Category Archives: Innovation

01.20.10
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Christian Crumlish on Social Design Patterns

Last night I went to a great talk by Christian Crumlish about the Yahoo! Pattern Library and social design patterns. Christian has a book, co-authored by Erin Malone, out at the moment on O’Reilly, Designing Social Interfaces, from which part of this talk was drawn.

Brief history of patterns
Design patterns – concept of a pattern language originated in architecture in the 70s. Christopher Alexander wrote two books: A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building. He posited that you could do architecture and could plan towns and buildings and rooms and even construction through recognising a series of patterns that were replicated the world over. Once you had discovered them you could apply them to problems. Trying to demystify architecture by recognising that there’s a syntax. Not one single pattern language, just that they had derived a particular one.

Idea didn’t take off in architecture. Alexander isn’t that well respected, but it’s taken root in other fields. CompSci picked up on idea of patterns in 80s, Design Patterns is famous book, pushed idea into dev world. Concept of wikis and design patterns in software and architecture are siblings. Ward Cunningham built Portland Pattern Repository, pattern libraries and collections often maintained in wikis, and the ideas co-evolved.

Jenifer Tidwell, proposed idea of HCI or User Interaction design patterns. Wanted to apply idea to software that involves human begins. She put together a book, Designing Interfaces, and inspired a number of UI people to think in terms of patterns, which influenced the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, launched in 2005. Internal Yahoo! library. In 2006, decided to make it available in the public at least in part.

Added rich interaction patterns. Idea is you can drop stuff into a page and get it working. Should be able to find the code for each pattern in the Yahoo code library. Not all those links exists, but they try. Crumlish now caretaker for the library and is interested in adding social patterns to it. Yahoo! makes own products and buys companies and a number of the most popular social sites, specially early ones, which are now Yahoo! did similar things in different ways. Flickr and Delicious popularised tagging as a way of letting users add metadata that’s not topdown or hierarchical, but their interfaces are different: comment or space delimiter, compound words or not. Talking a look at that aspects of user interface, compound interface elements that make a social experience. Looking for a language. Also found out you can’t solve the tag problem.

Reason why we have a pattern library is a post from Fast Company, One Company, 100 Designs. Yahoo is essentially one site, but it all looks different. It isn’t just one giant website, but there are numerous examples where things were inconsistent for no good reason, so the pattern library is trying to provide common basis for a starting point so people innovate on top of that.

Social designs, in the early days of social interface, it’s got awkwardness built in because of unfamiliarity, lack of mores, customs and habits that show people how to behave.

Saw the problem with telephones: didn’t now how to use them, didn’t think they needed them, didn’t have a model of speaking to people a big distance away from you and the uses weren’t clear. Network effect is also important – one telephone isn’t useful, you need a network of people to communicate with. Early days of blogging, joke was how do you do business with blogs? Well, how do you do it with telephones. And that’s what these social interfaces are about. You don’t teach them. [I disagree that you don’t teach people how to do business with blogs!]

We figured out how to use a telephone, and the model back in the old days is that you were calling a place and asking for a person. Idea now is that a telephone is attached to a person, so you’re always calling the person with the mobile It’s not that one model is better that the other, but it’s inherently different, which means there are habits which need to be changed. If you can be reached at any time, you need to either let that happen or set boundaries, e.g turn your phone off or not answer late at night. But these things are still being negotiated and not everything has been figured out. E.g. people shouting down the phone, being loud, and it may be that they grew up with a different type of phone, and don’t know how to use a mobile yet.

Users are entering new and unfamiliar situations and they don’t know how to act, or how to behave. So they are going to be awkward, but can try to mitigate that, try to teach people, make it harder to spam people, things like that.

Social patterns informed by the whole web, to inform Yahoo! and if they work, they release them out to teach others. Asked a lot at Barcamps, talked to people, wrote an O’Reilly book. Found overarching principles that should inform this kind of work.

Five principles
Pave the cowpaths. Look at the behaviour that’s already happening and facilitate that, rather than forcing people into behaviour you think is better. Brute force attempts to make people behave in a way that doesn’t make sense will fail. Eg Dogster. When we’re online we’re performing, the computer is between us and everyone else in the network, so we get to chose an identity and perform in a certain way. Dog owners, that’s what they are doing. They are talking about their pets, pretending to be their pets, talking mainly about themselves at one remove in a childlike and innocent voice, and people like it. But interesting thing about Dogster is that when it started it was just a photo sharing site, and one thing they noticed early on was that users were uploading photos of animals, and when you have a social component and let people add the value, it’s easy to decide that people aren’t doing what you want, but what Dogster saw was that people like putting up pictures of pets, and created site that supported that behaviour, then supported other behaviours that people like to do. If they had turned away pet lovers, they would have killed off what turned out to be a profitable business.

