Ian Silvera (@ianjsilvera) gives a step-by-step guide on how to find out who’s behind changes on a Wikipedia page. Cross-posted from the Help Me Investigate blog.

First, click on the ‘view history’ tab at the top right of the Wikipedia entry you are interested in. You should then be directed to a page that lists all the edits that have occurred on that entry. It looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Bradshaw_(journalist)&action=history

Second, to identify if someone has been deleting unhelpful criticisms of an organisation or person on their Wikipedia entry, you could read through each edit, but with large Wikipedia entries this exercise would be too time-consuming. Instead, look for large redactions.

To do this scan through the red coloured numbers in brackets. Low numbers such as (-700) mean that a reasonable amount of information has been deleted from the Wikipedia entry. Also, the date the Wikipedia entry was edited is located on the left-hand side of the page.

Once you’ve indentified a large passage that has been deleted, click on the user’s IP address listed in the centre of the page (unfortunately, if the user has an account with Wikipedia, you won’t be able to see their IP address — here the investigation may have to end).

You should now be directed to a page that lists all that user’s contributions on Wikipedia. For example, not many users have deleted content on Paul Bradshaw’s wiki, so I clicked on a Wikipedia user that removed two characters on Mr Bradshaw’s entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/193.60.133.202

Now click on the ‘diff’ button, located in the middle of the page, to check if the mystery editor did remove criticisms or unhelpful information.

You should now be directed to a comparison page which shows the Wikipedia entry before and after the deletion. For instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sony&diff=prev&oldid=378515677

Presuming that your mystery editor has deleted some valid criticisms or unhelpful information, it’s time to find them.

Locating

To find a person using their IP address you can use an IP locater. I use Neil Smith’s locater found on his website here: http://www.uk-osint.net/whoandwhere.html (just type the IP you’re interested in and press ‘search’).

Now, a lot of IP address are re-directed, many through Delaware, so IP locaters aren’t that accurate, but that’s not to say you may get lucky and the mystery editor’s internet provider may be a niche provider unlike BT, Virgin or the like (a computer service company that only does work for large businesses, for example). Even if the provider turns out to be BT or the like, Mr Smith’s IP locater is fused with Google Maps so you can zoom in and find the address of your mystery editor.

Returning to my example, I typed the IP address (193.60.133.202) of my mystery editor into the IP locater and identified the provider as Birmingham City University. So, clearly someone who has been using Birmingham City University’s computers on the 29th of July 2010‎ edited Mr Bradshaw’s Wikipedia entry — likely candidates include Paul Bradshaw or someone associated with Birmingham City University (an academic, PR Company or a student).

At this point of the investigation things become less technical – you will have to phone and confront the organisation or person you’re interested in with the information you’ve found.

Examples of Wikipedia investigations

• The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Independent found that 10,000 Wikipedia edits were made from the House of Commons: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/03/09/thousands-of-changes-made-to-wikipedia-from-within-house-of-commons/
• The blogger Tim Ireland discovered that Bell Pottinger deleted criticisms on their Wikipedia entry: http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2011/12/bell-pottinger/
• The blogger David Allen Green (Jack of Kent) found that Johann Hari had maliciously edited the Wikipedia entries of journalistic rivals under the alias ‘David Rose’: http://jackofkent.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/who-is-david-rose.html
• My discovery of the removal of unhelpful information on A4e’s Wikipedia entry:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/mar/14/hugh-muir-diary-techdept

Do you have any other tips on tracing Wikipedia edits? Or examples of it used in journalism? We’d love to hear them.

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Last month you may have read the story of lobbyists editing Wikipedia entries to remove criticism of their clients and smear critics. The story was a follow-up to an undercover report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Independent on claims of political access by Bell Pottinger, written as a result of investigations by SEO expert Tim Ireland.

Ireland was particularly interested in reported boasts by executives that they could “manipulate Google results to ‘drown out’ negative coverage of human rights violations and child labour”. His subsequent digging resulted in the identification of a number of Wikipedia edits made by accounts that he was able to connect with Bell Pottinger, an investigation by Wikipedia itself, and the removal of edits made by suspect accounts (also discussed on Wikipedia itself here).

