Tag Archives: YouTube

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

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Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.

Citizen journalism site NowPublic adds new features

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Canadian website NowPublic.com has introduced a host of new features to the site to ‘raise the bar for trust and credibility’ for citizen journalism, a press release from the site has said.

A new ranking system for members of the ‘crowd powered news site’ has been introduced to rate members based on their contributions – including factors like page views generated, comments received and number of front page stories.

A ‘presence stream’ added to the site also shows feeds of content created by users’ on external sites like Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

Finally a news dashboard has been created to give users control over what content and which NowPublic feeds they subscribe to.

House of Lords takes to YouTube

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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]

YouTube creates channel for reporters

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Following the launch of its citizen news channel, YouTube has added a section for reporters.

Professional and amateur journalists are encouraged to upload under the new channel, whether this be breaking news footage, footage from student journalists, citizens reporting on news events or professional journalists looking to create an online portfolio of their video work. Betonred casino

Users, who select the reporter channel in their account settings, will have their content scoured by YouTube, as part of the site’s drive to highlight news content, a post on the site’s official blog said.

BBC Trust: bbc.co.uk internal search and external linking need ‘major improvements’

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The BBC‘s internal website search is ‘not seen as very effective’ by users, according to a review of the site released by the BBC Trust today.

The number of visits to bbc.co.uk pages that were the result of referrals from the site’s internal search engine dropped from 24% during the last three months of 2006 to 19% over the same period in 2007.

In contrast, 70% of search engine referrals came from Google.

“The search just throws everything at you, you would have to spend ages just looking through the pages to find what you need,” one respondent to the Trust’s research said.

The Trust was also ‘disappointed’ with the number of click-throughs generated by external links on bbc.co.uk and criticised the Beeb’s relationship with other content-sharing websites:

“We are also not convinced that BBC management’s ambition to be ‘part of’ the web rather than ‘on it’ by embedding BBC content in other sites (such as Youtube) plays any role in acting as a ‘trusted guide’ to the wider web.  Rather, this is mainly a way of marketing BBC content to those who might not otherwise access it.”

The links to other sites form part of the BBC’s role as a ‘trusted guide’ online.

According to the review, there were 6.7 million click-throughs to external sites from bbc.co.uk in July 2007 – 4.7 million of which originated in the UK.

However, the number of click-throughs from sport and news – the most visited areas of the site – have decreased year-on-year since 2006.

BBC management suggested this decline is a result of the BBC site being seen as a ‘destination’ rather than a way to navigate the web. The Trust argued that issues of accessibility and effectiveness were the problem.

The risk of the BBC becoming a ‘dominant gateway service’ is ‘very much alive’ and requires effective external linking to avoid this, the review stated.

As such the Trust has asked BBC management to submit plans on improving linking and other ways to help users navigate beyond the BBC.

BusinessWeek.com revises 2005 article on blogs because of ‘longtail’ traffic

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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 Zeitgeist videos: Salman Rushdie, Chad Hurley, Gordon Brown, Will Lewis, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey…many more

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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]

YouTomb: where YouTube videos go when they die

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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.

YouTube launches citizen journalism channel – Citizen News

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Have to admit this had passed me by (so thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the point) at launch, but YouTube has unleashed on the world a channel specifically for citizen journalism called…wait for it…Citizen News.

It has also hired a news manager to oversee the whole affair. Here she is:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQkON7NN6WY]

YouTube moves into India

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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.