In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some recent developments in the intersection between hyper-local SoLoMo (social, location, mobile). His more detailed slides looking at 20 developments across the sector during the last two months of 2011 are cross-posted at the bottom of this article.

Facebook’s recent purchase of location-based service Gowalla (Slide 19 below,) suggests that the social network still thinks there is a future for this type of “check in” service. Touted as “the next big thing” ever since Foursquare launched at SXSW in 2009, to date Location Based Services (LBS) haven’t quite lived up to the hype.

Certainly there’s plenty of data to suggest that the public don’t quite share the enthusiasm of many Silicon Valley investors. Yet.

Part of their challenge is that not only is awareness of services relatively low – just 30% of respondents in a survey of 37,000 people by Forrester (Slide 27) – but their benefits are also not necessarily clearly understood.

In 2011, a study by youth marketing agency Dubit found about half of UK teenagers are not aware of location-based social networking services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, with 58% of those who had heard of them saying they “do not see the point” of sharing geographic information.

Safety concerns may not be the primary concern of Dubit’s respondents, but as the “Please Rob Me” website says: “….on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home… The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

Reinforcing this concern are several stories from both the UK and the US of insurers refusing to pay out after a domestic burglary, where victims have announced via social networks that they were away on holiday – or having a beer downtown.

For LBS to go truly mass market – and Forrester (see Slide 27) found that only 5% of mobile users were monthly LBS users – smartphone growth will be a key part of the puzzle. Recent Ofcom data reported that:

• Ownership nearly doubled in the UK between February 2010 and August 2011 (from 24% to 46%).
• 46% of UK internet users also used their phones to go online in October 2011.

For now at least, most of our location based activity would seem to be based on previous online behaviours. So, search continues to dominate.

Google in a recent blog post described local search ads as “so hot right now” (Slide 22, Sept-Oct 2011 update). The search giant launched hyper-local search ads a year ago, along with a “News Near You” feature in May 2011. (See: April-May 2011 update, Slide 27.)

Meanwhile, BIA/Kelsey forecast that local search advertising revenues in the US will increase from $5.1 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2015. Their figures suggest by 2015, 30% of search will be local.

The other notable growth area, location based mobile advertising, also offers a different slant on the typical “check in” service which Gowalla et al tend to specialise in. Borrell forerecasts this space will increase 66% in the US during 2012 (Slide 22).

The most high profile example of this service in the UK is O2 More, which triggers advertising or deals when a user passes through certain locations – offering a clear financial incentive for sharing your location.

Perhaps this – along with tailored news and information manifest in services such as News Near You, Postcode Gazette and India’s Taazza – is the way forward.

Jiepang, China’s leading Location-Based Social Mobile App, offered a recent example of how to do this. Late last year they partnered with Starbucks, offering users a virtual Starbucks badge if they “checked-in” at a Starbucks store in the Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. When the number of badges issued hit 20,000, all badge holders got a free festive upgrade to a larger cup size. When coupled with the ease of NFC technology deployed to allow users to “check in” then it’s easy to understand the consumer benefit of such a service.

Mine’s a venti gingerbread latte. No cream. Xièxiè.

Continuing the serialisation of the research underpinning a new Help Me Investigate project, in this fourth part I describe how one particular investigation took shape. Previous parts are linked below:

• Part 1: Investigative journalism; conceptualising Help Me Investigate
• Part 2: Building the site
• Part 3: Reflections on the Proof of Concept phase

Case study: the London Weekly investigation

In early 2010 Andy Brightwell and I conducted some research into one particular successful investigation on the site. The objective was to identify what had made the investigation successful – and how (or if) those conditions might be replicated for other investigations both on the site and elsewhere online.

The investigation chosen for the case study was ‘What do you know about The London Weekly?’ – an investigation into a free newspaper that was, the owners claimed (part of the investigation was to establish if the claim was a hoax), about to launch in London.

The people behind The London Weekly had made a number of claims about planned circulation, staffing and investment which went unchallenged in specialist media. Journalists Martin Stabe, James Ball and Judith Townend, however, wanted to dig deeper. So, after an exchange on Twitter, Judith logged onto Help Me Investigate and started an investigation.

A month later members of the investigation (most of whom were non-journalists) had unearthed a wealth of detail about the people behind The London Weekly and the facts behind their claims. Some of the information was reported in MediaWeek and The Guardian podcast Media Talk; some formed the basis for posts on James Ball’s blog, Journalism.co.uk and the Online Journalism Blog. Some has, for legal reasons, remained unpublished.

Methodology

Andrew Brightwell conducted a number of semi-structured interviews with contributors to the investigation. The sample was randomly selected but representative of the mix of contributors, who were categorised as either ‘alpha’ contributors (over 6 contributions), ‘active’ (2-6 contributions) and ‘lurkers’ (whose only contribution was to join the investigation). These interviews formed the qualitative basis for the research.