This month the story reverted to an old-fashioned he-said-she-said report on conflict between Wikipedia and the PR industry as Jimmy Wales spoke to Bell Pottinger employees and was criticised by co-founder Tim (Lord) Bell.

More insightfully, Bell’s lack of remorse has led Tim Ireland to launch a campaign to change the way the PR industry uses Wikipedia, by demonstrating directly to Lord Bell the dangers of trying to covertly shape public perception:

“Mr Bell needs to learn that the age of secret lobbying is over, and while it may be difficult to change the mind of someone as obstinate as he, I think we have a jolly good shot at changing the landscape that surrounds him in the attempt.

“I invite you to join an informal lobbying group with one simple demand; that PR companies/professionals declare any profile(s) they use to edit Wikipedia, name and link to them plainly in the ‘About Us’ section of their website, and link back to that same website from their Wikipedia profile(s).”

The lobbying group will be drawing attention to Bell Pottinger’s techniques by displacing some of the current top ten search results for ‘Tim Bell’ (“absurd puff pieces”) with “factually accurate and highly relevant material that Tim Bell would much rather faded into the distance” – specifically, the contents of an unauthorised biography of Bell, currently “largely invisible” to Google.

Ireland writes that:

“I am hoping that the prospect of dealing with an unknown number of anonymous account holders based in several different countries will help him to better appreciate his own position, if only to the extent of having him revise his policy on covert lobbying.”

…and from there to the rest of the PR industry.

It’s a fascinating campaign (Ireland’s been here before, using Google techniques to demonstrate factual inaccuracies to a Daily Mail journalist) and one that we should be watching closely. The PR industry is closely tied to the media industry, and sockpuppetry in all its forms is something journalists should do more than merely complain about.

It also highlights again how distribution has become a role of the journalist: if a particular piece of public interest reporting is largely invisible to Google, we should care about it.

UPDATE: See the comments for further exploration of the issues raised by this, in particular: if you thought someone had edited a Wikipedia entry to promote a particular cause or point of view, would you seek to correct it? Is that what Tim Ireland is doing here, but on the level of search results?

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I asked Pat Lazure, co-founder of the wiki journalism project WikiCity Guides, to tell me more about his experiences with the project. This is what he said:

Key Factors Driving Citizen Journalism

There has been a lot written about citizen and crowd-sourced journalism, and to this end, several entrepreneurs and creative folks have aggressively explored the widening opportunities within this space. I could write a chapter on why this is happening but instead, boiling it all down, there are two key factors driving these opportunities:

(i.) Reduced barriers to entry: The cost and technical skills required to publish content continue to drop.

(ii.) Technical advancements in advertising: Advertising revenue has been the lifeblood of media ever since the advent of the penny press in the 1830’s. However, the proliferation of self-serve and pay-for-performance ad schemes (CPC, CPM, collective buying platforms, etc.) have left many traditional media models haemorrhaging; thus making them smaller, and thereby creating market opportunities for the citizen journalist.

Journalism – The New Wild West

So for the time being, journalism – in its most loosely defined terms – is now the Wild West. We’ve witnessed the push for hyperlocal, we see thousands of bloggers emerge every day, and we’ve even seen non-profit news organizations emerge. Yet, no single entity claims to offer a convincing, economically viable solution for what’s next. Instead, fragmentation abounds, there’s a lot of clutter, and the rest of us continue to experiment.

WikiCity Guides

WikiCity Guides is one such experiment that I co-founded last year. WikiCity Guides provides local content on places, events, and people who would be of interest to those associated with any of its 22,000 U.S. towns. It serves these communities much like a local blog, yet using the same open source MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia; any of its readers are allowed to contribute content. By providing town-specific content and other topical resources including local business listings, news, weather, and classified ads, WikiCity Guides allows local users to enhance their town’s pages by adding deep community content that interests them most. With over 13 million pages, WikiCity Guides is now the largest wiki in the world and is located at www.WikiCity.com.

