Yesterday’s MediaGuardian led with a lengthy and thoughtful piece on the importance of Facebook. I’m in it, talking about why Murdoch hasn’t attacked the site in the same way as Google, but also why I think identity will be the next big battleground for publishers. This is something I explored in an audioboo a few months back, so I thought I might publish it here for the first time. Here it is:
On May 25th we celebrate the Argentinian Bicentenary. And while the big media aren’t showing any really interesting initiatives, we have Tu Bicentenario, an independent and experimental journalistic project that aims to give real-time coverage to the main events of the celebrations with social tools and user-collaboration.
With a highly customizable website that integrates different movable boxes, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Maps and mobile streaming, they are trying to facilitate the creation and publication of content not only by the creators but by the audience too.
The most interesting content that came out of the project so far -in my opinion- is the survey in pictures and videos of historic sites, contrasted with old images to show the changing of cities. This material is being geolocated in Google Maps.
Some Argentinean Google Maps users also upload 3D models of the most important sights so you can do a virtual tour of the country.
Nestle’s social media car crash over Greenpeace’s Kit Kat video continues – this time on its Facebook fan page. Background here. Follow-up to my previous video above.
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 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.
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.
A good example of how seeing your website as a platform for other people to do things can lead to one of the oldest business models around: taxes. From TheNextWeb:
“Facebook still has one major trick up its revenue-sleeve: taxes. With companies such as Zynga raking in millions from the Facebook platform, Facebook could easily implement a 10% tax with little damage to its community, instantly raising tens of million more in revenue.”
The OJB Facebook Group is about to hit 1500 members, and yet we’ve never really done anything interesting with it. I’d like to change that.
I am advertising the position of OJB Facebook Group Manager. It has no pay, of course, but it does have potential for fun, and valuable experience.
For example, could we crowdsource something? Could we broaden the voices on OJB? Use apps and widgets creatively? Engage with the Wall and forums better? Something else? (setting up a Fan page?).
What would you do with a group of 1500 people? Send me a message on Facebook with your ideas and a link to your online presence, and then I’ll set up some online discussion to develop it further.
PS: As an equal opportunities non-employer, I’m particularly interested to hear from people outside of the Anglo-American world.
The question is no longer just a hypothetical one. With increasing convergence between social media and traditional content, what is known as a traditional news website might not exist in the coming years.
Perhaps a revealing example is the creation of Facebook applications by a Seattle-based aggregator, NewsCloud, which received a grant from the Knight Foundation to study how young people receive their news through social networks.
With developer Jeff Reifman leading the way, NewsCloud has developed three applications (Hot Dish, Minnesota Daily and Seattle In:Site) that engage users in news content through linking to stories by providing a headline, photo and blurb. The applications also allow them to blog, post links themselves and much more – all while getting points for completing “challenges” that can be redeemed for prizes, which works as an incentive to stay engaged. Prizes include everything from t-shirts to tickets to a baseball game to a MacBook. Some of these challenges are online ones (sharing a story, commenting on content, blogging, etc.) and others are offline challenges (attend a marketing event, write a letter to the editor). Continue reading
2 weeks ago the Scottish Sunday Express led with this cover story (PDF) on how the survivors of the Dunblane massacre were turning 18 and – shock, horror – drinking and making rude gestures. Reporter Paula Murray, it seemed, had “managed to inveigle her way into a Facebook friendship with teenagers from the town and write a salacious piece about their “antics”, based on information culled from their profiles.” You can read it in full here (text) and also here (PDF). The original was quickly taken down.
So far, so middle market. But what happened next was an abject lesson for the Express – and Paula – in how things have changed for journalists who will do anything for a ‘story’. Continue reading
Don’t worry, I’ll get over this Twitter thing very soon, but for now I want to address all of the ill informed coverage that stifles use of Twitter because it can’t see beyond a) celebrities using it and b) the Facebook-style status update thing.
If you’re struggling to think of what to talk about on Twitter, here are some suggestions: Continue reading
I’ve just been casting my eye over the Magazine Production work of two groups of second year students on the journalism degree I teach on. In addition to design and subbing, they were assessed on ‘web strategy’ – in other words, how they approached distribution online.
To give this a little context: early in the module ideas for magazines had to be pitched to the student union for financial backing in a Dragons’ Den-style competition (where among other things they had to address web strategy and business model). One idea per class ‘won’, which the whole class then had to work together to produce.
The winning ideas were: Nu Life – a magazine aimed at international students; and Skint – a money-saving guide with a particular focus on food. This is what they did…
Both groups created a Ning social network as the hub of their activity. Nu Life‘s pulled RSS feeds from the magazine blog and from local news services, in addition to having blog posts on the Ning itself, hosting images, originally produced video, an event, and forums. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 