The BBC is to make its on-demand web TV and radio player, iPlayer, embeddable on other websites, according to TV news site Channel 21.
The move means viewers will be able to watch clips of BBC programmes on third party websites such as Facebook.
Silicon Valley Insider talked to Marc Frons, chief technology officer of NYTimes digital, about the projects he’s working on and the development that they’ll be rolling out in the near future. Here’s a brief overview:
Things we have already covered:
The shock of the new:
A businessman is suing an old schoolfriend allegeding the friend created a fake profile of him on the social networking site Facebook.
Mathew Firsht, 38, is seeking damages from Grant Raphael at the High Court, claiming that the profile contained personal details and false information about his sexual orientation and political views.
Developers from Facebook and Google sitting on a panel at Supernova 2008 in San Francisco yesterday.
CNET has them saying that its the lawyers who are keeping them from using collaboartive technology for their respective friend-connecting APIs while the developers work on ways of sharing data between social networks.
Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect service last month saying it violated the site’s terms of service – the violation was redistributing user information from Facebook to other developers without the users’ knowledge.
What would Google have to do to not vialate the terms then?
Well, that one’s with the lawyers.
We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Showing us its wares today is the aptly named HelpAReporter.com – set-up by Peter Shankman.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
HelpAReporter was designed simply to help journalists find the sources they need without a lot of hassle. I started the site for two simple reasons:
a) I think that other services are more about making money and less about actually getting reporters what they need. “I need someone who understands 18th century art” turns into 600 emails that say “I once saw a piece of 18th century art as I WAS WRITING MY BOOK ON HOW TO SELL THINGS ON THE INTERNET DO YOU WANT A COPY TO REVIEW?!”
b) I think that in the end, reporters don’t WANT to hate publicists, and publicists don’t WANT to come across as idiots. I’d like to help prove that.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Journalists start every single day behind the eight-ball. They need sources. Sadly, most publicists send emails that do nothing more than waste their time. I’m trying to change that – journalists simply submit their queries at www.helpareporter.com/press, and it goes out to my list – now over 10,000 sources big. They can put in their email or go anonymously if they choose.
I make all my sources promise to stay on topic, and not waste a journalist’s time. So far, they’re all agreeing! That rocks.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
I never say never – I didn’t expect this to be any bigger than the original Facebook group I started. Now, 10k members and growing? Who knows how big it’ll go?
4) Why are you doing this?
Here’s why… The site takes probably 15 minutes a day to administer. I simply take the emails, put them into a text document, at a few times a day, send them out through the email distribution list.
Too many people (in this industry and well as in the world) simply live on a ‘ME, ME, ME’ mentality. Why not do something good for others? I’ve been very fortunate – The companies I’ve started have all done very well. Why shouldn’t I give something back to account for all that luck? The fact that more people don’t think like that kinda saddens me – but on the plus side, it means that I can shine without doing that much extra. So it’s a nice balance.
5) What does it cost to use it?
The site is 100% free for both journalists and sources.
6) How will you make it pay?
Right now, I don’t need to. Perhaps I will one day? A text ad? Who knows. Right now, if people really like it, I invite them to donate to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in California. Perhaps one day I’ll sell it, or start some small advertising on it. For now, it’s totally not necessary.
Norway’s largest city is in cyberspace, and its 713 000 ‘citizens’ are generating good revenues for the newspaper that owns it.
Schibsted-owned VG.no is not only Norway’s most read and most profitable news site, it also has a social network making a nice contribution to the news site’s admirable financial results.
A city of teenagers
VG is currently earning a gross margin of more than 50 per cent from this social network, called ‘Nettby‘ (Norwegian for NetCity), Jo Christian Oterhals, head of development, VG Multimedia & chairman of Nettby Community AS, Norway, told the audience at World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in Gothenburg last week.
The 713,000-strong city is in fact the biggest city in Norway, bigger than the capital, Oslo.
“Teenage girls are very active here, and we all know that if you get the girls, you also get teenage boys,” said Oterhals, who explained that Nettby’s 713 citizens make up for 61 per cent of all teenagers in Norway.
