Trinity Mirror has relaunch the website of West London’s Hounslow Chronicle.
The new site includes hyperlocal community features – pioneered by Trinity’s Teesside Gazette – for areas of Hounslow, Feltham, Isleworth and Brentford.
Telegraph.co.uk is set to introduce a raft of ecommerce propositions across its site this summer as it aims to bring in revenue channels beyond traditional advertising, according to NMA.
The site’s commercial team is in talks with potential partners for services that are likely to include an enhanced shopping platform, a price-comparison service and betting.
Google has just held its two day European Zeitgeist conference in the UK bringing together a host of captivating speakers, here are just a few of the session videos – many more on the Zeitgeist YouTube channel.
Matthew d’Ancona interviews Chad Hurley
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA_Lw9zCT2E]Sir Salman Rushdie
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka1Y1BY19Vw]The future of online video panel with Ashley Highfield and others
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmsUWuh0CU]
Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acoC5zjgM0]Content vs community panel part 1 (Inc. Mattias Cohler, Facebook, & William Lewis, editor of The Telegraph)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7awAN8ceIgc]Content vs community part 2
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aan24cfI1bg]Have to admit this had passed me by (so thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the point) at launch, but YouTube has unleashed on the world a channel specifically for citizen journalism called…wait for it…Citizen News.
It has also hired a news manager to oversee the whole affair. Here she is:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQkON7NN6WY]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.
Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.
I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).
Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).
Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.
External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.
The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.
As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.
This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.
In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog – like the Times’ sub-site – draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.
Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.
The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.
The independence of the Guardian’s three national titles – Guardian.co.uk, Observer and Guardian in print – will not be compromised by the integration of the news production process across the titles, editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette.
Rusbridger claimed that combining the titles would ‘unlock the creativity’ of his staff but that the distinct voices of each title would remain. Senior editors met with staff last week to discuss the future of the newspapers as it integrates its production processes.
News and information company Thomson Reuters has confirmed that it is cutting 140 journalist posts by the end of the year.
According to the Guardian, head of news David Schlesinger wrote an internal email which explained that areas of “natural overlap and duplication in coverage” existed between the two companies and that as a result jobs would go.
The cuts, which will take place later in the year, are expected mostly to be of editorial staff in Europe.
Michael Arrington says the spat between Google and Facebook over the banning of Google’s Friend Connect is purely and simply about control of users and user information.
“Internet giants know that the days of getting you to spend all of your time inside their walled gardens are over,” he writes.
“So the next best thing is to at least maintain as much data about the user as possible, and make sure they identify with your brand while they are out there not being on your site.”
OpenID is becoming popular with developers as it allows users to log into sites with IDs taken from elsewhere – thus encouraging users not to move all their info wholesale.
Facebook and MySpace, he says, keep users happy and prevent them from moving all their personal info to other sites by allowing some portability so they don’t leave entirely.
“Not too portable, mind you.”
Join the queue Scotland…