The project itself continues to evolve, and now that much of the site has been built, we are shifting our focus towards growing our audience. Most recently, we launched a partnership with the Wahoo Newspaper, which is located in Wahoo, Nebraska. We’re still fine-tuning the model, but the initial premise was to create a wiki platform that reinforces the newspaper as the hub – not the spoke – for all of the happenings within the community. To this end, the site continues to evolve as a collection of hyperlocal facts, figures, businesses, and opinions that will continue to grow in size and usefulness with each edit. So far the project has been well received, and has generated an incremental 7% monthly page views for the newspaper’s website, albeit within a very small market.

For most publishers, the benefits to offering a community wiki and harnessing wiki journalism may not seem self-evident. However, as the media fragments, a community wiki can serve as one more tool within the publisher’s toolbox to add “stickiness” to their audience, increase page views, and a unique way to create fanatical ownership and loyalty amongst contributing readers.

Looking ahead, the extent to which wiki journalism is embraced by the masses remains to be seen, but some of the barriers to entry continue to fall. Like Wikipedia and so many other wikis, fewer than 5% of visitors actually participate in the editing process. Part of this is due to the not-so-friendly wiki syntax that are inherent to most wikis.  Not to fear though… The wiki community has recognized this draw-back and is in the process of introducing its new Usability Initiative, which will help avoid some of the confusion and encourage more users to contribute.

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Even though I had followed the latest financial crisis since its inception on every news site of relevance, I had to wait for the Atlantic’s cover story on the topic to understand where Wall Street had gone wrong (at least to the extent that anyone understood it).

While online news as it exists today is great for 24/7 access, real-time updates, increased transparency, and multiperspectival discussions, it still lacks the depth and detail of a feature story in a print magazine.

As a proponent of digital communication, I can appreciate the pervasiveness of news coverage in the online age, but as a student of journalism I often crave the completeness of long-form journalism, which is lacking on the Internet.

In a very enlightening article in the Nieman Reports’ fall edition, Matt Thompson brings up this very point about digital journalism. Thompson writes that while each new day brings with it an array of breaking news stories on various topics, virtually none of them purport to explain the significance, context or relevance of the subject at hand.

This is hard to deny. The home page of almost every popular news site looks like a commercial for news stories other than the one you’re reading: a video clip of the funniest moment on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show from the previous night, the latest gaffe by the dumbest politician, and/or a crude moment of incivility by the celebrity newsmaker of the week.

The fact that these sorts of blurbs beg the reader to go off on various tangents is not the Internet’s greatest fault. The very nature of reading on the Web—short blog updates on the latest event preoccupying the media, hyperlinks that often take one through tangential stories neither directly relevant nor any more detailed—cater to the sense of urgent consumption that occupies Internet users and feeds them with an ever-increasing number of trivial details, while taking them farther and farther away from the big picture.

The Web is certainly not alone in this. Newspapers offer mere snippets of important stories for lack of time and space, and broadcast shows are well known for distilling big issues into high-impact sound bites.

I applaud the fact that the Internet can offer information on obscure topics, and promote the sort of analytical thinking and reasoning that the restricted space of print cannot provide. In fact, comments threads of blogs have some of the most insightful analyses I have ever seen. But this is all the more reason why journalists should be doing more to stimulate this sort of debate and discussion by talking about underlying themes and broader perspectives.

As Thompson points out, lay readers lose interest in complex issues because the absence of context and background often makes it impossible to grasp for anyone that is not an expert in the field.

“I came to think of following the news as requiring a decoder ring, attainable only through years of reading news stories and looking for patterns, accumulating knowledge like so many cereal box tops I could someday cash in for the prize of basic understanding,” he writes of his experiences as a young news consumer before he became a journalism student.

In this environment, it’s often easier to read a story about Britney Spears, which requires no in-depth knowledge of her life, than to assimilate the complications of single-payer health care in America without putting it in context of earlier attempts to do so.

Thompson suggests that bringing a Wikipedia-style format to online newsrooms could prove to be a step in the right direction. He might have something there. Every time I want a quick education on a topic I’m unfamiliar with, I head to Wikipedia. As a responsible journalist, I’ve been taught to double-check all the facts I use from the site with primary sources, but the user-generated encyclopedia provides more context and background to an issue than any news Web site I know. In addition, it boasts of updates in almost real time.

