Nieman: Zeega, ‘like Storify for multimedia’

The Nieman Journalism Lab has a post on Zeega, a storytelling web app that it describes as “like Storify for multimedia”. The people behind Zeega, which is not yet public, describe it as a whole different medium rather than simply new software.

Nieman describes the concept:

The still-in-alpha software feels like Storify for multimedia: As you travel across the web, use a simple bookmarklet to collect media fragments — a Flickr image, a YouTube video, a track from the Free Music Archive — and dump it into a project bin. You can share your project bin and invite others to collaborate on the story. The editor interface is simple: Select a few seconds from a video, cut it with a few seconds of another video, drop in a music track, and suddenly you have a little story. You can even prompt the user to call a number or send a text message, delivering a surprising bit of audio in return. The output is pure HTML5, no Flash.

The post also has details on the team behind Zeega and how this summer there were awarded a $420,000 Knight News Challenge grant.

Co-founder Jesse Shapins tells Nieman how he feels hacks should seek to collaborate with hackers and how journalists should develop a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of specific technologies.

“I do think you should have a culture within journalism of creativity around interaction, around the ways in which code works, and what the code makes possible. That doesn’t mean making a journalist learn to write every single programming language that exists. If they’re able to have a rich understanding of the creative possibilities, they can creatively approach the projects that they create.”

There is more on how Zeega makes interactive storytelling simple here.

Similar posts:

• Five stories to inspire you to try Storify – which anyone can now join
• You can now add SoundCloud recordings to Storify
• Nieman: Will ‘like’, ‘share’, and ‘recommend’ influence the future of news?
• Storify adds slideshow view for blog posts, presentations and broadcasts
• Citizen Media Law Project: ‘Thou shalt not use multimedia in vain’

Tool of the week for journalists – TimeKiwi, to create social media timelines

Tool of the week: TimeKiwi

What is it? A new tool to turn tweets, blog posts and Instagram photos into a timeline. Add a Twitter handle, a Tumblr, WordPress and Posterous blog and an Instagram account and TimeKiwi will mash them into a combined timeline.

How is it of use to journalists? For storytelling. The tool allows you to demonstrate how a story has progressed. The tool does not require you to authorise the app so you can add any Twitter handle to see how that person’s tweets have played out over time.

Take this example of a timeline of canon Dr Giles Fraser who resigned from his role as chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral last week over plans to forcibly evict Occupy protesters. Adding his @giles_fraser handle allows you to show his tweets as either a vertical or horizontal timeline.

The free version of TimeKiwi cannot be embedded so it is of limited use in telling a story on your site but you can still share links to created timelines. A “business” version is in the pipeline which promises an embed feature and custom views which could be of particular interest to journalists who can then show mapped out tweets and blog posts within a news story.

This TimeKiwi takes in the @journalismnews Twitter account and the Journalism.co.uk WordPress blog.

Similar posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to cross-post Google+ posts to a WordPress blog
• Tool of the week for journalists – ifttt, a promising app for dealing with data
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: making Twitter @ replies public
• Tool of the week for journalists – Buffer, for scheduling tweets
• Ten technical Twitter tips for journalists

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how and when to attribute

Director of community engagement and social media at the Journal Register Company, Steve Buttry, has published an incredibly useful handout on how and when to attribute in articles, which he refers to as “a matter both of journalism ethics and of strong writing”:

Readers are entitled to know where we got our information. If we are citing official statistics gathered by a government agency, that tells the readers something. If we are citing the contentions of an interest group or a political partisan, that tells the readers something else. If we don’t attribute our information, readers rightly wonder how we know that.

Buttry’s advice includes when a journalist should and shouldn’t attribute, giving specific examples, as well as the importance of using copy and paste carefully, how to link out to sources, how to attribute anonymous sources and how best to reference press releases.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Similar posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – eight rules for accurate journalism
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – journalism education advice
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – investigative journalism
• Six pre-request FOI questions for journalists
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – serving local communities online

Newspaper image recognition app Paperboy launches for UK titles

From today you can use the free Paperboy iPhone and Android app to take a photo of newspaper or magazine article and image recognition technology will use the picture to find the digital version of that story. You can then share the digital article via social media or save to the app’s library, or to note taking and archiving platform Evernote.

The Guardian, Telegraph, Times and Independent are among over 100 UK titles to be searchable via a mobile phone photo. There are also plenty of local titles involved, such as the Yorkshire Post, Kent Messenger and Sunderland Echo.

“We bridge the gap between print and online”, Tom Desmet, marketing manager of Kooaba, the Swiss start-up specialising in the image recognition technology behind the app, told Journalism.co.uk, speaking of his high expectations for the app.

In a way it has the potential to revolutionise the newspaper business for both the reader and the publisher.

The technology was first introduced in Switzerland and last month was enabled for German and Austrian newspapers and magazines, following a partnership deal with digital news distributers NewspaperDirect. The UK, US and Canada today (Tuesday, 1 November) join the growing list of countries to have photo-searchable titles.

How are people using Paperboy?

The initial Swiss launch a year ago has given Kooaba the opportunity to test the app and discover how people are using it, Desmet explained.

About half of the usage is people who would like to remember a certain article or recipe, 25 per cent is about exploring additional content and the last 25 per cent is about sharing it.

Recipes are doing particularly well, according to Desmet.

We’ve got some magazines that are only doing recipes and people really love to remember those things.

How does the app make money for the company behind it?

There is no charge for smartphone users to download the Paperboy app and the basic package is free for publishers. Adding additional content, such as including videos in a digital article, carries an upgrade fee.

Kooaba earns “a little kick back fee” if a photo referral from the app to NewspaperDirect results in a reader paying for a digital subscription, but the majority of the apps’s earnings are generated by interactive adverts, Desmet explained.

If you take a picture of a page and there is an advert and it’s interactive, you can get additional product information or find the nearest retailer.

How can news publishers make their print editions interactive?

Publishers have two options to make their digital editions available: they can either approach NewspaperDirect or go directly to Kooaba.

All they have to do is upload a PDF of a newspaper every day to our backend and it will be interactive and it doesn’t cost them anything.

How does the image recognition technology work?

Desmet said the company is confident that the technology “works really well” and is almost aways problem-free. He said that stories that are text only and without photos are occasionally not recognised but this “almost never happens and it is something we are working on”.

Kooaba is a world leader in the image recognition field, according to Desmet, who said one of the company’s earlier apps predated Google Goggles, an app that allows you to take a photo of an object and use the picture to search the web.

We were the first to have the visual search, even before Google Goggles was out there, but then they created the same app and we couldn’t compete – so we got into a really specific use case and launched Paperboy.

Paperboy can be downloaded for free from the iTunes App Store and the Android Market. The company is also working to release a Windows phone app.

The Paperboy app can be used to snap and search the following UK titles, according to a list on NewspaperDirect.

Similar posts:

• Paperboy app: Take a photo of newspaper article to find the digital edition
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 29 October-4 November
• Pluck adds new features to social media technology
• MSN UK signs up with PressDisplay to add newspaper e-editions to site
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Google developing micropayment system in pitch to newspapers