Category: online tools

How open are your lines of communication?

Alison Gow7 Comments
And yea, it is written that when four or more editorial execs are gathered together to forward plan the coverage of an impending Happening, one among them will, at some point, spake thusly: “We should do a liveblog”.
And everyone else nods while secretly wishing they had suggested it, and the suggestee gains immense Multimedia Kudos and envy points.

Of course, ‘we should do a liveblog’ is just one of the options when playing Multimedia Newsroom Bingo. Other popular phrases include “Can we make a Dipity timeline”, “What about a SurveyMonkey” (it’s always ‘a’ SurveyMonkey – I love that) , “We could do some (ie. any) video” and that old favourite, “Get some comments off the forum” (ie. is there a workie who can translate all that textspeak into English?).

To be fair, I’m as happy to talk to the talk as the next meeting-attendee but there are times when it seems these meeting-friendly web 2.0 phrases disguise a deeper issue.
Because at the end of the day Dipity, liveblogs, surveys et al still come down to newsrooms trying to control what the story is. It’s not quite one-way traffic but a contraflow is most definitely in operation and we’re the ones in charge of the signals.
What we are really saying is this:

“Want to know the background to this story? Here’s our Dipity timeline” (featuring our rss feeds and images)

“Want to take part and get involved? Join our liveblog” (and we’ll pre-moderate comments, determine and set the polls and decide when it opens and closes)

Such an approach is massively counter-productive. Yes you might have a Googlemap on your website but will you allow your readers to contribute to it? If not, why not? Suppose you did allow anyone to edit and it backfired – would you risk such a venture again? Or is it a case of once bitten, twice shy?
And another starter for 10: Do you select the ‘anyone can edit this’ option when using Dipity? If you do, then you’re creating an opportunity for collaboration. If not, why not?

These are, I think, important questions we newspaper-types need to ask ourselves not just once but repeatedly. Otherwise, even when we tell ourselves we’re trying new ways to communicate, ultimately we’re still dictating how news is presented and served up.
We may not necessarily control what happens to it next on other sites but on our own, it’s pretty much ours to dictate.

But, look, the tradition model (write content, publish content in paper, sell shedload of newspapers), is gone. The current model of write content, upload some content, publish all content in print, is built on compromise and uncertainty. So where do we go from here? I don’t have the answer but I think it might look something like:

Ask people/publish
Expand on what people tell us…
PUBLISH WHAT IS KNOWN allowing anyone to keep asking/adding to content
Conclude findings in print…
… and keep asking and listening because what you end up with may be completely different to the idea you started with

For me what makes a website sticky are the developments in a topic I care about. I go back to take part, see what others are saying, how things have changed, to comment and expand. I don’t go back to watch a video of someone talking about a plan for a new housing estate.
I would dearly love to see the traditional newspaper website format replaced with something more akin to wikis and blogs. To have open-ended news gathering and reporting (where we don’t close down the comment option after a week whether people have finished talking about it or not), and to have newsrooms embrace an approach where collaboration and partnerships are seen as opportunities.

Joanna Geary’s latest blog post struck a chord with me when she said “I began to realise that it was only journalists who thought they always had to finish the stories by themselves“.
Too many times we try to finish a story, we present it as a neat package with a beginning, middle and end, and present it to the reader with a flourish. We follow up of course, and we may start a forum thread, or publish readers letters – increasingly reporters blog about their stories too, once they have written them.

But it’s not enough. I’d love reporters to spend a week where none of their stories were featured in the newspaper – they would only be able to get their information out online, via a blog, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, a wiki – hell, they could even arrange a meeting at a local cafe and talk to people – anything but the printed page. I think it would be an eye-opener for everyone involved.
The way we currently operate – and I mean our wetware, not a company’s hardware – inhibits our ability to share information and our thinking. That, in turn, inhibits our ability to grow audience, reach, reputation and, by extension, revenue. We’re bright people; we can be better than this.

A brief surge of interest FriendFeed

Alison Gow2 Comments
FriendFeed is back on the radar, although not necessarily mine. I’ve had an account since it launched and never really been able to sustain the enthusiasm. The other problem is that it’s intermittently blocked on my work internet, so simply logging on can be a small triumph.

Anyway, recently the site has had an overhaul – or, more accurately, it is attempting to become Jaiku – and since more people are wandering over to Friendfeed, I thought I ought to give it another go.

