Category Archives: online journalism

Could Mashlogic be the answer to infoglut in the Web 2.0 world?

Combating information overload in the Internet age can be a tricky thing. The reader is often overwhelmed with the plethora of Web sites and news portals, and the publisher has to come up with a way to retain loyal users who will stick to their brand even while they are taken from hyperlink to hyperlink through an endless loop of news stories on a singular topic of interest.

Mashlogic, a tool that allows users to personalize their Web searches and define information on their own terms, promises to change that. The site assures readers that it can bring relief to their “RSS indigestion” woes in the Internet age.

Consumer version

In addition to allowing the user to choose his or her most trusted sources of news on the Web, the consumer version of Mashlogic, which can be downloaded as a plugin for the Firefox or IE browser, permits readers to outline topics of interest in order to adapt Web-surfing to their needs.

“Mashlogic adds a layer of contextual information to casual viewing experience on a Web site,” says John Bryan, vice president of business development.

Users can go to the Mashlogic site and build their own “mashes.” Here, they can customize source feeds, which may include everything from brand names such as the Guardian or the New York Times, to aggregate mixes, which may incorporate celebrity news and sports teams they follow, and content from bloggers and tweeters. Everything from Wikipedia definitions to LinkedIn profiles of people mentioned in articles can be tracked based on a user’s interest. Mashlogic also allows readers to highlight and choose sources and order them based on their priorities. Little wonder then, that Techcrunch is calling it a “Swiss Army Knife for hyperlinks.” Behind the scenes, the tool scans RSS and XML feeds from the chosen sites for “strings of words” in Web pages based on the user’s pre-selected choices.

2Stay Tool

Internet readers trying to distill information overload on the Web aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of Mashlogic. Companies and news sites that are interested in preserving their brand, retaining readers and generating page views and revenue can utilize the company’s more recent tool, aptly named, “2Stay.”

Here, the publisher takes a few lines of java script and embeds it on a page. When the tool looks for matching terms on a site that has this embedded script, a branded box alerting the reader to relevant articles from the site itself will pop up as the user drags his cursor over specific terms. It gives site owners a way to let users navigate news on their site without having to rely on search engines, which can often turn up irrelevant information from untrusted sources. The technology works on two levels – it looks at direct tags, which would redirect the reader to articles based solely on words or phrases, and also contextually scans tags around a term, yielding associated tags, and hence secondary stories. This not only prompts the user to stay on a site longer, but also directs traffic to more popular – and hence, more profitable – parts of a Web site.

“It keeps people on the site for longer and allows people to navigate around a site. It’s a way of drilling down archival content,” says Bryan. “What’s really cool about it from the publisher’s perspective is that we have the ability to drive people from a low cpm area to a high cpm area.”

When I ask him how this is different from the “most popular” or “most commented” articles that most sites showcase, Bryan reminds me that it’s not a contest, “We don’t see Mashlogic as being a replacement to any of the other tools that you have on your site.”

Nevertheless, he is quick to point out that a lot of such lists are usually buried at the end of an article on conventional Web sites, or that they often take a reader through a maze of related stories, without the option of going back to the original article. The Mashlogic tool, on the other hand, opens up relevant stories in different tabs, aiding the horizontal reading experience, literally.

“What we offer the user is a way of quickly finding the associated article without leaving the page.” The tool is also intuitive in the sense that it recognizes terms that would be of interest to the user, and the longer time one spends on a site, the deeper it starts to reference buried content.

One of the places this technology works best, according to Bryan, is in the case of celebrity news. As if to reinforce this point he shows me how you can follow stories tagged with Indianapolis football star Peyton Manning on the citizen sports site, Bleacher Report. Merely moving the cursor over the quarterback’s name prompts a callout, which gleans Manning stories from all around the site – a list that includes everything from his team’s latest victory to his place on the NFL power rankings.

But could this excess of Peyton Manning news, so characteristic of niche information and fragmented audiences in the online world, carry with it the very real danger of obscuring the more important news items? Would this entice readers to spend too much time on Manning and too little on the health care bill, for instance?

“I’d like to think they’d use it for both,” says Bryan. In the age of democratization of the Web, the user should indeed be able to choose what he reads and where he reads it. And Mashlogic allows him to do this well. If, in fact, a user were interested in healthcare, the technology would allow him to access the leading magazines, sites, blogs, forums and even tweets on the topic, to create a 360-degree view. “Mashlogic does that better than anybody else because we would scour all the sources that you said you trusted or wanted to reference,” Bryan says.

2Go Tool

The company’s third product, “To Go” is for the ultimate brand fanatic. The brand can be anything from a preferred site to a favorite sports team or celebrity, or even a topic of interest. Readers would be required to download a button from their chosen sites, which would offer one-click access from anywhere on the Web.

Hence, 2Go is for the reader what 2Stay is for the publisher. “As a user, I have opted in to the have the ability to jump back, never be more than one click away from my favorite site,” explains Bryan.

Sure enough, as we traverse the ESPN site for news, a Bleacher Report-branded callout pops up, with related stories on B/R, ready to take the B/R fan back to his preferred source with one click. Mashlogic is currently in negotiations with about ten companies to install this tool, and according to Bryan, it’s being pretty well received.

Thus, what the three technologies being offered collectively do is adapt a reader’s experience to his preferences while allowing publishers to retain their most loyal users on their sites. “Mashlogic does not affect the way a site works, in any shape or form, the site works just the way it works,” Bryan says, as he closes an annoying popup ad.

