French data journalism outfit Owni have put together an impressive app (also in English) that attempts to put a user-friendly interface on the intimidating volume of War Logs documents.

The app allows you to filter the information by country and category, and also allows you to choose whether to limit results to incidents involving the deaths of wounding of civilians, allies or enemies.

Clicking on an individual incident bring up the raw text but also a mapping of the location and the details split into a more easy-to-read table.

But key to the whole project is the ability to comment on documents, making this genuinely interactive. Once commented, you can choose to receive updates on “this investigation”

This could be fleshed out more, however (UPDATE: it’s early days – see below). “So that we can investigate a war that does not tell its name” is about as much explanation as we get – indeed, Afghanistan is not mentioned on the site at all (which presents SEO problems). In this sense the project suffers from a data-centric perspective which overlooks that not everyone has the same love of data for data’s sake.

A second weakness is an assumption that users are familiar with the story. While the project is linked with Slate.fr and Monde Diplomatique there are no links to any specifically related journalism on those sites, leaving the data without any particular context. Users visiting the site as a result of social media sharing (which is built into the site) might therefore not know what they’re dealing with.

Technically, however, this is an excellent solution to the scale problem that War Logs presents. It just needs an editorial solution to support it.

UPDATE: Nicolas Kayser-Bril, the man behind the project (disclosure: a former OJB contributor) explains the background:

“We contacted several outlets on Monday to coproduce the app. (we’re still in talks with several others in Italy, Belgium, Germany). What we offered them was an all-inclusive solution that gives them visibility and image gains and a way for them to engage with their audience.

“You’re right to say that the app lacks an editorial perspective as such. We’re implementing a feature called ‘contextualization’ that will offer users links to backgrounder stories published on partner websites according to several criteria (year, civil/military report, region, nationality of the engaged forces).

“Moreover, we’ve crowdsourced a huge work that considerably expanded the glossary published by Wikileaks and the Guardian. We launched a call for help on Monday morning. In 36 hours, we had 30% more entries related to unexplained abbreviations or details about equipment, as well as a French translation. Something we want to provide is a way for everyone with a low level of English to decipher the documents.”

Past OJB contributor Nicolas Kayser-Bril is now in charge of datajournalism at Owni.fr, a recently launched news site that defines itself as an “open think-tank”.

“Acting as curators, selecting and presenting content taken deep in the immense and self-expanding vaults of the internet,” explains Nicolas, “the Owni team links to the best and does the rest.”

I asked Nicolas 2 simple questions on his work at Owni. Here are his responses:

What are you trying to do?

What we do is datajournalism. We want to use the whole power of online and computer technologies to bring journalism to a new height, to a whole new playing field. The definition remains vague because so little has been made until now, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to slideshows, online TV or even database journalism.

Take the video game industry, for instance. In the late 1970’s, a personal computer could be used to play Pong clones or text-based games. Since then, a number of genres have flourished, taking action games to 3D, building an ever-more intelligent AI for strategy games, etc. In the age of the social web, games were quick to use Facebook and even Twitter.

Take the news industry. In the late 1970’s, you could read news articles on your terminal. In the early 2010’s you can, well… read articles online! How innovative is that? (I’m not overlooking the innovations you’ll be quick to think of, but the fact remains that most online news content are articles.)

We want to enhance information with the power of computers and the web. Through software, databases, visualizations, social apps, games, whatever, we want to experiment with news in ways traditional and online media haven’t done yet.

What have you achieved?

We started to get serious about this in February, when I joined the mother company (22mars) full-time. In just a month, we have completed 2 projects

The first one, dubbed Photoshop Busters (see it here), gives users digital forensics tools to assess the authenticity of an image. It was made as a widget for one of our partners, LesInrocks.com.

More importantly, we made a Facebook app, Where do I vote? There, users can find their polling station and their friends’ for the upcoming regional election in France.

It might sound underwhelming, but it required finding and locating the addresses of more than 35,000 polling stations.

On top of convincing a reluctant administration to hand over their files, we set up a large crowdsourcing effort to convert the documents from badly scanned PDFs to computer-readable data. More than 7,000 addresses have been treated that way.

