In the second of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about dealing with the large amount of information that magazine editors receive. 

Managing information overload

A magazine editor now has little problem finding information on a range of topics. It is likely that you will have subscribed to email newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook groups and pages, YouTube channels and various other sources of news and information both in your field and on journalistic or management topics.

There tend to be two fears driving journalists’ information consumption: the fear that you will miss out on something because you’re not following the right sources; and the fear that you’ll miss out on something because you’re following too many sources. This leads to two broad approaches: people who follow everything of any interest (‘follow, then filter’); and people who are very strict about the number of sources of information they follow (‘filter, then follow’).

A good analogy to use here is of streams versus ponds. A pond is manageable, but predictable. A stream is different every time you step in it, but you can miss things.

As an editor you are in the business of variety: you need to be exposed to a range of different pieces of information, and cannot afford to be caught out. A good strategy for managing your information feeds then, is to follow a wide variety of sources, but to add filters to ensure you don’t miss all the best stuff.

If you are using an RSS reader one way to do this is to have specific folders for your ‘must-read’ feeds. Andrew Dubber, a music industries academic and author of the New Music Strategies blog, recommends choosing 10 subjects in your area, and choosing five ‘must-read’ feeds for each, for example.

For email newsletters and other email updates you can adopt a similar strategy: must-reads go into your Inbox; others are filtered into subfolders to be read if you have time.

To create a folder in Google Reader, add a new feed (or select an existing one) and under the heading click on Feed Settings… – then scroll to the bottom and click on New Folder… – this will also add the feed to that folder.

If you are following hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter, use Twitter lists to split them into manageable channels: ‘People I know’; ‘journalism’; ‘industry’; and so on. To add someone to a list on Twitter, visit their profile page and click on the list button, which will be around the same area as the ‘Follow’ button.

You can also use websites such as Paper.li to send you a daily email ‘newspaper’ of the most popular links shared by a particular list of friends every day, so you don’t miss out on the most interesting stories.

Social bookmarking: creating an archive and publishing at the same time

Social bookmarking tools like Delicious, Digg and Diigo can also be useful in managing web-based resources that you don’t have time to read or think might come in useful later. Bookmarking them essentially ‘files’ each webpage so you can access them quickly when you need them (you do this by giving each page a series of relevant tags, e.g. ‘dieting’, ‘research’, ‘UK’, ‘Jane Jones’).

They also include a raft of other useful features, such as RSS feeds (allowing you to automatically publish selected items to a website, blog, or Twitter or Facebook account), and the ability to see who else has bookmarked the same pages (and what else they have bookmarked, which is likely to be relevant to your interests).

Check the site’s Help or FAQ pages to find out how to use them effectively. Typically this will involve adding a button to your browser’s Links bar (under the web address box) by dragging a link (called ‘Bookmark on Delicious’ or similar) from the relevant page of the site (look for ‘bookmarklets’).

Then, whenever you come across a page you want to bookmark, click on that button. A new window will appear with the name and address of the webpage, and space for you to add comments (a typical tactic is to paste a key quote from the page here), and tags.

Useful things to add as tags include anything that will help you find this later, such as any organisations, locations or people that are mentioned, the author or publisher, and what sort of information is included, such as ‘report’, ‘statistics’, ‘research’, ‘casestudy’ and so on.

If installing a button on your browser is too complicated or impractical many of these services also allow you to bookmark a page by sending the URL to a specific email address. Alternatively, you can just copy the URL and log on to the bookmarking site to bookmark it.

Some bookmarking services double up as blogging sites: Tumblr and Stumbleupon are just two. The process is the same as described above, but these services are more intuitively connected with other services such as Twitter and Facebook, so that bookmarked pages are also automatically published on those services too. With one click your research not only forms a useful archive but also becomes an act of publishing and distribution.

Every so often you might want to have a clear out: try diverting mailings and feeds to a folder for a week without looking at them. After seven days, ask which ones, if any, you have missed. You might benefit from unsubscribing and cutting down some information clutter. In general, it may be useful to have background information, but it all occupies your time. Treat such things as you would anything sent to you on paper. If you need it, and it is likely to be difficult to find again, file it or bookmark it. If not, bin it. After a while, you’ll find it gets easier.

Do you have any other techniques for dealing with information overload?

Delicious icon by Icon Shock

A few weeks back I wrote about my ‘network infrastructure’ – the combination of social networks, an RSS reader and social bookmarking that can underpin a person’s journalism work.

As I said there, the social bookmarking element is the one that people often fail to get, so I wanted to further illustrate how I use Delicious specifically, with a case study.

Here’s a post I wrote about how sentencing decisions were being covered around the UK riots. The ‘lead’ came through a social network, but if I was to write a post that was informed by more than what I could remember about sentencing, I needed some help.

Here’s where Delicious came in.

I looked to see what webpages I’d bookmarked on Delicious with the tag ‘courts’. This led me on to related tags like ‘courtreporting‘.

The results included:

• An article by Heather Brooke giving her personal experience of not being able to record her own hearing.
• A report on the launch of a new website by the Judiciary of Scotland, which I’d completely forgotten about. This also helped me avoid making the common mistake of tarring Scottish courts with the same brush as English ones.
• Various useful resources for courts data.
• Some context on the drop in court reporters at a regional level – but also some figures on the drop at a national level, which I hadn’t thought about.
• A specialist academic who has been researching court reporting.

And all this in the space of 10 minutes or so.

If you look at the resulting post you can see how the first pars are informed by what was coming into my RSS reader and social networks, but after that it’s largely bookmark-informed (as well as some additional research, including speaking to people). The copious links provide an additional level of utility (I hope) which online journalism can do particularly well.

