Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

#media140 – Impure visual data tool to tell the story

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There has been a range of session formats at #media140, from in-depth keynote speeches and discussion roundtables, to more jam-packed workshops showcasing some of the latest tools in social technology.

Today I attended one of the latter, a session on visualising data by Spanish design house Bestiario.

While it was, in a way, a whirlwind tour of the company’s information processing platform Impure, delegates managed to get a great overview of what it can produce (on my part only with thanks to my translator!)

The focus of the session was not about the written story, but simply visualisation, telling the story with infographics using, in essence, a drag and drop technique.

Just today the Guardian published a visualisation by Bestiario looking at who the UK gives aid to and how it has changed.

For a more detailed explanation of how to use the tool you can visit the site itself, but in simple terms the platform enables journalists to create data visualisation projects.

Users can import data files (csv), convert into a table, pull out specific fields, create different data structures and also select from a range of visualisation formats, based on the data you’re working with.

The final visualisations are publicly published on Impure, and users can also embed the infographics on their own site.

At the moment the application is free to use, and the company says there will always be “an open version”, in order to build and maintain a community.

Flip video cameras to be discontinued

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Multimedia journalists’ favourite the Flip video camera is to be discontinued.

In a release sent out today, Cisco, which bought out the mini video camera with built-in USB two years ago, said it is to shut down its Flip business.

Cisco said it will “support current FlipShare customers and partners with a transition plan”.

Launched in May 2007, the Flip had sold a million digital camcorders in the US by the following year and was becoming increasingly popular in the UK.

In a release in 2008, Cisco reported the Flip captured 14 per cent of the total video camera market and was worth more than £340 million.

Mashable: The New Yorker puts story behind ‘like’ wall

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Mashable is reporting on how the New Yorker has employed a music industry technique to engage with its readers by demanding that they ‘like’ a Facebook page before they can read a story.

The magazine has put an article by author Jonathan Franzen behind a ‘wall of likes’ by making it necessary for Facebook users to engage in order to gain access. Franzen’s piece, which is about coming to terms with the death of friend and fellow author David Foster Wallace, appeared in the print version of he magazine but not on the website.

To read the story online (it will appear in print, but not in full on the New Yorker‘s website), users have to go on the Conde Nast title’s Facebook Page and “Like” it. The title’s Facebook Page has about 200,000 fans. “Our goal with this isn’t just to increase our fans,” says Alexa Cassanos, a spokeswoman for the New Yorker. “We want to engage with people who want to engage on a deeper level.”

Mashable’s full article is at this link.

The Atlantic: The hackers who keep the Washington Post running

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The Atlantic has a feature explaining how, and why, developers create a variety of news apps at Washington Post. The article includes details of this tool that was designed to allow WashingtonPost.com visitors to read tweets written in Russian following an explosion at Moscow airport in January, plus several other examples of creating apps for planned events and for breaking news.

With dozens of stories appearing in the Washington Post every day and only so many web developers, there’s only so many ideas the team can deploy. Deciding which ideas are acted upon comes down to what [senior web developer Dan] Drinkard described as ‘level of effort versus perceived value and impact’. His job is to balance long term projects that center around a news event they know is coming – a major debate or election, for instance – with these short one-offs. ‘It’s sort of split three ways,’ he explained. ‘There’s the big stuff, initiatives that you know you’re going to spend the next six months working on. There’s the little stuff that you spend one or two months on, or even a matter of weeks, and there’s the little stuff that comes up every day so you can help unstick something.’

Some of these projects include an interactive map allowing readers to follow the movement of Middle East protests, a Google Maps tool to allow Marine Corps Marathon attendees to geo-tag their photos, and QR codes in the print edition of the paper that aim to drive readers to further coverage online.

[Deputy editor Cory] Haik said that not every interactive item the Post launches has news value – some, like the Charlie Sheen quote randomizer, are mainly for fun. When the Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a shooting of the next Transformers installment, it invited readers to submit their own Photoshop version of the image. While I’m sure a serious foreign policy enthusiast would enjoy a Twitter aggregation of a Pakistani governor’s tweets, sometimes you have to feed your Reddit readers with some sad Keanu Reeves.

The Atlantic’s full post is at this link.

Nieman: New data on the Daily suggests social media decline

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Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab has been analysing the success – or as he believes the decline – of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad only US newspaper, the Daily, by monitoring tweets sent directly from the app.

This post is interesting, not only as an insight into possible problems at the Daily, but for some of the techniques and tools Benton uses for his analysis.

No one outside News Corp. and Apple has a reliable way of knowing how often people read the Daily. But there is one way in which the Daily’s app interacts with the public web — through Twitter sharing. On nearly every page in the app, there’s a sharing button in the top right that allows the reader to share a link to the story on Twitter or other social networks. (A few pages, like the table of contents and user-customized pages, aren’t sharable.)

Benton has used PostRank, a Canadian social media indexing service that analyses how individual web pages are shared through social media.

It’s easy to think of a tweet as just 140 characters, but there’s a lot of metadata around that little snippet of text: when it was tweeted, who tweeted it, how many followers she has, what date she joined Twitter, and more. Amidst all that data is information about where each tweet was generated. Did it come from Twitter’s web interface, or from the official Twitter BlackBerry app, or a third-party app like Echofon or TweetDeck? That’s in there.

And thanks to Twitter’s requirement that app developers register with its API to allow in-app tweeting, that means you can track every time someone tweets from within the Daily.

The data doesn’t look good for the Daily. Its activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the app started charging users.

Nieman Lab’s full post is at this link.

Facebook launches page for journalists

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Facebook has launched a new page for journalists to help them “find sources, interact with readers, and advance stories,” a post by the social media company has announced.

