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Kevin: Steve Yelvington writes about hyperlocal news, internationalism and isolationism. It’s a great post for a number of reasons, not all simply journalistic. As an American living abroad, it resonates with me about the complications of our intersecting
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Kevin: An academic study about blogging and journalism. I especially liked this line: “As collaborative, open source journalism, Sipe’s blog allowed readers to connect with the event, to see him as a human being rather than as merely a byline, and to do
Category Archives: Uncategorized
links for 2006-12-27
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Software defined radio lets radios be all things to all technologies. A GPS unit that could reconfigure itself to use the latest technology, or a GSM phone that could transition itself into a CDMA phone.
links for 2006-12-21
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Stop just trying all kinds of things, says online journalism prof Mindy McAdams. “What works on the Web? YouTube, Craigslist, MySpace, etc. Why? Because we get to do stuff. We can play. We can contribute.”
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New media “is changing the world because it is allowing truly egalitarian access to the media for the first time ever,” wrote Lance Duston for a newspaper in Maine. Not because of underlying technology that should be incorporated into newspapers.
links for 2006-12-19
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Suw: Clay Shirky takes a skeptical look at Second Life. But is SL doomed because the press love big numbers? No. If anything a smaller community if what it needs right now.
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Suw: It’s addictive. At first you wonder why anyone would use it, but then you do, and then you get addicted. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Shiny, shiny tools won’t save you from trolls
Last week, Meg Pickard, who works with community at AOL Europe, came round to have a chat. She talked about creating and managing communities. I was going to write about her comments because they were just so damn good, but like a lot of people, I’m currently digging out from a blizzard of holiday cheer and Christmas parties so am catching up with blogging.
There were so many gems in what she had to say, and I’ll highlight just a few:
- “Is this a community or just people who have something in common?” she said. Brilliant, I say. Your readers/viewers aren’t a community. Don’t throw blogs and social networking tools on your site and expect a ‘community’ to form. Your audience represents a lot of different communities – geographical, interest-based, activity-based, etc. But, just because they have your channel, newspaper, website in common, doesn’t make them a community.
- “Community is off-line as well as online,” she added. Websites who don’t use off-line events to bolster their online communities are missing a trick.
- “Good communities need participation by users and by YOU,” Meg said. Too many news sites are looking to community as a silver-bullet technical solution. They seem to think they just need to add some blogs and bingo the next BoingBoing or add some social networking tools and they are on their way to becoming the next MySpace. No, the biggest change is getting out there on your own websites and mixing it up a bit.
- Moderation is a big issue. “But who is moderating it? Do you let your users moderate each other?” she said. Do you give them voting tools like Digg? Do you let them hide things they don’t want to see? She said that moderation rules should focus on making the sure the comments, photos and video are ‘safe and appropriate and not whether they are ‘good’ and on topic’.
It was a great presentation from a digital native who not only looks at these spaces with the eye of a trained anthropologist but also from someone who lives in these online communities with her Flickr groups, Last.Fm stream and her own online projects.
But let me just touch on that last point: Moderation. It’s often one of the overlooked issues with community. My second online news job, 10 years ago, was with Newhouse Newspapers’ Michigan Live, and part of my job, as with all of the online journalists on staff, was policing our forums when our ‘fuck filters’ failed. Community was never a build it and they will come proposition. I have had to build up a few online communities, and it takes work. And once they have a critical mass, they can still be overwhelmed by trolls.
When I first joined the Guardian, someone on Comment is Free said that by trolls I only meant someone who I didn’t agree with. No, that’s not a troll. Trolls are folks who delight in breaking things. The BBC calls them WUM – wind-up merchants. But they can wreak havoc in online spaces, and the answers aren’t simple and they aren’t wholly technical. Looking through my RSS feeds, I noticed the most recent example of an news site that has succumb to trolling: The Arizona Daily Star, with an explanation from Executive Editor Bobbie Jo Buel on why the site had to delete comments. Ryan Sholin has a great write-up, and I’ll quote liberally from his second of three points:
…that is a damn fine commenting system they’re running over there: It’s got the Digg-ish thumbs up/thumbs down function I’ve been wanting to see. It’s got the Slashdot-esque threshold I agitated for a long time ago. The paper has a clean, well-designed registration page, and users must be registered to post or rate comments. I want this commenting system. Seriously. What sort of CMS are you guys running and is the commenting system built into it, or is it an add on?
I agree. The Daily Star has gone further than most newspapers in building a commenting system with a lot more intelligence than standard forums or blog software. (And like Ryan, I’m curious as to what software you’re using, feel free to e-mail me as well.) UPDATE: I just found out that the software is Bakomatic from Participata.
And as for the staff and managers at the Daily Star, don’t worry. You’re not alone in having an outbreak of trolls. It happens to everyone. I hope you don’t pull down your comment feature. You’ve put a lot of work and thought into it. Good luck, and a little unsolicited advice:
- Get some community managers in there.