Excerpt from the article - most of these links came from my Delicious bookmarks

All about preparation

You can see how building this resource over time can allow you to provide context to a story quicker, and more deeply, than if you had resorted to a quick search on Google.

In addition, it highlights a problem with search: you will largely only find what you’re looking for. Bookmarking on Delicious means you can spot related stories, issues and sources that you might not have thought about – and more importantly, that others might have overlooked too.

A network infrastructure for journalists online

For some years now, I have started every online journalism course I teach with an introduction to three key tools: RSS readers, social networks, and social bookmarking.

These are, I believe, the basis of a network infrastructure which few modern journalists – whatever their platform – can do without.

The word ‘network’ is key here – because I believe one of the fundamental changes that journalists have to adapt to in the 21st century is the move to networked modes of working.

Firstly, because the newsroom itself is becoming more networked with contributors situated outside of it (the increasingly collaborative nature of journalism).

Secondly, because sources are becoming more networked (formal organisations are increasingly complemented by ad hoc ones formed across Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and so on).

And finally, because distribution of news – which has both commercial and editorial implications – is reliant on networks outside of the journalist or their employer’s control.

When I describe the network infrastructure outlined below, I outline two levels: the tools themselves, and how they connect to each other. In an attempt to clarify that, I’ve created a diagram.

The icons in the diagram attempt to show clearly the purpose of each tool:

• The exclamation mark representing RSS readers indicate that the tool is focused on monitoring what’s new;
• The question mark representing social bookmarking indicate that that tool largely serves to answer questions, providing context and background
• The facial expressions representing social networks indicate that this tool help provide access to sources who may have stories to tell (positive; negative) or who are asking important questions (confused).

Here is a further breakdown of each element, and how they connect to each other.

RSS Reader

As outlined above, this part of the structure is all about ‘What’s new?’ and is quite often the first thing a journalist checks at the start of the working day (indeed, it’s ideal for checking on a phone on the way to work). It is the modern equivalent of picking up the day’s newspapers and tuning into the first radio and TV broadcasts of the day.

The RSS Reader gathers news feeds from a range of sources. Here are just a few:

• Formal news organisations
• Journalistic blogs
• Organisational blogs
• Personal blogs of individuals in your field

In addition, an RSS reader allows you to follow customised feeds reporting any mention of key terms, organisations and individuals across a variety of platforms:

• Google News
• The blogosphere as a whole
• Social bookmarking services such as Delicious
• Forums
• Microblogging services such as Twitter
• Video sharing services such as YouTube
• Photo sharing services such as Flickr
• Audio sharing services such as Audioboo
• Social networks such as Facebook Pages

This is how the RSS reader connects to the two other elements of the infrastructure: most social networks have RSS feeds of some kind, as do social bookmarking services (one of the reasons I prefer Delicious over other platforms is the fact that it has an RSS feed for every user, for every item bookmarked with a particular ‘tag’ (explained below), for tags by particular users and for any combination of tags.

These are explained in a bit more detail in my post on ‘Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering‘.

But if you can follow these feeds in an RSS reader, why use a social network at all?

Social networks

Why use a social network? To follow people, not just content, and because your own contributions to those networks are a key factor in gaining access to sources.

With many social networking platforms (Twitter, for example) you can of course find individual users’ RSS feeds in an RSS reader, or a feed of people you are ‘following’ – either of which you can subscribe to in an RSS reader. But there’s little point, and your RSS reader will soon become flooded with updates. Instead, you should use the RSS reader to follow subjects and add the individuals talking about those subjects to your social networks.

The social network provides an added level of serendipity to your newsgathering: increased opportunities to encounter leads, tips and stories that you would not otherwise encounter.

It is also a three-way medium: a platform for you to ask questions or invite experiences relevant to the story you are pursuing, or to follow the public conversations of others asking questions or sharing experiences.

Because of this focus on social networks as a serendipity engine, I adopt an approach of seeing Twitter as a ‘stream, not a pool’ – not worrying about following too many people but rather about following too few, but having my cake and eating it by using Lists as a filter for those I want to miss least.

The final use for social networks is often the first use that journalists think of: distribution. And it is here that social networking also connects to the other 2 parts of the network infrastructure.

If you read something interesting in your RSS reader and wish to share it across social networks, you can often do so with a single click – with a bit of preparation. Twitterfeed is a tool which will automatically tweet updates on your Twitter account – all you need to know is the RSS feed for the updates you want to share. If you’re using Google Reader, for example, that feed is on your Shared Items page.

To tweet something interesting you’ve seen in your RSS Reader all you have to do then is (in the case of Google Reader) click on the ‘Share’ button below that item.

Social bookmarking

The first two parts of the network infrastructure – an RSS reader and social networks – are about the initial stages of newsgathering; the first things you check at the start of a working day.

Social bookmarking, however, is about what you do with information from your RSS reader and social networks – and information you deal with throughout your day.

Today’s news is tomorrow’s context. And social bookmarking allows you to keep a record of that context to make it quickly accessible when needed.

That’s the bookmarking part. The social part also allows you to publish information at the same time as you store it; to discover what information other people with similar interests are bookmarking; and to discover which people are bookmarking similar things to you).

Because social bookmarking is the least immediate element of this network infrastructure, it is also the aspect which the fewest students get their heads around and actually use.

Yet it is, for me, perhaps the most useful element. It takes an upfront investment of time and the development of a habit which initially doesn’t have any obvious reward.

But when you’re up against a deadline and are able to retrieve a dozen useful reports, documents and people within minutes – then you’ll get it.

