Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

MySociety ‘retreat’ places up for auction on eBay

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MySociety, the democracy website, which turned five in October, has put two places for its annual retreat up for auction on eBay.

MySociety says on its blog:

“This is only the third such retreat in five years, and it is a super-rare occasion when all the various people who make mySociety tick get together. On these retreats we meet to set our agenda for the next year and try to reassess what we’ve done and what we’re about. It’s a fantastic opportunity to meet many of the most talented developers and thinkers in the field of the internet and democracy, people you’d otherwise rarely be able to catch. And it’s a great moment to catch them, pausing for a moment to discuss what we’re about and where we could go next.”

Tom Steinberg, the director and founder of mySociety, told Journalism.co.uk that the retreat will be held January 9-11 2009, and that the location is still to be decided (somewhere in the north-west).

“The purpose of the retreat is to get together and do all those things that it’s impossible for a fully virtual organisation to do just
online,” he said.

This includes:

  • Reassessing  priorities
  • Coming up with new ideas for services and tools
  • Discussing financial position and how to improve it
  • Coding side-by-side
  • People getting to know each other

Recession timelines… Media job cuts plotted / credit crunch in North East Wales

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A case of great minds think alike today. Two lovely Dipity timelines for you to enjoy.

The Guardian plots media job loss announcements here…

and the NWN Media’s Evening Leader does a good job here, at plotting a North East Wales credit crunch line:

Free ‘perky’ font from Danish School of Journalism

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Quite a long time ago (September 8, in fact), a press release arrived. It announced the arrival of a rather sophisticated font, courtesy of the Danish School of Media and Journalism – available to all.

But, the font didn’t arrive with it so I held off publishing this post; it’s become a bit of a joke after it’s been sitting in the draft folder for so long. But I couldn’t bring myself to delete it.

Now, two months later, the font has arrived. Here, we introduce you to: ALLER.

Aller has been especially designed for the school by Dalton Maag and it will be available for free downloads for two years.

Marc Weymann was the lead designer, and he worked in collaboration with Henrik Birkvig of The Danish School of Media and Journalism.

It beat off other fonts for its ‘highly legible’ and ‘lovely texture’  and the font’s pitch explained how ‘the cleanness of the letter forms are softened when a curve leads into a perky point in some of the characters.’

Google phone madness – any journos out there got one yet?

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So it has arrived to the UK. The Google Phone, the T-Mobile G1.

Mixed reviews, as reported at the Telegraph. How does it compare to iPhone and will it beat it in sales?

For the journalists who reckon it’s worth it, it could prove very handy for blogging and filing away from the office. To be so darn well reliant on dodgy Wifi can be very frustrating at times. But any better than the iPhone?

Here’s a review from Times Online:’The T-Mobile G1 is great. The iPhone is better.’

Meanwhile, the tariffs for the new Blackberry Storm have been released.

Any journalists out there purchased one of these babies, and want to feedback?

When Twitter goes bad: newspaper tweets a funeral

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US newspaper The Rocky Mountain News has come under scrutiny for its use of microblogging tool Twitter.

The paper has been using the service to provide news alerts with its @The Rocky account, but recently experimented with an individual reporter twittering from the funeral of a 3-year-old.

“Rocky reporter Berny Morson filed live updates from the memorial service of 3-year-old Marten Kudlis. The messages are unedited,” reads the editor’s note accompanying the article on the death of Marten Kudlis, who was killed in a car crash last week.

Michael Roberts at the Latest Word blog points out that the updates are ‘self-satirizing in the most morbid, inappropriate way possible’.

“Morson’s not to blame for the lameness of these entries, which suggest a golfing commentator whispering at green-side while Tiger Woods lines up a putt.”

Questions have been raised about the appropriateness of Twitter coverage before, but usually centring on its suitability as a medium for coverage e.g. does the event require frequent updates or can it wait? Covering a funeral – that’s proprierty gone AWOL.

Twittering the Bangalore bombs

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Interesting comparison by Daniel Bennett of mainstream media coverage and a Twitter account of today’s bombings in Bangalore, India.

Bennett points out that updates to the microblogging tool by technology entrepreneur Mukund Mohan show the changing nature of breaking news (the oldest is at the moment):

Mohan’s details of telephone lines being down and news of evacuations, show how news organisations can harness the tool in emergencies.

NYTimes innovation plans: Widgets, iPhone, APIs

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Silicon Valley Insider talked to Marc Frons, chief technology officer of NYTimes digital, about the projects he’s working on and the development that they’ll be rolling out in the near future. Here’s a brief overview:

Things we have already covered:

The shock of the new:

  • Widgets: Customisable box of Times stories, video, slideshows and the rest on your blog or social network page? Yes please.
  • Aggregation: It bought Blogrunner an eternity ago and uses it now just to pull content from partner sites into NYTimes – think PaidContent, CNET stuff on the Tech pages. But ‘bigger plans’ are afoot – Frons won’t say more though.
  • Apps: Yes, NYTimes.com is working on apps for Apple’s forthcoming iPhone store.

Innovations in Journalism – one-click image uploading from Skitch.com

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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. Today’s candidate is Skitch.com – an easy way to upload your images.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Mark Pearson and I work for plasq – a company of about 10 people spread around the globe.

We work to make fun, intuitive and expressive software, and are best known for “Comic Life”, an application which makes it easy to turn your digital photos into photo comics.

We’ve now developed Skitch and Skitch.com:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60dQekmsEGg&feature=related]

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Skitch makes the screen grabbing process enjoyable and very fast.

Journalists involved in the tech industry often need to take many screenshots. Skitch supports many common formats including TIFF, which publishers often need for magazines. If the journalist produces content for online use, jpg and png are available too.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are just getting started! We recently released two new features to allow you to email images to Skitch.com as well as send images hosted on Skitch.com to twitter.

Combine these two features and you can send images from your camera phone to Skitch.com then automatically have them appear on twitter.

4) Why are you doing this?
To improve and speed up sharing images with others.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Currently while in beta, it is free.

6) How will you make it pay?
We haven’t announced our pricing yet.

WAN 2008: Microsoft’s e-reader technology open to all publishers

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Microsoft has opened up the technology behind the New York Times’ e-reader to all publishers.

The Times Reader format, which creates a digitised version of the paper browsable on or offline, is now freely available to publishers.

The system has already been implemented by some publishers, Michael Cooper, director of advanced reading technologies at Microsoft, told delegates at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference.

“What took Microsoft and the New York Times 18 months to develop has been adopted by other publishers in less than six weeks,” he said.

The technology, Cooper said, will allow publishers to deliver content to a range of devices in one go.

The growth of the mobile internet will not eliminate the need for the e-reader technology, he added, because of the format and offline accessibility to news it offers.

However, the next stage of the technology will be to develop it for use on mobile phones.