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.

03.06.09
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links for 2009-03-06

  • Is the Fidler pad finally becoming real?
    Kevin: I was recently asked about what impact Amazon's Kindle would have on newspapers. I think Steve Yelvington is right in this post that newspapers are wary of Amazon becoming a content broker, just as the music industry woke up too late that Apple is now a broker for music. But I was very interested in Steve's comment at the end of his post. "The traditional newspaper — an omnibus collection of often unrelated news, information and advertising, bundled up into a monolithic product — is being torn apart by market forces that no e-reader will change. But news in some form will be there. It is, after all, everywhere else."
    (tags: e-ink newspapers revenue businessmodels)
03.05.09
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links for 2009-03-05

  • A Better Plan for the Newspaper Industry
    Kevin: Alan Mutter and his Newsosaur blog is one of my regular reads. We really need more business-oriented voices in terms of journalism blogs. Motley Fool looks at some of Alan's suggestions for the future of the newspaper industry. He's got three suggestions including printing only when advertising will support it, charge for original content (note not all content) and develop advertising models beyond banner ads. The post is worth a read, and Alan's Newsosaur is worth following on a regular basis.
    (tags: newspapers businessmodels economics advertising)
  • Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect – ReadWriteWeb
    Kevin: Yahoo has launched a major challenge to Facebook connect with a service became available on 600,000 sites. The Yahoo Updates service is a partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. It uses the open standard OAuth in its system and ReadWriteWeb says it's quite easy to use. Off to give it a try.
    (tags: services yahoo commenting)
  • The Geography of a Recession – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com
    Kevin: The New York Times has an excellent graphic that shows: "Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates." My home county in Illinois has a Chrysler plant and 14.9% unemployment. Excellent visualisation.
    (tags: crisis economics jobs economy visualization maps)
  • News | BBC expands social media strategy via personalisation – NMA
    Kevin: The BBC has announced an expansion of its social media stragegy. They will add a 'social discovery' mechanism in which site users would have an activity page. The article says that this would include links to other social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The proposition isn't really clear from the article. Will this service merely allow BBC site users to aggregate their social media activities on the BBC. They will also create a new 'Head of Social Media'. Alas, most efforts in the BBC are dissipated through bureaucratic dampening.
    (tags: BBC socialmedia strategu)
03.04.09
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links for 2009-03-04

  • News goes social: Which news organisations are using Twitter best?
    Kevin: Mark Jones, the Global Community Editor at Reuters, writes on his personal blog about the best uses of Twitter by news organisations. He's right to flag up the Austin Statesman page for highlighting their Twittering staff. I think there are lots of excellent individual efforts in relationship to journalists and Twitter including Rory Cellan-Jones and Darren Waters at the BBC and Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss here at the Guardian. But I think Monica Guzman with the Seattle PI does a great job. It's the people using the service for social media journalism who stand out in my mind.
    (tags: journalism twitter bestpractices)
  • The world's innovation hubs, mapped out | Media | guardian.co.uk
    Kevin: Friend and colleague Jemima Kiss flags up a McKinsey and World Economic Forum visualisation of innovation and cities around the world. It really tells a story, including the huge output of Silicon Valley, Tokyo and even Chicago in terms of patents. The location of London on the map should have UK policy makers worried. US policy makers should be worried about details in the report of highly skilled immigrants returning home. Positive immigration policies can help deal with these issues. However, this map takes into account US patents, which one would assume would over-represent US cities in the data.
    (tags: data global visualisation visualization innovation map)
  • Socialtext Adds Twitter-like “Signals” And a Desktop AIR App
    Kevin: Wiki vendor SocialText add status updates like Twitter or Facebook, calling them 'Signals' and add an Adobe Air application. TechCrunch says the Signals feature competes against enterprise micro-messaging services like Yammer or WIzeHive.
    (tags: collaboration wiki messaging)
  • Sunlight Labs: Blog – Content Management Systems just don't work.
    Kevin: Clay at Sunlight Labs talks about the issues he has with content management systems and argues that web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails are a better option. It's an interesting wrinkle on a common discussion in the industry, and it's worth the read.
    (tags: development CMS django drupal rails frameworks)
  • DEMO Trend: The Smarter Web – ReadWriteWeb
    Kevin: ReadWriteWeb looks at three servicers, XMarks, Evri and Ensembli that add semantic web features and help show related content through natural language relationships and other emerging semantic web technologies. As RWW says, we haven't arrived at the glorious semantic web future, but these are steps on the path.
    (tags: tools web trends search monitoring semantic)
03.03.09
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links for 2009-03-03

03.01.09
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Yahoo! behaving badly. Again.