Here’s the process:

1. You come across something of interest. It may be a useful article, blog post or official report in your RSS reader – or a document linked to by someone in your social network. You might encounter the thing of interest while working on a story. You may read it – you may not have time.
2. You bookmark the specific webpage containing it using a service like Delicious. You add ‘tags’ to help you find it later: these might include:
   • the subjects of the webpage (e.g. ‘environment’, ‘health’),
   • its author or publisher (e.g. ‘paulbradshaw’, ‘OJB’),
   • specific organisations or individuals (‘nhs’, ‘davidcameron’),
   • the type of document (‘report’, ‘research’, ‘video’)
   • or information (‘statistics’, ‘contacts’),
   • and even tags you have made up which refer to a specific story or event (‘croatia11′)
3. You can if you wish add ‘Notes’. Many people copy a key passage from the webpage here, such as a quote (if a passage is selected on the page it will be automatically entered, depending how you are bookmarking it) to help them remember more about the page and why it was important.
4. You can also mark your bookmark as ‘private’. This means that no one else can see it – it becomes ‘non-social’.
5. Once you save it, it becomes available for you to retrieve at a future date: a personal search engine of items you once encountered.

The key thing here is to think about how you might look for this in future, and make sure you use those tags. For example, the publisher might not seem important now, but if in future you need to re-read a certain report and can recall that it appeared in the FT, that will help you access it quickly.

UPDATE: I’ve written a post explaining how this works with a particular case study.

Remember also that tags can be combined, so if I want to narrow down my search to items that I bookmarked with both ‘UGC’ and ‘BBC’, I can find those at delicious.com/paulb/UGC+BBC.

This is one of the reasons why a social bookmarking service is more effective than an RSS reader. You can, for example, search your shared or starred items in Google Reader – and you can tag them also – but as you tend to get more results it is harder to find what you are looking for. The use and combination of tags in Delicious narrows things down very effectively – but equally importantly, it allows you to bookmark pages that do not appear in your RSS reader.

That said, if you cannot find what you are looking for in Delicious, Google Reader is another option. It is also worth using a backup service which provides another way to search your bookmarks. Trunk.ly is one that does just that.

Of course, the bookmark only points to the live webpage – and it may be that in future the page is moved, changed, or deleted. If you are dealing with that type of information it is worth copying it to another webspace (I use the quote option on Tumblr) or using a (generally paid-for) social bookmarking service that saves copies of the pages you bookmark (Diigo and Pinboard are just two)

Social bookmarking: networks and cross-publishing

One of the features of social bookmarking services is that you can follow the bookmarks of other users. In Delicious this is called your network – and it’s where social bookmarking not only connects to RSS readers but also becomes a form of social network. Here’s how you build your network:

1. Look at your bookmarks. Next to each one will be a number indicating how many users have bookmarked this. If you click on this you will see a list of who bookmarked it, and when. (Alternatively, you could also look at all users using a particular tag – if you’re a health correspondent, for example, you might want to look at people who are tagging items with ‘NHS’). Click on any name to see all their public bookmarks.
2. If you would like to follow that person’s future bookmarks (because they are bookmarking items which relate to your interests), click on ‘Add to my network’
3. You will now be able to see their bookmarks – and those of anyone else you have added – on your ‘Network’ page. It is, essentially, a mini RSS reader.

Which is why I use Google Reader to follow my network’s bookmarks instead. Because at the bottom of your Delicious Network page is, of course, a link to an RSS feed. Right-click on this and copy the link, then paste it into your RSS reader and you don’t need to keep checking your Delicious Network separately to all your other RSS feeds.

Of course, if you find someone interesting on Delicious, you might find them interesting on Twitter or a blog. If they’ve edited their Delicious public profile (the one you found in step 1 above) it might include a link. Alternatively, there’s a good chance they’ve used the same username on other social networks – so search for them using that.

This is another example of how social bookmarking can connect to social networking.

Here’s another: you can use a service like Twitterfeed (explained above) to auto-publish every item you bookmark – or just those with a particular tag, or a combination of tags. Because Delicious provides RSS feeds for your bookmarks as a whole, those with a particular tag, and any combination of tags.

For example, anything I tag ‘t’ is automatically tweeted by Twitterfeed on my @paulbradshaw Twitter account. Anything I tag ‘hmitwt’ is tweeted the same way – but to my @helpmeinvestig8 account. Editor Marc Reeves uses the same service to tweet all of his bookmarks with “I’m reading…”.

You can use a Facebook app like RSS Graffiti to do the same thing on a Facebook page.

One process across your network infrastructure then starts to look like this:

1. Read interesting blog post on Google Reader
2. Bookmark using Delicious – use a tag which is automatically tweeted
3. Link auto-tweeted on Twitter

Conversely, if you want to automatically bookmark links that you share on Twitter, you can do so by signing up to Packrati.us. Tweeted links will be given the tag ‘packrati.us’ as well as any hashtags that you include in the same tweet (So a link tweeted with the hashtag ‘#crime’ will be tagged ‘crime’).

Another process across your network infrastructure then starts to look like this:

1. Read interesting link tweeted on Twitter
2. Retweet it, adding relevant hashtags
3. Link is auto-bookmarked on Delicious

Listen, connect, publish

This has turned out to be a long post – which is why I think the diagram is needed. The initial set up is simple: sign up to social networks and a social bookmarking service, and set up an RSS reader. Subscribe to feeds, and add people to your networks.

But once you’ve done the technical part, you need to develop the habit of listening and continuing to add to those networks: check your RSS feeds and networks every day (but know when to switch off), and look for new sources. Bookmark useful resources – articles, documents, reports, research and profile pages – and tag them effectively.

Finally, contribute to those networks and connect the different parts together so it is as easy as possible to gather, store, publish and distribute useful information.

As you start to understand the possibilities that RSS feeds open up, you also start to see all sorts of possibilities beyond this. A site like If This Then That (IFTTT) not only showcases those possibilities particularly effectively, it also makes them as easy as they’ve ever been

It is a small – and regular – investment of time. But it will keep you in touch with your field, lead you to new sources and new stories, and help you work faster and deeper in reporting what’s happening.