Talk like a person
On a social site there you’re trying to create a climate of sociability, it’s all the more important that your web copy is conversational, is human, is about how people really talk. There’s a range here, cases where you want to be more formal, or less. But don’t hide from your users the fact that there are human beings behind the site as well as in the network on the site. Set a humanistic tone. Flickr famous for having a human tone, not a faceless corporation.

How to talk like a person:
* Conversational voice
* Self-deprecating error messages (take the blame, don’t put it on the user or cryptic messages, say that you’re going to try to fix it.)
* Ask questions (creates conversational dialogue with the user, e.g. Twitter “What are you doing?”. It’s just a prompt that establishes a dialogue.)
* Your vs My (If you use Your you create a dialogue. ‘My Yahoo!’ is an asocial thing. If it’s only me, it’s like looking in my filing cabinet, it’s me and my stuff. But something that’s Your, it’s ‘who is the person saying you?’. The way your mind works is that it creates a feeling that you’re not the only person there.)
* No joking around (Tempting, when you want to be conversational, to be jokey. But it doesn’t always translate, as you know from sarcasm doesn’t always work.)

Play well with others
Embrace open standards, technologies, OS etc. What you make will plug into other people’s stuff easily, you won’t create barriers to people building on and extending your stuff. Use standards that are established. Allow the data that’s in the site to be taken off the site and displayed elsewhere, mashed up, etc. There’s almost no way to stop that, as people will scrape, so use XML, Json, microformats, so people can create value around what you’ve done. Have ways to bring data into the system. allow for portability, allow for interoperability. There are exceptions, these are just trends, things you should consider.

Learn from games
One issue is that up and coming generations of users are learning on games more often, on video games. they have high expectations for how rich, responsive and sophisticated interfaces should be. You can’t change enterprise software into a game, but there are elements of game dynamics that help people get into a flow state, and you can get into those things.

E.g. if you gave people a way to collect favourite pages, then you can let them express the collectible behaviour people like.

When you design a game, you’e not designing an end-state, you’re designing a set of rules, boundaries, tokens, a space to play in. Every time you play, it plays out a different way. Social design is more like that, less like creating a device. This is a space where people will meet and interact. People are going to finish the experience themselves. You might build the house, but they’ll decorate it. Give up control, design something that has variables that the users can control.

Game Neverending, by Ludicorp. Very much like a MUD, but had chat element, small graphics, and Ludicorp went ton to make Flickr. It was not a game, literally, but it feels like a game, you discover elements, e.g. hovering over a name to provide a drop-down. Playfulness and discovery. People make up their own games in Flickr, they make badges and award them to each other. Early users fostered game-like behaviour.

Respect the ethical dimensions
Ethics are complicated, you have to balance different goods against one another. There are ethical ramifications behind your choices. You are at least putting together people who might not be put together. You’re playing with people lives, affecting people’s lives. You have to think through the consequences of your choices.

Counter-example: Tagged.com. Once you’ve signed up, they ask for your email address, and if you give them that and your password and say ok, then they spam your address book with a marketing message as if it’s from you. Was clear they were designing it so that users were accidentally “agreeing” to this. Plaxo did the same once. This is ethically questionable behaviour.

96 Patterns
[Nice diagram.] Patterns come in three categories, revolving around ‘social spaces’.
Self >> Activities >> Community

Three stake holders: the owner/designer, the user, the community at large. The community starts to behave like an organism.

Give people a way to represent themselves, and give them a way to customise it, claim their work, identify themselves when commenting, etc. Need to distinguish users from each other, so people can differentiate themselves from someone with same name, for e.g. Colour scheme, avatar, name – all self expression.

Self
Four groups of patterns:

Engagement: e.g. sign-up. to be social you need people and thus they need to join.
Identity: Once they’ve joined they can create an identity.
Presence: who else is here? who else has been here? What have they done?
Reputation: your score, ranking, category, help strangers encountering you for first time understand who you are and what you do

(created flash cards based on the patterns)

User cards, mini-profile, gives basics around the person.

Social objects
Things people have a common interest in, want to discuss or find interesting. things they rally around. Early social networks didn’t have that concept, e.g. Friendster. So there was a ‘so what’ moment. You’d join, find friends “traversing the graph”, you’d add them, and then you’d collect everyone. And at some point you’d go “Ok. Now what? What do I do now?”, and there was noting to do. You could talk to them, but you could do that anyway.

Friendster wanted to have ability to gather round common interests. They created Fakester, e.g. a person like Santa, or an inanimate thing like skiing, and through that connection had created symbolic way to form identity around an object or activity. Friendster didn’t like Fakester. Not necessarily a bad thing, making people use real names has a benefit to some extent (me: not always), but they violated the Pave the Cowpaths principle, and they deleted all the Fakester accounts all at once. Massacre. Friendster had a big scaling problem in their architecture but he big decline was when they kill the Fakester off. So you need not just people but also objects, e.g. photos, or freeform objects/topics people can decide for themselves.