The company has developed a pretty savvy e-commerce strategy for revenue generation. Any references to books or music in articles can directly take the user to the Amazon or iTunes site to purchase a specific item. The technology is also cleverly using third party sites to play sample music for the user, before he chooses to buy it. The feature can reference video, audio and text URLs. Hence, an NPR callout can jump the reader straight to a podcast from their broadcasts. Bryan also envisions having the callouts sponsored by advertisers. What would be more apt than having a Clorox callout advising a reader about environmentally-friendly Green Works products as he reads about the H1N1 virus, he reasons.

Too much distraction, perhaps? In an Internet age where readers are already in danger of encountering endlessly tantalizing hyperlinks, one too many sidebars, and interactive rich-media advertising, do they need more? But, on the other hand, don’t you want to be alerted to that contextual piece on Sarah Palin, as you glimpse through an article about her latest gaffe on a news show?

“A lot of the content, which is still very relevant tends to fall off the radar due to breaking news stories; it’s still pretty relevant, it’s just not current,” as Bryan points out. Mashlogic has the potential to combat the low attention span of the Internet age and bring that content to readers’ attention. In addition, it can provide them with the hundred and seventy-sixth article on Jon and Kate that they may have missed. What’s not to love about that?

Tracking Figures

Churnalism in a Petri Dish

Google Latitude’s Location History provides more opportunities for mobile journalism

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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

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?

Presentation: Law for bloggers and journalists (UK)

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Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below.

Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local‘s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The editor of the Birmingham Post Marc Reeves also came for an hour to share his own experiences in the regional press.

Two things occurred to me during the process of preparation and delivery of the session. The first is that law in this context is much broader: as well as the classic areas for journalists such as defamation, you have to take into account online publishing issues such as terms and conditions, data protection and user generated content.

Secondly, I’ve long been an advocate of conversational teaching styles (one of the reasons I teach in a coffee lounge) and this was a great example of that in practice. The presentation below is just a series of signposts – the actual session lasted 4 hours and included various tangents (some of which I’ve incorporated into this published version). Experiences in the group of students and guests ranged across broadcasting, print, photography, online publishing, academic study, and international law, and I came out of the session having learned a lot too.

I hope you can add some more points, examples, or anything I’ve missed. Here it is:

Law for bloggers and journalists (UK)

View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw.

The fall of a news site: the Spanish case of Soitu.es

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Like in the music or art fields, we, the Spanish-speaking people, allways look to the Anglo-American world to see what the new trends and innovation about digital journalism are (and laugh when Rupert Murdoch opens his mouth).

But now we can show our own example of a news site that tried to survive in this ecosystem and… died. But it’s all about trial and error!

I’m talking about Soitu.es, which closed its highly-regarded doors after 22 months of life. Of course, its demise had a strong impact in the blogosphere, its increasing traffic more than 10% in the last month.

This Spain-based news site was born in the wrong way, trying to show off with an enormous and fancy newsroom of almost 40 people, in times when the bet must be low-cost. The correct path is to start with a smaller staff and try to grow when the cash starts flowing in. Instead, Soitu.es made an alliance with the BBVA bank, that soon came to an end when they didn’t see the profitability, taking the whole project down with them. Its Director, Gumersindo Lafuente, blamed the financial crisis – as expected – after he spent money on their own CMS and ad server instead of using the great open source options available.

With this experience in mind, David De Ugarte came up with a few key points to make your news site a sure failure:

Over-budget your project: There is nothing quite like having great amounts of money from the beginning to install in your team the habits that will make you fail, while the expectations of your investors remain high.
Abandon your own speech about reality: Comment uncritically on all the fashionable stuff. Cut no ice. Don’t believe in anything and stand for anything and with a bit of luck they won’t remember anything you published.
Don’t allow users to identify with you: people used to buy El País newspaper – or any newspaper, for that matter – as a militant action or a way of life. If you want to fail you can’t allow something like that to happen. Don’t let them associate you with something in particular and don’t make yourself specialist in anything.
Have a “paper mindset”: pay columnists to write like they have been doing it all their lives without a single link for contextualization.
Burn time and capital as fast as you can: organize conferences and invest while you can in nice headquarters with fancy furniture.

2 videos: How social media changed the journalist’s day; and making money from content

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Here are 2 very interesting videos from a recent talk by Karl Schneider, Head of editorial development at B2B publisher Reed Business Information, at UCA Farnham. In the first Schneider takes a look at how the typical journalist’s day has changed – I particularly like the concept of previously only ‘20%’ of a journalist’s activity being visible, and 80% invisible, but that equation being reversed with the arrival of collaborative social media.

The journalist’s day from Stop.Frame on Vimeo.

In the second video Schneider likens online publishing to exhibitions and events, rather than traditional print and broadcasting models:

Can we make money from web content? from Stop.Frame on Vimeo.

Young people drying up like puddles on a sunny day: useful tools

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There is a tool available to show graphically changes in population over time between 1992 and 2031.

The website provides an interactive map that graphically illustrates the extent to which age profile of the UK will change over the next few years. The mapping tool allows the user to select criteria for studying various age groups from UK level down to every local authority area. So, if you’d like to see what the age profile of your locality will look like in ten years’ time, this site can help. It is especially useful for local news bloggers.

To find out more, visithttp://www.statistics.gov.uk/ageingintheuk/agemap.html

If you set the age range to the 0-15’s, it’s like watching pools of water dry up on a sunny day, as the drought of young people spreads across the country. Or watch the progress of the over-65s (which I join just after the end of the period) as the map gradually darkens.