RSS girl by HeatherWeaver on Flickr

During some training in open data I was doing recently, I ended up explaining (it’s a long story) how to pull a feed from Delicious into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I promised I would put it down online, so: here it is.

In a Google Docs spreadsheet the formula =importfeed will pull information from an RSS feed and put it into that spreadsheet. Titles, links, datestamps and other parts of the feed will each be separated into their own columns.

When combined with Delicious, this can be a useful way to collect together pages that have been bookmarked by a group of people, or any other feed that you want to analyse.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Decide on your tag, network or user

The spreadsheet will pull data from an RSS feed. Delicious provides so many of these that you are spoilt for choice. Here are the main three:

A tag

Used by various people.

Advantages: quick startup – all you need to do is tell people the tag (make sure this is unique, such as ‘unguessable2012′).

Disadvantages: others can hijack the tag – although this can be cleaned from the resulting data.

A network

Consisting of the group of people who are bookmarking:

Advantages: group cannot be infiltrated.

Disadvantages: setup time – may need to create a new account to build the network around.

A user

Created for this purpose:

Advantages: if users are not confident in using Delicious, this can be a useful workaround.

Disadvantages: longer set up time – you’ll need to create a new account, and work out an easy way for it to automatically capture bookmarks from the group. One way is to pull an RSS feed of any mentions on Twitter and use Twitterfeed to auto-tweet them with a hashtag, and then Packrati.us to auto-bookmark all tweeted links (a similar process is detailed here).

The RSS feed for each will be found at the bottom of pages, and is consistently formatted like so:

Delicious.com/tag/unguessable2012

Delicious.com/network/unguessable2012

Delicious.com/unguessable2012

2. Create your spreadsheet

In Google Docs, create a new spreadsheet and in the first cell type the following formula:

=importfeed(“

…adding your RSS feed after the quotation mark, and then this at the end:

“)

So it looks something like this:

=importfeed(“http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/unguessable2012?count=15″)

Now press enter and after a moment the spreadsheet should populate with data from that feed.

You’ll note, however, that at most you will have only 15 rows of data here. That’s because the RSS feed you’ve copied includes that limitation.

If you look at the RSS feed you’ll see an easy clue on how to change this…

So, try editing it so that the count=15 part of that URL reads count=20 instead. You can put a higher number – but Google Docs will limit results to 20 at a time.

3. Collecting contributions

Technically, you’re now all set up. The bigger challenge is, of course, in getting people to contribute. It helps if they can see the results – so think about publishing your spreadsheet.

You’ll also need to make sure that you check it regularly and copy into a backup spreadsheet so you don’t miss results after that top 20.

But if you find it doesn’t work it may be worth thinking of other ways of doing this – for example, with a Google Form, or using =importfeed with the RSS feed for a search on results for a Twitter hashtag containing links (Twitter’s advanced search allows you to limit results accordingly – and all search results come with an RSS feed link like this one)

Of course there are far more powerful ways of doing this which are worth exploring once you’ve understood the basic possibilities.

Doing more with =importfeed

The =importfeed formula has some other elements that we haven’t used.

Another way to do this, for example, is to paste your RSS feed URL into cell A1 and type the following anywhere else:

=importfeed(A1, ”Items Title”, FALSE, 20)

This has 4 parts in the parentheses:

1. A1 – this points at the URL you just pasted in cell A1, and means that you only have to change what’s in A1 to change the feed being grabbed, rather than having to edit the formula itself
2. “Items Title” – this is the part of the feed that is being grabbed. If you look in the feed you will see a part that says <item> and within that, an element called <title> – that’s it. You could change this to “Items URL” to get the <URL> part of <title> instead, for example. Or you could just put “Items” and get all 5 parts of each item (title, author, URL, date created, and summary). You can also use “feed” to get information about the feed itself, or “feed URL” or “feed title” or “feed description” to get that single piece of information.
3. FALSE – this just says whether you want a header row or not. Setting to TRUE will add an extra row saying ‘Title’, for example.
4. 20 – the number of results you want.

You can see an example spreadsheet with 3 sheets demonstrating different uses of this formula here.

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.

When people start out blogging they often ask what blogging platform they should use – WordPress or Blogger? Tumblr or Posterous? It’s impossible to give an answer, because the first questions should be: who is going to use it, how, and what and who for?

To illustrate how the answers to those questions can help in choosing the best platform, I decided to go through the 35 or so blogs I have created, and why I chose the platforms that they use. As more and more publishing platforms have launched, and new features added, some blogs have changed platforms, while new ones have made different choices to older ones.

Bookmark blogs (Klogging) – Blogger and WordPress to Delicious and Tumblr

When I first began blogging it was essentially what’s called ‘klogging’ (knowledge blogging) – a way to keep a record of useful information. I started doing this with three blogs on Blogger, each of which was for a different class I taught: O-Journalism recorded reports in the field for online journalism students, Interactive Promotion and PR was created to inform students on a module of the same name (later exported to WordPress) and students on the Web and New Media module could follow useful material on that blog.

The blogs developed with the teaching, from being a place where I published supporting material, to a group blog where students themselves could publish their work in progress.

As a result, Web and New Media was moved to WordPress where it became a group blog maintained by students (now taught by someone else). The blog I created for the MA in Television and Interactive Content was first written by myself, then quickly handed over to that year’s students to maintain. When I started requiring students to publish their own blogs the original blogs were retired.

One-click klogging

By this time my ‘klogging’ had moved to Delicious. Webpages mentioned in a specific class were given a class-specific tag such as MMJ02 or CityOJ09. And students who wanted to dig further into a particular subject could use subject-specific tags such as ‘onlinevideo‘ or ‘datajournalism‘.

