#MozFest – Build ‘social video’ using Popcorn Maker

A still from “History in the Streets”

Imagine being able to add tweets, maps, and Wikipedia information to online video without coding skills. Consider having the ability to layer video with images from Google Street View as easily as hypertext allows you to link together web pages.

You can now do exactly that using the Popcorn Maker, a tool launched in alpha on Friday at the Mozilla Festival on media, freedom and the web in London.

Popcorn Maker is a web application that allows journalists who cannot code to add YouTube or Vimeo videos and select to add tweets, Flickr images and maps, plus use additional plugins to include images from Google Street View and even primary source documents from Document Cloud. Users of Popcorn Maker drag the elements onto the timeline using a platform that looks like Final Cut and other familiar software. Completed projects can then be embedded into news stories.

Online video journalism has had the tendency to follow TV conventions of talking heads, noddies (a cutaway of an interviewee nodding his or her head to hide an edit) and narrated video packages. What Popcorn offers is an easy way to create a web-native form of video storytelling. And because it is “social video” or “semantic video” experiences are dynamic, constantly updating, and customised right in the web browser for each user.

Popcorn.js is Mozilla’s HTML5 media toolkit, a javascript library for integrating the web into video production, launched version 1.0 at the festival.

The challenge of building Popcorn was first launched a year ago and since then the library has been gathering plugins thanks to an army of open source developers.

Popcorn has already being used in some newsrooms but until the launch of Popcorn Maker it has required embedded developers to code the mashups.

Brett Gaylor, project lead for Mozilla’s Popcorn told Journalism.co.uk what Popcorn offers video journalism.

It’s the ability to link to the relevant content that that video is about.

The basic function that Popcorn serves it to act as a timing layer over a video or audio file which means you are able to link times within video or audio to other content on the web.

For example, between 30 and 40 seconds into a video you could show a map of where where this interview took place. Or if you are doing a report on the second world war and you what to show where the Canadians were in Dieppe you could have a Wikipedia article that would appear at that given time.

And because it has the ability to link out to changing web content, a video, say, on the credit crisis will link to a hashtag and give the latest tweets.

In the above test example I added a YouTube video and grabbed the Twitter tool (bottom right), adding it to my timeline and searched for the #MozFest hashtag.

Gaylor hopes the beta version of Popcorn Maker will launch late spring 2012, with a polished, finished product by the end of next year.

We are now working on how to allow the user to lay those out on the page. We’ve conquered how to do it and now we have to make it a pleasing experience for the author to place those items on a page.

There several inspiring demos online, including History in the Streets, which links to Google Street View, and, on Wired.com, there is the documentary the One Millionth Tower, premiered at the festival and showing at the Frontline Club this evening (Monday 7 November) and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Popcorn gave filmmakers the ability to control a 3D environment and augment that environment with real time information from Wikipedia, Yahoo Weather API, Flickr and Google Maps.

Still from “The One Millionth Tower”

Ideas and examples of potential uses shared by Mozilla:

• Pull a football player’s real-time stats, Wikipedia entry or twitter feed right into the action of a game or sportscast;
• Pull a politician or pundit’s “truth score” history or voting record into an online interview;
• Dynamically inject photos from Flickr as “b-roll” or context for video or audio stories;
• Match footage about an oil spill with real-time footage of the spill’s present size in real time;
• Annotate political speeches or newscasts with viewers’ own media, commentary and social responses;
• Pull Google Street View onto the screen to dynamically explore depicted neighbourhoods and places.

Examples of uses of Popcorn so far include:

News

PBS Newshour used Popcorn to annotate President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address.  The French/German broadcaster Arte augmented current affairs programming using the platform. Both implementations involved developers working in the newsroom to code the social video.

Radio

Popcorn’s ability to augment video also applies to audio.  Radio pioneers Radiolab used Popcorn to invite fans to create accompanying visualizations for their “seeking symmetry” episode, while Danish Radio augmented their broadcast with an innovative “hyper-transcript” that allowed viewers to see a dynamic transcript of the audio, and select parts of the broadcast to tweet to their followers.

Commercial applications

Semantic video pioneer RAMP is using Popcorn to augment commercial content like the People’s Choice Awards.  RAMP’s MediaCloud technology produces automated tags and transcripts across 1800 videos and seamlessly integrates celebrity content from across the web into their video archive.