Actions
Give people something to do.

Collecting: which is least social, most passive or individualistic thing you can do, but it’s a starting point. E.g. favourites, bookmarks, adding to a page. Small social element there, if i collect something you made. IF i display that collection it says something about me.

Sharing: bread and butter of social network. Giving stuff to each other.

Broadcasting and publishing: sharing on a megascale. Facebook is bad at distinction between broadcast/individually targeted behaviours. Blogging seen as 1-to-many, which is why blogs don’t always foster communication and conversation.

Feedback: comments, rating, voting, favourites (again). Asking for feedback. Feedback is where you get more viral and exponential behaviour.

Communicating Comes later, after collecting, sharing etc.

Collaboration: managing, voting, editing, wikis.

Social media: Following filtering, recommendations, helping people find stuff and sort out what’s good, recent, etc.

Community
Last three are all community. Let community elevate people and content they value. Allow people to moderate itself, within reason. Selfish reason for self-moderation – third party mod doesn’t scale, can never hire enough moderators. Have to make community responsible for quality of the content. Has to police itself, set its own rules within boundaries. Not totally hands off, have to establish clear norms, important in early days to model good behaviour, participate in the community to show people what the community should look like .But want to create mechanisms by which people can manage it for you.

Connections: Relationships, finding people, friends. Declaring a connection between people, what types of relationships you want to support, do they have to be reciprocal or can they be one way, or only one way? Can people find people or do they have to traverse the graph manually. Do you have implicit and explicit relationships. Can you algorithmically determine if people are in same groups? Can you use that info to create implicit relationships. Fans and fame, one to many relationships. What permissions and authorisations are implied by connections? Should they be announced in an activity stream? But do you announce when people stop being friends?

Community management: Rules, establish norms, manifest in your own site and show people how you expect them to behave, give people way to decide what should happen, e.g. Craigslist. Asked the community to discuss what they should charge for to make it tenable. Give people ways to collaboratively filter information. People need to be able to report abuse.

Place, Geo, Location: mapping, face-to-face meetings, calendaring, geo-behaviours. Just scratching the surface of all this. This is a growth area.

Circles of connections – pre-defined or user-defined groups for permissioning purposes.
Public conversation – e.g. Facebook walls. Curious and interesting thing, as people talk to each other who don’t know each other talking on a third person’s wall. Twitter is all public conversation.
Enable a bridge to real life events. Let people do stuff in person too.

Anti-patterns
Noticed there are certain behaviours used repeatedly that are anti-patterns. Something that seems like a good idea, but has negative consequences. Appears to solve a problem or is a shortcut, but has an aftermath.

Cargo Cult: During WWII in Pacific, US would set up landing strips to supply the troops. In natural course of things, western goods would appear on the island, and the more primitive people on the island liked these goods, but when the war ended the US left. So religious cargo cults sprang up, so war uniforms, making effigies of airplanes and towers, did what air traffic guys did, to try to draw new cargo.

In social media, good e.g. is that after Flickr, Zooomr tried to do the same thing, nicked a lot of copy, and decided the lack of an E was the big thing. Just copying without understanding why. May get the right things but may not know why, or ever understand what bring success.

Don’t break email: Lots of email notifications, but the problem is when it’s used as a one-way medium, e.g. if you have noreply@facebookmail.com, and you may not even get a bounce message back. Trying to make people go back to the website to look at an ad, but it’s still not good to break email. Basecamp let you reply, above the line, and it’s added as a comment to the thread. You don’t have to break email. Build on existing infrastructure – work with it not against it.Don’t break users’ existing habits.

Password anti-pattern: Asking for people’s email and password so you can spam their mailbox, or even just help you get your friends list out of the email contacts list into the new social graph. But it encourages risky behaviour as you shouldn’t be giving your password away

Ex-boyfriend bug: Dodgeball discovered this, when “The ‘people you should know’ list on Facebook is actually a list of people you hate.” – Rex Sorgatz. Algorithms show people you should connect with, even though there’s a reason you may not. Algorithm doesn’t need to know who is your ex, but needs to allow you to block someone and say ‘never show me this person or tell them about me’.

Potemkin Village. Settlements in Russia, Potemkin told Catherine that settlements in Crimea were going really well, but it wasn’t, so when she insisted on visiting, he created a series of facades and shipped peasants town to town to create the lie. Don’t create forums and discussion areas and map them out. In first early days of alpha, there’s no one there, and so if there’s a lot of fora, you won’t find people so creates a barrier early on. Cure: start with very limited number of fora, even just one or two. Put everyone in the same room. Odds are your initial community is small, and they will tell you when they want more space.

[There was a short Q&A afterwards. I didn’t capture it, but Jeff Van Campen’s notes did.]