For the MA in Television and Interactive Content, then, I simply invented a new tag – ‘TVI’ – and set up a blog using Tumblr to pull anything I bookmarked on Delicious with that tag. (This was done in five minutes by clicking on ‘Customise‘ on the main Tumblr page, then clicking on Services and scrolling down to ‘Automatically import my…‘ and selecting RSS feed as Links. Then in the Feed URL box paste the RSS feed at the bottom of delicious.com/paulb/tvi).

(You can do something similar with WordPress – which I did here for all my bookmarks – but it requires more technical knowhow).

For klogging quotes for research purposes I also use Tumblr for Paul’s Literature Review. I’ve not used this as regularly or effectively as I could or should, but if I was embarking on a particularly large piece of research it would be particularly useful in keeping track of key passages in what I’m reading. Used in conjunction with a Kindle, it could be particularly powerful.

Back to the TVI bookmarks: another five minutes on Feedburner allowed me to set up a daily email newsletter of those bookmarks that students could subscribe to as well, and a further five minutes on Twitterfeed sent those bookmarks to a dedicated Twitter feed too (I could also have simply used Tumblr’s option to publish to a Twitter feed). ‘Blogging’ had moved beyond the blog.

Resource blogs – Tumblr and Posterous

For my Online Journalism module at City University London I use Tumblr to publish a curated, multimedia blog in addition to the Delicious bookmarks: Online Journalism Classes collects a limited number of videos, infographics, quotes and other resources for students. Tumblr was used because I knew most content would be instructional videos and I wanted a separate place to collect these.

The more general Paul Bradshaw’s Tumblelog (http://paulbradshaw.tumblr.com/) is where I maintain a collection of images, video, quotes and infographics that I look to whenever I need to liven up a presentation.

For resources based on notes or documents, however, Posterous is a better choice.

Python Notes and Notes on Spreadsheet Formulae and CAR, for example, both use Posterous as a simple way for me to blog my own notes on both (Python is a programming language) via a quick email (often drafted while on the move without internet access).

Posterous was chosen because it is very easy to publish and tag content, and I wanted to be able to access my notes based on tag (e.g. VLOOKUP) when I needed to remember how I’d used a particular formula or function.

Similarly, Edgbaston Election Campaign Exprenses and Hall Green Election Campaign Exprenses use Posterous as a quick way to publish and tag PDFs of election expense receipts from both constituencies (how this was done is explained here), allowing others to find expense details based on candidate, constituency, party or other details, and providing a space to post comments on findings or things to follow up.

Niche blogs – WordPress and Posterous

Although Online Journalism Blog began as ‘klogging’ it soon became something more, adding analysis, research, and contributions from other authors, and the number of users increased considerably. Blogger is not the most professional-looking of platforms, however (unless you’re prepared to do a lot of customisation), so I moved it to WordPress.com. And when I needed to install plugins for extra functionality I moved it again to a self-hosted WordPress site.

Finally, when the site was the victim of repeated hacking attempts I moved it to a WordPress MU (multi user) site hosted by Philip John’s Journal Local service, which provided technical support and a specialised suite of plugins.

If you want a powerful and professional-looking blogging platform it’s hard to beat WordPress.com, and if you want real control over how it works – such as installing plugins or customising themes – then a self-hosted WordPress site is, for me, your best option. I’d also recommend Journal Local if you want that combination of functionality and support.

If, however, you want to launch a niche blog quickly and functionality is not an issue then Posterous is an even better option, especially if there will be multiple contributors without technical skills. Council Coverage in Newspapers, for example, used Posterous to allow a group of people to publish the results of an investigation on my crowdsourced investigative journalism platform Help Me Investigate. The Hospital Parking Charges Blog did the same for another investigation, but as it was only me publishing, I used WordPress.

Group blogs – Posterous and Tumblr

Posterous suits groups particularly well because members only need to send their post to a specific email address that you give them (such as post@yourblog.posterous.com) to be published on the blog.

It also handles multimedia and documents particularly well – when I was helping Podnosh‘s Nick Booth train a group of people with Flip cameras we used Posterous as an easy way for members of a group to instantly publish the video interviews they were doing by simply sending it to the relevant email address (Posterous will also cross-publish to YouTube and Twitter, simplifying those processes).

A few months ago Posterous launched a special ‘Groups’ service that publishes content in a slightly different way to make it easier for members to collaborate. I used this for another Help Me Investigate investigation - Recording Council Meetings – where each part of the investigation is a post/thread that users can contribute to.

Again, Posterous provides an easy way to do this – all people need to know is the email address to send their contribution to, or the web address where they can add comments to other posts.

If your contributors are more blog-literate and want to retain more control over their content, another option for group blogs is Tumblr. Brumblr, for example, is one group blog I belong to for Birmingham bloggers, set up by Jon Bounds. ‘We Love Michael Grimes‘ is another, set up by Pete Ashton, that uses Tumblr for people to post images of Birmingham’s nicest blogger.

Blogs for events – Tumblr, Posterous, CoverItLive

When I organised a Citizen Journalism conference in 2007, I used a WordPress blog to build up to it, write about related stories, and then link to reports on the event itself. Likewise, when later that year the NUJ asked me to manage a team of student members as they blogged that year’s ADM, I used WordPress for a group blog.

As the attendees of further events began to produce their own coverage, the platforms I chose evolved. For JEEcamp.com (no longer online), I used a self-hosted WordPress blog with an aggregation plugin that pulled in anything tagged ‘JEEcamp’ on blogs or Twitter. CoverItLive was also used to liveblog – and was then adopted successfully by attendees when they returned to their own news operations around the country (and also, interestingly, by Downing Street after they saw the tool being used for the event).

