Category Archives: Innovation

04.02.09
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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.

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03.24.09
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Ada Lovelace Day: Tribute to Suw Charman-Anderson

For Ada Lovelace Day, it will probably come as no surprise that I’m choosing to blog about Suw, my wife and mad ninja geek soulmate. Suw came up with the idea for Ada Lovelace Day because she often went to conferences where no women were on the panels, even though she knew plenty of incredibly talented, intelligent women who would contribute to the discussion about technology and social media.

As she said when she launched Ada Lovelace Day:

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised.  

It’s not necessarily a lack of women in technology that Suw was mourning, but a lack of visibility.

Suw also wanted to highlight the contributions of women in technology and science so they can serve as role models for girls. I’m from the US, and it’s long been known that girls start school with strong math skills but lose interest in their tweens, mostly due to social pressure. Suw said that the situation is similar here in the UK.

One of the reasons I chose Suw is because I think she’s a great role model for girls who want to study technology and science. When Suw and I first started dating, I remarked to a friend that she was probably the first woman I dated who out-geeked me, and while that might sound like typical male insecurities, I love her for it. Being a geek is not just about skills and knowledge but also about passion, and she has a passion for knowledge, not just in terms of computers and the internet but for all kinds of knowledge, whether it was the geology she studied at university, physics or psychology. Her curiosity is limitless, and if we share a common failing it is that we’re so curious about nearly everything that we sometimes find it difficult to focus on just one thing. She is a keen observer, and she quickly turns from noting a trend or a pattern to asking deeper questions about the underlying causes and motivations driving that trend. She wants to understand the world around her.

She also is a pioneer. I felt like a blogging charlatan when I met her. I started blogging in 2004 at the request of my editor at the BBC. I quickly fell in love with it, but Suw had been exploring blogs and other forms of social media long before. She set herself up as a ‘blogging consultant’, and many people told her that she couldn’t make a living with it. But she has, largely because she was years ahead of the curve of blogging and social media consultants that have sprung up in the past few years, and she remains ahead.

One of the things that keeps her ahead of the curve is not just her knowledge of the technology but also a deep understanding of people’s relationship to the technology and how social motivations influence our use of technolgy. I think the psychology of social media is fascinating, and I think Suw’s understanding that the fundamental human need to not only express ourselves but to communicate drives so much of the current trends online and on mobile.

She’s also a doer, and I think that Ada Lovelace Day proves it. She realised that highlighting women’s contributions in technology is important, and instead of getting frustrated, she did something, something that she hopes to build on. For all these reasons and more, that’s why I have chosen to blog about Suw Charman-Anderson, my wife and someone who I think is not only inspirational to girls looking to become tomorrow’s technology leaders but someone who inspires me.

03.16.09
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Future of journalism: Uncertain but not hopeless

As a journalist who I am sure has been (and possibly still is) considered ‘barking mad’ by some of my colleagues in the industry, quite a bit of what Clay Shirky wrote in his post about newspapers thinking the unthinkable resonated with me. I’m still digesting it because I think the main thrust of what he said was that the industry is entering a period of great uncertainty. I saw this day coming in August of 1993 when I saw Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, in a student computer lab at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. As I wrote in my first post here on Strange Attractor, I knew that the web would fundamentally change journalism.

It took longer than I thought it would. After I left university and went to Washington DC for my first jobs, it was like taking a step backwards into internet history compared to where the University of Illinois was in 1994. Did I know where it was all headed in 1994? Absolutely not. But I’d say it’s a lot easier to see where the internet is heading now than where we’re heading in journalism.

I’m still digesting what Clay has written, but it seemed to me that he was attempting to move beyond the self-denial that the industry has exhibited for much of the past 15 years.

It isn’t that newspapers didn’t see the internet coming. The problem was that newspaper companies and, to be honest, most print journalists tried to adapt the internet to newspapers rather than adapt the news business to the internet. If most (not all by any means) print journalists were honest with ourselves, we would stop trying to lay the blame entirely at the feet of management and avaricious owners and own up to our own resistance to the internet. Too few of us went running boldly to the embrace the future. There’s still time, and it’s better to move towards the future on your own steam than be pushed as many of us are now.

