Category Archives: Handy tools and technology

Innovative journalism/technology development projects in the US and UK

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This post is Journalism.co.uk’s contribution to the Carnival of Journalism, which is being hosted by Scribblesheet.

So much has happened in the last 12-months in the online news area we thought it was about time to focus a little attention on some of the projects and processes looking to drive the next step of innovative ways of getting news to the public.

Quite simply, we just want to draw attention to two development projects – one either side of the Atlantic – which aim to meld journalism and technology and find new and unique ways of engaging an audience.

It’s no surprise that both these projects are being run by – or in conjunction with – forward thinking academic institutions.

The UK project is, appropriately enough, called Meld. It’s being run this week by UCLAN department of journalism, under the watchful eye of fellow contributor to the Carnival Andy Dickinson.

Teams of of journalists, creative technologists/interaction designers volunteered to be brought together for a week of hot-housing ideas which would then be pitched to industry partners – Sky News, Johnston Press (JP) and Haymarket Media.

Each partner set a slightly different brief for the teams:

Sky News wants to ‘grow its unique users and page impressions (especially unique users) by offering a variety of original news related content’.

JP wants to ‘enhance our relationship with our readers and expand the local audience for our range of news and data websites.

While Haymarket wanted a rich media offering to serve a traveling baby boomer audience, something that appealed to a new men’s market or a Web 3.0 offering to blend ‘source and social’.

Based on these briefs, the industry bods provide feedback on the ideas – IP developed at the workshop is owned by the teams, each of which would be expected to negotiate their own terms should any commercial relationship develop with the industry partners.

The project is about pure innovation, trying to develop great ideas that benefit the industry and consumer, not innovation cosseted by the sometimes limiting effect of industry-led development where cost worries often cut innovation and failure of a single idea can be seen as failure of innovation, per se.

This snippet of Matt Marsh (taken from the Meld Blog) sums up the spirit of innovative thinking bursting over at the project.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKxGbbGEO7c]

The second project is similar, it’s a project being run as part of the graduate programme at CUNY, this time under the eye of Jeff Jarvis (Jeff has already documented part of the process).

Students on the first wave of the entrepreneurial journalism course spent last week pitching their ideas to a dozen jurors drawn from New York’s stellar media community.

A five minute pitch followed by seven minutes of questions from the jurors offered the chance to walk away with as much as $45,000 seed much for an innovative journalism project.

The course was set up with a $100,000, two-year grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation.

The students developed projects including a hyper-local site for a Brooklyn neighbourhood, innovative uses of Ning to create specialist social networks, blog search engines using Google’s custom search technology and several project – personal finance for young people, a service to match school athletes with colleges – that questioned weather they could survive just for Facebook (Judge Saul Hansell has posted a fairly full piece about the nature of the individual projects).

A few project were awarded grants from the jurors to develop their ideas further, notably a project to get the public angle on what follow up stories reporters should follow.

The overriding importance of this and the Meld project is that it gives the opportunity to develop left-field ideas which get inside the mind of those that would benefit by using it, rather than just owning it.

These ideas aren’t just providing the next cash cows for big media, they are writing a new language for journalism, creating new platforms for the principles of good practice to be carried forward into this new century.

That is both novel and revolutionary.

New BBC homepage

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For those who have not yet sneaked a peek, this is the beta version of the new BBC homepage (thanks to Richard Titus on the BBC Internet blog for the tip).

bbc home page

The new page allows you to personalise and localise what you want to see. Most of your regular and favourite stuff from can be brought to the page so it’s easy to get at.

The little widgets that all the content sits in are also moveable and adaptable, you can set the number and type of stories – for example – that you want to see in each news and blog section.

It also has a nifty little clock and a whopping great ad left top (as always) promoting Auntie’s latest big thing.

But you can’t import feeds from elsewhere into the page, all the content on display has to be BBC content rather than your favourite stuff from other sites and blogs. NYTimes.com’s personalisation feature remains tops in this regard (If only they could add a web mail widget, then we’d be laughing). Rekuperatoriaus filtrų keitimas https://cleanfilter.lt

The new Beeb page seems very much about making its content more accessible, rather than making the page a necessary ‘one-stop destination’.

Richard Titus is acting head of user experience and design at the BBC, he wrote about the new page:

“From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking.

“We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml.

“This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed-based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience.

“This concept formed one of the most important underlying design and strategic elements of the new homepage. The approach has the added benefit of making content more accessible, usable, and more efficient to modify for consumption across a wider array of networks and devices.”