In July 2007, Yahoo! gave users of it’s Yahoo! Photos service just three months to retrieve their pictures before closing the service and deleting all of the unclaimed images. As recently as December 2008, I was still getting comments on my post about it from unhappy people who had entrusted photos to Yahoo! and had only just discovered that their archive had vanished. I thought that Yahoo!’s behaviour in closing their photo service was pretty shoddy. I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t stop accepting new uploads, and delete people’s photos piecemeal, as and when they had been transferred to Flickr or some other photo service. For such a large company to close a service with so little communication to users and such a short time frame for those affected to act was incomprehensible.

That was eighteen months ago, so obviously things have changed at Yahoo!, right? They’ve learnt that data portability and clear, timely communications are important, right? I mean, they wouldn’t repeat such mistake would they? Summarily shutting down a service with almost no notice?

Sadly, yes. They would.

Three days ago I got this email:

Yahoo! Briefcase Is Closing - Yahoo! get it wrong again

I very nearly deleted it as spam, because it had no content apart from the two attachments. But, curious to know if it really was an official email, I took a closer look at the headers, then clicked “View” for the first “noname” attachment. I got this:

Yahoo! Briefcase closing attachment

I checked out the links and yes, this is legit. This is the email that Yahoo! has sent its Yahoo! Briefcase users in order to tell them that all the files they had kept online are going to be toast at the end of the month. An empty email with two identical “noname” attachments. Well done Yahoo!, I think you’ve just earnt the first Strange Attractor Fuckwit of the Year 2009 Award. And it’s only February.

Unlike Yahoo! Photos, Yahoo! aren’t suggesting an alternative service, and they’re only giving users one month instead of three to get their stuff out. I only have one file in Yahoo! Briefcase, but that’s neither here nor there. It could have been something important and I could easily have deleted the email from Yahoo! as spam.

Why have Yahoo! not given people more notice? Why did their ill-conceived email have no content? Why put all the content in a couple of attachments? Why delete people’s data instead of archiving it until people can delete it themselves?

I’m not even going to get into asking why Yahoo! have ditched this service, instead of polishing it up and making it suitable for use in today’s cloud computing world. I’m just stunned that, once again, Yahoo! has shown such astonishing arrogance and disinterest in their users’ needs. Instead of learning from the closure of Yahoo! Photos and doing a better job this time, they’ve actually taken a step backwards.

Shame on you, Yahoo!.

02.28.09
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links for 2009-02-28

02.27.09
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Focus on editorial ideas, then find the right tool

My esteemed colleague and comrade in digital arms, Jemima Kiss, Twittered this very astute observation, in less than 280 characters, about Twitter and use of the micro-blogging application by news organisations:

jemimakiss: Common mistakes news orgs make with Twitter 1) That it’s all about Twitter, rather than how people are actually using Twitter and..

jemimakiss 2) They get fixed on using a tool, like Twitter, rather than working out what they want to do & finding the best tool for it. That is all.

She’s spot on when it comes to Twitter. There is a tendency for organisations to rush with the herd to a new social media service or site without thinking about what, editorially, they are trying to achieve. I’ve seen the same thing happen with blogs and Facebook. After entering the mainstream, some journalists demanded their own blog. Why did they want a blog? They saw it as a back door to having a column. They had always wanted an opinion column because it was a sign of status and as we all know, blogs are just opinion (sarcasm noted). A typical conversation in the industry might go like this:

Editor: How often are you planning on updating your blog?

Aspiring columnist: Oh, once a week should do.

Editor: Were you planning on linking to anything?

Aspiring columnist: Why would I do that? This is my column, er, I mean blog.

Editor: Are you going to take part in the conversation and respond to comments?

Aspiring columnist: No, of course not. I’m far too busy for that kind of thing.

Editor: So why do you want a blog instead of a column in the newspaper?

Asprining columnist: *silence*

That’s not to say that the journalist wouldn’t get their own column, er, I mean blog, thus continuing traditional media’s focus on celebrity over interactivity. Some journalists make incredibly good bloggers, but when a blog is used simply to replicate what possible in print, it is an editorial waste.

Functionally, there might not be a great difference between a column-with-comments and a blog, but editorially, there is a huge difference.

  • Bloggers post frequently.
  • Bloggers take part in the conversation and respond to comments and questions.
  • Bloggers link to the conversation on other sites.

Blogs take part in a distributed conversation in ways that columns rarely do, whereas columns – even ones with comments – provide a relatively closed, introspective conversation.

Jemima has flagged up how much the same is happening with Twitter. This all comes down to understanding how social media differs from traditional uni-directional publishing and broadcasting and thinking about the editorial concept and the unique opportunities for engagement.

02.24.09
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links for 2009-02-24