Clay was trying to turn a page and say we’re in the midst of revolution and have been for a while not. Get over it.

The internet is a disruptive technology, not something that politely challenges that existing order. Now that the revolution has met the worst recession in at least 60 years, we’re entering extremely uncertain times.

As Clay wrote:

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

But let’s not confuse uncertainty with hopelessness. Journalists are not in a hopeless situation. Any journalist can now become a publisher, and from my own experience, regaining your voice is liberating, empowering and also professionally beneficial. Not only is the cost of publishing approaching zero, the cost of experimentation is too. We don’t have to pay for presses. We don’t even have to pay for desk-top publishing. You can do broadcast-quality interviews with a person on the other side of the world for free with Skype. Technology can threaten our business model but it can be liberating for our journalism. We just have to do what we always done, great journalism, and build a great community around it. Honestly, since I started blogging and doing social media journalism five years ago, it’s been some of the most gratifying journalism of my career.

As Steve Yelvington wrote recently, “We don’t have a clue where this is going … and that’s OK.” Steve was writing about the launch of the Guardian’s Open Platform (the Guardian being my job). Steve would love to have the resources we have at the Guardian or those of the BBC or the New York Times to launch a platform, but he doesn’t need them. He’s building his sites on the open-source platform, Drupal, and it’s army of users and developers around the world are constantly working to extend it. You don’t need expensive technology to innovate.

We’re entering a post-industrial era in journalism. It’s scary. It’s uncertain for journalists, but just remember, it’s not hopeless.

03.09.09
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Journalists! Go check out the projects from Rewired State

I had Rewired State in my calendar for months because it was happening in the Guardian’s new offices, but a rather full schedule in 2009 and over-subscription of the event itself prevented me from making it. What was Rewired State?

Government isn’t very good at computers.
They spend millions to produce mediocre websites, hide away really useful public information and generally get it wrong. Which is a shame.

Calling all people who make things. We’re going to show them how it’s done.

My good friend and former colleague at the BBC, Chris Vallance, came to the tail end of the event, and he was said that the projects sparked a lot of ideas, many of the ideas that would make great journalism.

Voxpomp was one that caught my eye immediately. The idea is simple: “Statements made by MPs during Parliamentary debate cross-referenced with news stories of the time.” You can search by subject and member of parliament in a very simple interface. There is another project that allows people to log when and where they have been stopped under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This is code in progress, but it’s definitely an interesting idea. Foafcorp is an SVG visualisation that shows links between companies and their directors using UK Companies House Data. Here is an explanation from the developer.

The full list of projects are now available online.

That’s the good. However, how many of you had heard about the event? I wish that the organisers had done better outreach or publicity before the event. It was an obvious success because organisers told me that they had 300 applications and only space enough for 100 people so they had to ration the invites. However, the media and technology journalists at the Guardian didn’t even know about this event, even though it was happening in our building. Charles Arthur, or editor of Technology Guardian and driving force behind the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign, hadn’t heard about it. The only reason that I knew about it is because I work closely with our development teams who were involved with it. I only received a very brief press release (frankly a one page email) from organisers on the Friday before the event. If Guardian journalists didn’t know about it, how many other journalists had heard about it until after the fact? 

I popped my head right near the end because I was meeting Chris. Suw and I saw a number of familiar faces from the Open Rights Group, MySociety and government and technology circles we know.

I know that this is a hackday and the purpose was to create new applications with public data and wasn’t necessarily concerned with making a big splash in traditional media, and I’m definitely not trying to imply that you needed journalists there to validate the project. But I think this was an important event, and I’m concerned that apart from a the participants and their followers on Twitter and a few folks who happened to find out about it,that very few people outside of those circles knew about it. I’m not even finding many blog posts about it.

Guys, you did something really good. It’s OK to let a few more people know about it. I know that organising an event takes a lot of work, and publicity might be the last thing on your to-do list. But there were some great projects that a much wider audience could easily understand. Underselling your work will make it difficult to convince the government that open data with better formats is an imporant agenda item with so many other pressing issues at the moment.