How to make a blog an e-paper…

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(…if that’s what you really want to do)

Using Feedjournal bloggers can essentially pdf their content by putting the feed for their posts into the site’s generator. The result is the blog laid out in a newspaper style, complete with headlines and bylines, you can even make a masthead if you so wish.

Dave Lee has tried it out on his blog and I have to agree with him that I’m not really sure what the point is. The idea of taking a functional online publishing platform and shoehorning it into a ‘traditional media’ format seems counterproductive.

Plus it doesn’t really make longer posts more user-friendly, as, having tried it out on our feed, a long enough post will take up a whole page and find its way to the front of the ‘paper’.

On the other hand the service could be a way for newsletter-style publishers to better link their print handouts with content online. Being able to repackage a blog’s content so quickly could encourage these kind of operations to devote more time to what they do online without neglecting their print operations.

For e-paper fans, however, the forthcoming release of a FeedJournal service for readers, allowing users to select the feeds that make up the pdf’s content, might be more appealing.

PM’s listener mashup

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Radio 4’s PM programme is asking listeners (via its iPM blog) to send in their postcodes as part of a mapping mashup experiment. The postcode should relate to the listener’s location when the shows on air.

More details about the project will be announced on the show this week. But even if it’s just a straightforward Google maps mashup of where the programme’s listeners are, it’s a handy way for the producers to track the reach of the show and maybe target areas where the audience is not as strong. All this and it gets the listeners involved.

UPDATE – here’s a link to the listeners’ map

News videos as ringtones?

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What’s the best way for news providers to go mobile – WAP portals, Java apps, bar codes if you’re The Sun?

Not so for Agence France-Presse, which is taking a very different approach and making news footage available as video ringtones. The clips can be downloaded from the website of video ringtone service Vringo.

In a press statement, Gilles Tarot, marketing and sales director of AFP North America said the video ringtones are ‘one of the newest and most personal ways of sharing information’.

Here’s a sample clip of what it might look (and sound) like. Wouldn’t it be better with the news commentary too though?

UPDATE: [News editor’s note] Sounds like awful idea to me.

Update of Update – having watched the example clip I’m even more convinced of it.

Multiple RSS feed widgets

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This is a nifty and simple little widget that allows you to have multiple RSS feeds in a single place through introducing a drop down menu function:

Clearly, my innate inability with technology is preventing me from actually getting it in the blog at the moment (could also be partly the curse of the dreaded WP multi-user rising again), but if I ever figure it out I’ll add it rather than just link to it.

UPDATE (and Ed’s note): We needed a plugin to allow Javascript within blog posts. To use this widget yourself, click “download” at the bottom of the widget, and you will be presented with a range of options for using it on various blogging and social platforms, as well as downloading to your PC or Mac desktop.

[inline]

[script id=”script-id” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.widgetavenue.com/wdg/loaders/jse.php?root=rss”]
[/script]
[script type=”text/javascript”]
var width= “OK”;
var widgetPrefs = new Array();
widgetPrefs[“url”] = “http://rss1.mediafed.com/feed/journalism/{r}”;
widgetPrefs[“lang”] = “en”;
widgetPrefs[“r”] = “News”;
widgetPrefs[“header”] = “pub/journalism_co_uk”;
widgetPrefs[“skin”] = “http://www.widgetavenue.com/modules/pub/journalism_co_uk/skin.php”;
widgetPrefs[“count”] = “10”;
widgetPrefs[“mode”] = “list”;
widgetPrefs[“_tracking”] = “WidgetAvenue”;
widgetPrefs[“refresh”] = “3600000”;
widgetPrefs[“_width_”] = “”;
widgetPrefs[“_docked_”] = “”;
widgetPrefs[“source”] = “”;
onLoadHandler(width,widgetPrefs);
[/script]

[/inline]

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Round-up: Widgety Goodness 2007

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The overriding theme at yesterday’s Widgety Goodness conference was: if you produce enough, some are bound to stick.

Widgets were described both as ‘chaff’ by speaker Steve Bowbrick and as existing in an ‘innovate and dump’ industry by Nooked CEO Fergus Burns.

This idea was echoed by speaker Matt Trewhella, an engineer with Google, who said that of 20,000 widgets produced under Google Gadgets, half the total traffic for these is produced by only 150 applications.

Success stories of individual widgets used to promote specific events or products dominated rather than evidence of long-term benefits to site traffic.