As Thompson writes, there is “something quite remarkable about how stories are structured on the site, how breaking news gets folded into an elegant, cohesive record, enabling site visitors to quickly catch up on a topic without having to sort through a torrent of disparate articles and headlines.”

That this is not merely beneficial to lay consumers of news is evident from the observation that journalists themselves often turn to Wikipedia to find a clear “road map to troves of valuable information,” albeit gingerly.

Again, as journalists, they verify their facts with more authoritative sources that the links below entries amply provide. If news Web sites were to offer the same sort of time line and narrative that Wikipedia does, information consumption could be made that much easier for the casual reader.

It is true that there is only so much reading that can be achieved on a celluloid screen. Much has been written about the various adaptations the brain undergoes in processing information from a light-emitting screen as opposed to static paper, but multimedia has its own advantages to combat such extensive reading.

The New York Times site, for instance, has been using interactive tools to provide more depth to its stories, in topics as wide-ranging as Roger Federer’s footwork on a tennis court to the history of health-care reform in the US. As has CNN with its in-depth specials, such as one exploring Afghan invasion through history and another detailing basic facts about the religion of Islam.

The BBC, arguably an exemplar in multimedia use, has a whole section devoted to historical accounts on various topics of reader interest. The Guardian has a series of interactive time lines on items that span a light-hearted World Cup narrative and the more disconcerting history of unemployment in the UK.

While these are great as standalones, news sites should be doing more to incorporate such features into their daily news stories so that users can make the most of real-time updates.

While the Web has different methods at its disposal to provide long-form journalism (in addition to endless lines of text), it can still do the same thing that a long feature in the Atlantic or a special report in the Economist does. And it can often do it better.

The media has often been guilty of using technology for technology’s sake. In the early nineties, CNN was criticized by media scholars for ushering in the age of “television camera” news, where the 24/7 network offered round-the-clock coverage made possible by satellite-fed communication, but did little else to offer background to its stories. Now, real-time updates, context-lacking blurbs, sound bites and viral videos are being popularized because of Internet technology.

Fortunately for us, that same technology that allows us to transmit snapshots of news in real time also has the potential to provide contextual and in-depth information in exciting and innovative ways. Here’s to hoping news organizations will use it.

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The New York Times reports that edits by new users to biographical entries on Wikipedia will be held back from publication until a more experienced editor approves them.

This seems something of a no-brainer to me. When I talk to students about Wikipedia I always point out that the main risks come with biographies, because of the obvious personal element involved (I also point them to the discussion pages behind each entry, and the ability to look at the history of edits and who made them).

It’s more likely that someone will have a beef with a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville than they will with the atmosphere of Jupiter.

Likewise, when someone dies, people know they can have fun with the media by inserting a little myth that they can guess will be repeated as fact by journalists under a deadline. (Recently Popbitch’s Camilla Wright, whose readers helped debunk inflated Michael Jackson sales figures, argued in a Press Gazette column that web journalists don’t seem to be as vulnerable to this as print journalists).

And it’s worth pointing out that the much-quoted study by Nature which compared Wikipedia’s accuracy with Britannica only looked at science articles.

So it’s a no-brainer on the accuracy front. But for Wikipedia it still raises that community issue: if a new contributor doesn’t see their edit go live immediately, how does that affect their involvement? How does creating a 2-tier system affect the community? Why not instead try adding a disclaimer to the top of all biographies urging caution because “this is about a person”?

It will be interesting to see what happens. In the meantime, I’m off to read about the atmosphere of Jupiter before someone hoaxes it.

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In journalism school you’re told to find the way that best relates a story to your readers. Make it easy to read and understand. But don’t just give the plain facts, also find the context of the story to help the reader fully understand what has happened and what that means.

What better way to do that than having a Wikipedia-like feature on your newspaper’s web site? Since the web is the greatest causer of serendipity, says Telegraph Communities Editor Shane Richmond, reading a story online will often send a reader elsewhere in search of more context wherever they can find it.