Dozens of other ideas are in the works. Within Owni.fr, we want to keep the ratio of developers/non-developers to 1, so as to be able to go from idea to product very quickly. I code most of my ideas myself, relying on the team for help, ideas and design.

In the coming months, we’ll expand our datajournalism activities to include another designer, a journalist and a statistician. Expect more cool stuff from Owni.fr.

As traditional media outlets close down, the relative importance of non-market players becomes more important.

Governments around the world were quick to see the opportunities for their news agencies. From Xinhua (China) to ITAR-TASS (Russia), from AFP (half of its budget comes from state subscriptions) to Voice of America, governments are trying to shape the world’s public opinion.

The coverage of Gaza by Al Jazeera is a case in point. They produced quality journalism no other outlet could dream of. Now, viewers should keep in mind that money for such newsgathering comes straight from the pocket of the Emir of Qatar. Believe me, I’m sure Al Jazeera’s journalists keep that in mind too.

To help you measure the amount of government-funded journalism, I built this little app, I smell a government rat in my news. Just type in any query and you’ll see the share of articles produced with state funds.

[iframe http://windowonthemedia.com/ismellarat/ismellaratSmall.php5 442 352]

Details about how it’s done and which sources are scanned are available at windowonthemedia.com.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

France is currently paralyzed by yet another strike. Unlike the ones you’re used to when visiting my country, usually from railway or airport staff, this one was launched by lawyers and judges alike, united against their government minister, Rachida Dati (read more here).

Traditional journalists have been covering the event as it unfolded. Google News brings you more than 300 bland and unsurprising articles.

The only place where you can read what’s going on in France’s judicial system is a blog. Maître Eolas, a lawyer who opened his blog 4 years ago, just published 64 testimonies from justice professionals. He even renamed his blog ‘Daily news from angry justice professionals’.

Narvic, probably the best media commentator in France, immediately saw that Maître Eolas had become a media.

I see here the best proof that justice professionals in this country are the first ones to think that’s something is rotten in the media kingdom. To them, only Eolas’ blog is credible enough to collect their grievances.

Yes, blogs are dead. The amalgamation of all blogs in an imagined blogosphere has ended. OJB has nothing to do with *~ChElLe~*’s MySpace blog, for instance. It was about time late-adopters (you know who they are) realized this basic fact.

Blogging is about leading a conversation. Such discussions sometimes reach a level so high that it has implications in the public sphere. Maître Eolas’ blog served as a Cahier de Doléances for French lawyers. Just like Guido Fawkes’ role in Peter Hain’s resignation, Maître Eolas’ blog is now the Fourth Estate ; a real counterweight to government policies.

Do you know other examples of bloggers having an influence on public life?

Such a phenomenon might very well be limited to Western countries, where the market for journalists is such that it’s more profitable to write for one’s own pleasure outside the traditional media. In post socialist countries for example, the shortage of journalists is so acute that any blogger is hired by a media group after a few months’ blogging. In such conditions, barely any blog can exert any real influence.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

As communism fell in Lithuania 19 years ago, existing dailies started to publish what they wanted. And what they wanted was money. The 2 main titles promptly became filled with advertorial paid for by politicians and industrialists.

The Lithuanian public quickly became disheartened with the printed press and turned to the internet instead. That’s why the audience of Lithuanian #1 website for news is only 8 times smaller than its UK counterpart, even though the country is 20 times as small as the UK (and twice as poor in terms of GDP per capita).

Seeing this enthusiasm for online news, MG Baltic, a Vilnius-based holding that trades in everything from consumer goods to news, decided to launch a website. The avowed goal was to complement their mass media portfolio.

On August 7, 2006, alfa.lt was born. 2 years later, it’s the national #3 website for news and #6 website overall. It’s also on-track towards breaking even with profitability planned for 2010.

To know more about this success story, I went to alfa’s office and interviewed the project manager and editor-in-chief, Virgis Valentinavicius.

Business plans aren’t dead

Far from an idealistic website that would make the world better, alfa.lt is the brainchild of executives eager to milk online advertisers. This made Virgis’ discourse very different from the traditional ‘do first, monetize later’ motto heard in start-ups. For him, every single litas invested must be turned into clicks.

