links for 2010-08-12
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Kevin: Ushahidi launches a free cloud-based service of its crowd-sourced crisis reporting platform. The new service, CrowdMap cuts the time to create a deployment. Instead of having to install it on a server, all you need to do is fill out a form with your password, a valid subdomain, name and tagline, according to a description on the Ushahidi blog.
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Kevin: James Ledbetter at Slate looks at some strange traffic numbers from Demand Media ahead of its IPO. Publicly available figures from Quantcast report a 75% drop in traffic, but the service also reports that traffic at Demand's eHow.com dropped to zero in July. Ledbetter posits some possible explanations.
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Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick says that Facebook's location service, Places, will launch soon. According to reports in CNet, it will not be a standalone service to compete with existing location services but rather an API for other location services to use. "I expect that several of these motivations will apply to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users as well, not just the single-digit millions of early adopters using services like Foursquare and Gowalla today."
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Kevin: Visualisations of investment money (right now, mostly in the US) and the connections between investors.
links for 2010-08-11
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Kevin: Hitwise reports that Facebook now accounts for one in six of all page views in the UK.
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Kevin: Slate creates a home for their experiments in multimedia journalism. Check out the visualisation they created mining Meetup for events related to the Tea Party to show areas of Tea Party activity in the US.
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Kevin: Yahoo's guide on how to write for the web including how to write a strong headline.
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Kevin: A simple way to visualise your check-ins on FourSquare.
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Kevin: Mark Hachman at PCMag.com describes a feature Yahoo had been trialling called "infinite browse". "The feature, in testing now at Yahoo News, adds a small window of search results at the end of a Yahoo News story, with results on the topics found within the news story." Yahoo product manager Mark Davis said that in its first week, Infinite Browse showed double the user engagement that they have seen with similar features.
links for 2010-08-10
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Kevin: Larry Kramer, former CEO of Marketwatch.com says that new news sites lack strong editorial leadership and voice. "Almost none of these sites have built a true journalistic infrastructure, with a powerful editorial voice at the top and a collective group of people who both worry continuously about how their content is being presented and who lead the army of reporters down their many paths with critical review and the benefit of experience. Together, these forces create journalistic greatness"
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Kevin: Allourideas.org has a widget that allows you to create an "idea marketplace" on your site much as you would embed a YouTube video.
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Kevin: Christian Christensen says that the real power of Wikileaks isn't in the technology but the trust "readers have in the authenticity of what they are reading". He believes several myths are surround the story such as the power of social media and the death of the nation-state and journalism.
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Kevin: Mark Briggs says that journalism grads are finding jobs but they are not of the traditional repoter/editor variety. Online community managers are in demand, and new media companies such as Yahoo and AOL are hiring. Mark flags up a new job with the Tribune Corporation (bankrupt publisher of the Chicago Tribune among other things) for producer/editors or "preditors".
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Kevin: Amy Starlight Lawrence looks at "four transformational trends" in journalism education. The second one is very interesting: Journalism and communication schools as content and technology innovators. "We see the early adopters among you experimenting with new story forms, teaching everything from data visualisation, web scraping and computational journalism, even developing new software".
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Kevin: Tom Simonite at MIT's Technology Review looks at a new service called PeerIndex, launched by former Reuters innovation head Azeem Azhar, that tries to show influence of Twitter users. There are other companies in this field, most notably Klout, but Azhar says that his service is different. PeerIndex looks "at the information contained in the tweets, and how that information spreads, to find authority in specific subject areas".
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Kevin: paidContent.org reports Demand Media's financial filings with US securities regulator, SEC, before its anticipated IPO. They skip OBIDA numbers that Demand is pushing and focus on the standard financials to show a $22.2m loss for the first half of 2010 on revenue of $114m.
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Kevin: Peter Kafka, writing the Media Memo at the Wall Street Journal's All Things D, looks at the numbers that Demand Media is highlighting ahead of its reportedly $1 to $1.5bn IPO or market floatation. Depending on what numbers you look at, the company either has made or lost money, and Goldman Sachs looks to be highlighting non-GAAP numbers to make the balance sheet look quite a bit better than it is. Well worth a read.
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Kevin: Writing on the Facebook Developer Blog, Justin Osofsky writes about how media organisations are using the social network and gives examples of best practices. Just to highlight point one, sites using Facebook's "Like Button" see three to five times higher click-through rates.
