GroundReport, the ‘user-driven’ news site, has launched what it claims to be the first citizen journalism widget.
The application, which works on a range of operating systems, will be updated with the latest citizen journalism headlines from across the globe and lets users filter news by category.
The Sun’s mobile barcode service, which allow users to scan barcodes in the paper to access extra information on their mobiles, has received 11,000 subscribers, according to a report by Mobile Today.
The ‘quick response’ (QR) technology requires users to download software onto their mobiles from The Sun’s site – though Nokia handsets have this pre-installed.
“There is an educational process that needs to be done. In the next few months we’re looking to do another pull-out [supplement in The Sun] to further inform people on how to use QR codes,” Ian Samuel, group head of mobile advertising for News International, says in the article.
Telewaving is today launching Wavelog, an application that allows users to post multimedia content directly from Nokia mobile phones to blogs.
The Wavelog system works with s60, the software run on smart Nokia multimedia phones like the N95.
According to the developers the software, which was developed and tested on Nokia N95 mobile phones posting to the WordPress, can run on any blogging platform.
The system sounds similar to the software developed by Nokia and Reuters for their mobile journalism project.
That system allowed journalists to upload multimedia reports from their N95 phones to a back-end WordPress blog that desk editors would then have access to.
The Telewaving system is also able to upload text, images, audio, and video and is able to upload over any network connection (this may just be US networks, though).
Yahoo will let widget developers run riot over its new mobile web platform, according to the Media Info Centre blog.
It also reported that Yahoo! has also unveiled a redesigned home page for mobile phones that lets users decide the content they want highlighted on the page.
It also released an upgrade to its Go software to aid surfing on mobile phones and to enable Yahoo to show ads with graphics.
World’s shortest post…
Thanks to Cybersoc for drawing attention to Tweet Scan, a site that allows you to keyword search public Twitter messages – another useful addition which makes it even less arbitrary and more newsworthy.
Twitter’s credo as a mainstream news device has been growing over the last few months. In September it launched a tracking service that allowed users to follow phrases on mobiles and through IM and it was used to good effect to follow real time reports of last year’s fires in East London and the Californian bush.
Robin makes the point that it’s a great resource for journalists looking for firsthand accounts from people close to events. To that I’d add it’s ability to mix professional and non-pro accounts around a topic. It’s short nature also lends particularly well to reporting traffic problems and other necessary travel information.
How I really want to see it used though is by a UK news publisher, be it national, regional or local, on a breaking news story. Be bold, I say.
Get an RSS feed from a Twitter search term embedded into a blog or on the news pages updating the user with alerts from the public and other news sources about breaking news events.
Yes, it’s that time again, the season of favourites lists, bests of, highlights of 2007, and rough guesses of what may happen in the coming 12 months.
I’ve brought together the few lists I have managed to find in between crazed bouts of gorging my way through East Sussex’s entire supply of mince pies and crapulent afternoons spent selecting the wine for the Christmas party (finally decided on Blue Nun – half bottles).
For what it’s worth, my predictions for the next 12 months are a pocket-sized Second Life for the Asian market, Google car insurance and marriage counselling by April and some kind of Granny app for Facebook so you can check on the vital signs of elderly relatives.
Local television broadcaster KHCW-TV channel 39 in Houston, Texas, has come up with an innovative idea for delivering traffic reports. The free service for mobile phones allows users to view images and video of traffic hotspots supplied by live traffic cameras along their route. The images provided by the KHCW Traffic Jam Cell Cams are near real-time, a press release for the service claims, and can be programmed into keys on your mobile phone for quick access.
The ideas behind this service are very much in keeping with my earlier blog post on experiments with niche news delivery, as the channel’s vice president and general manager Roger Bare describes: “This is something that isn’t dependent on having a morning news show to offer traffic to commuters. This service gives people real-time traffic information anytime, anywhere”
Journalism.co.uk is running a multimedia reporting contest with fabulous prizes, have a look over on the news pages for details:
The video below from beet.tv explains how the New York Times can use its Blogrunner service to monitor discussion in the blogosphere about its articles, including those posts that do not link directly to the original article – so-called ‘outsider’ blog posts.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNIrm27MftM]According to beet.tv, a new feature of Blogrunner means that links to blog posts that have been selected and sorted by the service to appear beneath an article will be a permanent fixture, even when the news has moved on. This then creates ‘”longtail” visibility for blog posts’, particularly for those appearing beneath NYTimes.com articles, says the write-up, as the site’s archive service receives a significant amount of traffic.