02.19.09
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Leveraging a print poster on the web

FlowingData highlighted this data project from WallStats showing how US tax money was spent. The US government being the sprawling beast that it is has an incredibly complex budget, and this visualisation not only makes it accessible but pulls the reader into exploring it.

It has to be good. It even had the American queen of home decorating and entertaining, Martha Stewart, talking about it. I also love is that by using Zoomorama, they have leveraged a printed poster online, simply but quite effectively.

02.19.09
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BeebCamp: Eric Ulken: Building the data desk at the LATimes

A fun example of structured data from the LATimes, which showed the popularity of dog names in LA County by postcode.

A fun example of structured data from the LATimes, which showed the popularity of dog names in LA County by postcode.

This is from one of the sessions at BeebCamp2, a BarCamp like event for BBC staff with some external folks like Suw, me, Charlie Beckett and others. Charlie has a great post on a discussion he led about user-generated content and what it adds to news, video games and also Twitter and Radio 4.

Eric Ulken, was the editor of interactive technology at the LATimes. He was one of the bridges between technology and the editorial

News organisations:

  • We collect a lot of data but don’t use it (We always thought that was a shame. We had a computer-assisted reporting team at the LATimes, wouldn’t it be nice if we used that.)
  • What online readers want from us is bigger than ‘news’ in the traditional sense
  • We need to be an information soure.

They did a homicide map, which mapped all of the murders in LA in a year on a map and which illustrated a blog that reported all of the murders in LA County in a year.

The project was well received, and they decided to develop a data desk. It brought together the computer-assisted reporting unit, investigative reporters, the interactive technology team and the graphics team to bring together the data desk. They all sat together in the newsroom. A lot of synergies were created. The Times had 10 to 15 investigative reporters on different desks from different disciplines.

Ten bits of advice:

  1. Find the believers.
  2. Get buy-in from above
  3. Set some priorities
  4. Go off the reservation (We had a real problem with our IT department. They had their priorities and we had ours. We invested in a server system using Django.)
  5. Templatize. Never do anything once. Do things you can reuse.
  6. Do breaking news. There is data in breaking news. They did a database of the victims. They added information to the database as it became available. The database was up in 24 hours after the crash. They had built most of the pieces for previous applications. (There was a question about accuracy. Eric said the information was being gathered, but it wasn’t structured. The information was edited by a line manager.)
  7. Develop new skills. They sent people out to workshops. They had hired a Django develop who was also a journalist. He taught Django to others in the office.
  8. Cohabitate (marriage is optional). The investigative reporters and computer-assisted reporters still reported to the pre-existing managers, but by being together, they saw possibilities for collaboration without reworking the organisation.
  9. Integrate.
  10. Give back. They worked to give back to the newspaper.

They used Javascript to add this to other parts of the site. They created these two datasets from the train crash and the homicides, but they also have used publicly available data in their projects. He showed their California schools guide. Apart from the standard data analysis available from state and national educational agencies, they also created a diversity rank that showed the relative diversity of the schools. They did do some reporting on the data. In analysing the schools data, they found discrepancies in reporting about the performance of the schools.

In a slightly more humourous example, he showed dog names and breeds by postcodes.

UPDATE: Eric has added some more details in comments below, and you can follow Eric’s work and follow his thoughts on his site.

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02.17.09
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BarCamp NewsInnovation UK

This idea has been rolling around in many heads for a long time. Chris Vallance (where is that new blog mister?), Philip Trippenbach and Suw and I have been talking about this for months. My autumn was occupied with the US elections and recovering from it, but Suw marshalled on. Our basic idea was to get past the talking about the future of journalism and just do it. We all talk about the future of journalism, but we felt like it was (long past) time to move things along. We also wanted to spread the future more evenly by bringing other journalists in on the process. We wanted to spread the future a little more evenly and while not turning every journalist into a programmer, help them understand the art of the possible in terms of digital journalism. But this is about the future of journalism, whether you’re a journalist, a programmer or anyone with ideas and an interest.

