Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

What the BBC learned from using Crowdmap tool to cover tube strikes

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On Tuesday, Journalism.co.uk reported that the BBC were using Ushahidi’s new Crowdmap technology to record and illustrate problems on the London Underground caused by the day’s tube strikes.

The BBC’s Claire Wardle has helpfully followed up on her experiences with a post on the College of Journalism website explaining how it went, what they changed and what they would like to do with the technology next time.

She explains the reasoning behind decisions taken throughout the day to amend their use of the platform, such as moving across to Open Street Map as a default mapping tool and the introduction of a time stamp at the start of each headline. She also provides some suggestions on how the platform could be improved in the future, including provisions for greater information outside of the map.

It would have be useful if there’d been a scrolling news bar at the top so we could have put out topline information which we knew everyone could see by just going to the map. Something like ‘the Circle Line is suspended’ or ‘the roads are really starting to build with traffic’ was very hard to map.

See the full post here…

Tumblr improves attribution process

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Tumblr has announced an upgrade of its attribution feature which will now only provide attribution to original sources within the post content, rather than all re-bloggers.

In the announcement on its staff blog, Tumblr says the upgrade was needed to fix issues within its automatic ‘via’ system, such as links being dropped, credit being buried under re-blog links, frequent mistaken attributions and the resulting impact on post appearance.

Starting today, reblogging will no longer insert attribution into the content/caption of the post except to quote content added by the parent post.

The new feature will also enable authors to attribute content to a source outside of Tumblr which will then be attributed whenever the post is reblogged on Tumblr, while the entire reblog history will remain in the post notes. For those seeking an uncomplicated yet immersive online casino experience, wgcasino offers a seamless interface and a rich selection of games that promise hours of entertainment. Dive into a world where each game is a new adventure waiting to be explored.

Why the US and UK are leading the way on semantic web

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Following his involvement in the first Datajournalism meetup in Berlin earlier this week, Martin Belam, the Guardian’s information architect, looks at why the US and UK may have taken the lead in semantic web, as one audience member suggested on the day.

In an attempt to try and answer the question, he puts forward four themes on his currybet.net blog that he feels may play a part. In summary, they are:

  • The sharing of a common language which helps both nations access the same resources and be included in comparative datasets.
  • Competition across both sides of the pond driving innovation.
  • Successful business models already being used by the BBC and even more valuably being explained on their internet blogs.
  • Open data and a history of freedom of information court cases which makes official information more likely to be made available.

On his full post here he also has tips for how to follow the UK’s lead, such as getting involved in hacks and hackers type events.

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10,000 Words: Making better use of location-based networks

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Inspired by the successes of location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, Mark Luckie offers some starting-points over on his 10,000 Words blog about how journalists and publishers could make better use of the technology.

His suggestions include greater exploitation of first person media by pulling together items such as tweets, photographs and audio recorded within a geographical area for a multimedia record of events or news.

Luckie adds that newsrooms could create apps or check-in alerts which centre on the technology which is able to pinpoint places of interest, such as cinemas, restaurants and shops near to a mobile phone user and then provide them with relevant reviews and articles.

With a little extra tinkering, an app can also aggregate reviews from other locals or like-minded movie viewers.

(…) So far though, the majority of those companies that are exploring and taking advantage of the technology fall outside of the journalism realm. Hopefully, as these services and social media applications become more mainstream, newsrooms will be more likely to adopt them for their own uses.

See his full post here…

Poligraft: the transparency tool set to make investigative journalism easier

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The Sunlight Foundation has launched a new tool – Poligraft – to encourage greater transparency of public figures and assist journalists in providing the extra details behind stories.

By scanning news articles, press releases or blog posts, which can be submitted to the program by inserting the URL or pasting the entire article, the technology can then pick out people or organisations and identify the financial or political links between them.

Discussing the impact of this technology, Megan Taylor writes on PoynterOnline that it is a simple yet powerful tool for the news industry.