Video-conferencing and other applications

At the application layer, the open source web conferencing platform Big Blue Button has adopted Popcorn for playback of presentations and webinars. The educational platform Grockit also uses Popcorn to provide richer feedback from learners and teachers.

Project lead Brett Gaylor told Journalism.co.uk technology correspondent Sarah Marshall more about Popcorn.

Popcorn.js, an HTML5 javascript library for integrating the web into video production by journalismnews

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Guardian: Court of protection should be open to media, says leading judge

The processes of England’s most private court should be opened up to public and media scrutiny, the head of the court of protection Sir Nicholas Wall has said in an interview with the Guardian.

The media has recently been granted increased access to the proceedings of the court, which makes decisions in the cases of people deemed vulnerable or unable to make decisions for themselves, but on the rare occasions that the media is granted access judges still decide on a case-by-cases what they can have access to and report on, and at what stages of a case.

Wall told the Guardian:

It seems to me a matter of public interest. The public is, after all, entitled to know what’s going on. Locking up a mentally disabled person is a very serious thing to do and we don’t want people quietly locked up in private.

He added:

The decision about opening up the court is very fraught and people have very strong views. My entirely personal view is that provided we can protect the confidentiality of litigants and their families, there’s not a reason we can’t hear the cases in the presence of the media.

Read the full report on Guardian.co.uk at this link.

Journalism.co.uk court of protection coverage.

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#MozFest – First draft of new Data Journalism Handbook written in 48 hours

The first draft of a handbook to help journalists deal with data has been created this weekend, with plans for it to be published next week.

You can read the table of contents of the Data Journalism Handbook here.

The book was written in 48 hours at the Mozilla Festival in London, with contributions from 55 people, including staff from the BBC, Guardian and New York Times. It has six chapters and 20,000 words and is a response to a challenge set by Mozilla, a nonprofit technology company, to “assemble a utility belt for data-driven journalists”.

The challenge stated:

There’s increasing pressure on journalists to drive news stories and visualisations from data. But where do you start? What skills are needed to do data-driven journalism well? What’s missing from existing tools and documentation? Put together a user-friendly handbook for finding, cleaning, sorting, creating, and visualising data — all in service of powerful stories and reporting.

Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation and Liliana Bounegru, European Journalism Centre hosted sessions at the Mozilla Festival to create the handbook.

A blog post written by Gray lists some of the contributors

• James Ball, Guardian Datablog
• David Banisar, Article 19
• Caelainn Barr, EU Data Journalist
• Paul Bradshaw, City University London
• Nicolas Kayser-Bril, Data Journalist
• Heather Brooke, Journalist and FOI Campaigner
• Lisa Evans, Guardian Datablog
• Rich Gordon, Northwestern University
• Francis Irving, ScraperWiki
• Friedrich Lindenberg, Open Knowledge Foundation
• Cynthia O’Murchu, Financial Times
• Aron Pilhofer, New York Times
• Anthony Reuben, BBC News
• Simon Rogers, Guardian Datablog
• Sascha Venohr, Zeit Online
• Lulu Pinney, Infographic designer

Interested in getting started in data journalism? Kevin Anderson is leading an introduction to data journalism one-day training course for Journalism.co.uk in January 2012.

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The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 29 October-4 November

1. Newspaper image recognition app Paperboy launches for UK titles

2. Journalists get a photo byline in Google News (but only those on Google+)

3. Independent launches site redesign and new iPad app

4. Dying for the truth: drug cartels target journalists in Mexico

5. Phone hacking: Internal NI documents published

6. Fifth of FT.com traffic coming from mobile devices

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

8. Jo Yeates’ landlord: media responsible for ‘extraordinary tissue of fabrications’

9. Investigative journalism news site ExaroNews launches

10. Injunctions furore has calmed, editors tell select committee

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• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 12-18 November

#followjourn – @bydanielvictor Daniel Victor/social media editor

Who? Daniel Victor

Where? Daniel is the new social media editor at ProPublica

Twitter? @bydanielvictor

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips, we are recommending journalists to follow online too. Recommended journalists can be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to rachel at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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• #followjourn – @NateLanxon Nate Lanxon/Editor
• #followjourn – @duncanhooper Duncan Hooper/managing editor
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• #followjourn – @Maid_Marianne Marianne Bouchart/editor

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: making Twitter @ replies public

This may seem like an obvious one for a lot of experienced Twitter users, but it seems like a lot of journalists still don’t know about that dot you sometimes see at the start of a tweet, before someone’s handle.