The brand’s philosophy is to reach to young, hard-working and high-achieving Lithuanians looking for serious information. Now, this young professional also needs entertainment, which alfa.lt provides. This mix of news and entertainment should make alfa.lt an all-encompassing provider of quality content. Dumbing-down isn’t in alfa.lt’s interest, Virgis said, as intelligent readers are more profitable in the long run.

(As I don’t read Lithuanian, I haven’t been able to make my opinion on alfa’s quality. A Lithuanian friend of mine was very critical of its content, calling it ‘similar to yellow press.’ Do you read alfa? What’s your opinion on its quality?)

Online marketing is the key

Success came from one main source: online marketing, Virgis explained. Alfa was the first in Lithuania to invest massively in targeted online ads. Designed to look like headlines, they were first put on Google Adwords, on news-related keywords, but this proved too expensive.

Instead, alfa.lt advertised on social networks. One.lt, the country’s #1 social network, provided alfa.lt with the demographic it needed at a very cheap price. Today, Virgis is thinking about stopping such online-advertising campaigns. In 2 years, prices have tripled as competitors started to use the same technique.

Online ads were at the foundation of alfa.lt’s success, Virgis said. In 2007, the site’s traffic increased fivefold from 100k unique users a month to 500k.

It’s all about the content

To satisfy this audience it acquired at great costs, alfa.lt has to offer the best possible articles. The bulk of the company’s resources are oriented toward content-creation.

About 20 journalists fill the crowded newsroom in the business district of Vilnius. Like every post-socialist country, Lithuania severely lacks journalists. Market pressures mean that salaries are sky-high and talent is rare.

Adding another twist to an already-critical market situation, 3 news websites opened in 2007, pushing salaries even further. Virgis didn’t want to spend all its money on bringing journalist stars in the newsroom. Instead, he hired people who could react with speed and adapt to change quickly. ‘Journalism needs no education but common sense’, he said.

With very little resources and a challenger position (see graph), alfa.lt doesn’t want to take risks with content. On video for instance, Virgis is very cautious not to waste too much money. ‘Alfa needs to be very specific when doing video’, he said, and online TV is a luxury that doesn’t always bring clicks.

Same answer when it comes to social features. Alfa.lt’s in the news business, not in social networks, he repeated. These are 2 different markets that require different sets of skills. What he suggested was for his parent company to buy a social network so as to benefit from synergies.

As a result of this content-oriented strategy, almost 70% of all content on the site is home-made, compared to 50% at Delfi.lt, alfa’s main rival and market leader. That will give the site a serious competitive edge when Google news comes in Lithuania and start making direct deals with wire services, as happened with AFP and AP stories.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Blogging cartoon in Romanian

A couple weeks ago I published the ‘5 Stages of a Blogger’s Life‘ cartoon, drawn by Alex Hughes. It was an experiment to test a theory of mine: that cartoons could be particularly successful in increasing news website visitor numbers, and that news organisations should be doing more with them.

The results? In one week that cartoon got over 40,000 hits, making it the most popular single post ever on the Online Journalism Blog .

Here’s why: cartoons are close to a universal language. You do not need to read English to understand them. The cartoons went around the world.

I say “close” to a universal language, because there is often a small amount of text. The effort to translate that is minimal, and that also presents an opportunity for bloggers to add value with a little effort – this is what bloggers in Spain, Romania and Iran, among others, did.

And it doesn’t stop with cartoons. How about a well-produced infographic? The second most popular post on the Online Journalism Blog is The World According to Newspapers, a series of cartograms by Nicolas Kayser-Bril that illustrate how different news operations ‘see’ the world. Tens of thousands of visits – many from the Far East – due in part to the fact that it made sense in any language.

And the popularity of video also owes something to this transglobal appeal. Apparently, Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen decries the fact that The Evolution of Dance is the most popular video on YouTube. No, it’s not Shakespeare, but he’s missing the point. Its popularity lies largely in how it transcends linguistic barriers, and indeed even cultural ones, spanning as it does a vast range of eras and styles. It’s Saturday evening television gone global. It’s Mr Bean.

So, newspapers would do well to look at one of their often undervalued assets, put it online to begin with (many don’t), and make the most of the opportunities it presents. More on that in a future post.