We had a lot of enthusiasm, but we never quite got around to doing anything about it. It looks like some of our number back in the US have gone out and done it. Introducing, BarCamp NewsInnovation.The goal:

The idea is to get energetic, tech-savvy, open-minded individuals who embrace the chaos in the media industry because the ability to do really cool things still exist. We also need find those people outside of our industry who love to consume news and information and are great thinkers and innovators.

Ok, let’s try this again. As I’ve shown up to this point, I’m terrible at organising anything. Let’s do this. BarCamp NewsInnovation UK. Let’s think outside the box (London). Let’s just get on with it.

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02.13.09
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Android, e-ink and live news displays

Android Meets E Ink from MOTO Development Group on Vimeo.

Motorola Development Group is showing off a proof of concept with Google’s Android running an e-ink display. With Amazon’s Kindle showing some signs of success, it looks like e-readers might finally be reaching a tipping point in terms of adoption. What I find interesting in terms of not only the Kindle but also this proof of concept is the delivery of content wirelessly.We’re starting to see experimentation in terms of form factor for these devices. We’re not just talking about laptops, netbooks and mobile phones.

With the cost of printing the New York Times roughly twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle, there might be a point where wireless delivery to an electronic reading device makes economic sense. This is very speculative and very much out in front of the market and most consumers, but as Nicholas Carlson points out:

What we’re trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.

Print is always cast in terms of habit. The argument is that people prefer the tactile experience of the printed page and the easily browsable format, but with the economics of print news delivery becoming financially untenable, it’s worth seeing what options are available and what options are developing.

02.11.09
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Guardian election road trip review: Geo-tagging


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With the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States now well behind us, I thought I’d take (a long overdue) look back at the road trip that I took during the US elections for The Guardian and talk about some of the things we tried in terms of innovations in coverage and what I learned from it.
This is the third trip that I’ve taken for the US elections. In 2000, I took a trip with BBC Washington correspondent Tom Carver. Webcasts were the thing of the day, and we took a portable satellite dish and a DV video camera to webcast live or as-live (recorded but treated as live). We answered a range of questions covering topics suggested by our global audience. In 2004, I took another trip with BBC News Online colleague Richard Greene. The trip was my introduction to blogging, and it set the path for my career for the last five years.

The common thread through all of these trips has been an attempt to engage the audience in new ways and field test new digital journalism techniques. Over a series of posts I’ll talk about some of the things that we did for US Election trip 2008.

Geotagging

As I mentioned last summer, one of the things that I wanted to try was geo-tagging. I was inspired by the GPS and geo-tagging function in my Nokia N82 to add this to our coverage. The camera in the N82 is stellar. With a 5 megapixel sensor and a brilliant Xenon flash, it is one of the best features in the phone. (I’d be interested in seeing what the new N85 has to offer, apart from the OLED screen. ZDNet has a review.) I’m going to focus on geo-tagging in this post and talk more about mobile newsgathering with the N82 and other smartphones in another post.
As good as the camera is on the N82, I knew that there would be times when I needed Suw’s Nikon D70, a proper D-SLR with interchangeable lenses. But how to add the geo-data? Dan Chung, award-winning photographer and digital innovator at the Guardian, and I had played around with a geo-tagging device from Sony, the GPS-CS1.

A geo-tagger at its most basic has a GPS radio and some memory. It records your location either every so often or after you move a certain distance. It’s not physically connected to the D-SLR in any way, but it does require you to sync the clock from the geo-tagger with the clock in your D-SLR. To add the geo-data to your photos, all you have to do is import the photos to your computer and import the GPS logs from your geo-tagger. Software then compares the time that the photo was taken with your GPS logs and merges the geo-data into the EXIF files of the photos. Newer high-end cameras such as the D200 have GPS add-on units (the GP-1), and point-and-shoot cameras like the P6000 have integrated GPS.

