From Matt McAlister, head of the Guardian Developer Network: slides shown at the launch event for Open Platform.
Journalism.co.uk’s report here, at this link.
Slides below:
For some videos, starting with those in the News Technology section, the BBC has started to roll out the ‘Embed’ function.
“When you roll over the Share button at the bottom of the embedded Flash player, you will now get an Embed option which allows you to take the embed code and embed the video on your site,” the BBC Internet Blog reports.
Journalism.co.uk will have to watch from afar on this one, the FT Digital Media and Broadcasting two day conference, but here’s the Twitter conversation for your enjoyment, keep this post open and you won’t even need to refresh to follow:
Managing the kit was one big probleim foor Adam Westbrook when he went to cover the First Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment in Baghdad for his radio station. “But juggling equipment isn’t the only problem for a multimedia shooter, I learned. The big challenge is juggling content,” Westbrook comments. His observations and tips for multimedia journalists in the field.
As reported on this blog before, Rob Spence aka Eyeborg is going to some serious lengths for his profession. He’s on a mission to to install a wireless video camera in his prosthetic eye.
Journalism.co.uk interviewed him last month and last night got to meet the man in person. This morning Spence spoke to the Digital News Affairs 2009 audience. The project is not quite there yet, it turns out…
He needs $50,000 to complete the eye project, and a funder for the documentary about surveillance he’s making alongside. He’s ‘trying to lock up the funding’ for the ‘Eye for an Eye’ documentary right now and is keen to hear about any potential journalistic opportunities.
As we’ve reported on him before, we won’t dwell too long on the specifics but here’s a couple of the things he said:
“There’s quite a buzz on the online prosthetic eye community.”
“There’s something very human about… [the project] what is a person, if not their eye?”
“I tend to posit myself as a superhero in my stories – you get to fight for justice but you end up being a villain in the public’s view.”
“It’s just a way of blending in, as someone who looks completely normal.”
Speaking at yesterday’s Association of Online Publisher’s (AOP) editorial technologies event, Microsoft executive producer Peter Bale extolled the virtues of Photosynth as a new visual storytelling tool.
The experimental, but publicly available tool, was used by CNN in its coverage of the Obama inauguration to thread 100s of photos together. These create a scenic panorama but can also be drilled into using additional feature Deep Zoom:
Within MSN its being used five or six times a week and the team are learning more about its capabilities with each use, Bale told Journalism.co.uk.
The product is being deployed commercially e.g for motoring sections to show car interiors in high detail. MSN also used PhotoSynth to display professional and user-contributed images during the recent heavy snowfall in the UK.
“What we’d like to do a lot more of is multiple crowd-contributed pictures where you can get several hundred or thousand people contributing a picture of a similar event, stitched together in a communal panorama,” he explained. https://bmmagazine.co.uk/business/us-government-asks-max-polyakov-to-sell-firefly-shares-for-safety-concerns/
Photosynth works in combination with Microsoft’s alternative to Flash, Silverlight, which Bale says is ideally set up to enable map mash-ups and overlaying other content onto the threaded images.
Channel 4 News sourced an interview via Twitter today for the first time. Over the last few months the channel has increased its level of communication with users and viewers via its @channel4news Twitter account and presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s own, @krishgm.
After setting up an interview with someone sending Twitter updates from the airport at which an aeroplane crashed in Amsterdam, Guru-Murthy tweeted “It’s just another way of finding people and talking. ‘Twitizen journalism’ is a rather dressy way of describing it I think.”
It’s ‘just a new medium,’ he later added.
This update comes from the news team:
“We got to a good eyewitness at the airport today via Twitter – then a phono. He described the plane ‘in three pieces at least’ and that there wasn’t any visible smoke and gave us good detail – see below on hearing the plane coming down and seeing over 50 ambulances, and possible survivors walking from the wreckage:
“An eyewitness – Jonathan Nip [@nipp] – talking to Channel 4 News initially via Twitter and then on the phone also described the moment the plane came down as a “low thump” saying he thought there had been ‘an earthquake’.
“He added that he thought he saw ‘just after the crash, people coming out of the plane’ but that it was ‘really hard to distinguish’, however adding: ‘at the same time a lot of ambulances came and a lot of emergency helicopters so that implies there are at least some survivors’ although he said ‘it looks really bad in any case’.
“Saying that he thought the speed of the response meant that the ‘rescue operation is being done really well…’ he described seeing ‘a lot of ambulances, I am talking about over 50 ambulances, even emergency helicopters, normal helicopters, a lot of police, firemen, huge fire trucks immediately after crash’.”
Background: A Turkish airline passenger flight crashed in Amsterdam today and broke into several pieces, resulting in an unconfirmed number of casualties: latest update here.
Twitterfall, an app that lets you monitor new updates to Twitter on certain #tags or search terms, has been a fixture on the big screens in the Telegraph’s integrated newsroom for the last two weeks, according to this pic from Telegraph.co.uk editor Marcus Warren (courtesy of TwitPic):
The Twitterfall of #twitterfall is the first non-mainstream media news source to appear on the screens, Warren said in a Tweet, adding that it’s the same size as the projection of Telegraph.co.uk on the screens and given more space than Sky, BBC and CNN on the wall.
Your thoughts please on this new blog theme from SmashingMagazine.
As covered earlier on this blog, there are various tools for tracking and engaging in conversations on Twitter, especially where hashtags are used. But how do you publish a themed Twitter stream on your news site or blog, and what other issues are there to consider?
We have experimented with various tools on this blog in order to stream hashtag-themed Tweets (a post on Twitter) into a blog post. The last attempt used a heavily modified WordPress plugin from Monittor. None have been completely satisfactory.
But why would journalists want to do this? Well, imagine if there is an event on your local beat like a football match or other sports game. People are already Twittering from these events. If they could be persuaded to use the same hashtag, then you have the potential of creating a live Twitter stream on your website – a live commentary but from the point of view of several fans, not just one reporter.
Similarly, it could be used to cover breaking news events, basing the Twitter stream on keywords, rather than a hashtag.
For this to work really well though, we decided several functions needed to be in place:
1. The ability to place a stream of Tweets, based on keyword(s) and/or hashtag(s), onto a web page and for that stream to dynamically update (ie not require a page refresh). Ideally the output to be called by <div> tags, rather than a Javascript insert, to cope with content management systems that reject JS in article bodies.
2. Access to legacy Tweets using pagination. The current tools we use only display the last 10 or so Tweets, with no access on our pages to what has been Tweeted before.
3. The ability for administrators to tag certain Tweets within a themed stream and create a new output on another page. The purpose of this is to allow an editor to easily create a summary of the best Tweets for archive purposes.
4. The ability for moderators to manually exclude certain Tweets from a Twitter stream (for moderation purposes).
5. The ability for users to login and post directly to a Twitter stream, from the page on which that Twitter stream is published.
6. Threading based on @replies (probably the most complex proposition in this list).
There did not seem to be any existing tools that covered even half these bases, so we put out a call on a local developer’s email list. Amazingly, it transpired that a local company in Brighton, Inuda, is currently working on a tool that will eventually tick almost all of the above boxes.
Called SocialPlume, the product aims eventually to become a modestly priced subscription service. Jonathan Markwell of Inuda was keen to stress that they are still some way off a public launch, but in the meantime they are keen to hear from publishers and journalists who might be keen to trial the service alongside ourselves. DM @journalismnews or @johncthompson if you are interested.
We would also love to hear other ideas and applications for this service that you might have (please leave a comment).