Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Delaware

Innovations in Journalism – share your links. Wait, isn’t that Del.icio.us? No, it’s more social – it’s Mento

Oliver Luft — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:12:22 +0000

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. This week’s ticket comes via Mento – sharing links, real social like.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi, I’m Gregor Hochmut. Mento is a platform for sharing links with the people around you. They could be co-workers, family, thought leaders you look up to – or simply friends who send you a humorous video every now and then.

Del.ici.ous and other bookmarking platforms have mostly focused on “saving” links for private use.

Mento, however, wants to focus on the communication and conversation that takes place – beyond the limited usefulness of email and instant messaging – when you share a link.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
In its current version, Mento is most useful as a collaboration tool for journalists. A group of could join together and put links about a shared topic in a common channel. Links in the channel would be visible to the team.

They could comment on each other and have a permanent, searchable archive for their links.

In addition, Mento is a simple communication tool for sending recommendations to people, its careful not to overwhelm with email so you get just one a day with all the links – or you can subscribe by RSS.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Journalists and publishers will be interested in the next expansion of the service. We intend to offer an easy publishing tool where you can create a branded, editorial link channel and publish it.

Imagine an RSS feed of relevant links that your editorial staff gathers on a daily, weekly or monthly basis – but the feed would be a public website (fully co-branded) that’s designed for regular web users who can easily subscribe to your link selection by email and other convenient means.

4) Why are you doing this?
There is more and more noise in our information environment every day and it’s getting harder and harder to filter the meaningful signals.

We’re on a mission to make your daily information streams more manageable and more meaningful.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Mento is free and always will be for the end-user.

6) How will you make it pay?
Along the lines of the branded editorial channels mentioned above, we will consider the economics of offering a professional link publishing service – but we have not finalized the business model for it so far.

In the meantime, we have had surprisingly good results with Google’s contextual AdSense program on the current Mento site since the advertisements are targeted based on the links that the user sends and receives.

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Social Media Journalist: “The problem with most news organisations is a lack of editorial understanding of social media” Kevin Anderson, Guardian blogs editor

Oliver Luft — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:39:55 +0000

Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Kevin Anderson, Guardian.co.uk.

1) Who are you and what do you do?
Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at Guardian.co.uk.

My title is misnomer seeing as desk editors handle most of the commissioning.

My role is two-fold. I spot newsworthy items bubbling up in social media – blogs, social news sites, Twitter, etc – and report on that or pass it along to the appropriate site editor.

I also seed and develop strategies to promote Guardian content in those social networks. My current focus is what I call real-time innovation. I use emerging tools for editorial purposes and feed back lessons we learn into our editorial development process.

2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
People ask me how I stay on top of it all, and I say that my network is my filter. I have Twhirl and IM on constantly, sitting in the background. New media professionals and contacts around the world pass me things I need to read or stories I need to follow up on through Skype, Twitter, IM and Del.icio.us.

Popurls.com is a great one-stop site for buzz, especially for the US elections, which I’m following right now. NetNewsWire, Flock and Ecto are my blogging tools of choice.

The Flock browser is good in a number of ways. Its Flickr uploader is great – better than Flickr’s until recently. It also allows you to add sites to multiple Del.icio.us accounts.

You can go from reading your RSS feeds to blogging instantly in Flock, as it pulls NetNewsWire functionality into the browser too.

For publishing, a combination of Ecto and any good blogging platform creates the best multimedia journalism tool that I’ve ever used.

I recently got a Nokia N82. With its stellar camera and integrated Flickr uploader it has a lot of promise , but it’s hampered by poor data plans in the UK.

The mobile carriers are focusing on USB-based data plans to link computers to the mobile web, which maybe a good start, but there are still too few good data plans for phones.

I end up relying on WiFi, which on the N82 is much better than on previous phones.

3) Of the thousands of social media tools available could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or newsgathering tool?
I think in terms of editorial objectives and then find an applicable tool. In 12 years of doing online journalism, I’ve had to learn hundreds of desktop tools, content management systems and now a dizzying range of social media tools.

You have to be aware of them to work effectively. Knowing about the tools allows me to do something on deadline without worrying whether it can be developed on time.