- Don’t run one-half of a Skinner box. Don’t just poke the commenters with cattle prods when they misbehave, also give them some cheese when they are good neighbours in your community.
- See Meg’s comment above. The community needs participation from users and from you and your staff. Join with your users in making it your (you and your commenters’) community.
When people ask me how blogs are different from forums, I say, “The blogger sets the tone”. I sort of joke when doing blog training for journalists that if you write a post like a pompous ass, people will respond accordingly. I’m only half joking. Yes, the technology will help you manage the comments and help foster the community, but unless you look at your content as well, you’re going to be fighting a losing battle against the trolls.
Technorati Tags: community, journalism, moderation, trolls
links for 2006-12-16
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That’s hardly surpising, but the study says “The most popular category of user-generated content is phone-to-phone photo messaging”. Is sending a MMS social media? Or rather is messaging social media?
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Davy Sims notes a 2006 Mediascope study that shows that “social networking via VoIP, IM and online forums will continue to drive internet growth as the medium becomes a more ingrained part of the consumer’s lifestyle.”
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Gartner Research says: “Community involvement varies, with fewer than 2% of all Internet users acting as frequent contributors, between 10% and 15% contributing occasionally and more than 50% lurking, reading or watching what the communities are discussin
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Chris Vallance riffs on my post ‘Feed the Geeks’ and goes on to say that we all are geeks of one kind or another, with ‘genuine enthusiasm and passion about a subject’.
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A look at some of the licencing and monetisation services out there for blog content.
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MIT has developed a system that would allow people to locate anyone in the 20,000 member MIT ‘community’ to find each other on campus. Engadget called a ‘stalker app’. Reuters called it ‘social networking in the real world’.
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Peter Kann – a Pulitzer-winning journalist, is chairman of Dow Jones – writes how the press needs some mending in the Wall Street Journal. Pessism, sensationalism, lack of context are just a few problems that need fixing.
links for 2006-12-13
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I’m so glad that I didn’t bother going to Loic’s conference this year. Looks like it was a bit of a disaster.
links for 2006-12-11
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It’s not user-generated content. It’s self-expression. Jon Pareles writes: “Terminology aside, this will be remembered as the year that the old-line media mogul, the online media titan and millions of individual Web users agreed: It demands attention.”
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A blogger who writes in French and English questions Technorati’s methodology and its view of the internet. Important questions here and some answers from Technorati.
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Simon McGarr and his fellow bloggers spend a weekend reading the papers in Dublin, comparing where each one gets its stories and the quality of the resulting paper. Pie charts illustrate just how little journalism is involved, and how reliant on PR the pa
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Simon McGarr and co’s opinions of their weekend newspaper reads, concentrated over one weekend
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Pretty shoddy-looking press release touting Edelman tool that seems itself to miss the point that social media is done by real humans, not a process that can be automated. Accusations of idea being nicked from SHIFT Comms in the comments.
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News sites need community. Community needs strategy. Rich Gordon has some excellent ideas.
Journalism.co.uk Readers’ Revolution: Robin Hamman
This post is greatly delayed from the Readers’ Revolution panel that I spoke on last week for Journalism.co.uk.
Robin Hamman, a friend and former colleague at the BBC, spoke about the Manchester Method and engaging with ‘stuff’. Like me, Robin doesn’t like the dry as dust term, user-generated content. (Jon Pareles of the New York Times questions whether we’re not seeing something a bit more basic: Self-expression. And Cynthia at IPDemocracy asks whether users are better filters than media moguls. I ask, “Better or more successful?”)
Robin said that people are creating all kinds of ‘stuff’, whether it is video on YouTube, photos on Flickr, podcasts or even meaning through social bookmarking on del.icio.us or Amazon recommendations. (Robin is an important part of my del.icio.us network and often sends bookmarks my way.)
He used to sheepishly admit that he was a blogger, and I can understand the way he feels. The Church of Journalism often seems to me to want a purity test for membership. I’ve spent most of my career trying to justify my self-identification as an ‘online journalist’. Many friends simply left journalism after the dot.com crash. Industry purists were going to make them pay for their dalliance with the trendy internet by making them take many steps backward in their career. We lost a lot of smart people in the post crash schadenfreude surplus. We could use those people now.
I digress. Ironically, Robin found that the average income for a blogger in the US is $39,000, a good $10,000 more than most journalists or reporters. (That’s not necessarily from blogging, but still, it means that bloggers aren’t doing badly for themselves.)