Meanwhile, if you have any insights into newspapers’ use (or not) of cartoons, infographics and video, let me know in the comments.

(Thanks to SedNonSatiata for the translation of the Romanian cartoon)

4 years after launching his blog, a famous French writer publishes a book of comments. The revenues of the book roughly equal 30 years of on-blog advertising.

Pierre Assouline is the typical 50-something, successful French intellectual. Whatever he authors turns into a bestseller, he is involved in the movie industry, writes op-ed pieces for the best newspapers, gives lectures and hosts a radio talk show. And, like many of his ilk, was definitely technophobic.

Until 2004, that is. 4 years ago, people at Le Monde convinced him to launch a blog, 6 months only after he started mastering e-mailing skills. La République des Livres (Books Republic) was born.

Hosted by the #1 news website in France, his blog quickly garnered success. It is currently ranked #16 on Wikio’s national blog chart and #1 in the ‘literature’ category. More than 170,000 comments have been left under a few thousand posts.

A few months ago, Assouline decided to compile an anthology of all comments (150k at the time). After reading through all his archive, he selected 600 of them that he organized in categories. They fill about 350 pages, published after a 50-page foreword in Brèves de Blog (Blog’s shorts).

Now, the literary value of such an aggregation is very debatable, although I found reading the book enjoyable despite my abysmal knowledge of literature. Assouline’s foreword nicely puts blogging into a wider timeframe, quite useful if you live around geeks for whom History started with Pong.

What’s most interesting, however, is to look at the numbers. 16,000 copies of the book have been made and the price tag is 21€ (30$/17£). Let’s do a little math. Sales amount to 315k€, which leaves an operating profit of 150k to share between the publisher and the writer. (See my post in French for the details).

Let’s compare this figure with revenues from blogging. With an estimated 5,000 daily visitors and a very optimistic 2€ eCPM, yearly revenues barely reach 6,700€ – approximately 4,800€ in operating profits. The book is therefore 31 times more profitable than the blog.

Now, 150k comments have been written by approximately 24,000 people. Even if 60% of them are 1- or 2-time commentators, the number of loyal readers, including those who do not comment, probably nears 30,000 persons.

That’s quite a large pool of prospects if you’re to market a blog’s spin-off, all the more as you know exactly how to reach out to them.

Bloggers could very well get inspiration from the movie industry, where profits come from squeezing a brand into by-products, rather than trying to monetize clicks and pageviews.

Do you have other examples of a blog being monetized in such ways?

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Over at sister blog JournalismEnterprise.com there’s an interview with Rue89 co-founder Pierre Haski. Rue89, a French news website, “doesn’t live off advertising. The cash flows from 4 sources:” Website design (50%), advertising, third-party services, and contributions from users (the tip-jar model). “The ad money is “out of reach” for a mid-sized player such as Rue89 and “it’s unclear if it will be in the future”.”

Read the full post (by Nicolas Kayser-Bril) here. We’re always planning other interviews – if you want to conduct one for JournalismEnterprise.com, let me know.

Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends. It would read through the Wikipedia pages of a given theme and summarize key concepts. A semantic algorithm would bring a selection of the most authoritative people on a subject.

The journalist is left with what she does best: checking and analyzing the data.

That means avoiding the pitfalls of redundant news content. That means escaping the trap of writing about topics without having a clue of what’s at stake. That means interviewing people who do things rather than those who talk about it.

This article is the first of a 4-part series. We’ll explore semantic hacks for newsgathering, writing and publishing in the coming weeks.

Part 1: Semantics today: What revolution?

Semantic journalism is closely related to the semantic web. The latter is a tidal wave redesigning the web since the early 2000′s, the motto of which is to make a webpage readable for machines. XML and RDF are the key words, Tim Berners-Lee the guru.

Now, having machines precisely understand the meaning of a story is another matter. Querying a database in natural language has been done since the 1970′s. Concretely, it means typing ‘What is the temperature in London?’ and seeing the machine display ‘20°C’.

But since the 1970′s, little has improved. Put simply, the computer reads the sentence, identifies a few words, their syntactical function and runs through a database to pick relevant information. Each word is given a meaning from the multiple senses it can carry.