However, the problem with most news organisations isn’t a lack of tools or technology but a cultural lack of editorial understanding of social media, internet media and internet culture.

Most news organisations continue to try to force their existing editorial strategies into the social media space instead of considering editorial strategies that are appropriate for the space.

Online video isn’t television on the internet, just as blogs are not about publishing a newspaper with comments.

I can use Twitter both as a newsgathering and promotional tool, or I can just use it to broadcast headlines at people.

Social media can increase loyalty from visitors to a site and increase the time they spend on the site, but it’s not about the tools but the way that journalists use them.

4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
I hate to sound like a broken record because others have said this before, but I really think Facebook is overrated for the majority of our audiences.

Traditional journalists who had never seen, much less used a social network before, hyped it because it was a revelation to them.

However, for those who had used social networks before, it was YASN – yet another social network – only shinier, with 20 per cent more Web 2.0 goodness.

I believe in freeing content and making it available where the audiences are, so it makes sense for content to be easily available to Facebook users and for news organisations to have a presence there.

News organisations can learn things from the success of Facebook, but they should also study the life cycle of social networks and learn not only from their successes but also from their failures.

Allowing like-minded readers or viewers to connect and interact using your content as a focus is a good social media strategy.

Hosting and taking an active role in the conversations around your content is also a good social media strategy.

Building a site or service that externalises community and keeps the ‘unwashed masses’ at a safe distance from journalists creates nasty overheads. It also means managing communities and brings nothing to your journalism and very little to your site visitors.

Why would Facebook users decide to move to InsertNewspaperHere-book?

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Search Engine Journal: using Del.icio.us to analyse site performance

Laura Oliver — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:52:23 +0000

Handy tips on how to use social bookmarking tool Del.icio.us to discover why people are tagging your content and what keywords they are using.

The tool can also be used to assess the popularity – in terms of bookmarked content – of your competitors’ sites.

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Social Media Journalist: “I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a media type who’s ever heard of Del.icio.us.,” Robert Hardie, Northcliffe Media

Oliver Luft — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:53:25 +0000

Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Robert Hardie, from UK regional newspaper publisher Northcliffe Media.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
Robert Hardie, content strategy director for Northcliffe Media.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
All Northcliffe’s 56 This Is websites for obvious reasons, LinkedIn, Facebook (probably weekly) and my Attensa for Outlook RSS reader.

We get 200,000+ interactions across the This Is network, which is an amazing insight into what normal people use UGC and social media for.

LinkedIn to keep aware of who’s doing what that we might benefit from, Facebook to see what it’s doing more than what my friends are doing (I just speak to them), Attensa for Outlook so that all my RSS feeds end up on my Blackberry.

3. Of the thousands of social media tools available, could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or a news gathering tool?
Google News, it works for both readers and publishers and indexes better and wider than anyone else.

4. And the most overrated in your opinion?
Del.icio.us. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a media type who’s ever heard of it, let alone used it.

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Social Media Journalist: “Facebook is overrated. The novelty is wearing off and people are getting bored” Matthew Buckland

Oliver Luft — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:22:00 +0000

Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Matthew Buckland from Mail & Guardian, South Africa.

1) Who are you and what do you do?
I am Matthew Buckland, the GM of Mail & Guardian Online.

As head of the online division I am responsible for the overall online and mobile strategy, with an overview of editorial, production, technical and online sales.

I am also involved quite heavily in our social media strategies and sites.

2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
I use Twitter, both web and mobile. I blog on my own blog about online media, web 2.0 and technology, thoughtleader.co.za and sometimes on Poynter’s new media titbits.

I use Mybloglog on my blog quite a bit. I use Facebook web and mobile… but less and less these days. At the end of last year I began using Slideshare to share my presentations and see others. I Digg every now and again, and use a local version, Muti.co.za.

I also keep half an eyeball on Linkedin – but don’t really do it justice. I am an occasional Del.ici.ous user. I use both Flickr and Picasa as online photo albums/photo sharing.

For video sharing I use Youtube, obviously. I’m also a wikipediaholic.

I used SecondLife for about a week, but realised it would be best for my health to shut it down and never look at it again

Generally I find these social media tools are a good way of networking, sharing ideas and content, and building relationships with people. They also waste a lot of time and create noise in my life.