Why can’t that search start and end on your web site?

What happens today

Instead of writing this out, I’ll try to explain this with a situation:

While scanning the news on your newspaper’s web site, one story catches your eye. You click through and begin to read. It’s about a new shop opening downtown.

As you read, you begin to remember things about what once stood where the new shop now is. You’re half-way through the story and decide you need to know what was there, so you turn to your search engine of choice and begin hunting for clues.

By now you’ve closed out the window of the story you were reading and are instead looking for context. You don’t return to the web site because once you find the information you were looking for, you have landed on a different news story on a different news web site.

Here’s what the newspaper has lost as a result of the above scenario: Lower site stickiness, fewer page views, fewer uniques (reader could have forwarded the story onto a friend), and a loss of reader interaction through potential story comments. Monetarily, this all translates into lower ad rates that you can charge. That’s where it hurts the most.

How it could be

Now here’s how it could be if a newspaper web site had a wiki-like feature:

The story about the new shop opening downtown intrigues you because, if memory serves, something else used to be there years ago. On the story there’s a link to another page (additional page views!) that shows all of the information about that site that is available in public records.

You find the approximate year you’re looking for, click on it, and you see that before the new shop appeared downtown, many years ago it was a restaurant you visited as a child.

It was owned by a friend of your father’s and it opened when you were six years old. Since you’re still on the newspaper web site (better site stickiness!), you decide to leave a comment on the story about what was once there and why it was relevant to you (reader interaction!). Then you remember that a friend often went there with you, so you email it to them (more uniques!) to see if they too will remember.

Why it matters to readers

For consumers, news is the pursuit of truth and context. Both the news organization and the journalists it employs are obligated to give that to them. The hardest part of this is disseminating public records and putting it online.

The option of crowd-sourcing it, much like Wikipedia does with its records, could work out well. However just the act of putting public records online in a way that makes theme contextually relevant would be a big step forward. It’s time consuming, however the rewards are great.

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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

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The Telegraph have finally published their MPs’ expenses data online – and it’s worth the wait. Here are some initial thoughts and reactions:

• Firstly, they’ve made user behaviour an editorial feature. In plain English: they’re showing the most searched-for MPs and constituencies, which is not only potentially interesting in itself, but also makes it easier for the majority of users who are making those searches (i.e. they can access it with a click rather than by typing)
• There’s also a table for most expensive MPs. As this is going to remain static, it would be good to see a dedicated page with more information – in the same way the paper did in its weekend supplement.
• The results page for a particular MP has a search engine-friendly URL. Very often, database-generated pages have poor search engine optimisation, partly because the URLs are full of digits and symbols, and partly because they are dynamically generated. This appears to avoid both problems – the URL for the second home allowance of Khalid Mahmood MP, for example, is http://parliament.telegraph.co.uk/mpsexpenses/second-home/Khalid-Mahmood/mp-11087
• The uncensored expenses files themselves are embedded using Issuu. This seems a strange choice as it doesn’t allow users to tag or comment – and the email/embed option is disabled for “secret documents”
• There’s some nice subtle animation on the second home part of expenses, and clear visualisation on other parts.
• The MP Details page is intelligently related both to the Telegraph site (related articles) and the wider web, with the facility to easily email that MP, go to their Wikipedia entry, and ‘bookmark’.
• Joy of joys, you can also download the MPs expenses spreadsheet from here (on Google Docs) – although this is for all MPs rather than the one being viewed. Curiously, while viewing you can see who else is viewing and even (as I did) attempt to chat (no, they didn’t chat back).

I’ll most likely update this post later as I get some details from behind the curtain.

And there are more general thoughts around the online treatment of expenses generally which I’ll try to blog at another point.

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Allison White has written this wonderful roundup of last week’s news for the OJB. But now she’s got a job. Persuade her to do this again in the comments…

Google

-Announced no desire to create content and will respect copyright.

It added face-blur technology to its Street View mapping serivce to protect privacy. Also speculation from Groves Media on whether this technology is more of a threat to civil liberties than CCTV.

