The financial crisis speeds up the newspapershift. Media diverges. Newspapers become television, television becomes a press agency. And everything becomes the web. Probably not a single news websites makes enough revenue to employ the same amount of journalists traditional media like newspapers and television employ. The result is a shift. Not in demand, in distribution. What will happen, and how will this shift change organizations?
Here are some ideas and thoughts that I think make sense. Please help me sharpen this concept, or point me at my fallacies. It would be interesting to have a discussion about this. [Read more]
Today is the day of the US elections. I don’t think we ever had a live event on the web that will get so much live coverage. This means incredible amounts of information will be published over all kind of services and social networks. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wordpress, Blogger and many more.
Most popular web services have programmable interfaces. These interfaces allow developers to extract information out of the system. This creates a whole new genre of storytelling: storytelling with public databases. You can aggregate the information you need and sort it the way you want.
To prove the concept I made three small mock-ups. They all use search.twitter.com to see how people voted.
When I made the first the first animationErik Borra replied by developing the idea into something that stores the data retrieved from Twitter in a database. I made a new interface that shows a graph based on what people say they voted on Twitter. And the result is a Twitter Poll.
These three examples are not representative data, it is extracted from Twitter. But it shows you how much personal and valuable information is in the public database. All you have to do is ask yourself what you want to tell to your readers and if this information is available.
I voted
This animation gets the latest twitter message where someone says they voted on McCain or Obama. It automatically refreshes. [Read more]
The last year has seen social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn updating the design of the homepage to turn it more into a notification page: the homepage as a place where you can see what your friends are doing. Your virtual center of the network.
These updates let you know what your friends are up to, but they also let you know what your friends like or share. The social networks often work as recommendation networks as well. [Read more]
The web is becoming a more live medium, the medium itself isn’t changing it is how we publish to it. I think the ‘live web’ is the most exiting development since the rise of social networks. You write a Twitter notification on your mobile phone, post a picture to the web or stream a live video with Qik or Seesmic. Often recording is publishing.
When you write a blog or create a podcast your entry has context in itself. It has a start and it ends. Most postings on micro blogs don’t have context in the messages. The context is in the stream or in time. For example Twitter messages often make sense in your personal timeline or in the conversation within your personal network.
Twitter and Qik are just the first services. Realtime platform independent micro services, that distribute contextless fragments of information are here to stay.
This sense of a ‘live medium’ is something that is changing the web as it is and how we use it. It will change search, or at least sorting search results and it will change reporting news.
A service like Twitter makes news travel fast. This makes it the #1 breaking news source for a lot of people. Why? Because it is reporting as it is happening. It isn’t always right, but it is reporting, open for conversation and correcting itself. It is live coverage and it is a storytelling experience. [Read more]
In his first post for the OJB Wilbert Baan looks at sorting news by systems
The website as we know it is breaking apart. Widgets, API’s and feeds take information to other places outside the domain. In a network culture we like to take our information with us. Your mobile phone, desktop, widgets, websites, digital television, everywhere. For the EN project I am thinking about how we can interact with news as an object. How can we take the article everywhere or use it to make new collections.
The article as a social object
For example on Flickr the picture is the social object. It connects you to your friends. You have a personal contact page where you see the pictures that are relevant to you. All of these photos are probably public information, but it is the selection based on your personal network that makes this page interesting for you. [Read more]
What will happen to news publishers? A guess based on what’s happening right now