Online Journalism Blog

This was originally published in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits last week

Google Latitude – a service that allows people to see where you are – has launched 2 new services – Location History and Location Alerts - that provide some interesting potential for mobile journalism.

Location History (shown above) allows you to “store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order.”

There are obvious possibilities here for then editing a map with editorial information – if you’re covering a parade, a marathon, or a demonstration you could edit placemarks to add relevant reports as you were posting them (or someone else with access to the account could from the newsroom).

Location Alerts is less obviously useful: this sends you a notification (by email and/or text) when you are near a friend’s location, although as Google explains, it’s a little more clever than that:

“Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you’re at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you’re either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your “unusual” locations and start sending alerts.”

There is potential here for making serendipitous contact with readers or contacts, but until Latitude has widespread adoption (its biggest issue for me, and one that may never be resolved), it’s not likely to be useful in the immediate future.

The good thing about Latitude is you can enable it and disable it to suit you, and my own experience is that I only enable it when I want to meet someone using GPS on my phone. To sign up to Google Latitude user, go here. To enable the new features, go to google.com/latitude/apps.

Those are 2 uses I can think of, and I’ve yet to have a serious play – can you think of any others?

Elections bring out the best in online journalism. News organisations have plenty of time to plan, there’s a global audience up for grabs, and the material lends itself to interactive treatment (voter opinions; candidates’ stances on various issues; statistics and databases; constant updates; personalisation).

Not only that, but the electorate is using the internet for election news more than any other medium apart from television (and here are some reasons why).

PaidContent has a good roundup of various UK editors’ views, and decides blogs, Twitter and data are the themes (more specifically, liveblogging and mapping). [Read more]

Alice Fanning's map of UK eco stories

As a new semester begins it seems a good time to finally post about how my second year journalism degree students approached the ‘interactive’ element of their portfolio way back in May (yes, everything they do is interactive, but bear with me).

For the first time I gave them an open brief in terms of what they did interactively (in previous years I asked them to produce Flash interactives). Having been taught how to create everything from audio slideshows and image maps to multimedia interactives, Google Maps and Yahoo! Pipes mashups, I was curious to see what they would pick. Would they all plump for the same option? [Read more]

If your entry has been incorrectly amended you can edit it by clicking on your placemark or listing in the left hand column. [Read more]

Thanks to all those who have so far added themselves to the OJB readers’ map – it looks very impressive. I had a couple emails from people who arrived at the map to find it called something else – ‘Mark Weber’ or ‘Félix Bahón’. One of the problems of making it editable, it seems, is people accidentally changing the name of the map itself.

UPDATE: Another is that people can accidentally edit each others’ entries, and so Laura Oliver of Journalism.co.uk in London has suddenly been reassigned to the role of video journalist at Sydney’s Telegraph.

Anyway, the map is now back to its original name with some instructions in the description as well as here.

If your entry has been incorrectly amended you can edit it by clicking on your placemark or listing in the left hand column. Then go to the top of the left hand column and click ‘Edit’. Both the map name and the selected placemark become editable.

It seems Google Maps has some way to go before being intuitive enough for the average reader to contribute to.

Meanwhile, looking forward to seeing more readers popping up, particularly in those hard-to-reach places…

…and after those Google Maps mashups, what better time to start playing with this stuff?

If news organisations thought they were starting to ‘get’ this whole internet journalism thing, yesterday may make them think again.

At 8pm GMT yesterday I received a breathless email from Azeem Ahmad, a student from the journalism degree I teach on:

“Tell me you have seen the Google Maps/Twitter mash up of the American Super Tuesday voters.. it’s amazing! The pointer is flying all over the world, from Spain to England, and all through the various parts of America.”

Logging onto Twitter I found a similar buzz from Martin Stabe and Kevin Anderson:

“Enthralled by Twitter and Google Maps super mashup. I could be entertained for hours”

A quick search on Terraminds (image below) showed it wasn’t just us journo nerds: Twitter was alive with chatter about the mashup – one tweet in particular was worth noting: [Read more]

I’d like you to help me out with a little mapping demonstration. I’ve created a map of Online Journalism Blog readers – here. I’d love if you could add yourself to the map. If you’ve never done this before (and what better way to start?), this is how:

1. make sure you’re signed in to Google,
2. go to the OJB map,
3. search for your postcode/zip code/street address,
   
4. click ‘Save to my maps’ on the box that appears – select the OJB readers option from the drop-down and click ‘Save’.
   

   

5. You can then edit the entry – change the title to your name and add any biographical details you want (e.g. link to your blog) in the Description box. Then click OK.
   

I’m hoping that a) this will allow OJB readers to network with each other more easily; and b) this will provide a platform for experimentation/mashups (perhaps a mashup with WiredJournalists.com?) – if anyone has any ideas, let me know.

But it’s only as powerful as its members, so map away!