WebU

It's Alive! Animating Print Publications on the Web

For some time I've been pretty derisive of the "animated .pdf" school of web publishing.
You've seen these  Frankenstein creatures: dead wood print publications that are zapped with flash magic in the lab and then propped up on a slab on the web for people to view "just like the real thing" complete with animated page turning and even swoooshing sounds as the page flips open.
A lot of people have been trying variations on this technology for a long time. Initially papers and magazines would simply post static .pdf's of their actual pages, as a "service"  to readers, but mostly I think it was an attempt to lead their advertisers online. "See? Look how nice your ad looks on the web! And it didn't hurt a bit!"
Things began getting a little out of control as different companies (Olive, PressSmart come to mind) began offering tools that attempted to duplicate the print exeprience online. The National Post — and all the CanWest daily papers — offer fairly sophisticated digital editions (which include the option of listening to a machine read each story). In our own chain we've used the technique for some advertising-
focussed sections (like the Spectator's "New Home Living" magazine) and a few complete specialty publications.
I can understand why publishers go for these little monsters: they're relatively cheap to produce and you can upsell advertisers to the product, or at least, as I said before, get print advertisers used to the idea of being on the web, but I can't really believe they do much for readers.
I mean, they really seem like a transitional technology, a crutch, or perhaps training wheels, to help print producers move into the digital age. But as the father of three daughters I can tell you from experience: you learn to ride a bike a lot faster without the darn things. You'll fall down a couple of times, but if you're depending on your own sense of balance to survive (rather than leaning on those little wheels), you soon learn what it takes to get moving.
Putting dancing pictures of our print products on the web, instead of going digitally native (think: links, rich content, searchable databases, interactive maps and graphics, audience contributions and user-controlled filtering etc)  seems like shackling ourselves.  It woud be like television networks broadcasting shows that blanked the TV screen and then simply streamed audio — radio shows — through our TV channels. Maybe that's what early television looked like, and maybe some viewers and advertisers liked it that way — at first. But it didn't last.
As I said, that's been my thinking for some time now, but lately I've seen some things that are making me re-evaluate that derision. Mayebe, just maybe there is a future in duplicating the print experience on the web. Sort of. I'll elaborate in my next post, but for now, what do you think? Are digital editions a waste of space, a crippling crutch diverting scarce web resources and attention. (Objection! He's leading the witness. Sustained.) Or are they a simple added benefit for readers and advertisers who happen to like them?
Bill

How to find video stories in the classifieds

Ever read any of the "Missed Connections" ads on Craigslist or in the back pages of your favourite alternative weekly? You know the ones that go something like:

"Me: 30-something poet with pony tail and messenger bag. You: Flustered blonde with polka-dot boots and a 30 gig Video iPod. We never talked, but our eyes met briefly on the 86-B at 9:30 pm Tuesday night when you dropped your copy of Jane Eyre..." etc.

Reading the ads can be a kind of guilty pleasure, a form of social voyeurism in which nobody gets hurt or too creeped out. But do you ever wonder who these people are?
Katy Newton did and then she did something about it - a weekly video feature for a cool new multi-media site on the Los Angeles Times site: ICU
It's a crapshoot of course - a good number of the sad souls taking out "Missed Connections" ads may very well be people you really just don't need to know about. But Newton doesn't show us the failures, only people who are entertaining, touching, even funny. Check out "Hot Guy I Hit With My Car", sample line: "He was all rugged and ... hot. The last time I hit a guy with my car he wasn't very hot."
The point is these are simple human stories that translate very well to video. They're on scene interviews whose story shape emerges in the editing, which is not always true of news coverage. This means however that there's a little less pressure to find a fabulous interview or compelling story — they clean up nicely in the editing suite. Take a look, let me know what you think. (Thanks to LA blogger, Tony Pierce, for pointing out the ICU site)
Bill

Watching Walmart Grow - and other strange uses for Freebase, "The World's Database"

Watch the Walmart Growth video here

The map was made by Toby Segaran, blogger, programmer and author of Programming Collective Intelligence.

