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YouTube grant programme – a step closer to Google as a publisher?

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Last week YouTube announced its new Partner Grant Program:

The goal of YouTube Partner Grants is to act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation. Funds from YouTube Partner Grants will serve as an advance against the partner’s future YouTube revenue share.

Any partners are eligible – including news organisations – and some of the features on offer, such as tracking user engagement and subscriptions, would be particularly attractive to news channels on the site.

Parent company Google has long maintained that it is not a publisher, but could investment via partnerships with publishers and producers of video be a step away from this defence?

A spokesperson for Google gave Journalism.co.uk a short, definitive answer – no.

Our specialty is certainly not creating the content. We leave that to the experts. But we’ve seen some amazing content creators rise up over the years to get audiences that rival network television. Our goal with Partner Grants is to give these folks who are often doing 360 degrees of the content creation, production and marketing process, additional funds that they can use to buy better cameras, invest in more talent, or beef up their marketing. We look at this as a small first step in the broader evolution of partners on YouTube, but a giant leap forward in the evolution of online video.

Landmark decision clears Google of copyright infringement in YouTube case

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Viacom’s $1 billion legal battle with Google, over YouTube’s hosting of allegedly copyright infringing video clips, has come to a landmark conclusion.

The lawsuit was thrown out after a judge found the search engine giant’s video site had not breached the ‘safe harbor’ provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

This enables online sites like YouTube to avoid liability if not given sufficient notice of the infringing material.

In a comment on their company blog, Google said the ruling will have a huge impact on the online communications world.

This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other. We’re excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world.

Reporting on the ruling on their news feed, Viacom say they will appeal the decision.

We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible.

See the full ruling below, courtesy of Scribd.com.

Read an analysis of the ruling here….

Google looks to failed searches to find story ideas

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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.

Read the FT report here.

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.

Full story at this link…

Google News founder says aggregator has responsibility to protect hard news

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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:

Mapping stories and historical images on Google Street View

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Historypin, a site that overlays historical images and related stories on Google Street View, describes itself as “like a digital time machine”:

It uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the world’s historical images and stories.

Historypin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the Historypin map. Uniquely, Historypin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peaks into the past.

It has been developed by We Are What We Do, the “social movement” and campaign that was behind the book ‘Teach your Granny to Text and Other Ways to Change the World’, in partnership with Google.

If the technology behind it were opened up, this would be a fascinating way to publishing ‘nostalgia’ pictures from local newspapers, news archives or map historic stories.

(via Mapperz)

Mediating Conflict: Looking at the media ‘stealing’ stories from blogs

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If you haven’t spotted it already, read Danny Sullivan’s blog post about the mainstream media ‘stealing’ his scoop – the story about a woman suing Google, alleging that bad directions had resulted in her getting hit by a car.

Sullivan documents the various ways his story for Search Engine Land was picked up by mainstream titles, and raises complaint with the way material was used.

…News is messy. But we should all try to do better attribution.

Following on from the post, the UK-based blogger and PhD student, Daniel Bennett, broadens the discussion to one of methodology: how to monitor the way mainstream media uses blog content, if they don’t attribute it?

…If blogs and indeed other sources of other news are written out of media reports how can we accurately measure their influence? It seems to me that relying solely on content analyses to assess the impact of blogs on the traditional news media is highly unreliable.

#snprivacy: Journalists’ privacy plea to social networks

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This post was written following months of mounting concern about the way new sharing and connection features are being implemented on the most popular social networks. If you agree with what we ask of social network developers, feel free to quote this blog, or tweet marking your messages #SNprivacy. Journalism.co.uk will be putting more questions about privacy policy to Facebook later this week. To have your say, please leave comments below, tweet @journalismnews, or email judith [at] journalism.co.uk.

Re: Privacy policy

Dear social networks,

You say you want to reflect real world relationships and connections. Well, in the real world there are connections and information that journalists don’t want made public, shared or given to third parties. Please help us protect our privacy, so vital to responsible journalistic work. It will help you avoid law suits and government inquiries, too.

We know that we need you to help us work more effectively as journalists, to share with others, and to make connections in ways impossible before your birth. But likewise social networks need users and their endorsement. Google’s head of public policy and government relations, Susan Pointer, recently said: “We live or die by the trust our users have in our services.”

Social networks also rely on bloggers and technology/media journalists to communicate new and changed tools accurately.

We realise there is some shoddy and inaccurate reporting around social networking, especially in some of the mainstream press, but there are also many writers who care about relaying information responsibly.

We believe changes to Facebook’s privacy settings are particularly worrying for journalists and bloggers, who have good reason for protecting their privacy and confidential sources.

As the US blogger and librarian Bobbi L. Newman reported, users now have to ‘opt out’ of auto-personalisation settings that allow their friends to share their content.