For the final JEEcamp I used Tumblr as an aggregator, importing the RSS feed from blog search engine Icerocket for any mention of ‘JEEcamp’.

In future I may experiment with the Posterous iPhone app’s new Events feature, which aggregates posts in the same location as you.

Aggregators – Tumblr

Sometimes you just want a blog to keep a record of instances of a particular trend or theme. For example, I got so sick of people asking “Is blogging journalism?” that I set up Is Ice Cream Strawberry?, a Tumblr blog that aggregates any articles that mention the phrases “Is blogging journalism”, “Are bloggers journalists” and “Is Twitter journalism” on Google News.

This was set up in the same way as detailed above, with the Feed URL box completed using the RSS feed from the relevant search on Google News or Google Blog Search (repeat for each feed).

Likewise, Online Journalism Jobs aggregates – you’ve got it – jobs in online journalism or that use online journalism skills. It pulls from the RSS feed for anything I bookmark on Delicious with the tag ‘ojjobs’ – but it can also be done manually with the Tumblr bookmark or email address, which is useful when you want to archive an entire job description that is longer than Delicious’s character limit.

Easy hyperlocal blogging – WordPress, Posterous and Tumblr

For a devoted individual hyperlocal blog WordPress seems the best option due to its power, flexibility and professionalism. For a hyperlocal blog where you’re inviting contributions from community members via email, Posterous may be better.

But if you want to publish a hyperlocal blog and have never had the time to do it justice, Tumblr provides a good way to make a start without committing yourself to regular, wordy updates. Boldmere High Street is my own token gesture – essentially a photoblog that I update from my mobile phone when I see something of interest – and take a photo – as I walk down the high street.

Personal blogs

As personal blogs tend to contain off-the-cuff observations, copies of correspondence or media, Posterous suits it well. Paul Bradshaw O/T (Off Topic) is mine: a place to publish things that don’t fit on any of the other blogs I publish. I use Posterous as it tends to be email-based, sometimes just keeping web-based copies of emails I’ve sent elsewhere.

It’s difficult to prescribe a platform for personal blogs as they are so… personal. If you talk best about your life through snatches of images and quotes, Tumblr will work well. I have a family Tumblr, for example, that pulls images and video from a family Flickr account, tweets from a family Twitter feed, video from a family YouTube account, and also allows me to publish snatches of audio or quotes.

You could use this to, for instance, create an approved-members-only Facebook page for the family so other family members can ‘follow’ their grandchildren, and publish updates from the Tumblr blog via RSS Graffiti. Facebook is, ultimately, the most popular personal blogging platform.

If it is hard to separate your personal life from your professional life, or your personal hobby involves playing with technology, WordPress may be a better choice.

And Blogger may be an easy way to bring together material from Google properties such as Picasa and Orkut.

Company blogs

Likewise, although Help Me Investigate’s blog started as two separate blogs on WordPress (one for company updates, the other for investigation tips), it now uses Posterous for both as it’s an easier way for multiple people to contribute.

This is because ease of publishing is more important than power – but for many companies WordPress is going to be the most professional and flexible option.

For some, Tumblr will best communicate their highly visual and creative nature. And for others, Posterous may provide a good place to easily publish documents and video.

Blogs – flexible enough for anything

What emerges from all the above is that blogs are just a publishing platform. There was a time when you had to customise WordPress, Typepad or Blogger to do what you wanted – from linkblogging and photoblogging to group blogs and aggregation. But those problems have since been solved by an increasing range of bespoke platforms.

Social bookmarking platforms and Twitter made it easier to linkblog; Tumblr made it easier to photoblog or aggregate RSS feeds. Posterous lowered the barrier to make group blogging as easy as sending an email. CoverItLive piggybacked on Twitter to aggregate live event coverage. And Facebook made bloggers of everyone without them realising.

A blog can now syndicate itself across multiple networks: Tumblr and Posterous make it easy to automatically cross-publish links and media to Twitter, YouTube and any other media-specific platform. RSS feeds can be pulled from Flickr, Delicious, YouTube or any of dozens of other services into a Facebook page or a WordPress widget.

What is important is not to be distracted by the technology, but focus on the people who will have to use it, and what they want to use it for.

To give a concrete example: I was once advising an organisation who wanted to publish their work online and help young people get their work out there. The young people used mobile phones (Blackberrys) and were on Facebook, but the organisation also wanted the content created by those young people to be seen by potential funders, in a professional context.

I advised them to:

• Set up a moderated Posterous so that it would cross-publish to individuals’ Facebook pages (so there would be instant feedback for those users rather than it be published in an isolated space online that their friends had to go off and find);
• Give the Posterous blog email address to the young people so they could use it to send in their work (making it easy to use on a device they were comfortable with);
• Then to set up a separate ‘official’ WordPress site that pulled in the Posterous feed into a side-widget alongside the more professional, centrally placed, content (meeting the objectives of the organisation).

This sounds more technically complex than it is in practice, and the key thing is that it makes publishing as easy as possible: for the young users of the service, they only had to send images and comments to an email address. For members of the organisation they only had to write blog posts. Everything else, once set up, was automated. And free.

Many people hesitate before blogging, thinking that their effort has to be right first time. It doesn’t. Going through these blogs I counted around 35 that I’ve either created or been involved in. Many of those were retired when they ceased to be useful; some were transferred to new platforms. Some changed their names, some were deleted. Increasingly, they are intended from the start to have a limited shelf life. But every one has taught me something.

And those are just my experiences – how have you used blogs in different ways? And how has it changed?

Despite the incredible work done on the spreadsheet comparing social bookmarking services I am yet to find one that does everything that I use Delicious for (background here). One service I have been using, however, is Trunk.ly.