Microsoft

-Looking to limit the kinds of computers that can use their low-cost OS, making them poor computers even if they could be better and still be as cheap.

-The Microsoft/Yahoo struggle is still ongoing – rumor has it that Carl Ichan is buying up stocks in Yahoo to replace board members
who will sell to Microsoft. Seems he is replacing board members but his plans are not evident

Twitter

-Poynter did a good roundup of the Twitter coverage of the Chinese earthquake. Also gave news of situation and stories in Burma.

-Twitterfone is a new app for mobiles that allows users to call and leave a voice message, which is translated to text and then posted on Twitter. Has issues like knowing how to end the call.

-Funny meme on Twitter is finishing this sentence: “When Obama wins, …” Mine was “When Obama wins, college will be free and pizza will be subsidized”

Tech

-AP trying to get a button on the iPhone

-Effort underway to make clickstream tracking opt-in only in US. Marketers say it will be the death of their industry, but will most likely be like opting out of telemarketers.

-RIAA and MPAA still insist on using DRM on content bought to limit customer .Microsoft may also be planning to use a copyright ‘cop’ on the Zune for NBC. EA backs down on using DRM after user outcry at the idea

-Wikipedia to become a print edition, some debate about if the authors should get paid but Techdirt says it is non-controversial and they should not be paid.

-The FBI backs off of the Internet Archive – they wanted records of who used it now journalists can rest more at ease

-In the case against Ray Niro, writer of Troll Tracker blog, tried to prove he was not a “real” journalist and could not claim rights as one because he wasn’t trained, was bias and that he was a corporate mouthpiece. Defense took apart the claim of what it really means to be a journalist.

Nimbuzz moving in on Skype’s territory by making an app for both mobile and PC

Comcast bought Plaxo Inc., the social networking site. It turns online address books into online networks.

Other

Bush gave his first online interview Tuesday

Adrian Monck moved to WordPress http://adrianmonck.com/

Social

Quarter of social net users are using their mobiles to be social online in the UK.

Social Networks boom in Europe, projected to reach 107.4 million people in 2012. UK expected to be largest with 27.1 million projected.

How marketers are using social media and how often

Employers continue to ban Facebook and other social media sites at work without recognizing the possible benefits from these sites.

A new social site for health issues is iMedix, and although in beta is pretty poor in the community department. The people on it now are rather ‘happy-go-lucky’ as is some of the content which may not be appropriate for the kind of users it wants to attract (people with health problems)

-Social Networking Sites are now allowing people to basically export their data to other sites: MySpace with a few other partnered sites, Facebook to anyone, and Google to anyone. Although Facebook is closing access to journalists and is looking to take off its 5000 friends limit.

Web

Two sites, Newstrust and Newscred, have set up a system to rate the credibility of Web sites. Buzz Machine says it won’t work because there is just too much bad stuff and too easily discredited good stuff.

LiveNewsCamera.com allows viewers to see the news as it’s happening, uncut. Pope speeches, Iraqi parliament hearings, and the like.

PRWeb now allows users to search for their press releases, although this may bring fewer balanced results in a search

Harry McCracken from PC World has left to start his own tech web site.

A lot of talk going on about Seesmic: consensus seems to be that it is rough now with great potential and it is hard to imbed on some sites.

MSNBC has created a new widget to scroll news and also two games to see main news headlines. Not sure if they’re effective, but they’re trying

Media

Time Warner may be looking to unload that do not transfer well to web (i.e. Coffee table mags)

Using video to truly enhance a story – not having it be a stand alone piece but a short snipit filled with things print can’t show, like emotion.

The BBC will be using the Parliamentary channel coverage to instead cover the Olympics

From Thoughts of Nigel: 3 ways China should handle Western media – give access to reporters, don’t freak out on negative coverage, and work on building a worldwide reputation

ReinventingClassifieds.com is looking to create a new business model to keep the classified section alive

Dutch free dailies are increasing circulation and so are free Italian papers

Irish paper group, River Media, appears to be in trouble and is looking for $16 million in help.

Guatemalan journalist, Jorge Merida Perez, shot dead in his home. He worked for the Prensa Libre.

