Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

News Corporation ‘working around the clock’ to fix Daily bug

News Corporation has said it is “working around the clock” to fix a technical problem in its new “iPad newspaper”, the Daily, that has prompted hundreds of complaints and negative ratings from users.

Readers have left comments on the Apple’s US app store to complain of frequent crashes, load problems and other stability issues when the Daily attempts to fetch a new update of the newspaper.

Since its high-profile launch in the US last week, the product has attracted more than 3,600 reviews on the Apple online store.

While about a third of people gave the app the full five stars, the next most common rating was one out of five, with almost 1,000 people giving it the lowest score possible.

One reviewer wrote: “Is this the future of news? The app crashed the first time I ran it. After rebooting and restarting it hung while downloading the current edition.”

Another person adds: “Very slow loading, better fix it within two weeks or we are gone.”

In a blog post on the official website, the Daily’s tech developers wrote: “We’re working around the clock to improve the stability and functionality of The Daily.

“We’ve had massive uptake since Wednesday’s launch, and with that kind of audience scale in such a short period of time, we’ve seen some stability issues and bugs that need to be addressed.

“We’re working as quickly as we can to find these problems and fix them. The beauty of the application ecosystem is that we can constantly iterate on and improve our product, and we’re aiming to put out an update within the coming weeks.

“We are addressing the technical issues that we’ve seen and we want you, our readers, to know that this is a major priority for us.”

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says the Daily will “push the boundaries of reporting”, offering news, features, photography, audio, video, and graphics for 99 cents a week or $39.99 for an annual subscription.

The Guardian’s Matt Wells on live blogging the Egypt protests, in Arabic

1 Reply

Followers of the Guardian’s Egypt protests live blog in the last few days may have noticed short passages of Arabic text appearing amid the blog’s customary roster of updates, summaries and other multimedia.

Then later an entire news article or two appearing on the site in the unfamiliar language.

I spoke to blogs editor Matt Wells about the decision to translate the Guardian’s coverage into Arabic.

It began a few days back when one of the newspaper’s journalists suggested embedding Google’s translate button, which automatically translates any webpage, into the live blog. With independent news organisations such as Al Jazeera harassed by the state and foreign journalists reportedly suffering obstruction and detention, impartial Arabic-language news is not necessarily readily available in Egypt.

“The news there is dominated by state-run media,” Wells said, “and unofficial sources are mostly in English or under-resourced.”

Online translation services, however, are generally not very accuarate, even if Google has come a long way since the early days of Yahoo’s BabelFish.

The Guardian asked a native Arabic speaker in the office to take a look, and she confirmed that it “wasn’t exactly 100 per cent accurate”.

Then the blogs team put it to the readers, asking, what do you think of the Google translate service? We’ve had our native Arabic speaker cast her eye over it and don’t think it’s accurate enough.

Proving that reader comments aren’t the trash they get slated as by some, one reader joined the dots that the staff hadn’t.

If you have a native Arabic speaker, why don’t you translate some of it yourself?, they asked.

And so the Guardian started publishing live blog summaries in Arabic, and will be translating two or three news articles a day with the help of a professional service, Wells said.

“Clearly we are not going to become an Arabic news service, but we saw it as a useful feature.

“It is more of a gesture to our readers to show that we are appreciative of our audience in that region and of the fantastic response we’ve had.”

Wells said that the Guardian’s commitment to community management was key to the live blogging strategy, especially with coverage like that of the Egypt protests. The paper has two dedicated community managers – Laura Oliver and James Walsh – who sit and work with the news teams but “have the specific brief of engaging with readers in the comments below the line and on Twitter.”

That means flagging up useful information posted by users, pulling material into the live blogs from elsewhere and responding to comments or letting reporters know when it might be best for them to do so. It is a role that the Guardian is serious about developing, Wells said.

“It results in a much more engaged and two-way conversation with the users.”

As for the live blogging, there is no doubt that the Guardian likes, and does a lot of it. With more than 250,000 hits a day for the Egypt live blog alone, Wells called it the “centrepiece” of the paper’s coverage.

“This time it really feels like we’ve pushed on the form again.”

New curation tool Bundlr sets sights on ‘untangling the web’

2 Replies

Curation seems to be all the rage these days and lots of new tools are popping up and attracting the attention of journalists. Among them is Bundlr, a new and free tool for online curation, clipping, aggregation and sharing web content easily.

The creators behind Bundlr are two 23-year-old developers, Filipe Batista and Sérgio Santos, from Coimbra, Portugal, who are both just finishing graduate degree in informatics engineering. Their eureka moment came while thinking about how to aggregate content about a particular conference.

“After attending a great conference, we thought about ways to show how it really was to be at the event. Share photos, videos, reports and all that was being published online, in a single shareable page. But we couldn’t figure out a simple way to do it.”

So what does Bundlr really do and where does it differ from Storify and other curation tools?

“First, our tool guesses beforehand what the user wants in a webpage. In a YouTube page it’s obvious that the user wants the video, at Flickr the main image.

“Second, we do not only clip the image but all the metadata surrounding that image. For instance, publishing date, geolocation data, author, views, etc. This is true for every website we support. If a webpage is supported it means it was tailor-made to work with Bundlr so that the clipping process will be as seamless as it gets.

“Third, we don’t limit the layout inside the timeline format. We show the clips in a grid. In the future, with all that metadata we collected, we can get very creative with clip layouts.”