I’ve got a bunch of new subscribers, and I’ve subscribed right back at ’em, and I’ve even sorted them into little groups (Personal or Professional – look, I never said it was an extensive sorting operation).
As I was pottering away in my FriendFeed stream some new photos from the Daily Post Flickr group popped up in my stream, reminding me that I probably ought to create a Liverpool Echo Friendfeed (the Echo Flickr group is starting to flourish now; it’s amazing what a difference just being visible on the group page makes) so I suppose FriendFeed has proved useful already.

I can’t say how long I’m going to keep using it though; I guess I’ll give it a week of being one of my web tabs (as long as the work webmasters let me anyway) and see if it makes a difference in how I follow links, tweets, images and Shared items on people’s Reader. But then, if it hasn’t grabbed my attention, I’ll forget about it again.

Sometimes, I can be quite antisocial with social media…

Using Slideshare for a blog post

Alison GowLeave a comment
A while ago I wrote a blog post on the lifecycle of a news story, that our editorial training editor suggested I turn into slides, as a potential teaching tool.
I messed around with the idea and then showed my attempt to an old mate, Glyn Mottershead, Professional Tutor in Newspaper Journalism at Cardiff University and general star (find him here ).
He performed ppt kungfu on my slides, and I finally got around to uploading it to Slideshare…

Lifecycle of a News Story

View more presentations from Alison Gow. (tags: journalism web)

Why protect your Twitter updates?

Alison Gow13 Comments
I’ve found my Twitter followers are growing quite rapidly recently, probably as connectors such as Mr Tweet and Twellow become more widely used.
I follow quite of lot of them back (unless they only update via an automatic feed telling Twitter they’ve blogged) as I like having a widening conversation circle – but there are a couple of things in the way of ‘Twetiquette’ that I find irritating:

1. Auto DMs that say something along the lines of: “thanks for the follow. Find out more about (insert pointless marketing opportunity here) by visiting my website”… I love the excellent “Click on My Junk” post by Amber Naslund, which sums this up perfectly

2. The other irritation is this:

So this person is already following me – but how do I find out about my new follower if I can’t see their Twitter stream? Yes, I can click on their profile’s website link but often that won’t tell me if we share friends, if they converse or simply broadcast, or whether they are following me because we live in the same area or work in the same field.

In fact, it irritates me so much that I ended up (once more) turning to Twitter for the answer.

I got some interesting responses.

In the “I don’t do it but understand why some might” camp:
@Torgwen Yes to have small group of friends/for work etc. whereas now any unknown nosey b***r like me can read what you write!
@davidbartlett1 maybe if you say “I’m going to America for three weeks” you fear someone might break into your house?

In the “They’re missing the point” camp:
@editorialgirl I don’t get it either. Some of my followers have protected updates – so I have no idea if they’re worth following back or not
@foodiesarah & what exactly are they hiding? even more ironic when bio says “social networker”. umm, that’ll b on a one-way social network ?

And there’s the “life is too short to bother with lurkers” camp:
@louisebolotin I block unknown followers who have protected their updates!

Confession: When I joined Twitter I protected my updates for about 2 weeks; I stopped because it felt wrong and … precious. Nothing I tweeted was so interesting that it merited forcing someone to ask permission to follow me. Why did I protect them in the first place? Just to see if it worked. Well, it did. I got no new followers for that fortnight, and I switched it off pretty smartly.

Personally, if you protect your updates, I feel as though you’ve already placed limits on our potential conversations and future networks.
It would be interesting to know if many of those who padlock their updates are newsbies to social networks. Do you protect yours? If so, why? Is it because you are fed up with spammers? Block them if it bothers you that much.
Social media is about opening conversations, sharing, linking, building networks; if you put up barriers and police who can follow you too rigidly, you are going to miss out on a lot.

Why are users leaving Plurk?

Alison Gow4 Comments
I signed up to Plurk, the quirky microblog that allows threaded conversations, shared photos, links and videos, more or less at its launch and I’ve been a staunch supporter ever since, despite the fact that it’s a rather odd looking beast.

But lately Plurk has gone into a decline, and now it seems as though it’s really starting to fail in earnest. Last week a Plurk friend, Rob, became the latest user I’ve seen to question its problems.
On his blog he asked the question Plurk No Growing. Why? on his blog and polled whether it was Plurk’s ‘karma’ gimmick that was holding it back (66% said it was a turn-off).
Others complain “Plurk is too time consuming w/ the web interface”, “Lack of promotion”, and “as nice as threaded conversations are in theory, in practice, they don’t really work in a Plurk/Twitter-like service”.