Once you’ve imported your existing bookmarks from Delicious Trunk.ly stores any new ones you bookmark on Delicious, keeping the backup up to date. In addition it can store any links you’ve shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and any RSS feed.

It is essentially a search engine for links you may have shared at some point – but its technical limitations stop it from being much more. For example, there do not appear to be any RSS feeds for tags*, and there is no facility to combine tags to find items that are, for example, tagged with ‘privacy’ and ‘tools’. (It would also be nice if it tagged links shared on Twitter with any hashtags in the tweet)

That said if, like me, you want to continue using Delicious but with an ongoing backup in case, Trunk.ly appears a sound choice. And it’s early days, so here’s hoping they add those features soon… *cough*.

*Planned apparently. See Trunk.ly in the comments below.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with a new web service and mobile app called Springpad. LifeHacker describes it as a “super advanced personal assistant”. And I can see particular applications for journalists and editors. Here’s how it works:

Investigating on the move, and online

In Springpad you create a ‘notebook’ for each of your projects. You can then place Tasks, Notes, bookmarks and other objects in those notebooks.

For a journalist, the notebook format lends itself well to projects or investigations that you’re working on, especially as ideas occur to you on the move. As new tasks occur to you (‘I must interview that guy’, or ‘follow up that lead’) you add them to the relevant notebook (i.e. project or investigation) from the mobile app – or the website.

If you’re browsing the web and find a useful resource, you can use the Springpad bookmarklet to bookmark it, tag it, and add it to the relevant notebook(s).

And any emails or documents you receive that relate to the project you can forward to your Springpad account.

What’s particularly useful is the way you can choose to make public entire notebooks or individual items within them. So if you want others to be able to access your work, you can do so easily.

There are also a range of other features – such as events, contacts, barcode recognition, search, and a Chrome bookmarklet – some of which are covered in this video:

How I use it

Springpad seems to me a particularly individually-oriented tool rather than something that could be used for coordinating large groups (where Basecamp, for example, is better). None of its constituent elements – tagging, to-do lists, notes, etc. – are unusual, but it’s the combination, and the mobile application, that works particularly well.

If you have a number of projects on the go at any one time you tend to have to a) constantly remember what needs to be done on each of them; b) when; c) with whom; and d) keep track of documents relating to it. The management of these is often spread across To Do lists, a calendar, contacts book, and filing or bookmarks.

What Springpad effectively does is bring those together to one place on your mobile: the app (although at the moment there’s no real reason to use it for contacts). This means you can make notes when they occur to you, and in one place. The fact that this is both synced with the website and available on the app when offline gives it certain advantages over other approaches.

That said, I’ve adopted a few strategies that make it more useful:

• Assign a date to every Task – even if it’s in 3 months’ time. This turns it into a calendar, and you can see how many things you need to get done on any given day, and shuffle accordingly.
• Tasks should be disaggregated – i.e. producing an investigation will involve interviews, research, follow ups, and so on. Each of these is a separate task.
• Start the day by looking at your tasks for that day – complete a couple of small ones and then focus on a bigger one.
• If new ideas related to a Task occur to you, add them to that task as a note (these are different to standalone Notes). This is particularly useful for tasks that are weeks in the future: by the time they come around you can have a number of useful notes attached to it.
• Use tags to differentiate between sub-projects within a notebook.
• Install the bookmarklet on your phone’s browser so you can bookmark project-related webpages on the go.
• Add the email address to your contacts so you can email key documents and correspondence to your account (sadly at the moment you still need to then open the app or website to tag and file them, but I’m told they are working on you being able to email-and-file at once).

Not a replacement for Delicious

You can import all of your Delicious bookmarks into Springpad, but I’ve chosen not to, partly because the site lacks much of the functionality that I’m looking for in a Delicious replacement, but also because I see it as performing a different task: I use Delicious as a catch-all, public filing system for anything that is or might be relevant to what I do and have done. Springpad is about managing what I’m doing right now, which means being more selective about the bookmarks that I save in it. Flooding it with almost 10,000 bookmarks would probably reduce its usefulness.

For the same reason I don’t see it as particularly comparable to Evernote. Dan Gold has an extensive guide explaining why he switched from Evernote to Springpad, and simplicity again plays a large role. It’s also worth reading to see how Dan uses the tool.

Perhaps the best description of the tool is as a powerful To Do list – allowing you to split projects apart while also keeping those parts linked to other items through notes, tags and categories.

Early days – room for improvement

The tool is a bit rough around the edges at the moment. Navigation of the app could be a lot quicker: to get from a list of all Tasks to those within one notebook takes 3 clicks at the moment – that’s too many.

Privacy could be more granular, allowing password-protection for instance. And the options to add contacts and events seem to be hidden away under ‘Add by type’ (in fact, the only way to add an event at the moment appears to be to sync with your Google account and then use a calendar app to add a new event through your Google calendar, or to go to an existing event in your app and create a new one from there).

The bookmarklet is slow to work, and alerts only come via RSS feed (you could use Feedburner to turn these into email alerts by the way).

That said, this is the first project management that I’ve actually found effective in getting stuff out of my head and onto virtual paper. Long may that continue.

UPDATE: I’ve created a spreadsheet where you can add information about the various services and requirements. Please add what you can.

Delicious, it appears, is going to be closed down. I am hugely sad about this – Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer. Not just because of the way it makes it possible for me to share, store and retrieve information very easily – but because of the network of other users doing just the same whose overlapping fields of information I can share.

I follow over 100 people in my Delicious network, and my biggest requirement of any service that I might switch to is that as many of those people move there too.

So I’d like to ask: if Delicious does shut down, where will you move to? Publish2? Pinboard.in? Diigo? Google Reader (sorry, not functional enough for me)?  Or something else? (Here are some ideas) Please post your comments.