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Kevin: Ken Doctor looks at the local site launched earlier this year in Hawaii with the backing of eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar. Civil Beat asks people for $19.99 to participate. Ken says: " In my community, I’d have great local news reporting, great community discussion — and great Yelp-like functionality, great Open Table-like functionality, great-Angie’s List like-functionality, hey, great eBay-like-functionality-mixed with craigslist (aka The New Classifieds!)." Ken is really asking where is the broader business model.
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Kevin: A live chat at the Poynter journalism institute with Jim Brady and Steve Buttry of the new local news site in Washington DC in the US, TBD.com. It is a partnership with a local television station, and Jim talks about integrating a web operation with a TV station. Steve, head of community engagement at the site, talks about their blog network and ad and revenue sharing.
Two projects to watch: Ben Franklin Project and TBD.com
TBD.com's Near You zip code-based news filter
At 428 am in Washington DC a new news site, TBD.com, launched, and it is definitely one worth watching. Why? They have assembled an all-star staff, brimming with passion. The general manager for the project is Jim Brady, the former executive editor and vice president of Washington Post Newsweek interactive. Steve Buttry, the site’s head of community engagement, has a long history in traditional journalism, training and innovation. (For any journalist struggling to come to terms with the unrequited love you feel for the business, read this post by Mimi Johnson, Steve’s wife, as he left the newspaper business to go all digital at TBD.) They have some great staff who I have ‘met’ via Twitter including networked journalists Daniel Victor and Jeff Sonderman.
When he was hired, Jeff described his job as a community host as this:
developing ways to work with bloggers and users to generate, share and discuss content.
He described TBD.com as this:
Our goal is to build an online news site for the DC metro area, and do it taking full advantage of the how the web works — with partnership not competition, users not readers, conversation not dictation, linking not duplicating.
If you look on Twitter this morning, Jeff and Steve are very busy on their first full day as hosts for the new news service.
Digitally native at launch
The site is clean and clear, easy to navigate with a lot of excellent touches. TBD.com launched with an Android app and are awaiting approval for their iPhone application. They zip (post) code news filter to find out content not only from TBD but also from bloggers in the area is excellent. I lived in Washington from 1998 until 2005 as the Washington correspondent of BBCNews.com. I know the city well. I typed in my old home zip code, 20010, and got news about Mount Pleasant including from a blog called The 42 Bus, which was the bus that I used to take to work everyday. Their live traffic information is template for how city sites should add value for such bread and butter news. You can quickly pull up a map showing traffic choke points in the area. They even have a tool to plot your best travel route. The traffic tools are pulled from existing services, but the value is in the package.
They had a launch event last week, and they explained their networked journalism strategy. Steve Myers at the Poynter journalism institute said half of the links at TBD.com would point to external sources, much higher than at most sites. said that At launch, 127 local bloggers had joined their network. Steve Myers had this quote from Steve Buttry about their linking strategy:
“If we’re competing on the same story, we’ll do our story and we’ll link to yours,” said Steve Buttry, director of community engagement for the site. If another source owns a big story, “we’ll play you at the top of the home page and we’ll cover something else with our staff resources.”
Wow. Personally, I think that this is smart. With resources declining at most news organisations, they have to be much more strategic about how they use their staff. They need to focus on what value that they add. Jeff Jarvis says: “Cover what you do best and link to the rest“, and this is one of the highest profile tests of that strategy.
Ken Doctor, brilliant news industry analyst at Newsonomics, has 10 reasons to watch TBD.com. Harvard’s Nieman Lab for journalism has another six reasons why they are watching the launch. Of Ken’s list, I’ll highlight two. Bucking the trend for many new high-profile news projects in the US, this is a for-profit business. Ken’s seventh point is huge:
7) It’s got a big established sales force to get it going. Both TV stations salespeople with accounts — and relationships. So TBD is an extension of that sales activity, not a start-up ad sell, which bedevils many other start-ups.
The other thing that TBD.com has going for it is that it has the commitment of someone who already has seen some success with new models, Robert Allbritton. A few years ago, he launched Politico.com, bringing in two high profile veterans from the Washington Post to compete not only with their newspaper but also specialist political outlets like Roll Call. Politico has managed to create a successful print-web product, “not profitable every quarter but says it’s turning a profit for any given six months,” Allbritton told paidContent.org. What is more important though is his commitment to his ventures. He’s got the money and commitment to support projects past the short term.