This demographic is obviously an attractive one for advertisers, but premium membership is also an important source of revenue. “Premium membership is really important for us now, we have more than 50,000 paying customers at any given time,” Oterhals added.
City guards key to success
Nettby is Norway’s second biggest social network after Facebook, but VG.no is not worried about the competition from the trendy website, because the users and purpose of the two social networks are so different:
“Nettby is a place you go to meet new people; on Facebook you keep up with existing friends,” Espen Egil Hansen, managing editor of VG.no, told me on a previous occasion.
Nettby is very much like a party where teenagers hang out, flirt and meet new friends.
“But you can’t just open the door, the best parties are well administered,” said Oterhals.
“That is why Nettby has city guards, volunteers who help moderate and control Nettby,” he explained, adding that these city guards were hand-picked by Nettby’s own people.
“To throw a good party you need good planning, a place, a host, basic rules, a bouncer, an invitation and a few introduction. We try to provide all this,” said Oterhals.
No recipe to make teenagers read news
“Currently there are almost no links between VG and Nettby other than the logo, as it was very important for us when we started Nettby that the kids who came in there did not get the impression that this was their fathers’ website,” said Oterhals.
In other words, Nettby has not been a recipe to get young readers reading newspapers – a topic much discussed during WAN.
Instead, Oterhals told journalism.co.uk, part of the rational for running this social network was to be part of what is happening on the web and to figure out how young readers use the web.
“What is your competitor online is not as easy to figure out online as in print – it could be Google, it could be Facebook – so we stay awake at night thinking about what the next big thing will be, who our new competitors are,” he said
VG.no has also launched the site in Sweden, where it failed due to many Norwegian teenagers hanging out there, and more recently in Spain, where it is an add-on to the online operation of 20 Minutos, Schibsted’s Spanish freesheet.
“Analysts said Nettby’s success will last for six years max, so the challenge for us is to look at how can we repackage and launch it as new products. I think that will be our strategy for the future,” said Oterhals.
BusinessWeek.com has looked to data from its web traffic to update a story originally published in 2005 (pointed out by The Bivings Report).
After seeing that their article ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business‘ was continuing to attract significant traffic, authors Stephen Baker and Heather Green decided the demand for the information meant an updated version was necessary.
“Type in ‘blogs business’ on the search engine, and our story comes up first among the results, as of this writing. Hundreds of thousands of people are still searching ‘blogs business’ because they’re eager to learn the latest news about an industry that’s changing at warp speed. Their attention maintains our outdated relic at the top of the list. It’s self-perpetuating: They want new, we give them old,” wrote Baker and Green.
The article has not only been given the new headline ‘Social Media Will Change Your Business‘, but now features annotations and updates from experts.
An editor’s note at the top of the revised piece openly explains this strategy (emphasis is mine):
“When we published ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business’ in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn’t see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.
“So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we’ve been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We’ve placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story.
“First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter-they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It’s clunkier language than blogs, but we’re not putting it on the cover anyway. We’re just fixing it.”
The original version still exists on the site, but directs readers to the updated piece. The writers have also been using their blog on the site to gain feedback from readers on what should be changed.
So that’s re-optimising the article for search engines, meeting the demands of readers and promoting the site as an up-to-the minute information source, all rolled into one.
Google has just held its two day European Zeitgeist conference in the UK bringing together a host of captivating speakers, here are just a few of the session videos – many more on the Zeitgeist YouTube channel.
Matthew d’Ancona interviews Chad Hurley
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA_Lw9zCT2E]Sir Salman Rushdie
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka1Y1BY19Vw]The future of online video panel with Ashley Highfield and others
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmsUWuh0CU]
Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acoC5zjgM0]Content vs community panel part 1 (Inc. Mattias Cohler, Facebook, & William Lewis, editor of The Telegraph)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7awAN8ceIgc]Content vs community part 2
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aan24cfI1bg]Crowd-sourced news site NowPublic has teamed up with mobile and social media firm ShoZu to set up a new way for users to contribute.
Images and photos can now be sent to NowPublic from mobile devices through the ShoZu application, according to a press release. The app is freely downloadable and already features on certain Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson handsets.
The application can also be used to upload images, videos and text to a range of social media sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, with the option to publish to multiple websites at once.