Furthermore, as developer Ka-Ping Yee exposed, privacy breaches were made in the original open API which allowed external access to Facebook users’ ‘event’ information. We are pleased to see Facebook has reacted to this and corrected the privacy error.

We believe Google Buzz was naive in setting up auto-connections between contacts in Gmail address books. The public availability of email addresses on Buzz, as reported by TechCrunch, was also of concern. We are pleased to see Google has amended these privacy errors.

Journalism.co.uk has recently revealed misleading information surrounding Address Book Importing (ABI), which we feel does not adequately explain how social networks are using – and keeping – users’ email address book information.

We argue that the default options should always be set so that the privacy of the user is respected. With friend friend finder tools, like Facebook’s, users should have to opt in to share email addresses and opt in to each one shared.

It’s an issue publicly highlighted by Facebook’s former chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly (currently running for office as attorney general in California):  he is calling on Facebook “to structure all its programs to allow Facebook users to give permission before their information is shared with third parties”.

We are worried by Twitter and Friendster’s lack of engagement with us on privacy and ABI issues.

Facebook, with which we did enter lengthy dialogue, has said it welcomes feedback. Nonetheless, we are concerned it continues to dismiss the issues thrown up by its friend suggestions and connection features, which are implemented with harvested email addresses. Наши друзья: porno365.plus желают вам хороших праздников и смотреть только качественное секс видео. порно 365 это жемчужина в мире порнухи, куча роликов, много категорий и тегов, вы всегда можете сочетать теги и категории по вашим предпочтениям и найти то, что вы действительно хотели!

In light of the privacy breaches and concerns outlined above, we ask six things of growing social networks.

1. Please conduct thorough user research before you implement new features

2. Please publicise new features before you launch them fully, allowing us time to change new or existing privacy settings as necessary

3. If you change privacy settings, please ask us to opt *in*, not opt *out*. Social networks should NEVER set the default option to share users’ information

4. Please provide clearer explanations about how data is shared and how connections are made

5. Please test your new features more thoroughly before launching

6. Please answer our emails or postings on your forums about privacy concerns and reports of privacy breaches – written as either users or journalists / bloggers

Note to bloggers: please feel free to reproduce this plea on your own blogs, with a link back to the original post.

Google News Blog: Google’s Living Stories come to WordPress

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Google launched its “living stories” project in December with collaborations with the New York Times and Washington Post:

The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment (…) Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritised on one URL.

Having made the format open source in February, Google has now created a plugin for blogging platform WordPress to help publishers create their own “living stories” more easily.

Full post at this link…

(Hat tip to Andy Dickinson, who posted about the WordPress plugin at this link.)

Journalist scoops press and police with simple Google search

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Danish police had been searching for Rumenian murder suspect Marian Clita for a good 24 hours when Norwegian journalist Andreas Lunde Googled him, found his phone number and got him on the line.

In a scoop that almost beggars belief, ABC Nyheter’s Andreas Lunde, tracked down the man wanted for the brutal murder of Norwegian Scandinavian Airline stewardess Vera Vildmyren in Copehnhagen, a man sought by both the police and the press, with a simple Google Search.

“I found a blog post he had commented on, using his name and phone number when doing so, put the Rumenian land code in front of the number and called,” Lunde told Danish TV2 News.

Clita picked up the phone, confirmed he was indeed Marian Clita, professed to be unaware the police was searching for him, but, when asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, said he would get a taxi to the police station in ten minutes – and kept his word.

Later, ABC Nyheter called him again, and Clita said he had reported himself to the police and was waiting for them to find an interpreter. The police said Clita had told them: “I have killed a woman I Copenhagen” and thanked Lunde for tracking him down.

Lunde wasn’t actually on the Clita-case, but, as he told a former colleague, “I wasn’t on that particular case, but I’m a journalist and I’m curious, and when I get hold of his number it becomes my case.”

A video-journalist, Lunde has on many other occasions proved how willingness to experiment with new and old technology and storytelling techniques can be used to enhance journalism. In this case, two fairly dated tools, Google and a telephone, were the keys to the story.

For the record: I’m a media columnist with ABC Nyheter and as the president of The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA). I have a keen interest in promoting and sharing good online practices.

Guardian: Tax Google for carrying news, says report

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Control of the media is dominated by a handful of publishers and broadcasters and the proceeds of tax for sites, such as Google, that carry news, but do not produce it, should go to local newspapers, a new report will say this week.

The report argues for levies to promote new media and encourage a diversity of news sources. Recycling money in this way, say the authors, is not new for Britain. Google could generate £100m a year for cash-starved media if it was taxed for the content it distributes.

In Making a Good Society, the report from the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, which will be published this week, the idea of charitable funding for news gathering is also discussed.

Full story at this link…

This is not the first time that a system of levies has been discussed – a joint National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and BECTU study last year proposed a similar system of taxation for internet service providers and mobile network operators to support public service broadcasting.