It’s there because if you start a tweet with someone’s handle, it’ll only appear in the timeline of people that follow you both. If you stick a full stop before it, everyone will see it.

It’s a good thing to do for publishers especially, to show that they have responded to people. And it is useful when a conversation might benefit from someone else jumping in or you just want to make it more open.

An example, chosen because it was the most recent one I could find in my account:

Tipster: Joel Gunter

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.

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#jpod: What is the best time and frequency to post to Twitter and Facebook?

How frequently should news organisations post to Facebook? How often should the headline of a news story be tweeted? Why do some of your Facebook fans get to see your stories and others do not?

Three experts in social media optimisation (SMO) have the answers.

In this podcast Journalism.co.uk technology correspondent Sarah Marshall talks to Jeff Widman, co-founder of PageLever, an Facebook analytics company used by four of the top 10 Facebook pages; Jiri Voves, co-founder of Socialbakers, which aims to be the top provider of Facebook statistics; and Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer.

Podcast: Download

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Guardian: Number of possible phone hacking victims close to 5,800, say police

The number of possible phone hacking victims is now close to 5,800, the Met police have confirmed.

This is 2,000 more than previously stated by the force.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said:

It is not possible to give a precise figure about the number of people whose phones have actually been hacked but we can confirm that as of today’s date, 3 November 2011, the current number of potentially identifiable persons who appear in the material, and who may therefore be victims, where names are noted, is 5,795. This figure is very likely to be revised in the future as a result of further analysis.

See the full story on Guardian.co.uk at this link.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: timing your Facebook posts

In Journalism.co.uk’s tech podcast tomorrow, Sarah Marshall will be looking at social media optimisation. Before that, here are some tips from PageLever’s Jeff Widman on Mashable for timing your Facebook posts to reach the largest number of people.

If you post often, you will see an immediate spike in News Feed impressions, but it’s generally not worth the cost in lost fans. When your fans see two status updates from you in their News Feeds, they’ll likely get annoyed, and will consequently unsubscribe or un-fan. There are few exceptions to this rule.

If you post too infrequently, you’re missing out on opportunities to reach your fans. Over the course of a year, a page with 10,000 fans that posts only half as often as they could misses more than 1 million chances to get their content in front of a hyper-targeted Facebook audience. The larger your fan page, the more often you should be posting — without annoying your fans.

See the full post on Mashable at this link.

Tipster: Joel Gunter

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.

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SoundCloud launches HTML5 widget viewable on iPhone and iPad

SoundCloud has today released an HTML5 player enabling audio recordings embedded in news stories to be viewed on an iPhone or iPad.

The move will no doubt be welcomed by news organisations and podcasters, keen to embed audio in posts but aware that the iPad and iPhone audience cannot view them as Apple devices do not support Flash.

In an announcement SoundCloud lists the features of the public beta version of its widget and named those who have been using the first test version.

• iPad/iPhone mobile support
• Attractive new waveform design encourages more interactivity with the sound
• Timed comments now are more usable on the widget (at the request of users)
• Easier to view information about the sound (e.g. title, person)
• Easier sharing (e.g. Facebook Like, Google+ and Twitter sharing options)

In addition, this HTML5 widget is the first move to provide creators with clearer indicators of possible sharing actions and further transitions SoundCloud away from a pure music player to more robust, interactive sound object. Thus far, Britney Spears, Big Time Rush, Wattpad, Intelligence Squared (a global forum for live debate), Future Human Podcast and West African Democracy Radio have been using SoundCloud’s HTML5 widget and as this beta test is the first iteration, subsequent versions will include even more social elements.  The public beta is built on a new HTML5 technology platform that will allow SoundCloud to add new features to the widgets at a faster pace from now on.

Last month, SoundCloud announced a partnership with Storify, allowing users to add SounCloud recordings to the curation site.

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