3) Of the thousands of social media tools available could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or newsgathering tool?
I think of all the hyped up social media tools we’ve seen, blogging has shown that it is more than just a fad, but here to stay.

We’ve seen how mainstream online publishers have embraced blogs both as new publishing formats and newsgathering tool with considerable success.

4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
I’m beginning to think Facebook is overrated. The novelty is wearing off and people are getting bored, very quickly.

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Social Media Journalist: ‘Services like ustream or qik that live stream video from DV cams and phones have huge potential’ Damon Kiesow

Oliver Luft — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:41:07 +0000

Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Damon Kiesow, Nashua Telegraph.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
I am the Managing Editor/Online at The Telegraph in Nashua, NH. I am responsible for the overall news presentation and strategy for our digital publications including NashuaTelegraph.com, NHPrimary.com, FeastNH.com and EncoreBuzz.com.

We have a staff of about 50 in the newsroom and nashuatelegraph.com was a finalist in two categories in this year’s Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge Awards.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
On a typical day:

I use each for a variety of reasons. Delicious is my reigning favourite due to the huge filtering and early warning effect it provides. I follow about 78 people, mostly digital media professionals.

A few times per day I review their most recent bookmarks to keep up to date on what they are thinking about and what new tools and toys they have discovered.

I know many of them do the same and some of my ‘best’ ideas we have implemented at the paper have come from those bookmarks.

Twitter serves a similar purpose – and I am following many of the same people as on Delicious. But I like Twitter for the flexibility (IM, phone, PC, Web) and both the immediacy and asynchronous nature of the service.

It is just a great way to stay in touch with people without the burden of reading or responding to email or phone calls.

I use Ning mostly every day to visit sites like wiredjournalists.com, and we have created several Ning sites for the newspaper including Encorebuzz.ning.com.

I have been on LinkedIn for 5 – 6 years and it is still the best place to accumulate business contacts. I probably do not use it every day, but a few times a week I get requests to connect.

Facebook is one I use just due to the critical mass of people they have online. I check it every day and we do have a few small applications running on the service that feed out breaking news from the newspaper. Most of my time there is spent ignoring Zombie and Pirate invitations.

3. Of the thousands of social media tools available, could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or a news gathering tool?
If I had to choose from just the tools I use regularly – I would pick Twitter. They have really focused on a core concept and seem very open to letting people expand on it.

It is too early to say if Twitter will be a huge hit for us as a newspaper but we pick up a few followers a week and the trend seems to be increasing.

I like the fact that we can use it both simply to push content (using twitterfeed.com) and as a two-way conversation with readers. We follow anyone who follows us and try to be responsive to questions or comments that come in via our Twitter friends.

In terms of other products – I think the most likely winners this year will be services like ustream.tv or qik.com that allow live streaming video from DV cameras and cell phones respectively.

This has huge potential both as a newsgathering tool and as a social media/self publishing phenomena. We are just starting to experiment with both of these services.

4. And the most overrated in your opinion?
At the moment I consider Facebook to be the most overrated. Things are beginning to change but it is still a walled garden for the most part.

I would not be comfortable investing a lot time or effort in using Facebook as a social media platform for the newspaper without some continued opening up of their API and clarification of their terms of service.

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Social Media Journalist: “BBC journalists are increasingly using Del.icio.us to collaborate and turn research into content” Robin Hamman, BBC Senior Broadcast Journalist

Oliver Luft — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:55:48 +0000

Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry. This week, Robin Hamman of the BBC.

1) Who are you and what do you do?
Robin Hamman, I’m a Senior Broadcast Journalist at the BBC where I spend much of my time showing people how to use social media and blogging as part of their ordinary programme and content making processes.

2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
Most of them! My day starts with a visit to my web-based RSS reader that pulls in all the new content from around 90 blogs and other sources I subscribe to.

Some of those feeds are also things like Technorati, Icerocket and Google blog searches on various keywords. This means I very rarely have to proactively seek out content on the web anymore.

As I read through my RSS feeds I use Del.icio.us to bookmark and share the interesting content I find. This, in turn, publishes into my blog automatically at lunchtime – again, creating content out of something I’d do anyway.