“There’s tremendous reach, but unlike Google, high investment can’t guarantee that reach. Success is highly elusive,” the situation was explained by Chris Cunningham, vice president of ad sales at website designers Freewebs.

While compared to a marketing campaign, widgets are relatively inexpensive to produce, yesterday’s speeches suggested that online publishers should be wary about jumping on the widget bandwagon until more is known about the long-term advantages.

Predictions for widgets in 2008:

– widgets will be aware of other widgets you’re using and be able to interact with each other;

– more personalised widgets – though some warnings about how this made lead to overfamiliar advertising were also issued;

– developments in widgets for mobile – though the speakers were still scratching their heads over who would lead the way in this market.

For more thoughts on the event Steve Bowbrick has re-produced his speech, there’s a useful round-up by Roger Warner on the marketing side of the conference.

Problems blogging with SpinVox

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After speaking to SpinVox about the potential advantages of its blogging technology, some bright spark at Journalism.co.uk thought it would be a good idea to test it out ‘in the field’.

So I did – or attempted to – from yesterday’s conference on widgets in Brighton, the idea being that I could phone in updates to the blog providing instant reaction and a way to record my notes on the day in draft form.

I thought wanting to compose my post before calling it in would be the biggest problem, but you quickly get used to ordering your thoughts in this way.

Instead two major problems occurred:

  • I used the service about six times during the day, having to nip out of sessions or make the call in breaks. On four occasions I received text messages after I had returned to the session telling me that my message could not be converted and that I would need to send it again.

This was too late – it wasn’t convenient to leave the conference again to make another call and if I did so it wouldn’t be such a direct reaction.

There is an option on the SpinVox site to add new vocab to their voice recognition service and this might be a useful preparation tip, particularly at a conference where widgets is the unfamiliar buzz word.

Maybe I don’t enunciate well enough and I can forgive it not recognising certain technological terms, but confusing ‘in’ and ‘and’ is surely the basics.

Aside from these issues, there also seems to be no way to assign a headline to the blog post over the phone – this requires going in and editing the blog, which defeats the point.

Another thing – the length of post you can leave through the service is severely limited – about two minutes – so it really can only be used in a Twitter style. (In which case I’d rather just use Twitter).

This is an emerging technology – so if we can get it sorted I’d like to try it out again as I’m not sure I got the whole experience.

As a plus point, the service didn’t pick up any background noise from the conference space, which is pretty impressive.

SpinVox have built up a business on converting mobile voicemail to text and the Times are already using their blogging software – so was I doing something wrong?

UPDATE – SpinVox have contacted me and are looking into it to see if their might be a problem with my account, so hopefully they can give some advice.

UPDATE – Paid Content’s Robert Andrews is currently using SpinVox to update his Twitter account (though this might not be using the same technology as the blogging service) and it seems to be working perfectly.

Oh my Widgety Goodness, it’s the survival of the fittest…

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Widgety Goodness 2007 was right on our doorstep today in Brighton, so I popped down to check out if there was anything new and interesting from an online publisher’s point of view.

We heard about widgets that automatically deliver content tailored to you and your friends’ Facebook profile, and we heard about widgets that overlay full-screen internet TV, to provide additional information about the video you are watching or just so that you can chat to your friends online.

We even heard the burgeoning widget universe being described as a Darwinian disco (© Steve Bowbrick), which conjured up for me a vision of a lot of middle-aged publishing execs trying to get on down with the young things on the dancefloor and dancing out of time like deranged orangutans.

Naturally, we heard a lot of pitches. But also a helpful dose of scepticism, as the following video sample from Russell Davies of the Open Intelligence Agency, shows:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouqpn9WKAqA]

Not good news for glossy magazine publishers then. Those perfume ads help pay for a lot of people’s wages.

Laura will update with more tomorrow, but bottom line, widgets will be getting smarter, cheaper and more ubiquitous in 2008. As long as publishers and marketeers don’t forget to put the user in control, they can be a good method of delivering personalised content across a number of social and local platforms.

Handbag.com launches Facebook application

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Bright Blue Day Digital has created Handbag.com a little app – just in time for Crimbo…

Features:

I’m Loving / I’m Hating: fashion item rating that gets added to a wish list feature. The application can then aggregate this list and record Facebook-fashionista’s judgement on the latest styles.

Limited Edition Exclusive Gifts: virtual gifts to be distributed by sad saps equipped with virtual credit points generated by using the application.

Handbag.com Hotline: Fashion news supplied by RSS.

handbag