“The first year of Politico was pretty ugly in terms of revenue,” he admitted. “You’ve got to have some staying power for these things to work.”
The Ben Franklin Project
The other project that I’m watching is John Paton’s Ben Franklin Project at the Journal Register Company. What is it?
The Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project is an opportunity to re-imagine the newsgathering process with the focus on Digital First and Print Last. Using only free tools found on the Internet, the project will – from assigning to editing- create, publish and distribute news content on both the web and in print.
Succinctly, this company is looking to disrupt its own business. Instead of attacking costs by cutting more staff, they are looking to cut costs by eliminating the price of their own production using free tools. It’s not something that every organisation could do, but with 18 daily newspapers and 150 non-daily local publications, it shows the ambition of their project. This is not a tiny organisation.
In practice, the organisation set the goal for all 18 of its newspapers to publish online and in print using free online and free open-source tools, such as the Scribus desktop publishing application. They are also pursuing the same kind of community engagement, networked journalism strategy that is at the heart of TBD.com.
On 4 July, 2010, Independence Day in the US, they published their 18 daily newspapers and websites only using free tools and crowdsourced journalism. Jon Cooper, Vice President of Content, Journal Register Company wrote:
Today — July 4, 2010 — marks not only Journal Register Company’s independence from the costly proprietary systems that have long restricted newspapers and news companies alike. Today also marks the start of a revolution. Today marks the beginning of a new path for media companies whose employees are willing to shape their own future.
This is just part of Paton’s turnaround strategy for the Journal Register Company. However, in 2010, which is proving to be another tough year for the US economy (especially in some of the areas the company covers), Paton just announced that the company is 15% ahead of its revenue goals. He said:
Our goal is to pay out an extra week’s pay this year to all employees for hitting our annual target of $40 Million.
That is an amazing investment in journalists and an incentive for them to embrace the disruptive change he is advocating, but it’s so heartening to see journalists engaged and benefitting from change in the industry.
With all the talk about innovation in journalism, it is rare to see projects launch with such clear ambitions. After a lot of talk in the industry, we’ll now see what is possible.
links for 2010-08-09
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Kevin: A comparison of different local news strategies in the Boston area. They compare AOL's patch, part of the internet providers efforts to remake itself as a digital content company. Each site has one full-time editor who also writes and shoots video. They compared this with local newspaper chain GateHouse. Their Wicked Local sites benefit from coverage by its more than 100 community newspapers. Patch and Wicked Local also combine aggregation, highlighting local bloggers content. It's too early to declare one model the winner, but worthwhile knowing the different models in play.
links for 2010-08-05
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Kevin: A great post on Poynter E-Media Tidbits by Megan Taylor that builds on ideas about computational thinking by Greg Linch. Megan breaks down Greg's ideas into three simple concepts: Automation, algorithms and abstraction. She flags up a great example of how APIs at the New York Times allow them to cut down on repetitive work, according to Derek Willis.
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Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick writes that Hunch, founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and angel investor Chris Dixon, has relaunched as a "taste-graph recommendation engine". Answer 20 quick questions and get recommendations for movies, books, magazines, computers, meals, vacation destinations, etc.
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Kevin: Edward Boches lists four lessons to learn from the New York Times, which now looks like it is starting to turn a corner in terms of their business. Just to highlight the first of his four points. "Get over the not invented here syndrome." Edward highlights their willingness to syndicate content from other niche sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. I'd also highlight not only their use but also investment in WordPress. Definitely worth checking out the four other points.
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Kevin: My friend Andy Carvin with NPR highlights some results they found from canvasing opinion from some of the US public radio network's 1m fans on Facebook. More than 40,000 people responded. They have a compiled the results and shared them on their blog and also on Slideshare. Some highlights, almost all, 96% use Facebook at least once a day. The majority of the respondents listen between 1-3 hrs a day, while the average listener listens about 4.25 hrs a week. Almost three-quarters agreed that Facebook was a major way for them to receive news and information from NPR.
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Kevin: Check-in service Gowalla has launched a service tied to political campaigns in the US. Campaigns can create events on Gowalla that supporters can check in at. As with many check-in services, they will get a badge related to the campaign. Supporters will also be able to register their own events. Gowalla also says that advocacy groups can use the service to "highlight their causes".