Complementing this data was quantitative information about users of the site as a whole. This was taken from two user surveys – one conducted when the site was three months’ old and another at 12 months – and analysis of analytics taken from the investigation (such as numbers and types of actions, frequency, etc.)

In the next part I explore some of the characteristics of a crowdsourced investigation and how these relate to the wider literature around crowdsourcing in general.

Yesterday I asked – on this blog, on my Facebook page, and on Twitter – what Android phones were best for a journalism student who didn’t want to buy an iPhone or BlackBerry. The blog post comments are particularly informative on the key features to look out for, while the tweets provide a good overview of who recommends what, and why. I’ve used Storify to organise those below:

Plenty has been written about the iPhone, and plenty on the Android vs iPhone debate. But many students, having already decided to go the Android route, still don’t know which to get. So, assuming someone has decided to get an Android phone, which would you recommend – and why?

If you prefer to contribute your thoughts on Facebook, you can do so here – or tweet me @paulbradshaw (I’ll put together a Storify).

UPDATE: Based on answers so far, I’ve created a poll:
Take Our Poll

The Gymbl - makes your iPhone not quite a good phone or a good camera

Jon Hickman reviews iPhone tripod Gymbl Pro.

Jonathan Ive didn’t design my iPhone with a pistol grip. Instead of a hard, brittle feeling, bumpy, plastic case, Jonathan Ive fashioned a fetish object wrapped in perfectly smooth flat glass. Jonathan Ive did not design the Gymbl Pro, by Youbiq.

Would Jonathan Ive use a Gymbl Pro in pistol grip mode to shoot a video?

No, he wouldn’t. Jonathan Ive would use an iPhone 4 to grab short informal videos. If he was in the field and had a chance to grab an important interview with somebody, he’d not hesitate to use his iPhone 4 in the hand. Jony would know that informal handheld shooting would add a sense of urgency or intimicay to his media file – he’d say: “There’s no need for handheld slickness, we’re over that now”.

Would Jonathan Ive use Gymbl Pro in tripod mode to take a photo?

No, not until he’s tasked the iOS team with putting a self-timer into the camera – then he’d say, “Hey this is pretty cool for family portraits”.

Would Jonathan Ive use the Gymbl Pro’s adaptor, so that he can mount it to a professional tripod?

No, if Jonny was going to go to the trouble of lugging around a heavy Manfroto tripod, he’d be sure to take a D-SLR with him too – in for a penny in for a pound.

Would Jonathan Ive pay for the optional Gymbl Pro app?

No, Jonathan Ive wouldn’t pay an extra £1.99 for the Youbiq app. He’d wonder why he needs another cloud storage solution for photos, and he’d wonder why Youbiq didn’t think to offer this app (which does have a neat panorama stitching feature) for free as a promotional tool to drive sales of the Gymbl (after all, a tripod makes stitiching panorams much easier).

What would Jonathan Ive do if his phone went off with a Gymbl Pro attached?

He’d have to stop his film shoot to answer or reject the call. I imagine he’d find hitting the wake/sleep button to mute the ringer a little tricky due to the case thickness. He’d also find talking on the phone slightly tricky because his phone has grown a load of spiky metal.

In Summary

• What is it?
  • It’s a tripod system for an iPhone 4. You put your phone in a case, the case clips onto a mini tripod which also doubles as a pistol grip.
• Why would you use it?
  • To provide a comfortable grip for shooting longer videos, as a stand for face time calls, or to provide a tripod for photography and video. But really you’d use it because you’re a bit of a geek.
• Positives
  • Comfortable holding for longer shoots; pretty stable as a table-top tripod.
• Negatives
  • Seems pricey for what boils down to a gimmick; turns your phone into a camera, reducing ease of use as anything else other than a camera – so really you’d be better off with, you know, a camera.
• In a nutshell
  • Smartphones are great for production when you’re in a tight spot, cameras are great for producing something more polished – this gets lost somewhere in the middle.
• Price: $99.00
• Rating: 2/5

I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time breaking down all the habits and hacks I’ve acquired over the years – so this month’s Carnival of Journalism question on ‘Hacking your journalism workflow’ gave me the perfect nudge.

Picking those habits apart is akin to an act of archaeology. What might on the surface look very complicated is simply the accumulation of small acts over several years. Those acts range from the habits themselves to creating simple shortcuts and automated systems, and learning from experience. So that’s how I’ve broken it down:

1. Shortcuts

Shortcuts are such a basic part of my way of working that it’s easy to forget they’re there: bookmarks in the browser bar, for example. Or using the Chrome browser because its address bar also acts as a search bar for previous pages.