Anyone can use this, but it could be especially powerful in the hands of hands of journalists, bloggers, and others reporting or analyzing the news. It would take hours to look these things up by hand, and many people don’t know how to find or use the information.

Journalists could paste in their copy to do a quick check for connections they might have missed. Bloggers could run Poligraft on a series of political stories to reveal the web of contributions leading to a bill. All this information is public record, but it’s never easy to dig through. What is possible when investigative journalism is made just a little bit easier?

See a video below from the Sunshine Foundation posted on Youtube explaining how the technology works:

Hatip: Editorsweblog

Could technology actually be a gateway to long-form journalism?

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There’s a useful post on PoynterOnline this week in which author Mallary Jean Tenore details some of the best tools and technologies available which support the future of long-form journalism on the web.

These include Nate Weiner’s Read It Later, which can “save, share and organize URLs”. He explains that this means users can return to the whole article offline at their own leisure, rather than simply bookmarking the URL.

“Read It Later is essentially the article’s second chance. It actually improves the likelihood that the article will be seen,” Weiner said via e-mail. “If any article is there, the user put it there. And in order for a user to have put it there, they would have to have visited the publisher’s site.”

Other examples include Marco Arment’s Instapaper, which not only saves web pages but also creates RSS feeds of saved stories and an ‘Editor’s Picks’ feature based on the most bookmarked content and Twitter account @LongReads, created by Mark Armstrong, for a constant stream of long-form journalism examples.

See her full post here…

California journalism students to be provided with iPads

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Journalism students at a US university will be given iPads during their course to help them learn to file multimedia news stories from the latest technologies.

According to a release on the University of Southern California’s website, students on the Specialised Reporting course will be given the device as part of training to prepare them for reporting from various locations.

Course professor Bill Celis says the students will be encouraged to “push the boundaries” of the device in their production of multimedia journalism.

“Students can file stories from the field that include audio and slideshows. I’m teaching the same vital journalism skills I’ve always taught while ensuring the students have experience in the latest and emerging technologies.”

Hat tip: phoneArena.com

Nieman: Exploring a niche for non-niche fact-checking

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There are a number of fact-checking platforms online, including PolitiFact, FactCheck and Meet the Facts. “The efforts are admirable. They’re also, however, atomised,” writes Nieman Journalism Lab’s Megan Garber.

Now Andrew Lih, associate professor of new media at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism and author of The Wikipedia Revolution, has plans to bring the scope of the wiki format to the world of fact-checking with WikiFactCheck.

WikiFactCheck wants not only to crowdsource, but also to centralise, the fact-checking enterprise, aggregating other efforts and creating a framework so extensive that it can also attempt to be comprehensive. There’s a niche, Lih believes, for a fact-checking site that’s determinedly non-niche.

Full story at this link…

Resources for journalists covering the floods in Pakistan

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As the extent of the devastation caused by recent flooding in Pakistan continues to emerge, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s service AlertNet has some fantastic resources for journalists covering the disaster.

Firstly, there’s a directory of contacts telling journalists which aid agencies are working in the region. This directory is available for other humanitarian and crisis situations too.

On top of this you can use the site’s agency news feed, which carries the latest press releases issued by the groups working on the ground.

Related reading: Read how citizen journalism sites in Pakistan have sourced on-the-ground coverage for mainstream news organisations.

Yahoo News tests new ‘Infinite Browse’ feature

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Yahoo is testing the water with new features on its news platform which aim to improve the browsing experience of users and offer clear signposting to trending stories and topics, according to a post on the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog.

The first feature – “Infinite Browse” – provides a visitor with a small window of search results at the bottom of a news story, offering links to other Yahoo News results based on the same topics, in order to keep visitors inside the Yahoo network. It is currently being tested on a small number of visitors to the site.

The sfn.com blog also mentions a second “Trending Now” feature to be introduced soon.

Yahoo is also bringing trending topics to its Yahoo.com homepage and its network sites that include Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance. The feature, called “Trending Now,” will help users find hot topics of the day and discover related content, according to the Yahoo Blog.

See more at the Yahoo Search Blog on this here…