Month: March 2008

Macca-Mills judgement

Alison Gow1 Comment
It was an interesting day today. We had the Macca v Mills details come out and the beautiful part about the internet is, of course, that you can publish the entire statement online when there was no way it would all make it into the paper. So it’s here. It’s about 4 pages long and it’s absolutely compulsive reading. I recommend any body to have a look at it.”
spoken through SpinVox

Nokia N95

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This is my cat Nyx doing her finest ‘laser eyes’ impression.
I took it with my new Nokia N95 which arrived this weekend as part of my (sometimes hopeless) attempts to learn different ways of reporting and making news.
Anyway, it’s an absolute beast of a device and I’m hoping I will soon be able to try out live streaming to Qik or Bambuser via it.
This weekend, however, a heavy cold prevented me from doing anything constructive although I did try to make some headway with my Reader Engagement project between bouts of coughing.
Regarding the project I’ve moved further away from how newspapers can engage readers and more towards why we should be doing it. I’m very interested in Jane Stringer’s ideas of networks; she makes excellent points about collaboration and participation. Sadly, I am nowhere near as lucid as her.
I think a lot of newspapers will struggle to engage readers because they won’t hand over control. The Gazette on Teeside has done this with its hyperlocal sites and proved it can and should be done.
But it takes a degree of nerve to hand over your website to readers and not everyone is willing to make that leap of faith right now.
Personally I think that, unlike our readers, newspapers are no longer in the position to choose any more.
We have to change, and we have to do it quickly.

Speaking Freely

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“This is my first post to the blog from my mobile phone. My colleague Toby Chapman told me about SpinVox Service which apparently should allow this to be relayed onto blog directly. If it doesn’t then it just means that I’ve buggered up the mobile phone and I have to start again from scratch but fingers crossed this should be appearing soon.”
spoken through SpinVox

(Later)
Okay so it’s not exactly ‘It was the best of times… it was the worst of times’ but you get the drift.
So I can now speak to my blog via my mobile phone; it posts it direct and I’m very impressed by the accuracy. It even lets you swear, which is unexpected – I only threw it in to see if it had a ‘trip out’ mechanism.
Unlike Utterz, it’s not a social network but I could add it to my Facebook profile, Digg or del.icio.us if I wanted to.
There are some potentially good uses for this.
I could see Liverpool Daily Post reporters using this to file copy from, for example, high profile court cases. The reporter could dash outside during a lull in the proceedings, file to a (non-public facing) blog which the digital or news editor has access to, and simply file the report for it to be harvested and used on the newspaper website.
It’s can be linked to Twitter as well, so followers are alerted when new copy is filed.
Similarly, citizen journalists could ring the number and file their news.

Update 2013: SpinVox no longer exists

Forums v Comment

Alison Gow2 Comments
I’m starting to think the Daily Post should reinstate the old ‘have your say’ option under our web articles.
We used to have them but they were scrapped because posts had to be moderated before they could be uploaded manually.
This meant sometimes comments posted on Saturday evening wouldn’t appear online until Monday morning.
So now we have the forums – which are moderated after the post has been uploaded. So you get the odd spam advert on them, and the occasional idiot indulging in name-calling, but otherwise it runs smoothly.
All well and good.
But I suspect some people prefer to just comment-and-go, rather than go through the hassle of signing in to a forum and, potentially, having to create a new thread.
The Lancashire Evening Telegraph offers this this.
Maybe forums are areas were people have conversations with each other, and comment boxes are where they have conversations with the newspaper?

Work in progress…

Alison Gow2 Comments
I worked my socks off today and there’s still lots to do. I hope the Inspiration Fairy gives me a slap around the head some time this week 😦

Mobile post sent by Alison using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Writers block1

Alison Gow1 Comment
I’m loving Utterz; I’ve been listening to others at the SXSW event in Austin, Texas this morning (for research, of course) and it’s a fun way of blogging your thoughts. I’m elbow-deep in my project at the moment and I’ve had a couple of good ideas (well, I hope they’re good) for the Daily Post as a result of all the reading and interviewing I’ve been doing. So I’m hoping to break the back of 3,000 words today. Ho ho…

What on earth is Utterz?

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UPDATE 2013: Utterz became Utterli, and then closed.

Today I was distracted from a ton of research into social networks by a Tweet from a friend in Sweden. Mark is probably the only digital media expert who also smashes up computers with a baseball bat if they don’t please him. But he’s also a total web genius so when I heard him (literally) talking online about his McDonalds meal – for chrissake eat something decent – I figured it was time to have a go.
Utterz is a kind of instant-blog. You just speak your thoughts and ideas, anywhere, using your mobile phone or computer. You can use voice, video, pictures, and/or text in a mash-up.
So I ventured onto Utterz and signed up. Two minutes later I was listening to myself talking in a very self-concious manner about recording my first post. Then, for some unknown reason, I started talking about my hair! For God’s sake! I thought I only rambled when talking to other people; turns out I do it while talking to myself as well.
Anyway, ridiculous ‘posh-bird’ accent aside, I’m utterly in love with Utterz and have already made and loaded a widget on this blog.
There must be so many ways to use it – I did a bit of mooching around the Utterz site listening to people blog their thoughts and it was fascinating. I can think of so many ways to incorporate this in the Liverpool Daily Post website.
I hope Utterz takes off and I’m going to keep using it – at least until I get sick of the sound of my own voice…