If I’m out and about I’ll use Zonetag on my mobile to tag, location stamp and upload photos to Flickr. I also use Twitter to stay in touch with my friends and contacts, something via mobile, other times online.

If I’m planning to go out of town for work or a conference I put the details into Dopplr so I can see if any of my contacts are also going to be in town. I’m also a big user of Facebook – it, along with Twitter, has pretty much taken the place of email for me recently. I’m also experimenting with a few other social media tools such as qik, which broadcasts live video from my phone to the web, and some RSS aggregation tools like Yahoo Pipes.

3) Of the thousands of social media tools available could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or news-gathering tool?
If the question had been simply about online tools, then RSS would be my choice, but as you’ve asked about social tools, Del.icio.us is the one I’d highlight as having a lot of potential.

Get over to the CommonCraft video about it and you’ll soon understand. BBC Journalists and production teams are increasingly discovering and using this great tool to collaborate more easily whilst researching and to turn their research process into content.

4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
Anything to do with video online – I just don’t get it. The only reason I shoot and post video online, aside from when I’m demonstrating how to do it, is to save my hands from having to transcribe a conference presentation that I’m live blogging.

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Food for thought on feeds (but only a third fed)

John Thompson — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:48:26 +0000

Yesterday was a day of thirds for me. Two thirds good, one third not so good. In the first two thirds, I attended a roundtable discussion on RSS hosted by MediaFed, a provider of RSS feed tools and services.

It would have been topped off with an excellent three-course meal had I not had to leave for another meeting after the starter (so only one third of a lunch for me, and those that know me well will appreciate how I grieved for the loss of that sticky ginger pudding).

Ahem, but I digress. The purpose of the first discussion was to get some representatives from the UK publishing industry around a table to discuss their current implementation of RSS feeds and how they expect the platform to develop in the future. Before I summarise the points of the discussion, I think it would be useful to summarise what I think are the key RSS requirements from both readers and publishers.

What users want
1. Many people who have embraced RSS feeds are now suffering from feed overload. They want a way of pre- or post-filtering the content so they don’t have to wade through so much stuff.

2. People who have not yet embraced RSS feeds want platforms like widgets that allow them to do or read useful stuff on their desktops or on their social networking pages without having to do anything other than click a download link. In other words, products that already have the RSS feeds built in.

3. They almost certainly don’t want adverts; they definitely don’t want advertising content masquerading as editorial.

4. They may or may not want partial (headline and intro only) or complete feeds; my guess is that most would like the option.

5. They want to get their content from a range of sources of their own choice combined in a single feed.

6. They want feeds they can customise at source, eg by conducting a keyword search of a news archive and being able to subscribe to a feed of the results.

What publishers want

1. To make money from feeds, either by directly advertising within them, or by using them to drive people back to pages that contain advertising.

2. Most publishers probably still prefer to drive people back to their sites by only offering partial feeds.

3. They want detailed metrics on their feeds; who, what, when, why and how.

4. They don’t want their feeds to be used commercially by third parties ie they don’t want anyone else making money off the back of their content.

5. They want to enhance the user experience, but they also want to promote their brand.

Now to the discussion, with the caveat that this is not meant to be a detailed report, more a mix of points made at the meeting combined with my own thoughts.

If people are reading content with their RSS readers via mobile phones, email clients, aggregators etc, what role does the website actually play in the production of content?

The end of the home page? Well, not yet; I have personally seen no evidence of RSS draining away a significant amount of traffic from the home page of Journalism.co.uk and none of the publisher representatives present had either. Which is not to say that it isn’t happening to some degree, or will not increasingly happen in the future.

The Guardian, which currently only offers partial feeds (headline and short intro) is planning to offer the option of full content, with adverts, and hopes that links within that full content will drive people back to the site. The good news, according to MediaFed, is that there is some evidence that people will still click back to your site even if you offer full articles in your feed.

Feed take up is also an issue; The Guardian believes somewhere between five and eight per cent of its general news audience is using RSS. For other publishers that concentrate on technology titles, it’s naturally higher – about 10 to 15 per cent.

I expect that feeds and feed readers will become increasingly more sophisticated and will effectively serve up the equivalent of a web page, complete with channel tabs, multimedia content, advertising, related links etc. But the originating web site will still exist as a central hub to produce and gather content from readers and slice and dice it across various platforms.