In the example above, the computer can tell that ‘temperature’ is not referring to Sean Paul’s hit from the sentence’s structure. Then, it asks the database containing weather-related data for the current temperature in London.

Semantics rapid evolution has to do with Moore’s law and its army of escorting laws, all of which say that it’s getting cheaper to store and access data. Semantic applications can add more meanings to each word. Eventually, a semantic app will know that Temperature is also a 1937 movie. With a large enough database, it can store an almost infinite amount of temperature-related data.

However, when Sean Paul says that he ‘got the right temperature fi shelter you from the storm’, a computer will have a hard time understanding that there’s no actual shelter and no storm, no matter how many databases it commands. The key is to know that it’s a lush R&B song.

Some researchers argue that the traditional approach will not solve the semantic conundrum, no matter how much processing power is unleashed. Instead of a stratified method, where the program identifies the grammatical syntax, then the different possible meanings of each word, they favor a ‘what’s going on’ approach (they call it dynamic sense building, as opposed to compositional sense computing, in the words of semanticist Bernard Victorri).

In a paper, Daniel Kayser (full disclosure: that’s my dad) and Farid Nouioua explain that when a computer reads the sentence The truck in front of me braked suddenly, the key to extracting meaning isn’t in any of the words, but in knowing what is not said.

The semantic field for the word ‘car’, according to Sabine Ploux’s very cool semantic altlas

What the sentence actually means does not come by putting together the sense (as found in a dictionary) of each of its words. You need to know a lot about ordinary driving situations to grasp what any reader would find easily (e.g. the risk of accident was high). The knowledge required is not to be found in any dictionary or encyclopaedia, as thick as it might be. They argue that sense doesn’t come from what’s written, but from what’s assumed and left unwritten.

Semantics did not dramatically improve over the last decade. Automated summaries, for instance, a problem that has kept semanticists busy for the past 40 years, are still not expected for a distant future. Worse, it’s hard to see any technological lock that could, if broken, propel semantics into a higher gear.

In the coming weeks, the Online Journalism Blog team will test all kind of semantics apps that could help journalists. We’ll try to separate semantic snake-oil from genuinely innovative apps and discuss the value semantics can add. Stay tuned!

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

A new research from Indiana University showed that 54% of URL requests had no referrals. That means that most of the time, people do not click on links. They merely pick a site in their favorites or type in an URL in the address bar. A mere 5% of URL requests came from search engines.

The figures can hardly be doubted. The study monitored 100,000 users over 9 months – the largest yet. What is more, the number of URL requests without referrals actually increased over the course of the study.

Users seem less Google-prone than what is often claimed. They spend little time surfing and prefer to go directly to destinations they know.

The share of users that asked Google for “bbc.co.uk” actually rose over the years, meaning that web-literacy did not increase. Some users still do not understand the difference between the address bar and a search engine. As internet penetration continues to grow, late-adopters are forced to go online. Their behavior is far from the gorgeous image constantly pictured by geeky web consultants.

Should we jump to conclusions and withdraw all the theories on network building and SEO? Rich Gordon, from the Readership Institute, argues for instance that the answer for news outlets lies in building destinations, not bridges nesting deeper into the user’s head so as to see her come back more regularly.

Even though the figure of 54% of URL requests without referrals is impressive (and growing), it does not imply that web users are stuck in some 1995-like behavior. Asked by e-mail about the discrepancy between what some webmasters report, with Google traffic being the main concern, and his research, Mark Meiss offers several answers.

Quite surprised himself, he admits first that his experimental design considered requests from AJAX pages or RSS readers as having no referral. He also stressed the difference between some heavily visited websites, such as Facebook, and those on the news market. Users looking for news can be dwarfed by the new usages that emerged recently and that focus on a few websites (read: social networking). The full interview can be read here.

Although users do not adopt the newest surfing technologies as fast as the geek elite would like them to, the strategic visions centered on the power of the link should not be dismissed. AOL locked-in system failed years ago, and so will Facebook’s.

Journalists should not consider this research as a confirmation that they the ultimate destination for news, as some of them would like to think. Success lies in information flow, not in puddles of still articles.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril