like elements.
links for 2010-05-12
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Kevin: Journalism professor Mindy McAdams is taking a deep look at HTML5. Mindy is known for her excellent books on Flash, and this one in a series of posts about the new HTML standard. She's writing about the developments in the new HTML standard that will drive desktop, mobile and other device development for the next decade. She's writing for fellow educators and students, but this is invaluable for editors as well.
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Kevin: This is a summary of a James Fallows piece in the Atlantic magazine in the US looking at Google's plans for the news business. After interviewing several Google staffers, Fallow is convinced that the search giant is serious about helping newspapers. Emma Heald at the Editor's Weblog writes: "In Google's vision of making news sustainable, the first thing to note is that print is ignored. And a key element of the company's advice to newspapers is to continuously experiment."
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Kevin: A rather stunning visualisation of Twitter from Japan.
Social Media Revolution (Refreshed)
This original version of this video will be familiar to a lot of people already, but it has recently been reworked with new statistics, so it’s worth another look.
Twitter followers don’t equal influence
A few of us have been saying this for some time, so it’s good to see that Meeyoung Cha’s research backs us up! From Scott Berinato on Harvard Business Review:
Cha called her paper, “The Million Follower Fallacy,” a term that comes from work by Adi Avnit. Avnit posited that the number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless, and Cha, after looking at data from all 52 million Twitter accounts (and, more closely, at the 6 million “active users”) seems to have proven Avnit right. “Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions,” she writes.
Berinato’s interview with Cha in that post is also very interesting, and whilst some of her conclusions might just be confirming our existing gut feelings, it is very good to have some proper evidence upon which we can build.
Reading the comments to Berinato’s piece, however, leads me to think that some people are misinterpreting Cha’s conclusions. She’s not saying that social media has no use, she’s saying that follower numbers are not the right metric to measure influence (just like traffic stats for blogs don’t always correlate to their influence). The baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater.
Is Facebook dying under the weight of its own complexity?
I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook, not just because of their cavalier attitude towards their members’ privacy, but also because the UI stinks. Thomas Baekdal takes a detailed and interesting look at the reason he thinks Facebook is dying. Some key excerpts:
Facebook is really big, it has a ton of features. But, it is also turning into the worst case of complexity overload the web has seen in years. There are so many inconsistencies that it is hard to believe – or even to keep track of.
And:
On top of the complexity and inconsistencies, we have a growing problem of privacy issues. Facebook has a long track record of ignoring people’s privacy. As I wrote in “The First Rule of Privacy”; You are the only one, who can decide what you want to share. Facebook cannot decide that, nor can anyone else.
But, Facebook seems oblivious to this simple principle, and have started sharing personal information with 3rd party “partners” – continuing a long line of really bad decisions when it comes to privacy.
If you are on Facebook with a personal profile this is a must read. If you’re on it for business reasons, you might want to read it even more closely and pay particular attention to the various privacy changes Facebook have made. And on that note, the EFF has some great advice and information about Facebook’s now very confusing privacy settings and interface changes.