The House of Lords has launched five short videos on YouTube in a bid to attract young people to politics.
The videos explain the role of the House of Lords as part of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the Life Peerages Act.
Broadcast on the UK parliament’s YouTube channel, the clips follow the launch of Lords of the Blog, the blog for the house.
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NtqWwCIhW4E]The LA Times has created two great interactive features online: the first allows users to see different voting outcomes of November’s presidential election on a map of the US.
Using data from the 2004 election, states on the map can be assigned to either Obama or McCain, showing users how a winning these constituencies will affect the candidates’ chances overall.
The second marks the Californian soldiers who have lost their lives in the Iraq conflict.
Video, image galleries and a searchable database of soldiers’ profiles have been created, accompanied by moving text tributes from family members
Following on from their live coverage of a day in the paper’s offices, the Liverpool Daily Post are once more experimenting with liveblogging to cover a royal visit to the city.
The Post is using service CoveritLive to report on the visit and provide rapid, real-time updates on what’s happening.
This is a strategic operation reporters and videojournalists, who are stationed at different positions to capture the visit, posting updates and links to multimedia coverage.
Lessons learned from the previous experiment have been put into practice this time around and it’s attracting plenty of questions and reader reactions.
Ever wondered where the videos that have fallen off YouTube – or been pushed – end up?
Enter YouTomb – the elephant’s graveyard of clips that have been removed from the video sharing site for copyright infringements and other offences.
Speaking to Wired.com, YouTomb’s creators – a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – say the site isn’t about reshowing illegal material, but is for tracking cases where remixed and satirical clips have been removed for alleged copyright infringements.
“MIT Free Culture became especially interested in the issue after YouTube announced that it would begin using filtering technology to scan users’ video and audio for near-matches with copyrighted material. While automating the takedown process may make enforcement easier, it also means that content falling under fair-use exceptions and even totally innocuous videos may receive some of the collateral damage,” a mission statement on the site reads.
As such the videos on YouTomb are represented by stills and are not available to play, but show stats on how many views they attracted before being pulled.
Despite YouTube’s recent efforts to step up copyright policing and create an automate removal process, removed videos live on in some form through YouTomb, which takes on the mantle of a video watchdog.
According to the site, it is currently monitoring 223834 videos and has identified 4428 videos taken down for alleged copyright violation and 13522 videos taken down for other reasons.
As if there aren’t enough distractions to play with already – Google has now combined its news channel with Google Earth, a blog post from the search engine’s product manager says.
As Google News updates with new stories from its index of sources, the new layer on Google Earth will map these according to their location.
Updates on the map will be flagged with a Google News icon, which will display a headline and snippet of the story when clicked, plus links to other info on the event.
Channel 4 has overhauled its online video offering by embedding clips from its programming in news articles across the site.
Clips and interviews from the evening news programme, News at Noon show and More 4 News will be embedded and available in a separate pop-up window. And, even better, the code for the footage is available so it can be embedded elsewhere.
As part of the changes to video on the site, a new seven-day catch-up service for Channel 4’s news programming has also been launched. The Watch It Again player is hosted by Brightcove.
Reuters Thompson is opening up the way people can use its content across the web by making available a limited range of non-commercial API opportunities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API) through the Reuters Lab.
Reuters could be looking to extend its distribution through this experiment as it will allow developers the change to build new editorial web-based applications using content from Reuters.
However, developers have to make requests to the lab for permission to develop new applications claims Mashable.
The Nashua Telegraph is experimenting with live video from mobile phones on its website using streaming service Qik.
The Telegraph is using the tool to stream footage from N95 handsets to provide behind-the-scenes coverage of its online food show, The Doorbell Gourmet.
Qik’s popularity with publishers seems to be growing – last month the Sacramento Bee used the service to create a broadcast channel for reporters to cover protests over the Olympic torch relay.
Here’s Journalism.co.uk’s interview with Qik founder Bhaskar Roy.
UPDATE – The Telegraph has posted its first ever breaking news coverage using Qik.
Live footage of a police evacuating residents was captured using mobiles and streamed to the site using the service.
YouTube has launched a localised version of the video-sharing site for India.
YouTube India will apply ‘an Indian lens’ to filter content from the main site for an Indian audience, according to the site’s blog.
Local content partners have also been signed up to distribute their videos through the site.
Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Kevin Anderson, Guardian.co.uk.
1) Who are you and what do you do?
Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at Guardian.co.uk.
My title is misnomer seeing as desk editors handle most of the commissioning.
My role is two-fold. I spot newsworthy items bubbling up in social media – blogs, social news sites, Twitter, etc – and report on that or pass it along to the appropriate site editor.
I also seed and develop strategies to promote Guardian content in those social networks. My current focus is what I call real-time innovation. I use emerging tools for editorial purposes and feed back lessons we learn into our editorial development process.
2) Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
People ask me how I stay on top of it all, and I say that my network is my filter. I have Twhirl and IM on constantly, sitting in the background. New media professionals and contacts around the world pass me things I need to read or stories I need to follow up on through Skype, Twitter, IM and Del.icio.us.
Popurls.com is a great one-stop site for buzz, especially for the US elections, which I’m following right now. NetNewsWire, Flock and Ecto are my blogging tools of choice.
The Flock browser is good in a number of ways. Its Flickr uploader is great – better than Flickr’s until recently. It also allows you to add sites to multiple Del.icio.us accounts.
You can go from reading your RSS feeds to blogging instantly in Flock, as it pulls NetNewsWire functionality into the browser too.
For publishing, a combination of Ecto and any good blogging platform creates the best multimedia journalism tool that I’ve ever used.
I recently got a Nokia N82. With its stellar camera and integrated Flickr uploader it has a lot of promise , but it’s hampered by poor data plans in the UK.
The mobile carriers are focusing on USB-based data plans to link computers to the mobile web, which maybe a good start, but there are still too few good data plans for phones.
I end up relying on WiFi, which on the N82 is much better than on previous phones.
3) Of the thousands of social media tools available could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or newsgathering tool?
I think in terms of editorial objectives and then find an applicable tool. In 12 years of doing online journalism, I’ve had to learn hundreds of desktop tools, content management systems and now a dizzying range of social media tools.
You have to be aware of them to work effectively. Knowing about the tools allows me to do something on deadline without worrying whether it can be developed on time.
However, the problem with most news organisations isn’t a lack of tools or technology but a cultural lack of editorial understanding of social media, internet media and internet culture.
Most news organisations continue to try to force their existing editorial strategies into the social media space instead of considering editorial strategies that are appropriate for the space.
Online video isn’t television on the internet, just as blogs are not about publishing a newspaper with comments.
I can use Twitter both as a newsgathering and promotional tool, or I can just use it to broadcast headlines at people.
Social media can increase loyalty from visitors to a site and increase the time they spend on the site, but it’s not about the tools but the way that journalists use them.
4) And the most overrated in your opinion?
I hate to sound like a broken record because others have said this before, but I really think Facebook is overrated for the majority of our audiences.
Traditional journalists who had never seen, much less used a social network before, hyped it because it was a revelation to them.
However, for those who had used social networks before, it was YASN – yet another social network – only shinier, with 20 per cent more Web 2.0 goodness.
I believe in freeing content and making it available where the audiences are, so it makes sense for content to be easily available to Facebook users and for news organisations to have a presence there.
News organisations can learn things from the success of Facebook, but they should also study the life cycle of social networks and learn not only from their successes but also from their failures.
Allowing like-minded readers or viewers to connect and interact using your content as a focus is a good social media strategy.
Hosting and taking an active role in the conversations around your content is also a good social media strategy.
Building a site or service that externalises community and keeps the ‘unwashed masses’ at a safe distance from journalists creates nasty overheads. It also means managing communities and brings nothing to your journalism and very little to your site visitors.
Why would Facebook users decide to move to InsertNewspaperHere-book?