Google has bought start-up Jambool and with it Jambool’s online social payment service ‘Social Gold’, which allows developers to build payments directly into games and apps.
According to recent reports across media sites, including paidContent, the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog and TechCrunch, the platform, which enables companies to manage their own virtual currencies, will form part of “the backbone” of Google’s plans to harness the power of social media.
Yahoo is testing the water with new features on its news platform which aim to improve the browsing experience of users and offer clear signposting to trending stories and topics, according to a post on the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog.
The first feature – “Infinite Browse” – provides a visitor with a small window of search results at the bottom of a news story, offering links to other Yahoo News results based on the same topics, in order to keep visitors inside the Yahoo network. It is currently being tested on a small number of visitors to the site.
The sfn.com blog also mentions a second “Trending Now” feature to be introduced soon.
Yahoo is also bringing trending topics to its Yahoo.com homepage and its network sites that include Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance. The feature, called “Trending Now,” will help users find hot topics of the day and discover related content, according to the Yahoo Blog.
Steve Safran from Lost Remote adds a reflective take on Google Wave to the comment mounting up about it’s demise. According to Safran, the platform’s processes could be mirrored in the newsroom.
Back in September 2009, I wrote in the AR&D Newsletter: “Imagine starting a wave in your office about a news topic. People can constantly add to it, putting in the latest pictures, video and information. The assignment desk can contribute its findings and the reporters and producers have instant access, as well as the ability to add more. We don’t yet know how newsrooms can fully take advantage of this tool (and isn’t that wonderful?) but we do believe it will be a powerful way to have the entire staff work together.”
I was wrong.
Despite the product failing, says Safran, the experimentation should be admired.
An FT.com Technology story claims Google could be about to upset the success of Demand Media, an online content platform designed to cater to search engine queries from potential readers:
[A] recently granted patent to Google that appears to replicate one part of what has made Demand’s approach to content so successful could spoil the party (…) If the world’s largest search engine were to build a system and offer it to all web publishers, as it detailed in the patent filing, the move could upend one of the hottest new fields of digital media creation.
“Evergreen topic pages” – it’s a phrase which confused many when first used on the Online Journalism Review site.
Aiming to clarify the term and show how such pages will contribute revenue, Robert Niles has posted an explanation on the site.
The page does focus on a single theme. But neither a niche website nor a topic index on a general news website necessarily serves the function of an evergreen topic page. A optimized evergreen topic page ought to focus on a single element within a theme – not just sports, for example, but on soccer officiating in the World Cup.
I understand why this might be a tough concept for some news veterans. After all, what I’m asking you to create is in several ways the opposite of what we do on a daily basis writing for newspapers or broadcast reports. This is a different product for a news organization, but one much closely aligned with its core mission than fake front pages or coupon deals.
He explained that such pages are an aside to daily news updates, but can be used to supplement such coverage throughout time, with links to ‘evergreen’ topic pages which provide background information. The pages continue to fulfil online searches and provide a long-term additional income from advertising with limited maintenance.
I stumbled onto the value of evergreen content pages when I wrote my “statistics every writer should know” tutorial in 1996. I added AdSense ads to that site in 2003 and continue to earn several hundred dollars a month from those pages today.
A post on the editorsweblog.org is looking at the way semantic technology could transform online news searches.
The technology is explained as having the ability to change the internet “from a massive searchable text file into a queryable database”, where related media, or facts, are linked together across independent websites.
For newspapers, semantic technology improves reader engagement by linking together related articles. For readers, that means more context on each story and a more personalized experience. And for advertisers, it means better demographic data than ever before.
Watch the video below, courtesy of editorsweblog.org, for more information on ‘website rules’ being created to make semantic searches more efficient in the future.
A string of digital media companies producing story ideas based on unfulfilled online searches face a new adversary in the form of Google.
According to a report in the Financial Times, the search engine registered a patent earlier this year for “a system that would help it identify ‘inadequate content'” online and subsequently provide ideas for desired news stories.
This service could then be potentially sold on, competing with other companies already trying to develop similar systems.
Also in Google news, it is rumoured that the company will be launching its own paid-content system, Newspass, by the end of the year.
According to paidContent:UK, Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that content from a publisher signed up to Newspass will be indicated by a paywall icon.
In a statement to paidContent, Google said:
“Our aim, as with all Google products, would be to reach as broad a global audience as possible,” indicating potential for a global roll out of the system.
Krishna Bharat, founder of Google News, told an industry conference last week that it was the search giant’s “editorial responsibility” to protect hard news’ place in a more personalised news agenda.
I think people care about what other people are interested in, most importantly in their social circle (…) but beyond that the world at large. I think there is an influential, intellectual component to our audience that cares very much about getting the hard news of the day. I don’t think there is a risk of us personalising so much that we keep the hard news out the picture. We have an editorial responsibility not to do that.
Chris Horrie from the University of Winchester’s journalism school was at the the IJ-7 ‘Innovation Journalism’ conference at Stanford University last week and grabbed Bharat for a quick interview afterwards, in which the head of Google News gave his advice to journalists on writing for the web and search engines:
Journalism.co.uk consulting editor Colin Meek (@colinmeek) found himself stranded recently in Oslo, Norway but was rescued thanks to some nifty footwork by Kristine Lowe and an online project from Norwegian news site VG.no entitled Hitchhikers Central.
Colin was in Oslo to give, among other things, an evening presentation to the Norwegian Online News Association (NONA). Colin, when he’s not advising on Journalism.co.uk’s editorial board, is an investigative journalist and trainer in advanced online research skills (his next one-day, open course is in London Tuesday 15 June 2010). Here are some of the tips he shared with our Norwegian colleagues:
Why does search have to produce the same set of results that we always get?
One of Andrew Lyons’, commercial director of Ultraknowledge (UKn), opening questions at the Digital Storytelling conference last week as he talked delegates through UKn’s work with the Independent.
The Independent’s NewsWall, launched in January, is a new way of organising stories and navigating through them. It provides a “visual documentation” of a topic and what’s happened in that subject area. (Similar efforts are being made by Daylife’s technology and the Guardian’s News Zeitgeist.
When searched, the wall will return 30 picture-led stories as results, and figures for dwell time on the wall are proving interesting, said Lyons.
The next part will be the ability to save my search for a topic to my Facebook page and then only have it update when it’s relevant to me.
UKn can now start to produce sponsored NewsWalls around events such as the forthcoming World Cup or general election. It will also be opening up the archive of content available through the Independent’s NewsWall from two years to the full 23 years of its history.
UKn has already worked with other publishers to create more intelligent and visually organised search results pages, such as those produced by an initial search on Metro.co.uk.
But the firm wants to take this a step further, by helping news organisations build topic pages for breaking news items by cleverly tagging and organising archived work, and through its latest – and yet-to-be launched project – StoryTriggers – a way to help journalists and news organisations find new leads and spot breaking news trends.
Sometimes the story that you’re after isn’t on your beat, so how do you find it. But when you’re dealing with news its changing, fast – how do you SEO for this? How do you tag it and relate it to what’s happened in the past and what’s happening in the future? (…) We want to be an innovation lab for publishers.