I know some people get seriously annoyed when their kama falls(and consequently their emoticons are reduced) when they fail to use Plurk for a day or so but I’m not sure it should shoulder the full blame for what seems to be this site’s slow death.

I think the reason more and more people are posting messages like this…

… is the very thing that everyone got excited about in the first place… the ability to hold threaded conversations.

I have a small core of Plurk mates and a wider circle of friends whose conversations I dip in and out of.
I steer clear of threads that I know are just going to get nasty (anything regarding Israel at the moment) as what starts out as a reasoned debate always – and I mean always – descends into open hostility. Likewise, people who once got perhaps 135 responses for saying ‘morning Plurk’ and now get perhaps 10 (probably because there are so many users saying ‘morning’ it’s frankly boring to respond to everyone) and then post disgrunted messages about how the service has deteriorated.

Finally, Plurk has been incredibly buggy lately; messages post twice or not at all, the timeline works sporadically and is still not searchable, and it all feels a bit clunky.
I’m still using it right now but it feels like it’s withering on the vine. For an online social network that had such promise, it now feels like it’s in a terminal decline.

Flickr group widget

Alison GowLeave a comment
Can’t think why I haven’t done a widget of the Daily Post’s Flickr group before but I had two minutes spare and so I made one up quickly.
And it did, literally, take two minutes. It’s one of the easiest ways of sharing content and it also brightens up my iGoogle. Good old Widgetbox…
I think this is a brilliant way of serving up the images; be interesting to see if the group members like it too

Testing BubblePLY on video news stories

Alison Gow5 Comments
When I was a young reporter on a paper Down South a colleague once revealed, in hushed tones, that: “Our IT system puts the ‘IT’ in shit”.
Not necessarily fair, but very funny… and sometimes trying to work with new web apps on internal system set-ups designed to be suspicious can lead to exasperations.
This week a colleague spent a frustratingly long amount of time trying to upload a video interview done of a Flip by a reporter, only to find out…
a) the software wasn’t loaded on her machine
and
b) she couldn’t load it because of various IT lockdowns…

So, knowing I’d somehow managed to load the Flip software, she asked me to give it a try.
I managed to upload it, send it to my Youtube channel where it was converted to the necessary FLV file, and she was then able to put it on our website.
Convoluted and time-consuming but it worked… and it meant I also had a spare news video on my YouTube channel to play around. So I thought I’d have a go with a site I’ve been eyeing for a while without having time to do anything with it- BubblePly.

BublePLY has recently been tweaked to allow live links, full control over fonts and more use of images, and you can use your own, or just put a video url in the search facility and layer the data on top of it. The original doesn’t change but you can embed the new version, or link to it, as you want.
Having (very quickly) tried it out I found it pretty straightforward to use:

Then I tried it on a Qik film I’d live-streamed earlier this year and copied to YouTube, and while the film quality isn’t a patch on the Flip video, I prefer it:

This is probably one of the most user-friendly tools I’ve come across, and it’s very effective. It was simply a case of copying a link, adding some texts and links, and then copying the code to embed. I like this – it’s an effective, fast and easy way of telling a story, and sharing it quickly.
There’s only one downside – BubblePLY doesn’t work on my office computer!

Achieving a more transparent newsroom

Alison Gow4 Comments
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how far away the ethos of Web 2.0 is from traditional journalism.
As a trainee I learned I had to always protect my sources of information; there’s an unwritten rule that a journalist should generally imply the story on the front page has been obtained purely through painstaking, journalistic endeavour.

This is why, I think, some journalists feel what they do is a public service (rendering unto the reader Enlightenment?) We assume it’s our job to know, to be first, and we can be deeply suspicious of alternative sources of information (just ask any journalist their view of the local rival paper and you’ll see what I mean).

So the Web 2.0 idea of sharing knowledge, linking, exchanging information and ideas, can be a hard concept to grasp. In your average newsroom, knowing more than your colleague can increase your influence, both internally and externally – so why would anyone cede some of their power by going public with sources, especially websites, that others could then use?

The Daily Post’s front page today was found on whatdotheyknow.com – a Freedom of Information website which UCLAN’s Andy Dickinson has been highlighting in his training courses with Trinity Mirror.

