TechCrunch’s Paul Carr has a thoughtful piece on “cyber-vigilantism” where citizens witness or experience a crime and go online to chase it down, name the alleged perpetrators, or pressure the authorities out of complacency:

“[W]hen that naming happens, the case is over before it’s begun: no matter whether the accused is guilty or innocent, they are handed a life sentence. Until the day they die, whenever a potential employer or a new friend Googles their name – up will come the allegation. And, prison terms notwithstanding, that allegation carries the same punishment as guilt – a lifetime as an unemployable, unfriendable, outcast. There’s a reason why the Internet is a great way to ruin someone with false allegations – and it’s the same reason why falsely accused people are just as likely to harm themselves as guilty people.”

The post was written after TechCrunch decided to delete a story about an alleged sexual assault and is a useful read in provoking us as journalists in any medium to reflect on how we treat stories of this type.

There are no hard rules of course, and associated legal issues vary from country to country.

In the Judith Griggs case, for example, was I right to post on the story? My decision was based on a few factors: firstly, I was reporting on the actions of those on her magazine’s Facebook page, rather than the ‘crime’ itself (which was hardly the first time a publisher has lifted). Secondly, I waited to see if Griggs responded to the allegations before publishing. Thirdly, I evaluated the evidence myself to see the weight of the allegations. Still, I’d be interested in your thoughts.

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It’s often said that Twitter’s big advantage over Google is its ability to allow you to conduct ‘real time search’ – if an event is happening right now, you don’t search Google, you search Twitter.

But today Google has announced a series of features that, while still not offering real time search, take it just that bit closer. For me it is the most significant change to Google’s core service in years. 

Here’s the video:

This week, while talking to my students about the ability to search by date in Google, the computer assisted reporting blogger Murray Dick mentioned how unreliable the feature was, so I wouldn’t get too excited. 

What is new, however, is the ‘recent search’ facility, which brings up results from the past hour or two.

Perhaps most significantly, the intuitive nature of the controls makes it much easier to find relevant information – and has obvious uses if you are a journalist only interested in recent reports. I tried it with an event I attended today and the results were clearly better than a generic search.

The ‘Timeline’ feature is particularly useful – you can now drill down to a specific period, allowing you to do the opposite – rule out recent reports – if, for example, you’re looking for background on someone currently in the news.

Also useful is the horrendously multicoloured ‘Wonder Wheel’ which will generate related terms that you can browse through.

So, a search for ‘Paul Bradshaw’ brings up online journalism, journalism blog, Press Gazette and Birmingham City University – an obvious way to get an overview of the areas and companies a person is connected with, and drill down to information about those. 

‘More text’ will give expanded descriptions of results; you can choose to include images from the pages; and it is easier to switch to searches of video, forums and reviews. 

Also worth noting is that Google appear to now be supporting microformats: this means you can filter reviews by sentiment, and more easily disambiguate people in searches. 

It also means you should be looking at using microformats for your own content, of course… 

If you can see any other applications of Search Options, or find any features I’ve not spotted, let me know.

UPDATE: TechCrunch compare Google’s performance against Twitter Search, FriendFeed, OneRiot, Tweetmeme and Scoopler (which I love) in this real-time search-off.

UPDATE 2: ZDNet spots the addition of public comments on search results. Very interesting.

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One of those rather dry-sounding reports on TechCrunch that some-company-has-raised-some-investment-for-some-technology caught my eye recently, because in par 2 comes this:

“Conveneer is building a mobile platform called Mikz, which will be able to assign a URL to your mobile phone, making the content on your phone accessible on the Web. In essence, it turns each mobile phone into a Web server. Once your phone has a URL like http://joe.mikz.me, other Web applications and services can ingest the data that is locked in your phone, and also your phone can take advantage of common Web APIs. Mikz can pull information off your phone such as your contacts, GPS coordinates, photos, music, ringtones, and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone.”

Now, it’s one thing to realise that your typical phone now is more powerful than the PCs of a decade ago, but the real power in computers is their networked nature. This technology – if realised – could open up some incredible possibilities. One that immediately occurs is the possibility to make data on phones searchable -mash that up with GPS data and you can imagine saying ‘Find me images or video on mobile phones within 30 miles of today’s major news event’.

There are likely many more possibilities – and I’d welcome your input here on what this would make possible…

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Will 2009 be the year news organisations finally went open? Barely a month after the New York Times allowed users to build on 28 years of content with its articles API (with immediate results), The Guardian is opening up over a million articles to developers for free as part of its own ‘Open Platform‘.

TechCrunch reports:

“The Guardian is effectively letting control of its content go in order to maximise its reach – and therefore the number of eyeballs that see its brand/content – across the Web.

“the API does not prevent developers from running “commercial applications” using the API – but I’d read the fine detail first. They do say: “You can display your own ads and keep your own revenue. We will require that you join our ad network in the future.”

“… The APIs feature ‘full fat’ feeds and other content including video, audio and photo galleries. You can combine free text search and combine tags to create feeds based on XML, JSON and Atom. 

“… Some early examples include Zemanta’s Guardian topic research demo. It’s a simple app that searches the vast database of Guardian articles via its API and then uses Zemanta’s API to get links to related concepts.

“There is also Content Tagger, an application to provide user-generated tagging on guardian.co.uk content. ApiMaps.org, built by Stamen Design, is designed to crowdsource geodata about Guardian articles. Cass Sculpture Foundation is using the Open Platform to insert lists of articles from the Guardian about its sculptors into their biography and home pages.

Expect more news organisations to follow suit.

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The second part of Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report is out, with more obvious headlines: the more you post, the better your blog does. Here’s the detail from TechCrunch:

“Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.”

For ‘Technorati’, you can also read ‘Google’, as it also ranks pages based on how many incoming links they have (among other things).

This really only confirms what own experience – and those of millions of others – suggests. But I would add a caveat.

While regular posting definitely increases blog traffic, a well considered, high quality post can be just as effective. Posts like the 21st Century Newsroom series generate a constant stream of visits to this blog, for instance. Another point is that frequent posting can result in good posts being buried beneath other ones when people check their RSS readers.

The best strategy, it seems, is a balance of frequency with quality.

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