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.
Social networking site Bebo has now opened it applications platform to allow developers to create widgets in the same way they can on Facebook.
All Bebo users can assume developer status and start constructing their own gizmos, says the developers blog.
Wall Street Journal Online launched today a multimedia feature for Chinese readers called ‘Beautiful Country’ – the Chinese name for America.
Li Yuan will write a column and provide video commentary describing how American business culture differs from that in China.
Both will appear in English and Chinese on wsj.com and chinese.wsj.com
Interactive maps and graphics will supplement the commentary.
More on the PR.
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.
Later this week videos created by citizen journalists that look at issues surrounding the upcoming presidential primaries, in the US, will be available alongside professional work through the op-ed pages of NYTimes.com, according to Beet.tv.
Talking to Beet, Cynthina Farrar, producer with Purplestates.tv (and Yale researcher scholar), explained how non-professional reporters working with her new company put together nearly a dozen pieces for the Times.
(Video of her interview in the news section.)
Purplestates.tv is also running the videos through Facebook and will build applications for its videos to run through Open Social, Farrar added.
Journalism.co.uk is running a multimedia reporting contest with fabulous prizes, have a look over on the news pages for details:
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.
Andy Dickinson insists that you have a look at the ‘experiment in multimedia storytelling’ that is Whale Hunt – I have to agree, it’s amazing.