In the case of the ‘bullying’ story, a member of the public had submitted an FOI question which was duly responded to. The reporter then sought various comments on the information provided, and wrote up the story.
Then he credited the website where he found it, and the original person who had submitted the question. The panel, in print and online, reads:

How the figures were revealed
THE figures were released after a member of the public made a Freedom of Information request. Stephen Gradwick used democracy website http://www.whatdotheyknow.com to submit the enquiry. The original request, all letters and emails and the council’s response can be found at http://bit.ly/14Xm6

I know some of our colleagues have been confused by our decision to do this. Why would we blatently tell people that it wasn’t 100% ours? why would we admit that we found and used information someone else (gasp – not a journalist!) had set in train?

Well, we did it because it was in everyone’s interest to say where it had come from.
We found the information sitting on a public website. Any of our readers could have used it; how many were aware of its existance is another matter.
I think it’s fair to say that, as a result of us crediting the origin of the story, those who were unaware of this site’s existance before now knows:
a) S/he can use it to obtain information
b) It works
c) Their question may get picked up and highlighted by the Daily Post

In short, everyone’s a winner. Except for Liverpool council in this case, who probably wish whatdotheykow.com’s parent site, mysociety.org had never thought of the whole FOI-made-easy idea…

Sharing videos on Twitter with Ffwd

Alison Gow2 Comments
My heart sank when I opened up the Google Reader after a busy few days; more than 1,500 items is way too many to be able to keep on top of with a quick scan through.
So I weighed up the work/life balance and MAAR-ed without a backward glance – apart from Mashable’s feed, which is always worth a quick delve.
And so it proved again, tipping me off to an interesting tweak to video-sharing site Ffwd.

Among other things, Ffwd lets you import videos to your online library from various locations – Youtube, Break, Spike, MySpace, MetaCafe, Blip.tv, and Daily Motion – or upload your own from Youtube and Vodpod.
Once in your library, you can share them with friends, by sending them links. And now users can cross-post to Twitter when sharing a video.

That sounded like something that might work with our Daily Post YouTube and Twitter accounts so I signed up to see if/how it worked.

First I embedded two videos that had gone on our website that day (one from our YouTube channel, one from a blog embed) into my library.
Then I was ready to share the video.
Obviously you have to share a video with someone, so I needed to find a willing victim – in this case the Echo’s design editor, Gary Bainbridge.
He’s accustomed to being my guinea pig on such random tests that he merely shrugged resignedly and joined.
I shared a video with him (of Rafa’s Champion’s League press conference; Gary’s an Evertonian) wrote my message in the text box alongside and almost instantly it appeared in my Twitter stream:

It doesn’t appear as an @ tweet though – just a standalone message that also cross-posts to my Facebook status and Friendfeed.
If I had sent it out as the Liverpool Daily Post, as opposed to myself, it would have been published in the Daily Post’s LFC Twitter stream. It’s a simple way of alerting an audience to new content, although I wouldn’t say it was any more effective than tweeting a shortened url to the YouTube channel.

What it does do however (although Ffwd stresses it is not a social network) is give users the opportunity to share content quickly among themselves, while building their own online library/channels of content. That means the Rafa video has a new market in which to get picked up and send on; it also means, I think, that the addition of an unobtrusive LDP logo on the film could be useful.
So, interesting, potentially useful and free to join and use. Worth investigating further I think.

Testing FineTuna

Alison Gow4 Comments
I’ve been playing around with a new web app that lets you upload, comment on and share photos easily.
It’s called FineTuna and it is such a simple way of telling a story.

I’ve tried it out on a photo of the Yellow Submarine outside Liverpool John Lennon Airport (which was taken by Neil Shenton from the Daily Post’s Flickr group).
Basically, you select the image you want – either using a url or uploading direct from your computer – add notes wherever you choose on the photo, you can also draw lines (I circled the rusty spot on the sub and wrote a note saying it could do with a lick of paint) and then emailed it to my Gmail account. A link arrived which took me to the page with my annotated photo. I could then add my own notes and send it on to… well, anyone really.

I love this idea. It’s so quick and easy – perfect for covering a breaking news event; it would take seconds for a photographer at, for example, a major road crash, to upload an image, annotate with their own eyewitness account of what appeared to be happening, and email the link to the office. It would work brilliantly for liveblogging events and I think it could even work for certain crowdsourcing scenarios, where experts on, say, a specific forum, could annotate a relevant image with their own views. And you can install it as a FireFox extension.
It’s refreshing to have a real ‘does what it says on the tin’ new tool to play around with. Finetuna is, I think, an app that has masses of story-telling potential and it’s one I hope we can play around with in future.