And, if you're wondering if this means that I'm still on this Crowdsourcing kick, the answer is yes. In this case, the crowd is contributing data - lots and lots of data, which is then freely available for any geek or number nerd to come along and wring sense out of. Segaran built his Walmart growth video using data from Freebase, an open, public database that launched a year or so ago. Freebase is an attempt to build a freely accessible database of the world's knowledge. Here's how they describe it:

Freebase, created by Metaweb Technologies, is an open database of the world’s information. It’s built by the community and for the community – free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.
Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API.

It's a noble ambition, similar to the noble ambition that created it's cousin, Wikipedia. The difference between the two is that in Wikipedia the community contributes information by posting words, narratives, articles. In Freebase, the community contributes data - and applications that make use of that data. If you work with public databases, this is the stuff that dreams are made of. Data, raw data, and lots of it, too. If it's so great, I can hear you think, why aren't more people using it? Good question. I think there's at least two answers:  the difficulty in accessing, using and displaying the data  — ultimately this is a number nerd playground. And while I happen to think a number nerd is exactly what every newspaper needs, I'm not sure Freebase is going to be able to live up to it's founders dreams for one simple reason: data reliability.
Anyone can contribute data, anyone can edit it and that seems to pose serious problems, more serious, I think than it does for Wikipedia where errors and ommissions and bias can more easily be weeded out or at least made obvious by members.
With data - and especially applications or mashups (like the Walmart map) the data source is obscured, you can't make a rational judgement without digging past the thing (map, table, mashup etc) you're looking at and rooting around in the source data. And very few people can or will do that - which weakens the critical self-correcting funcitons a crowdsource project like this needs.
Here's how Freebase answers the question: How do I know the data is true?

Actually, you don’t know for sure. Because Freebase lets anyone edit the data, there’s always a chance that somebody has—intentionally or unintentionally—introduced a mistake. By the same token, data in the system can be cleaned up by anyone, and people make incremental improvements all the time.

What do you think? Is there a future for a public, open database project like this?
Bill

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Baltimore Sun's New Suburban Site Links to Competitors

Dear lord - I wish this wasn't news. But it is.
According to Editor and Publisher, the Baltimore Sun's new county news web site, ExploreHoward.com,  is actually linking to other news sites.
Gasp. That's right, they're sending readers to the competition.
I wrote last week - perhaps too dismissively - of the increasingly nimble Baltimore Sun's efforts to reach a youth market by launching a new paper and web product, "b". What they've done now to warrant the coverage in Editor and Publisher is launch a new website that aggregates news content from, it looks like, four community papers they own that serve suburban Howard County, Maryland.
One of the features of the new (mostly clean and simple looking) website is a news feed box, a headline widget really, that features headlines and links to stories about Howard County that are appearing anywhere - including their competition.
Gasp I say, someone please open a window. I think I feel an attack of the vapours.
It's a sad indictment of our business that our trade publications (correctly) see it as news when a newspaper website finally recognizes what huges swaths of the web have known for years: that one of the key jobs we can do for readers is to filter the world's information for them, reliably, swiftly and, if we're all very lucky, with a bit of style. You don't have to produce - or own, or even have the publishing rights to - that information to do this service: you can link to it.
Hello Fark, Digg, Reddit, Techmeme, Boingboing etc. etc. etc.
Sadly it is news when a newspaper website finally begins doing this. There are very, very few. One of the Canadian all-news radio station chain's has a CNN World News headline list on their web site, and the National Post's "Posted" blog starts many days (but not all, for some strange reason) with a roundup of the top stories being featured on all of their competitors web sites. But I can't think of any other news web sites that have grasped this very elemental principle. Do you?
Bill

Blogged with the Flock Browser

"Most Read" stories may be a matter of luck, not quality as research discovers 'hits' are almost random