The page, which has racked up more than 5,000 ‘likes’ since it was launched yesterday, also promises to “provide journalists with best practices for integrating the latest Facebook products with their work and connecting with the Facebook audience of more than 500 million people”.

Facebook cites what it sees as “great examples for how Facebook can be used as a reporting tool”.

NPR uses Facebook to source stories
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof reported from his Facebook Page while on the ground in Cairo
Ian Shapira of the Washington Post recently used Facebook as a powerful storytelling advice

Facebook is also launching a series of meet up groups around the world, kicking off in California later this month.

Within landscape design, the creation of artificial waterfalls has emerged as a fusion of art and function. These structures, sculpted from art concrete, mimic natural stone to disguise utility installations. This fake, yet convincing, aesthetic is achieved using faux stone materials, offering flexibility for both indoor and outdoor applications. Despite being artificial, these concrete waterfalls exhibit impressive resilience, contributing a lasting, beautiful feature to any setting.

Mashable: Converting a Facebook profile to a Facebook page

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Mashable is reporting on something that will come in very handy to anyone who has created a personal Facebook ‘profile’ rather than a ‘page’ for a newspaper, news website or other organisation: a Facebook profile can now be converted to a page.

Though the terminology is often muddled, a key difference between the two features is that users can simply “like” a Page while they must “friend” (establish a mutual relationship with) a profile, which makes Pages a much better solution for businesses and public figures.

Using Facebook’s new tool any ‘Friends’ from a profile will be transferred to become ‘fans’ of the new page.

Mashable’s full post is at this link.

Media Release: Ongo adds Reuters to news feeds

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News aggregation service Ongo is adding Reuters to its news feeds on offer to subscribers to its service.

Ongo launched earlier this year and offers content from news outlets including the Guardian and the Associated Press and provides a single web interface where full articles are delivered alongside customisation features, as well as curated content by an editorial team.

According to a release, the addition of Reuters brings the total number of daily stories for subscribers to more than 600.

Ongo’s base package consists of AP, Financial Times, New York Times picks, USA Today and Washington Post articles.

BBC Blog: IPTV is ‘arguably the platform of the future’

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The BBC wants to build a prototype and pilot Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).

Speaking at the IPTV World Forum yesterday, Fearnley, who is general manager news and knowledge of BBC Future Media, said IPTV – which allows content from the internet is displayed on a connected TV – is “arguably the platform of the future”.

Writing on the BBC Internet Blog after delivering the speech, Fearnley says there are opportunities for BBC News Online in IPTV.

Screen Digest reports that by 2014 90 per cent of TV sets sold in Europe will be internet enabled. And of course, connected TVs are only part of the story; around three quarters of major brand consoles purchased in 2011 will be browser enabled so this is a huge area of growth.

That said, the IPTV market is in its infancy and we don’t know what mainstream audience reaction will be. An agreed editorial strategy and defined product roadmap from the BBC are still a way off, but in the meantime we’re keen to prototype and pilot within the market, glean audience feedback, and iterate quickly.

Fearnley goes on to imagine how IPTV could develop.

By looking at the strengths of BBC News on the web we can start to see how the service could be re-imagined for IPTV. When BBC News Online was refreshed last year we introduced ‘live pages’, housing up-to-the-minute AV content and real-time updates. Major events continue to demonstrate that traditional, ‘lean-back’ consumption isn’t enough for audiences. During the recent disaster in Japan over 79,996 users ‘shared’ the live page; the live event experience on the web is strong.

Imagine a browser-based BBC News experience on your TV. With closer proximity between the live broadcast and BBC Online you can envisage users dipping out of a London 2012 linear broadcast to access details of an athlete, event, or location online – a context enriched by our advances in dynamic semantic publishing, which my colleague Jem Rayfield blogged about last year.

In comparison, apps optimised to a platform standard could deliver a more focused type of utility. You can imagine a BBC News app for connected TV that unites digital journalism with the AV of the BBC News Channel, improved by on-demand, allowing users to navigate through bulletins and to drive their own consumption. There’s huge potential here, and the BBC’s role is the same as ever: expressing the full, creative potential of the medium.

Feanley’s post says IPTV is in its infancy and appeals to the industry to develop technologies in a way that are easy to use –  just as Ceefax was.

“A simple, intuitive navigational platform standard – seamlessly integrating linear and on-demand worlds – is what we ask of industry.”

Full blog post on the BBC site at this link

Budget coverage: what to expect

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Tomorrow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will make his budget statement to the House of Commons, with media outlets busy preparing to cover in detail its contents tomorrow. So what have broadcasters got planned?

A brainstorming session at Channel 4 along with the help of Ben Marsh, the developer behind #uksnow map, has resulted in Cutsmap, a crowdsourced map to track spending cuts as part of Channel 4’s coverage of the budget. The map launched today, and you can read more about it here.

Meanwhile, Sky News Online is planning to offer a budget calculator to allow people to enter details such as their salary, age and fuel usage, to see how much better or worse off they will be following the announcement.

The ITV News website will host a live web chat starting at 12.20pm, featuring a panel of experts who users can question and interact with online.

BBC Radio 5 Live will cover the budget by ‘adopting’ two towns and following how the announcements will impact on residents’ lives over the coming year.

“We chose Chorley and Falmouth so we can look at how two places, 350 miles apart and with very different economies, are affected by the same policies. Who’s struggling and who’s doing well?” Stephen Mawhinney, Radio 5 Live’s head of news said in a release.

Mawhinney added: “We’ll be in regular contact with the people of Chorley and Falmouth, asking for their thoughts and experiences on everything from interest rates and jobs to the price of food, the prices of fuel, and the price of a university education – everything which affects how they live and how much money they have in their back pocket.”