Bundlr wasn’t intended to be a journalism tool but journalists can take advantage of its features for their everyday work. Besides gathering different social media and online contents like photos, videos and tweets to present in a single page, it can be used privately for research and brainstorming to write articles.

“There is an information overload. New sources and mediums are emerging and specialists need to find their way through everything being published online. But we’re lacking the tools to quickly select the best we find on the web, organize and share it.”

Bundlr is in beta stage at the moment, but the next stage of the plan is to have freemium accounts with a limited number of bundles for each user. A deal has just been struck with Portuguese venture capital firm SeedCapital and the service will be releasing its public version in a few days.

Batista and Santos are open to suggestions as they launch their first version, and they’ll be analyzing the way Bundlr users interact with it and see what makes sense for them.

“We believe that skimming through all this noise, and getting to the meaningful information is one of the main challenges internet users face today.

“What do you think about “untangling the web” as our tagline?”

You can get a beta tester invitation for Bundlr at this link.

Bundlr ( gobundlr.com ) from Bundlr on Vimeo.

Nieman: A year later, lessons for the media from the Haiti earthquake response

Android app update allows users to purchase Kindle newspapers

2 Replies

On Friday Amazon announced that its Kindle for Android app is the first of its Kindle apps to receive an update that enables users to buy, read and sync more than 100 Kindle newspapers and magazines.

Kindle for Android users can now buy a single issue or subscribe to the most popular newspapers and magazines, have them automatically delivered to their Android-powered device, and enjoy a full color reading experience optimized for the touch interface of Android-powered devices.

NewsBasis aims to link companies and journalists with Content Development Exchange

Government spending: Who’s doing what with the new data?

1 Reply

Today sees the biggest release of government spending data in history. Government departments have published details of all spending over £25,000 for the past six months and, according to this morning’s announcement, will continue to publish this expenditure data on a monthly basis.

According to minister for the Cabinet Office and paymaster general Francis Maude, it is part of a drive “to make the UK the most transparent and accountable government in the world”.

We’ve already released a revolutionary amount of data over the last six months, from the salaries of the highest earning civil servants to organisation structure charts which give people a real insight into the workings of government and is already being used in new and innovative ways.

A huge amount of public spending data has indeed been published under the current government, and today’s release is a significant addition to that. So who is doing what with the vast amount of new data? And who is making it easier for others to crunch the numbers?

The Guardian is usually streets ahead of other newspapers in processing large datasets and today’s coverage is no exception:

The excellent Guardian Data Blog posted an interactive visualisation and data spreadsheets this morning;
And published searchable datasets and called on readers to help crowdsource analysis;
Leading designer and data expert David McCandless has also lent a hand, analysing expenditure department by department.

The Guardian are liveblogging the release too, of course.

Who else?

The BBC have also been up to a bit of crowdsourcing asking people to send in any items of interest they have picked out;
The Telegraph is leading with coalition spend on PR and marketing, but gets pretty quickly stuck into yoga and pet food, the real nitty gritty.
Pets are not only being fed, according to Thinq.co.uk, but kept on trend: “Among the more bizarre payments listed is £1,000 given the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to a company that sells jewel-encrusted dog collars.”
The Financial Times (registration required) has done some analysis of the effect of cuts on the private sector, but also made sure to dig some dirt: £750 an all-day meeting in a bar for Equalities and Human Rights Commission staff and £164,000 on water coolers for staff at HMRC.

There are, of course, different ways of looking at the numbers, as one Guardian commenter, LudwigsLughole, highlights:

There are 90,000 HMRC staff. They spent £164,000 in six months on bottled spring water. That equates to an annual spend per head of only £3.64. So the FT are seriously suggesting that £3.64 per head to give staff fresh bottled water is excessive? Pathetic journalism.

Exploring the data yourself

“The biggest issue with all these numbers is, how do you use them? If people don’t have the tools to interrogate the spreadsheets, they may as well be written in Latin.” – Simon Rogers, Guardian Data Blog editor.

“Releasing data is all well and good, but to encourage the nation’s ‘armchair auditors’, it must be readily usable.” – Martin Stabe, FT.

Here are some of the places you can go, along with the Guardian, to have a crack at the numbers yourself. Please add your own suggestions in the comments below.

@timetric has built an interactive tool which you can use to produce various diffrerent graphs from the dataset, and is blogging about the release here;
Open University communications and systems lecturer Tony Hirst has been working on a ‘Government Data Spending Explorer’:

Lots and lots of data. So what? My take on it was to find a quick and dirty way to cobble a query interface around the data, so here’s what I spent an hour or so doing in the early hours of last night, and a couple of hours this morning… tinkering with a Gov spending data spreadsheet explorer:

Head to Where Does My Money Go? for more good work in making the data searchable and interactive:

[T]he real power of this data will become clear in the months to come, as developers and researchers – you? – start to link it to other information, like the magisterial OpenlyLocal and the exciting WhosLobbying. Please make use of our API and loading scripts to do so.

Also see the good suggestions on Where Does My Money Go? for how government data publishing might be improved in the future.

So, coming full circle I return to the Guardian, and to the data-minded Simon Rogers, who asks: Will the government spending data really change the world?

A big question. Feel free to add your opinion below and any other data projects you have seen today or that pop up in the future.

Rosie Niven: New Audioboo message feature a boon for journalists

Editors Blog | Journalism.co.uk

Online journalism news