From Adam Tinworth: The possibility of journalists being paid for increasing defined traffic online is being looked at, although still skeptically

The Liverpool Daily Post liveblogged the making of the paper Tuesday

The INMA drops “newspaper” from their title and adds “newsmedia”

Cablevision buys Newsweek over Rupert Murdoch, but it is also speculated Murdoch might end up with it in a few years anyways

Upcoming book Super Media has some chapters free online and discusses how journalism can save itself and the world through network journalism

Daily Mail site just pulled Flickr photos to write an article about fat pets without asking permission or attributing credit.

Boston NOW closed

Andy Bull writes on the blandness of sports journalism with the double speak and untruthfulness of players, teams and journalists

Wall Street Journal hires on chief technology officer, Sarabjit “Ruby” Walia

But London Evening just cut their media reporter, which is just the beginning of changes there they stated

PHP Freelancer

Charlotte Dunckley is a final year journalism degree students who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine – Things.

She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.

“I don’t have a website,” she replied.

“But you have a blog?”

“Yes.”

“Facebook?”

“Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.”

“So you do have a web strategy.”

Charlotte had been worried about her technical limitations and the lack of a website. Instead, she quickly realised that this wasn’t important – it wasn’t about building a big solid brick house, but about taking a bunch of caravans on tour, to where her audience lived online.

And crucially, this was backed up by her research – which is worth reading for any news executive or editor who wants to know how consumption of information is changing online.

Here’s what she wrote about her 15-30-year-old audience:

“When asked which four websites they visit most often, a whopping 67% of them included Myspace, with an equally large number – 65% – listing Facebook. The next greatest number was Ebay at just 20%. Other popular answers, surprisingly, but much lower, were Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr and Dont Stay In. Other websites were mentioned barely twice – the research gathered long lists of obscure websites.

“Evidently my target age group lean heavily towards using websites with some kind of social networking element. Another common trend were blogs (yay) – Trash Menagerie, Perez Hilton and Fluokids, to name but a few.

“So – getting exposure via a good web presence, in Birmingham, to our target age group, is perfectly achievable without a website.

“We have the top three most visited websites for our target audience covered – Myspace, Facebook and E-bay… a Flickr account has been set up and is awaiting content – I’m thinking well tagged page layouts, our original photography (where the photographer lets us use them) and images from our events and associated events. Similarly there will be no problem uploading event content from Youtube. We could even look into recording snippets of face to face interviews in future too. I presume a Wiki would be equally simple to set up? And of course, we have a blog – here. Commenting on other blogs is a way to create networks of readers. Blogs like the award winning Created in Birmingham would be our best bet.”

She demonstrates the concept of a distributed web strategy further by looking at how Fluokids works:

“Fluokids is a collective of young French bloggers who comment on music and events. Dazed and Confused (incidentally the most popular magazine purchased by our target group, according to our research) describes it as:

more than a blog but a youth movement – an internet and musical revolution whereby enthusiasts and DJs alike can download the newest and most wanted music coming out of Europe. By constantly posting remixes, these Gallic laptop maestros are pushing what people will like tomorrow. Teaming up with labels like Edbanger, Kitsune and Modular, the Parisian crew of seven regularly DJ all over Europe, and by their own admission are “nerds with an ultra-developed social life – as much on cyber platforms like MySpace as in real life.”

“Googling Fluokids yields the following first page (in correct order): Fluokids blog, Fluokids Myspace, that Dazed Digital article, Fluokids on Virb.com, Fluokids at Last.fm, Fluokids on Flickr, a couple of old event flyers and finally Fluokids on Technorati.

“The fact that their entire blog is French, and is still reasonably popular with my target audience, says a lot for the ‘cool’ status they have accumulated through placing the right content in the right channels.”

Now, she’s going viral too.

And Charlotte is not alone (although she is very, very good – and if you have a business in Birmingham you should buy some advertising from her). I have other students using the same channels to the same entrepreneurial effect. I notice that students’ first instinct when set a task is to… set up a Facebook group. To connect with people they don’t know. Now how many journalists have the same instinct?

PHP Freelancer