01.13.10
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Experimenting with Kachingle

In April last year I wrote about a start-up called Kachingle for The Guardian. I explained Kachingle thusly:

After registering with Kachingle, users decide on a maximum monthly donation, currently set at $5 (£3.50). When they see something they like, they simply click on the Kachingle “medallion” to initiate a donation. Kachingle tracks their reading habits, tots up how many times they visit each favoured site and divvies up the money proportionally at the end of the month.

It’s equally simple for site owners, who just need a PayPal account and a snippet of code to display the Kachingle medallion. The revenue split gives content providers 80% of the donations, with the rest covering Kachingle’s costs and PayPal fees.

I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on Kachingle to see when they would launch and was excited to get an email from Bill Lazar, Kachingle’s Marketing Engineer, last week saying that they were ready for beta testers to come on board. They will be launching properly in early February.

I think Kachingle is a really interesting idea, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to test it out. That’s the medallion, up there in the top of the right-hand sidebar. All you need to sign up with Kachingle is a PayPal account and a spare $5 a month (although you can spend more if you want to). That works out at £3.07 per month, which even in a recession I think I can spare!

Kachingle sits very nicely with my recent decision to buy as many hand-crafted present for Christmas as I could. In an economic downturn it is more important than ever to support small businesses and I really like the fact that the vast majority of the money I spend on sites like Folksy go to the person who made the item I’ve bought.

But Kachingle is not just a way that I might earn a little spare change, it also gives me a way to support others. I’m hoping that over the course of the next few months, bloggers I enjoy will be able to join up and let me show them my appreciation.

If you want to sign up as a Kachingler or as a Site Owner, get in touch with Kachingle’s beta programme. And, of course, let me know what you think in the comments!

12.15.09
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Ushahidi and Swift River: Crowdsourcing innovations from Africa

For all the promise of user-generated content and contributions, one of the biggest challenges for journalism organisations is that such projects can quickly become victims of their own success. As contributions increase, there comes a point when you simply can’t evaluate or verify them all.

One of the most interesting projects in 2008 in terms of crowdsourcing was Ushahidi. Meaning “testimony” in Swahili, the platform was first developed to help citizen journalists in Kenya gather reports of violence in the wake of the contested election of late 2007. Out of that first project, it’s now been used to crowdsource information, often during elections or crises, around the world.

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Considering the challenge of gathering information during a chaotic event like the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, members of the Ushahidi developer community discussed how to meet the challenge of what they called a “hot flash event“.

It was that crisis that started two members of the Ushahidi dev community (Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla) thinking about what needs to be done when you have massive amounts of information flying around. We’re at that point where the barriers for any ordinary person sharing valuable tactical and strategic information openly is at hand. How do you ferret the good data from the bad?

They focused on the first three hours of a crisis. Any working journalist knows that often during fast moving news events false information is often reported as fact before being challenged. How do you increase the volume of sources while maintaining accuracy and also sifting through all of that information to find the information that is the most relevant and important?

Enter Swift River. The project is an “attempt to use both machine algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify incoming streams of information”. Scanning the project description, the Swift River application appears to allow people to create a bundle of RSS feeds, whether those feeds are users or hashtags on Twitter, blogs or mainstream media sources. Whoever creates the RSS bundle is the administrator, allowing them to add or delete sources. Users, referred to as sweepers, can then tag information or choose the bits of information in those RSS feeds that they ‘believe’. (I might quibble with the language. Belief isn’t verification.) Analysis is done of the links, and “veracity of links is computed”.

It’s a fascinating idea and a project that I will be watching. While Ushahidi is designed to crowdsource information and reports from people, Swift River is designed to ‘crowdsource the filter’ for reports across the several networks on the internet. For those of you interested, the project code is made available under the open-source MIT Licence.

One of the things that I really like about this project is that it’s drawing on talent and ideas from around the world, including some dynamic people I’ve had the good fortunte to meet. Last year when I was back in the US for the elections, I met Dave Troy of Twittervision fame who helped develop the an application to crowdsource reports of voting problems during the US elections last year, Twitter Vote Report. The project gained a lot of support including MTV’s Rock the Vote and National Public Radio. He has released the code for the Twitter Vote Report application on GitHub.

To help organise the Swift River project for Ushahidi, they have enlisted African tech investor, Jon Gosier of Appfrica Labs in Uganda. They have based Appfrica Labs loosely on Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. I interviewed Jon Gosier at TEDGlobal in Oxford this summer about a mobile phone search service in Uganda. He’s a Senior TED Fellow.

There are a lot of very interesting elements in this project. First off, they have highlighted a major issue with crowdsourced reporting: Current filters and methods of verification struggle as the amount of information increases. The issue is especially problematic in the chaotic hours after an event like the attacks in Mumbai.

I’m curious to see if there is a reputation system built into it. As they say, this works based on the participation of experts and non-experts. How do you gauge the expertise of a sweeper? And I don’t mean to imply as a journalist that I think that journalists are ‘experts’ by default. For instance, I know a lot about US politics but consider myself a novice when it comes to British politics.

It’s great to see people tackling these thorny issues and testing them in real world situations. I wonder if this type of filtering can also be used to surface and filter information for ongoing news stories and not just crises and breaking news. Filters are increasingly important as the volume of information increases. Building better filters is a noble and much needed task.

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11.04.09
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Cars: There’s an app for that

Suw and I are taking two weeks off. Most of the time, we’ll be here in London enjoying a holi-stay. I might engage in some deep-thought blogging after recovering from a really too busy 2009. In the meantime, I’ll just engage in a little light coolhunting.

Someone recently was picking my brain about the future of in-car technology. I think that one of the knock-on effects of the iPhone is that people will expect apps and add-on services in a wider range of consumer electronics. Cars will not just have on-board computers to manage the engine but also on-board computers to navigate, entertain and inform much as we would expect in our home.

Hobbyists have already been adding these kind of systems to their cars for years, and Prius drivers love to hack their hybrid cars. High-end cars have complex environmental and entertainment systems, but we’re starting to glimpse how these activities will filter into the mainstream.

Satellite radio services in the US have been using some of their surplus bandwidth to provide information services, and with 4G data services such as WiMax and LTE service expanding in the next few years, mobile data will provide the kind of bandwidth that we’ve previously thought of as restricted to DSL and cable. Faster wireless connections will bring new forms of entertainment, expand the use of web services and provide new opportunities for information providers.

GigaOm has a great post on a prototype system in a Prius.

As a journalist, the question is whether news organisations will let another opportunity slip by them.

10.30.09
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Researchers determine mainstream online journalism still mainstream

In a shocking (possibly only to the researchers) conclusion, a study of major media online journalism newsrooms in the UK has discovered that they follow a relatively narrow mainstream agenda. I think that is a fair summary of an interview on Radio 4 with Dr Natalie Fenton from Goldsmith University Media Research Centre in London speaking about her book New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age. From the synopsis on Radio 4, “Dr Natalie Fenton from Goldsmith’s University in London, … argues that instead of democratising information, the internet has narrowed our horizons.”

I haven’t read the book, seeing as the release date on Amazon is tomorrow. I am sure that book covers the themes in greater depth in what can be covered in a couple of minutes on radio, but I found the interview infuriating.

Dr Fenton and her researchers looked at three online newsrooms, two of which I’ve worked in: the BBC News Website, the Guardian and the Manchester Evening News. I might have to pick up a copy and see if her researchers’ interviews with me are reflected in the book.

First, I would say the book was out of date a year ago based on changes here at the Guardian. We were just beginning our print-online integration. We are still going through the process, as are many newsrooms, but one thing we have done is combined web and print production as much as possible to not only reduce duplication of effort and work around re-purposing print content. This frees up journalists to do journalism and not just ‘copy and pasting’ as Dr Fenton puts it in her interview.

Secondly, I think her conclusions, as expressed in the interview, are undermined by a selection bias. As Charlie Beckett at Polis at LSE says in a blog post from a year ago when they unveiled their draft conclusions, there are problems with the methodology of the study and some of the assumptions underpinning the research. Dr Fenton comes to conclusions about online journalism based on research from three newsrooms connected to traditional news organisations. Is it really all that surprising that she finds their agendas in line with mainstream media organisations? The news environment is much more complex outside of most newsrooms these days than inside, which is one of the problems with the news industry. By condemning online journalism at traditional organisations as focusing on a narrow agenda as Dr Fenton does in the interview, isn’t this more accurately an indictment of the narrow agenda of the mainstream media seeing as the websites track closely the agenda of the legacy media be it broadcast or print?

Thirdly, online news operations connected to traditional news organisations have never had a major stand-alone newsgathering facility. The BBC News website once did have some original newsgathering capacity. I was their reporter in Washington. However, most of the newsgathering capacity rested with television and radio journalists whose work was re-purposed for the website. The situation is more complex at the Guardian now. We produce more web-only content during the week than we do print-only content.

Fourthly, Dr Fenton says that online staff are desk bound, and online newsrooms rely on “less journalists with less time to do proper investigative journalism”. Can we have some perspective on investigative journalism please? Really. Fighting to perserve investigative journalism and investigative journalism only is like trying to save the auto industry by fighting in the name of Porsche. Investigative journalism has always been the pinnacle of our craft, not its totality. It’s important, but investigative journalism was a fraction of pre-digital journalistic output. Again, if Dr Fenton has an issue with lack of investigations, then it’s an issue to take up with the organisation as a whole, not the online newsroom. Having said that, I’ll stand by the Guardian’s investigative output online and off: MPs expenses crowdsouring, Datablog, Trafigura, just to name a few Guardian investigations and innovations here in 2009.

Lastly, I think the narrow frame completely ignores the work of digital pioneers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of journalism. I think of the Guardian’s Matthew Weaver and his live digital coverage of the G20 protests this spring and his recent project to track post during the strike using GPS transmitters. I think of the Guardian’s Simon Jeffery with his recent People’s History of the Internet and the Faces of the Dead and Detained in Iran project as other examples of excellent digital journalism, journalism only possible online. I think of the work that my good friend Chris Vallance has done with BBC 5Live’s Pods and Blogs and iPM on Radio 4. I think of the many projects that I’ve been proud to work on at the BBC and the Guardian. Chris and I brought the voices of those fleeing Hurricane Katrina to the radio and also US soldiers fighting the war in Iraq radio audiences through creative use of the internet. I consider myself primarily an online journalist, but I’ve been working across multiple media for more than 10 years now. I covered the Microsoft anti-trust trial for the BBC News website, BBC radio and television. I’ve done webcasts from the 29th story of a building overlooking Ground Zero three months after the 11 September 2001 attacks. I tweeted from the celebrations of Barack Obama’s victory outside the White House after a 4000 social media-driven month of coverage of the historic 2008 US presidential election. Online journalism isn’t perfect, and it reflects imperfections in traditional journalism. However, in the hands of a good journalist, digital journalism offers up radical new opportunities to tell stories and bring them to new audiences.

My experiences and my career aren’t representative of the industry. I have been doing original journalism online for more than a decade. That is rare, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I lost a lot of colleagues in the dot.com crash when newspapers and broadcasters slashed online budgets. After an interview with the late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings in 2002 on the one year anniversary of 11 September attacks, he took us on a tour of their much slimmed online newsroom. He spoke with pride about the work of the online staff, but he said, “The Mouse (Disney, ABC’s parent company)” didn’t see it that way and continued to make deep cuts.

In 2009, the picture is much different. Print and broadcast journalists are doing more original work online. We have more online-focused journalists than even when Dr Fenton was doing her research. Journalists cast off by ailing journalism institutions are re-launching their careers on the web.

I chose the internet to be my primarily journalistic platform in 1996. I chose it because I saw unique opportunities for journalism. When I did, it was a lonely choice. I faced a lot of prejudice from print journalists who based their views on lack of knowledge and fear. A passion for the medium kept me going despite some of that prejudice. Everyday I get up and help push a unique medium just a further journalistically. (To their credit, my colleagues at the BBC in radio and television told me almost on a daily basis with respect and admiration how I was the future of journalism.)

These prejudices against online journalism are parroted by Dr Fenton in her interview, which I guess is one of the reasons that it made my blood boil. I hope the book paints the reality in a bit more complexity than was possible in a few minutes on air. I hope that she includes some broader examples of how online journalists do original journalism that can’t be done in any other media. However, if the interview on Radio 4 is representative of the book, it’s a reality I don’t recognise. Bad journalism begins with a thesis which never adapts to new information. It’s the same with bad research.

10.08.09
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QsOTD: Journalists shouldn’t confuse important with simply urgent

I’m keeping an eye on the UK Association of Online Publishers conference from afar today by following the #aop3c tag on Twitter. David Gilbertson, CEO of B2B publisher EMAP*, looks to be giving an incredibly insightful presentation, and journalists using Twitter show once again why the service is so useful. Joanna Geary of TimesOnline posted this very cogent comment from Gilbertson:

While news is urgent it may not be important and people pay for important.

Hard copy news businesses (print) will have to adapt to this, Gilbertson added, and he goes on to further refine the distinction he’s highlighting and its implications to the business of journalism. Matt Ball, MSN UK editor-in-chief, quotes Gilbertson as saying:

Intelligence prompts a decision, information doesn’t. You can charge for the former.

Geary fleshes the quote out a bit more: “David Gilbertson: B2B must deliver inteligence to help people do job, not info that people don’t know what to do with”.

UPDATE: David Worsfold clarified that he wasn ‘t quoting Gilbertson in the comments. It’s not clear whether Gilbertson said this or rather if it’s a bit of analysis from David Worsfold with Incisive Media, but I think it’s a makes a point worth highlighting. Worsfold either says or quotes Gilbertson on Twitter that these distinction between importance and urgency, between intelligence and information have “implications for news obssessed editorial teams”.

“Pure news” is not enough but remains critical, Gilbertson says. Pure news must be supplemented with data and analysis. He does draw a distinction between B2B and B2C publishing saying that intelligence is a critical driver in the B2B sector while consumption in the B2C sector is driven by many things that might include intelligence and perspective. However, when Gilbertson says that we can’t provide information that people don’t know what to do with, that is equally relevant to B2C as it is in pure business publishing.

Speaking as a news consumer rather than a journalist, I value information-rich news and context-rich analysis over incremental updates and uninformed commentary. I honestly believe, and my work bears this out, that consumers appreciate when you connect the dots and put information in a larger, more meaningful context. I’m not, and I doubt many average news consumers, are suffering from a lack of information, but I do know that many suffer from a lack of context.

The question for news organisations is how they develop products that deliver value and intelligence that consumers can act upon. These products can be essential new revenue streams for news organisations. As I wrote yesterday, news organisations need to put effort into developing these value-added products in tandem with conversations about charging for them. And yes, this will have implications for editorial teams. We must switch from merely chasing incremental developments to mining stories for meaning. In these tight times, we need to ask questions of how we can turn information that we’re already gathering into intelligence for our readers, and we need to develop unique, compelling products based on that intelligence that our audiences find valuable enough to pay for.

*Disclosure: The Guardian Media Group, parent company of the Guardian and my employer, owns a stake in EMAP.

10.01.09
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New York Times: More innovation in commenting

As I wrote recently, news organisations have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of innovative interfaces that could encourage readers to explore the rich content on their sites and also increase and improve reader interaction. When I wrote that post, the Washington Post had debuted a Django-based commenting system called WebCom that reminded me of ThinkMap’s Visual Thesaurs. WebCom reflects comment popularity, which can become a self-reinforcing cycle. I will be interested to see if they might add another layer to the interface that allows people to explore the conversation based on themes or topics. This could be easily achieved by using Thomson-Reuter’s Calais semantic analysis system to expose themes in the comments.

Now the New York Times has debuted a new visual commenting tool. It’s debut is being used to help people discuss and explore some of the issues regarding the healthcare (some might argue the health insurance) debate in the US. The boxes all relate to an issue in the debate, and a drop-down menu allows you to jump to that topic and see a brief overview of the issue. The relative size of the boxes reflect the number of comments, and hovering over the people icons at the bottom of the boxes allow you to quickly see a bit of the comment. You can also also easily jump to replies to comments that you have left. It appears that the topics aren’t generated organically by the discussion but are created by the New York Times editorial staff. In some ways, it’s a slightly advanced, and somewhat stilted form of threading. It’s almost more of a discussion system than it is strictly a commenting system. nytimesdebate.gif

At the time of writing this post, there are few comments so it’s difficult to see how it will work both conversationally and technically as the volume of comments increases. That will be the real test of the system because one of the reasons why news sites need interface innovation in commenting systems is because of the volume of comments on media sites.

Here on Strange Attractor, the comments tend to be more off-site, posts written in response to what Suw and I write. Very rarely do we have a high volume of comments on the blog, which makes it easy for us to manage and for our readers to engage with. We don’t write about politics or hot button social issues. Rather, we write about a very specialist, niche topic. The conversations tend to be pretty high level, and we love our readers because of the level of intelligence that they bring.

On news sites, the volume of comments on the posts is much, much higher, and it quickly becomes difficult for journalists and readers to follow the discussion and have any meaningful interaction. The comments tend not to respond to each other but rather are usually a string of unrelated statements. Most of the current solutions all have their drawbacks. Threading has its issues because it tends to fragment the discussion, which is what I fear this New York Times interface will do. Voting up, or down, Digg-style helps in some ways but suffers from the same issues of the self-reinforcing popularity that WebCom faces. Again, a few criticisms don’t mean I think these experiments aren’t worthwhile. Far from that, I think it’s great to finally see some interface exploration in terms of commenting and not just content presentation by news websites. Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come. It’s long past time that news organisations realise that the volume of comments they receive requires something more than flat, linear comment threads below blog posts or articles. Done right, it will help increase participation, user experience, interaction and maybe even the quality of the conversation.

09.29.09
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Innovative journalists and valuing “inquisitiveness”

The Harvard Business Review Editor’s Blog has a post titled How Do Innovators Think?. I was just going to add it to my daily list of links in Delicious, but it’s worth more than a quick link.

Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead “conducted a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews”. They found five skills distinguished these creative executives from less innovative heads of companies.

Dyer described the first skill they identified:

The first skill is what we call “associating.” It’s a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas.

They call it associating; I call it lateral thinking. I see it in innovative journalists who find tools or technologies created for another purpose but who immediately see the editorial possibilities. They are journalists constantly striving to wrench out efficiencies in how they work and perfect the process. They are constantly looking for new tools and services that can either solve existing problems they have or allow them to do things they hadn’t thought of before. They experiment, and if something doesn’t work, they move on. It’s not something they were trained to do, it’s something they instinctively do.

However, I don’t mean to say that innovative journalists are time-and-motion obsessed  bean counters simply intent on perfecting a process. They are motivated by many of the same things that motivate traditional journalists such as the goal of telling compelling stories. Long before people started questioning the text story as the atomic unit of journalism, they were exploring new storytelling methods. They unpack stories and examine how video, audio and data can be used to tell those stories in more compelling ways. They realise that in 2009 multimedia story telling is more than simply telling stories with multiple media but rather considering what elements of a story are best told with audio, video, images and now data.

Back to the post in the Harvard Business Review.

Gregersen: You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. It’s the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children. … If you look at 4 year olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 6 ½ years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they’re grown up and are in corporate settings, they have already had the curiosity drummed out of them. 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas. Unless, of course, they work for a company like Apple or Google.

Again, if there was something that sets apart the most innovative journalists I know it is their curiosity, their inquisitiveness. One might say that journalists should be, by vocation, curious but innovative journalists have a special curiosity about their craft and its processes.

How do news organisations unlock the potential of the innovators in their midst? Mostly, all you have to do is give them space and a little support. Recognise that their needs might be slightly different than the rest of the staff. Help them measure the relative success of their experiments and share their success stories. If there was one mistake that I’ve seen news organisations make over and over again (because it’s based on the 20th Century recipe for creating media stars) it is that they try to make their big name reporters or writers into innovators. That is often a fruitless detour. Most people doing this innovative work weren’t trained to do it but instead pursued it on their own. Fortunately, in the age of social media, innovative journalists aren’t all that difficult to find. They stand out if you’re looking.

09.28.09
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Andrew Turner: Beyond Google Maps

Beyond Googlemaps – Andrew Turner

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Andrew Turner: Beyond Google Maps presentation

Some people might say that I’m geo-obsessed. Since I started geo-tagging my Flickr photos, now about half of my entire Flickr stream is geo-tagged. I use Google’s Latitude, and I’ve written about the opportunities that I see for geo-location and news.

Last week, I met someone even more enthusiastic about geo-data and maps than I am, Andrew Turner. In this more than 200 slide presentation, Andrew presents a treasure trove of mapping concepts and resources. At slide 37, he talks about the near future for mapping and data. Andrew talks even faster than I do after I’ve drunk three cups of coffee, which is saying something so I’m thankful that several of his presentations are on SlideShare. This post is just to highlight a valuable resource.

One of the things I’m thinking about in light of his presentation and my own experience is how to make gathering data – geo-data and other data – easier for journalists. With more demands on our time, the workflow has to be extremely efficient or it won’t get done. I’m also thinking about the stories that benefit from location. One of things implicit in Andrew’s talk is how maps can tell stories, but not every story is best told with a map. The first mash-ups were map-based, and it’s led to an over-reliance on location for data-driven projects. Digital mapping is a powerful tool, but like all tools, digital maps are not appropriate for all tasks. However, the next time I need a map, Andrew’s presentation will definitely point me in the direction of the tools that I need to do the job.

09.22.09
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Paid content: Real scarcity versus artificial scarcity

Mathew Ingram at the Nieman Journalism Lab has an excellent post looking at the issues of paid content in general and micro-payments in particular. It’s a really useful post because he rounds up quite a number of posts and points of view on the subject. One thing really leapt out at me. Mathew writes:

Does that mean newspapers can’t make any money? Not at all. I think Mike Masnick has done a great job of pointing out how a media business can make money even if it gives content away for free — his company Techdirt does it, plenty of musicians and artists do it. And they do it by using the free content to promote the aspects of their business that have *real* scarcity rather than artificial scarcity.

After the Great Recession, news organisations are all seeking news sources of revenue and a more diversified revenue base so that we’re not as dependent on one highly recession-sensitive revenue stream, advertising.

As we look for new revenue streams, journalists need to get real about what adds value and need to be brutally honest about real scarcity. Currently, too much of the paid content discussion is obsessing over the societal value of journalism and not about rebuilding a revenue bundle that supports the socially valuable work that we do. Non-niche news has always been subsidised by other content and revenue streams. It is not dirty and it doesn’t devalue the social mission of journalism to think in terms of what other services and products we will need to develop to support that social mission. I’m more than happy for lifestyle news and food blogs to pay for investigations and bread-and-butter daily journalism. In many ways, it’s the simple recognition that our audiences are interested in many things, not just hard news.

Last week, speaking at the Norwegian Online News Association annual meeting, one of the points made by my fellow panelists was that news organisations have created a lot of innovative editorial projects but not many innovative commercial products. There are a lot of opportunities for news organisations to develop niche news and information products, but we best move quickly. Niche sites and services have already set up a dominant presence in many key content verticals. We also best move quickly on developing mobile apps, desktop apps and other tools to distribute our content and allow for easy recommendation. Steve Outing, for one, sees a lot of possibilities in mobile news and information services. What possibilities do you see to help pay for the social mission of journalism?