But Robin went on to highlight a very fundamental change in thinking in the Web 2.0 age, which is decentralisation. In
the past, he said that we talked about building big expensive stuff, huge big systems,
like message boards to host discussions and recommendation systems. They were resource intensive and took massive amounts of development and time. But he admitted that the BBC was a broadcaster, not a software developer, and the BBC made really second-rate systems. “Our software is several years behind in comparison to the
industry,” he said.
And after the sites and systems were launched, the BBC was opened up to ongoing management costs and legal issues. Now, the BBC is heading in a new direction. “Sustainable development is sexy,” he said. “We are trying to figure out a way that doesn’t force us to develop big expensive platforms”
Robin had his first job with the BBC eight or nine years ago. With the the first message boards, people would sign up and select a user name and
password. Editorial Policy blanched. “You can’t possibly allow people to post on our website
without verified first name and surname,” Editorial Policy staff protested.
Fast forward to the present with the BBC Manchester
project. It is a more honest and more sustainable
approach to dealing with ‘stuff’.
Thousands of people send pictures to the
BBC. But what happens to them? “Thousands of people send us stuff but never
get anything more than an automated response,” he said. It’s a fair question of any project that deals with ‘stuff’. How to evaluate the ‘stuff”? You can’t have a strategy based on failure, based on a paucity of submissions. Also, most organisations can’t just throw more people at the problem of evaluating submissions, and I would argue that simply having your staff evaluate submissions misses the point. The audience should be involved not only in creating ‘stuff’ but also in determining quality and relevance for themselves.
Robin’s basis for the BBC Manchester project is that there are mature tools out there: Flickr, YouTube, Revver, Photobucket, Del.icio.us, Furl, Reddit and on and on. Robin knew that just as he began blogging that he was joining a conversation, and that by using tools like Technorati he could plug into this conversation.
Robin is pointing out such an important point. Instead of simply trying to create parallel tools – MySpace or YouTube killers – media organisations looking for a community strategy would be smart to plug into these communities not trying to steal other sites community. No big media site is going to get me to move my photos from Flickr because part of the importance is the community that I have at Flickr with friends and professional contacts. However, media organisations can become hubs in these networks, but the thinking is completely different than a traditional media strategy.
Robin put it this way. He’s like the host of a party, and hosts are different than police. Hosts get their guests started talking. They wander around and make sure that no one gets too
drunk and that friends don’t get too disorderly.
Blogs are a great source of contacts, context and content. Every
once and a while, Robin says that he will wrap some of his own editorial content around other bloggers’ posts, but that’s pretty typical blogging behaviour. But his motivation is “all about linking
and sending them to traffic”. They are doing their first workshop in Manchester on January 18 for bloggers or people who want to learn. They will teach people
how to put Google and Amazon ads on their sites. They will teach them about best blogging practices.
Having worked for the BBC, I will admit that they are free of market pressures that a lot of companies face and can do things other companies probably can’t. Part of Robin’s Manchester Project is about digital literacy, which is one of the goals of the Nations and Regions division of the BBC. But linking out, being part of the network instead of trying to dominate it or co-opt is one of those clueful Cluetrain ideas that also make good business sense.
- You can see Robin in action here at an edited version of his talk on YouTube. (He told me at the BBC Backstage party -sponsored in part by ORG – on Saturday he was a little disappointed that the edit focused on his comments about the BBC development process.)
- Clyde Bentley’s talk is here on YouTube.
- I am here talking about something I called: Newsgathering in the Age of Social Networks. I am seriously jet-lagged. Having driven 15 hours the Friday before across New Mexico and Texas, only to grab a few hours of sleep before hopping on a jet back to London.
Thinking about ‘de-linearising’ media
Fantastic post from Tristan Ferne on the nature of time-based media, complete with little diagrams and everything. It’s a follow on from the Annotatable Audio project that Tristan worked with Tom Coates and others at the BBC on, and it sets my head a-spinning.
What if…
The problem with a radio show-related blog post is that the discussion is not only distinctly textual, it’s also decontextualised because the blog post is separated from the audio. If you don’t hear the show at the time it’s broadcast, (or during it’s ‘play again’ period of a week, on the Beeb at least) then commenting on it is hard – you can only comment after the fact. Even if you do hear the show, the blog doesn’t allow you to comment easily on a specific aspect of the broadcast discussion without having to reiterate that point up front. So whilst the blog is a valuable tool, it still limits the conversation.
What if you were making a discussion radio programme, and you could firstly chapterise it issue by issue, and then sub-chapterise it by caller, or by point made, and then people could both annotate the audio, adding in links and supporting/refuting evidence, and could leave audio comments using Skype or Odeo or whatever on specific sections of the programme.
I’ll admit most of this post is informed by conversations with Kevin (we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about innovation in journalism recently), but I think it pretty much applies to any type of show where you want discussion, whether they are radio or podcast. I think there’s a huge opportunity here not just for podcasters to make their shows more interactive, but for big media to find new ways to reconnect with their audiences.