Good news: trends probably aren't started by cool kids who are way smarter and more influential than you or I. Instead, products and ideas catch on in society because we're ready for them - and just about anyone can start up the the wave of acceptance for that new idea.
Some of the critical research on this was published back in Feb 2006 in Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, but most of us learned about it in a recent Fast Company piece by tech writer (and Canadian) Clive Thompson Is The Tipping Point Toast?
You remember the Tipping Point, a fascinating New Yorker article turned into a hit book by (another Canadian) Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell, struck by what he'd learned about the way epidemics hit a "tipping point" and moved suddenly from geometric to exponential growth, wondered if the same pattern was evident in society at large. Can ideas or behaviour be spread from person to person like a disease?
In his book he argued very persuasively that they could and outlined three rules that he thought governed this: The Rule of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Rule of Context. (Wikipedia has a decent summary of the rules here, )
 Marketers and the media seized on the first rule, which suggested that a very small number of people wielded enormous social influence and played the critical role in creating trends and hits - in getting things to the tipping point.
Some scientist have begun researching the idea in greater depth and are finding results that point in a very different direction — one of them, Duncan Watts, is the focus of Thompon's article, Is the Tipping Point Toast? I think the piece relies on a kind of straw man argument that ignores the nuance and complexity of Gladwell's book, but never mind. There's some interesting research underlying it just the same. Probably the most interesting is the experiment Watts undertook with two other scientists: Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market.
Watts set up a music downloading site, populated it with 48 unknown songs by unknown bands and then recruited about 14,000 people to the site to listen to, download and rate the songs. The audience were (unbeknownst to them) divided into cohorts - some were absolutely unfettered and acted as individuals. Others were allowed to see (to greater and lesser extents) the choices and ratings of others as they made their choices.
Here's how Thompson summarized their results:

In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs--and the bottom ones--were completely different. For example, the song "Lockdown," by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song's success seemed to be due to merit. "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

I wonder what this research should mean to news sites and our increasing efforts to let readers comment, rate and see each other's comments and ratings?
photo courtesy Mara B's photostream on Flickr

Crowdsourcing a map of the universe

I've been thinking (and reading) a lot about crowdsourcing lately, partly because it's becoming increasingly  obvious that online news sites need to figure out how to open themselves (and the job of filtering information) to their community, but also because I'm suddenly teaching WebU's crowdsourcing class. The course was created by Peter Organisciak, a Mac student (and by now probably grad - way to go Peter!) I hired to bring some needed technical expertise into our little "faculty".
In Clay Shirkey's SuperNova 2007 talk, he examined how the net's communication tools meant that now "love" could be as strong a motivator for work as money or profit, partly because you could break down so many big giant tasks into smaller pieces that people could choose to tackle. That's crowdsourcing in a nutshell, alhtough the motivation can range from love (for a person), or passion (for an idea) or status (think Slashdot or Fark) or even profit (Mechanical Turk).
Here's an interesting example of a neat crowdsourcing project at Oxford University:

Galaxy Zoo is the project of some Oxford astrophysicists trying to classify millions of never-before-seen-by-human-eyes stellar objects that big computers have photographed.* It turns out that human beings are much better at doing these classifications than computers are. It also turns out that people all over the world enjoy doing this via the internet.

(Thanks Betsy Devine)

Two intersting tidbits from the piece: one is the move to name a newly discovered astronomical feature after a Dutch schoolteacher who "discovered" it in the Galaxy zoo, the other is the discovery about people, not galaxies that came about by examining the data people submitted - an entirely unanticipated side benefit of crowd-sourcing...
Bill

(image from the Galaxy Zoo)

More Clay Shirky: Is love stronger than profit?

Another one of my favourite talks by noted Internet thinker and author Clay Shirky. I told you about his recent Web 2.0 talk  comparing television sitcoms to gin, a stupifying social lubricant that's helped us deal with wrenching social changes. Here's another one of his talks, this one delivered as one of the opening keynotes at Supernova 2007. Using the repeated tearing down and rebuilding of a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine as a metaphor, Clay explained how the net's social nature changes the basic dynamics of business and collective creativity, replacing the profit motive with something that looks a lot like ... love:

"Up until recently the radius and half life of (love) has been quite limited. With love alone you can get a birthday party together. Add co-ordinating tools and you can write an operating system. In the past we would do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love."

Well worth the eight minutes of your life.

Video: Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style

Blogged with the Flock Browser