I realise I use Twitter lists as a shortcut of sorts – to zoom in on particular groups of people I’m interested in at a particular time, such as experts in a particular area, or a group of people I’m working with. Likewise, I use folders in Google Reader to periodically check on a particular field – such as data journalism – or group – such as UK journalists.

Getting more specific, when it comes to data journalism tasks I rely on a whole range of tools and shortcuts for cleaning and interrogating datasets: the =TRANSPOSE formula, for example, will swap a spreadsheet’s rows and columns; =VLOOKUP will copy across data from matching cells; and the free tool Google Refine will quickly identify similar entries (which may have been misspelled).

On my desktop I rely on plugins for Firefox and Chrome such as Firebug (check a page’s HTML), OutWit Hub (scrape a page), TinEye (check if an image has been used elsewhere), ErrorZilla (check for cached and older versions of a webpage), and Easy YouTube Downloader (download YouTube videos). Links to these and other useful plugins can be found at http://delicious.com/paulb/firefox

But the most frequently used shortcuts are the bookmarklets that are installed on my mobile phone browser – ‘Read Later’ (Instapaper); ‘Bookmark on Delicious’; ‘Tweet with Echofon’; ‘save on Springpad’ or Evernote; and ‘Blog on Tumblr’. These are made even more powerful through automation.

2. Automation

RSS can be a hugely useful technology when it comes to saving time and automating processes – and Delicious is the king of useful RSS feeds in this respect.

If I want to tweet a useful link as well as bookmark it, for example, I simply add the tag ‘t’ – the RSS feed for which is automatically tweeted to my account by Twitterfeed. If I want to tweet it using the @helpmeinvestig8 account I add the tag ‘hmitwt’. Webpages which I think might be useful to students on the MA in Television and Interactive Content I tag ‘tvi’ – this not only sends them to the @bcumedia_matvic account but also to an email newsletter that students receive (I use Feedburner for this). If I wanted to I could set up a Tumblr blog to automatically pull items from the RSS feed for a particular tag, too. And all of this is triggered by one click, and one tag.

The process works the other way: Packrati.us will bookmark any link you tweet in your Delicious account. And Trunk.ly automatically archives both your Delicious bookmarks and tweeted links, providing a backup search engine.

IFTTT (IF This Then That) is a new service which promises some amazing possibilities for automating processes between (currently) 32 different services, including Delicious, Google Reader, stock performances, times and dates, emails, phone calls and any RSS feed. I’ve been using it to bookmark anything I share on Google Reader, but I’m on the lookout for other uses.

For other tasks the Firefox plugin iMacros can automate web-based actions so you don’t have to repeat them, while Automator on the Mac will do the same for computer-based actions. For links to these and IFTTT see http://www.delicious.com/paulb/automation+tools

3. Habits

For all the above it is ultimately up to you to set balls in motion, and here I think establishing habits is key. In particular, bookmarking is one habit that I find saves me more time than anything else.

Every morning I check my RSS feeds and bookmark items I think may be useful in future. Bookmarking and tagging them builds a resource that I can look to whenever I need to solve a problem, help someone, or write something quickly. So if I decide to write something on data visualisation, I already have an archive of pre-filtered material to refer to. If I need data on health, I already have several health datasets that I’ve bookmarked and tagged. And if I have a Yahoo! Pipes-related problem, I can check my bookmarks first.

Delicious is the main place that I do this – but it’s no longer the only one. My Tumblr blog is essentially a place where I bookmark multimedia and quotes – so if I need some multimedia or a choice quote, that’s where I look first.

And blogging itself is a great habit to have: it makes me remember things better, provides a space where I can re-find them, and helps me (or others) identify gaps.

4. Discipline

The final journalism hack is my most recent one – and I think something that more and more online journalists are learning too as they hit information fatigue. It’s self-discipline.

With so many sources of information, so many things to tweet, blog and bookmark, it’s easy to lose a morning in following links, tweets and feeds, and replying to emails. Having a clear idea of what you need to achieve on a particular day, and sometimes switching off other signals in order to complete it, is a hard skill to build – but an important one.

And so I try to only check email three times per day (start, midday and end). At the end of the day emails that require more time to respond go into my ‘Starred items’, and I check those and respond if I can first thing the next day.

I set limits on the time I spend checking RSS feeds, and on the number of blog posts I write.

I email longer webpages, reports and documents to my Kindle address to be read when I’m travelling.

I use the Springpad app to create ‘To Do’ items that I schedule for future days, taking them out of my head so I can focus on the here and now. And at the start of every day I go through these so that nothing is missed.

Then, I make time to switch off, to remove the phone from my hand, the laptop from my desk (it is set to switch itself off at a particular time every night), and sleep.

Another FAQ:

What good examples of mobile reporting have you seen?