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Kevin: This is a frank and brave post-mortem of a project created for the 2008 US elections. An associate professor had the idea to create a site that would bring together coverage from a few outlets in Missouri, where the project was based. However, she candidly lists her incorrect assumptions and also lessons she learned in promotion and community building.
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Kevin: The DBpedia data set and some examples of how to access it including use cases. DBpedia has created a set of linked data derived from Wikipedia.
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Kevin: DocumentCloud program manager Amanda Hickman looks at recent uses of the document hosting tool including an annotated version of the controversial Arizona immigration law. The annotations highlight and explain what parts of the law were subject to a judges injunction.
APIs helping journalism “scale up”
A couple of days ago, I quoted AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on developing tools to help journalists “scale up” what they do. ?In a post on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, Megan Garber has a highlighted a good practical example of what I meant .
One thing that computers and other technology can help journalists to work more efficiently is to cut down or eliminate frequent, repetitive tasks. Derek Willis at the New York Times talks about APIs (as Derek describes APIs as “just a Web application delivering data). Derek says:
The flexibility and convenience that the APIs provide make it easier to cut down on repetitive manual work and bring new ideas to fruition. Other news organizations can do the same.
Derek also points how savvy use of data is not just good for data visualisations and infographics, but it is also an excellent resource for New York Times’ journalists.
So if you have a big local election coming up, having an API for candidate summary data makes it easier to do a quick-and-dirty internal site for reporters and editors to browse, but also gives graphics folks a way to pull in the latest data without having to ask for a spreadsheet.
And as he said, the biggest consumer of New York Times APIs is the New York Times itself.
Projects such as building an API can be quite large (although new companies and also organisations like the Sunlight Foundation in the US and MySociety in the UK have great public service APIs and data projects), but with the benefits to both audiences, designers, developers and journalists, it makes it easier to justify the time and effort.
links for 2010-08-04
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Kevin: Benjamin Nowack takes the concept of "dynamic semantic publishing" that the BBC is pioneering and has come up with a system that could be used by smaller publishers, including bloggers to more easily pull together a much richer collection of related content and data using linked data content and semantic APIs such as OpenCalais and Zemanta. This is the first part in a two part series. He's going to demonstrate a proof of this concept on 9000 articles from ReadWriteWeb.
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Kevin: Jem Rayfield of the BBC describes a major change in how the public service broadcaster publishes content. With the extensive use of metadata, they have delivered a "far deeper and richer use of content than can be achieved through traditional CMS-driven publishing solutions.
"The site features 700-plus team, group and player pages, which are powered by a high-performance dynamic semantic publishing framework. This framework facilitates the publication of automated metadata-driven web pages that are light-touch, requiring minimal journalistic management, as they automatically aggregate and render links to relevant stories." -
Kevin: Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic gives his 5 key steps for Tumblr for media outlets. As many people have said, Tumblr is somewhere between blogging and Twitter. In fact, it combines much of the best of both platforms, allowing you to do short, status update like posts as well as longer form posts if you life. Tumblr is low-effort, interactive and viral, he says.
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Kevin: A good quick guide to Google Analytics for journalists.
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Kevin: The dismal state of the finances at Newsweek and possible succession plans as the Washington Post Company finalises a sale. (It will be difficult, even for a billionaire to right this ship.)
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Kevin: Journalism professor and sage Jay Rosen goes through his daily information diet and gives insight on how he manages all of the information that comes his way in this information saturated world. Using a mix of Twitter (and two lists that he has created), email and aggregators such as Gabe Rivera's Techmeme, Memeorandum and Mediagazer, he chooses topics for three to five posts that he will write in any given day.
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Kevin: Just a link to have handy to Google's Android app inventor, basically a integrated development environment for Android Apps.
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Kevin: Samy Kamkar demonstrated a hack at the 2010 Blackhat conference that could trick your router into giving your location information. Using a malformed URL, he could gain access your router and get the MAC address. Using Firefox's location technology and information from services such as Google and Skyhook, he could then find out where you were. Pretty scary stuff and worth reviewing good security practices.
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Kevin: ReadWriteWeb describes Hotlist as "a trend-tracker that connects users with upcoming events in the area and across their social networks". They have just launched an iPhone app, which makes a lot of sense because location-based services work much better on mobile when people can act on the recommendations and trends. What's interesting about Hotlist is that it doesn't require you to check-in as do services like Foursquare and Gowalla. It analyses real-time updates on Twitter and aggregates location-specific data from it. It then uses Facebook, Google and Yelp to find specific events from your network of friends. It's definitely another step in the evolution of location-based services.