Searching is the most popular activity online after email. It is the prism through which we experience a significant proportion of the world’s information – from news and information about our community, through to health information, commerce, and just about anything that has a presence online.

Search Engine Society takes a critical look at search engines, how they work, the techniques used to manipulate them – from gaining better rankings to censorship, and the implications for privacy and democracy.

Chapter one looks at the development and workings of search engines, from the once-essential directories of Yahoo! and the citation-based algorithms of Google that now dominate the search landscape, through to lesser-known players such as social bookmarking service Delicious which relies on user-generated ‘folksonomies’ to organise material, and specialised regional and ‘vertical’ search engines like the French language Voila or the genetic materials search engine The Bioinformatic Harvester. This is situated within a wider discussion of information retrieval histories from the Library of Babylon onwards – and touches on recent moves into geospatial, mobile, social and semantic search.

Balancing that focus on technology, the following chapter focuses on users, looking at how people search. Search behaviours vary widely between users and between searches – Halavais discusses research that showed how many users simply add ‘.com’ to a word as the start of their search, while others use a ‘shopping mall’ approach of going direct to the likes of Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (which also contain search facilities). Using a search engine, Halavais argues, is only one method of search, and search is “not only an iterative process, but one that is rarely linear and requires seeking out the concepts that surround a problem or question. In other words, the query and search strategy is likely to change as more information becomes available.”

Search as ‘re-finding’

Halavais also emphasises the importance of ‘re-finding’ – “not as a sub-set of finding, but the other way around” – indeed, this is the basis of social bookmarking services like Delicious and Digg that allow the user to store and label (‘tag’) webpages for later retrieval, as well as searching for webpages that have been given similar tags by other users.

Power law distribution patterns famously recur throughout the web and in the third chapter Halavais looks at how this affects search results. With Google’s rankings relying so strongly on how many links point to a particular page, it is important to look at how those links are distributed. The fact that highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links – what Huberman calls “preferential attachment” – leads to the “chunky” nature of the web – in concrete terms the dominance of websites like those of the BBC and Guardian; a quality which, Halavais argues, Google’s PageRank technology ‘calcifies’.

But when Google tweaks its search engine algorithms to attempt to improve results, it can have enormous consequences for organisations dependent on their rankings in search results. Halavais uses the example of Skyfacet.com and Answers.com which saw sales and visits drop by 17% and 28% respectively when they dropped off the first page of related Google searches. It is as if someone moved your shop from the main high street to an industrial estate. In this context it is not surprising that search engine advertising accounts for the majority of online advertising spend.

Digital divides

Following up on those issues, the fourth chapter looks at implications for democracy on two sides: firstly, the division between winners and losers in the contest for public attention; and secondly, the division between skilled and unskilled users of search engines. Halavais is keen to highlight that division is nothing new:

“Current search engines, like communication technologies before them, contain both centralizing and diversifying potentials. These potentials affect the stories we tell ourselves as a society; and the way we produce knowledge and wisdom.”

In practice, these potentials are heavily weighted towards US sites:

“In the language of PageRank, US sites simply have more authority: more links leading to them … sites have existed longer in the United States, where much of the early growth of the internet occurred… Add to this the idea that early winners have a continuing advantage in attracting new links and traffic, and US dominance of search seems a foregone conclusion … the search engines do not merely reflect this authority, they help to reproduce it.”

Indeed, ranking systems that reinforce authority, says Halavais, are conservative in nature and comprise what Lewis Mumford, writing 40 years ago, called “authoritarian technics”.  But because of the unlimited size and reach of the internet compared to previous media technologies, it is not so simple:

“The current structure is a complex combination of a high degree of centralization at the macro-level, with a broad set of diverse divisions at the micro-level.”

Blogger as ‘search intellectual’

Interestingly, at this point Halavais introduces the blogger as a “search intellectual”, upsetting existing structures of authority on the web and acting as “a counterweight to the hegemonic culture of the search engines” in bringing otherwise overlooked material into the “circle of reputation and links that search engines tend to enforece”. The recent rise of Twitter in performing a similar role would be worth adding to that list.

Chapter 5 takes a broad look at censorship – “just another word for filtering” – while Chapter 6 looks at privacy – search engines as “databases of intentions” where even anonymised logs of what individuals are searching for can lead to people being identified. Chapter 7 revisits the rise of “sociable search” tools and folksonomy – where classification is created by a mass of users’ ‘tags’ rather than any centralised scheme, and ‘finding’ is a social act closely related to ‘sharing’.

The book closes with a roundup of the possibilities of future search and the factors that will influence that, from increasing digitisation of material to improved mapping and the possibilities of RFID tags (which makes objects a part of the web too). Semantic search – technology that understands the meaning of what you are searching for, or of relationships between objects – is the promise that lies forever ‘just over the horizon’, while sociable search offers a more likely immediate move.

As is natural, there are areas which have developed since this book was written and so are not tackled in depth – most notably real-time search. The rise of Twitter and the ability to search through what people are talking about ‘right now’ represents such serious competition to Google that it introduced the first major new features to its homepage in years. Wolfram Alpha – the “computational knowledge engine” that made newspaper front pages this year – is not even mentioned.

But those are incidental issues in what is an important book. Halavais manages to acknowledge the dominance of Google without being distracted by it, and gives due attention to non-Western tools and services not commonly seen as search tools. He avoids the pitfalls of technological determinism and manages to distinguish between top-down domination and bottom-up diversity. What emerges is a sophisticated picture of power in flux. “Search engines are interesting to the person who wants to understand the exercise of power in the information society,” Halavais writes in the his conclusion. “In an era in which knowledge is the only bankable commodity, search engines own the exchange floor.” The more readers understand this exchange floor, the better we can exchange and interrogate what information we possess.

A shorter version of this review will appear in Journalism