What is the future of ‘RSSlets?’

RSSlets are essentially social bookmarking tools that link a post in a feed to services like Digg, Del.icio.us etc, or allow you to email the story link to a friend, or allow you to comment on it. Basically a viral marketing tool, probably still mostly being used by ’super-users’, ie technologically and web savvy people.

According to MediaFed, readers will use such tools even if you only provide a partial feed. And a lot of publishers fail to include a link to subscribe to their own feed, within their feeds.

RSS Customisation: Are dynamic RSS feeds the way forward in providing the subscriber with the level of detail they seek?

For example, a site visitor conducts a search on a site using a particular keyword and then subscribes to a feed of the results. The Sun offers this facility. Feeds built ‘on the fly’ like this can put a lot of load on a host server if the site is very large with a lot of diverse content and a lot of users, and the other disadvantage is that subscribers may never see other content that might also interest them that they could not have anticipated when they created their own customised feed.

For publishers, this highlights the need to include related links in feeds, especially full ones. It could also provide them with some interesting statistics on what really interests readers and even flag up ideas for applications such as desktop widgets telling you, for example, what the weather will be like on the ski slopes of France (France + ski-ing + weather).

Such a service really puts readers back in control, being able to drill down to such an extent that they might only receive a handful of posts, infrequently, in a particular feed. It is also a service that lends itself to mash-up feeds – aggregations of feeds from numerous sources into a single feed (more on that later).

Full or partial content: what are the benefits and limitations of these formats in driving traffic back to the website?

If your site relies on display advertising revenue, then there is the risk that full content may reduce clickthroughs back to your site where the advertising resides, although MediaFed suggested that clickthrough rates from full and partial content seem to be about equal. To be sure, you might need to sell and place advertising within the feed itself. This might be a hard sell; there are still top advertising agencies out there who have absolutely no idea about RSS. It’s also probably a good strategy to build links back to other content on your site within each article in the feed.

If you present more content in a feed, more often than not it will be read, especially if it contains imagery. If you just provide a headline and standfirst and they are particularly descriptive, then a reader might decide that that is all they need to know about the story, and fail to click through.

SEO (search engine optimisation) perspectives: is there a set of best practice rules to enhance feed distribution and subscriber take-up?

1. Avoid jargon wherever possible – ‘feed’ is better than ‘RSS’.

2. Put subscribe icons everywhere on every page of your site.

3. Use recognisable icons – http://www.feedicons.com/

4. Use widgets and social networking platforms to promote and distribute.

5. Ensure there is a link to your RSS feed in the meta tags of every page.

6. Include subscription links within your feeds and title them clearly so people know where they are coming from.

RSS portals: are feed aggregation services the future for RSS; will we want to pre-filter individual feeds to create a single valid output?

In the absence of customisable feeds, many users would like to be able filter a feed for relevant content, either by keyword, or by category (categories are a bit like tags, commonly used on blogs to group content – if you view feeds with categories attached to posts in IE7, they will display in a side panel). Better still, they would like to do that with a number of feeds from different sources, and then combine them into a single feed.

There is currently a paucity of online services that allow you to create pre-filtered aggregations of feeds – Feed Rinse is one (although when we tested it we couldn’t get it to produce a valid feed), Yahoo Pipes is another.

But there are plenty of aggregation services and if more feeds become customisable at source, publishers can expect their content to be mashed up with those of their rivals.

RSS mash-ups: who is using my data? RSS makes it so much easier for content to be sliced and diced and morphed into other feeds. Are we ‘tolerating’ this at the moment since most of the views still come via the web site? Who owns my data?

Clearly the publisher owns the data and most will have licence terms in place regarding the use of this data. Re-publishing someone else’s entire content without permission and for profit is clearly going to attract the attention of the copyright lawyers.

But, as was the situation with free versus paid content, the readers will drive the agenda here. Those that try to prevent their (partial) content from being mashed up with that of others may well lose out to their competitors. Old news notions about exclusivity and getting the scoop no longer apply online; you can be last with a story and still get the majority of the traffic. Obviously the easier it is is to slice and dice your content in as many ways as possible, the more likely you are to win the numbers game.

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