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Kevin: Mahendra Palsule, an editor at TechMeme, looks at various ways that sites and services are filtering information based on relevance including algorithmic filtering, filtering based on one's social graph, various forms of human filtering and influence and shared source filtering. He looks at the pros and cons of each approach and concludes that the best solution is support for multiple forms of filtering and also for flexibility to the degree of filtering. I also like his idea that you'd want to be able to act based on these recommendations.
Opportunities from the data deluge
There are huge opportunities for journalism and data. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, it will take ?not only a major rethinking in the editorial and commercial strategies that underpin current journalism organisations, but it will take a major retooling. Apart from a few business news organisations such as Dow Jones, The Economist and Thomson-Reuters, there really aren’t that many general interest news organisations that have this competency. Most smaller organisations won’t be able to afford it on an individual level, but it leaves room for a number of companies to provide services for this space.
Neil Perkin outlines the challenge and the opportunity in a wonderful column that he’s cross-posted from Marketing Week. (Tip of the blogging hat to Adam Tinworth, who flagged this up on Twitter and on his blog.) In our advanced information economies, we’re generating exabytes of data. While we’re just getting used to terabyte disk drives, this is an exabyte:
1 EB = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1018 bytes = 1 billion gigabytes = 1 million terabytes
To put this in perspective, I’ll use an oft-quoted practical example from Caltech researcher Roy Williams. All the words ever spoken by human beings could be stored in about 5 exabytes. Neil quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt to show the challenge (and opportunity) that the data deluge is creating:
Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, five exabytes of information were created. In the last two days, five exabytes of information have been created, and that rate is accelerating.
All the words spoken since the dawn of language in 5 exabytes or the amount of information created in the last two days helps illustrate the acceleration of information creation. Those mind-melting numbers wash over most people, especially in our arithmophobic societies. However, there is a huge opportunity here, which Neil states as this:
The upside of the data explosion is that the more of it there is, the better digital based services can get at delivering personal value.
And journalists can and definitely should play a role in helping make sense of this. However, we’re going to have to overcome not only the tyranny of chronology but also the tyranny of narrative, especially narratives that prejudice anecdote over data. Too often to sell stories, we focus on outliers because they shock, not because outliers are in any way representative of reality.
From a process point of view, journalists are going to need to start getting smarter about data. I think data crunching services will be one way that journalism organisations can subsidise the public service mission that they fulfil, but as I have said, it’s a capacity that will need to be built up.
Helping journalists ‘scale up what they do’
It’s not just raw data-crunching that needs to improve, but we’re starting to see a lot of early semantic tools that will help more traditional narrative-driven journalists do their jobs. In talking about how he wanted to help journalists at AOL overcome their technophobia, CEO Tim Armstrong talked about why these tools were necessary. Journalists have not been included in corporate technology upgrades (and often not included in creation of tools for their work). Armstrong said at a conference in June:
Journalists I met were often the only people in the room who never had access to a lot of info, except what they already knew.
It’s not technology for technology’s sake but tools to open up more information and help them make sense of it. Other industries have often implemented data tools to help them do their jobs, but it’s rare in journalism (outside of computer-assisted reporting or database journalism circles). Armstrong said:
You can pretty much go to any professional industry, and there’s some piece of data system that helps people scale what they do.
Journalists are being asked to do more with less as cuts go deep in newsrooms, and we’re going to have to work smarter because I know that there are some journalists now working to the breaking point.
There have been times in the last few years when I testing the limits of my endurance. Last summer, filling in behind my colleague Jemima Kiss, I was working from 7 am until 11 pm five days a week and then usually five or six hours on the weekends. I could do it for a while because it was a limited 10-week assignment. Even for 10 weeks, it was limiting the amount of time I had with my wife and was negatively affecting my health.
I’m doing a lot of thinking about services that can help journalists deal with masses of information and also help audiences more easily put stories into context. We’re going to need new tools and techniques for this new period in the age of information. The opportunities are there. Linked data and tools to analyse, sort and contextualise will lead to a new revolution in news and information services. Several companies are already in this space, but we’re just at the beginning of this revolution. We live in exciting times.