It’s hard to say because the fact that it’s mobile is not always very visible – but @documentally’s work is always interesting. The Telegraph’s use of Twitter and Audioboo during its coverage of the royal wedding was well planned, and Paul Lewis at the Guardian uses mobile technology well during his coverage of protests and other events. Generally the reporting of these events – in the UK and in the Arab Spring stories – includes lots of good examples.

Could it become a genuine niche in journalism or just offer an alternative?

Neither really – I just think it’s a tool of the job that’s particularly useful when you’re covering a moving event where you don’t have time or resources to drive a big truck there.

Do you think more newspapers and print outlets will embrace the possibilities to use mobile technology to “broadcast”?

Very much so – especially as 3G and wifi coverage expands, mobile phones become more powerful, the distribution infrastructure improves (Twitter etc.) and more journalists see how it can be done.

But broadcast is the wrong word when you’re publishing from a situation where a thousand others are doing the same. It needs to be plugged into that.

Do you think the competition that mobile reporting could offer could ever seriously rival traditional broadcast technology?

It already is. The story almost always takes priority over production considerations. We’ve seen that time and again from the July 7 bombing images to the Arab Spring footage. We’ll settle for poor production values as long as we get the story – but we won’t settle for a poor story, however beautifully produced.

Have you seen any good examples of how media orgs are encouraging their staff to adopt mobile reporting techniques?

Trinity Mirror bought a truckload of N97s and N98s and laptops for its reporters a couple years back, and encouraged them to go out, and various news organisations are giving reporters iPhones and similar kit – but that’s just kit. Trinity Mirror also invested in training, which is also useful, and you can see journalists are able to use the kit well when they need to – but as long as the time and staffing pressures remain few journalists will have the time to get out of the office.

What are the main limitations that are holding back this sector – are they technological, training related or all in the mind?

Time and staff, and the cultural habits of working to print and broadcast deadlines rather than reporting live from the scene.

What advice would you give to individual journalists thinking of embracing the opportunities mobile reporting offers?

Start simple – Twitter is a good way to get started, from simple text alerts to tweeting images, audio and video. Once you’re comfortable with tweeting from a phone, find easy ways to share images, then find a video app like Twitcaster and an audio app like Audioboo. Then it all comes down to being able to spot opportunities on the move.

An image taken by the student when he was stopped by plain-clothes officers

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was an ongoing problem for photographers and journalists using mobile phones who would find themselves stopped, searched, and sometimes arrested by police. After ongoing pressure and a judgement in the European Court of Human Rights, the section was finally suspended last July.

Now Amateur Photographer reports on the Metropolitan Police defending officers’ decision to stop and search a student for merely taking photographs near a school (the image above was being taken when he was approached by police). The search was done under Section 43, which “can only be enforced if a police officer ‘reasonably suspects’ a person to be a terrorist.”

Meanwhile, police are seeking new powers to replace those given under Section 44.

If you use mobile technology in your journalism, it’s worth keeping the stop and search bust card about you.

h/t Ewen Rankin

The Guardian reports on the AP photographer whose image dominated the front pages today. The following passage on how he returned to his office with a member of the public who had filmed it on his mobile phone passes by without remark:

“The adrenaline was running by now. So I turned [the flash] on and took five pictures. I realised they were important and I saw another guy shooting video on his phone.

“So I got him into a taxi and we went back to AP’s offices in Camden.”

Worth noting.

I’ve been fiddling with the mobile location-based social networking game Foursquare for a few months now. The concept is simple: as you move around a city you ‘check in’ to locations. You can see where your friends last checked in, and you can add comments as you go. But does it have journalistic uses? I think it does. Here are just 4:

1. Finding contacts

Until recently I refrained from pressing the ‘Tell Twitter’ or ‘Tell Facebook’ buttons when I checked into a location. However, that changed when I realised what happens when you do.

In one example, David Nikel, a political candidate in Birmingham, ‘checked in’ at Birmingham New Street train station 5 minutes after I had. Although I hadn’t ‘shared’ my check in via Twitter, because Nikel did, his automatically generated tweet said that I was there too. This alerted me and led to us meeting.

2. Social capital

Foursquare plugs into your existing social networks but adds an extra layer of information. If you know that John spends a lot of time at Urban Coffee Co you can make a point to go there yourself more often, or at least have it as a potential conversation-opener.

3. Tips

Users can add ‘tips’ to locations – a feature which is currently underused but has potential for leads as well as…

4. Distribution

Foursquare has already signed deals with Metro in Canada, Bravo TV and the FT. The potential is obvious: content directly relevant to your location. The big issue for Foursquare is whether it can achieve the scale that most publishers need.

How about you? Are using Foursquare or one of the other location based social networks, such as Brightkite or Gowalla – and how has it been useful?