Dan had me test the Song geo-tagger a couple of years ago, and I wasn’t that impressed. It didn’t acquire the satellites very quickly, and Sony didn’t officially support non-Sony cameras. But although the accuracy wasn’t brilliant, the idea is sound.
I looked around and settled on GiSTEQ CD110BT. It has a sensitive MTK chipset with 51-channel tracking, and I found the accuracy to be frighteningly good. The GPS track plotted on Google Earth actually shows when I changed lanes in my rental car. The Sony could take minutes to acquire the satellite, but from a cold start, the GiSTEQ usually got a lock in less than a minute. A synthesised voice says “Satellites fixed” when it’s got a lock. To conserve power, it will shut itself off but wake when moved or vibrated. I carried it around my neck on a lanyard or in the pocket of my camera bag when I was out and about. A supplied light adhesive patch kept it on my dashboard while driving. The unit also comes with both mains (AC) and car chargers.

That’s the good. The bad is that while GiSTEQ says CD110BT will work on PCs and Macs, mine didn’t out of the box. It required a firmware update to work with a Mac, and the firmware updater only works on PCs and didn’t like Windows XP running on Parallels virtualisation software. Fortunately, my friend Andy Carvin at NPR gave me five minutes on his PC to update the firmware, but even after that, I had difficulty getting the device to consistently download data. GiSTEQ has since released a new update that they say fixes this. I downloaded some GPS logs tonight without a hitch.

I’d like to try the Amod AGL3080 (review in Wired), which is touted as a driverless geo-tagger. It simply mounts as an external drive on Mac or PC, and all you need to do is copy the data from it. It uses a highly accurate SiRF III chipset. Unlike the GiSTEQ which is charged via the USB cable, the Amod runs on three AAA batteries. Kevin Jaako has a thorough review of it on his blog.

The software that comes with the GiSTEQ promises a lot and delivers most of it without too much fuss. It’s actually rebranded software from JetPhoto, and as the company says on its site, you don’t actually need a specialised geo-tagger. There are several Garmin or Magellan GPS units that will work with it. The software also works quite nicely with the N82, instantly recognising that the photos already have geo-data embedded in the files. If the geo-data is off, the software has a nice interface to relocate and update the geo-data. It also has a built-in Flickr uploader, although it could be a bit more intuitive and work more seamlessly with Flickr title and description fields.
But I didn’t just geo-tag my photos. I also geo-tagged my tweets using Twibble, a geo-aware Twitter app Nokia S60 phones. Twibble integrates seamlessly with the GPS on the N82. It also allows you to upload pictures you’ve taken with the phone directly to TwitPic. We just used this all to great effect for Guardian Travel’s first TwitTrip with Benji Lanyado. It is pretty heavy on the battery, but I had a power inverter in the car so everything was fully charged all the time. It was also a bonus to have Nokia and Google Maps on the phone for navigation.
I also geo-tagged all of my blog posts. I either took the geo-data from a Tweet or a photo, or if I didn’t have any geo-data handy, I used sites like Geo-tag.de or Tinygeocoder.com to generate geo-data from an address.
Visualising the trip
Thanks to a quick bit of python scripting by Guardian colleague Simon Willison, I have a KML file for all of the 2059 photos that I took over the more than 4000 miles of the trip. One of the reasons that I wanted to geo-tag pictures, posts and tweets was that while I know most of these towns, I wanted to give a global audience a sense of place.

But apart from easily visualising the trip, why all the fuss to do this? Adding geo-data to content is one of those fundamental enabling technological steps. It opens up a world of possibilities for your content. By geo-tagging your content, it allows users to subscribe to content based on location. Geo-tag your movie and restaurant reviews, and you can start leveraging emerging location-based services on mobile phones. With Google Maps on mobile and other mapping services, news organisations could provide real-time location based information. Geo-data allows users to navigate your content by location instead of more traditional navigation methods.
Some companies are already dipping their toes into geo-data. Associated Press stories hosted on Google News have a small inset Google Map inset based on the location information in the dateline. New York Times stories appear on Google Earth. But datelines are imprecise because they are city-based, but when you pull up more accurate data you can do much more. You can see the possibilities of mapped information on Everyblock.com.
But to get from most news sites to Everyblock, you’ve got to put in the foundational work both on the technical side and the journalistic workflow. Having said that, it’s not rocket science. It might seem a lot of work up front, but once the work is done, geo-data provides many opportunities, some of which could provide new revenue streams.