Last November I mentioned Foamee, the ‘Twitter Piggyback’ web site / service that allows you to keep track of beers you owe people.
Well, there’s another Twitter Piggybacker (hat tip to Adam Howell for the term and the link), this one with a local information bent: Commuter Feed. To quote,
Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.
Commuter Feed is a community-generated traffic report, published by anybody stuck in traffic with a twitter account and a cell phone. You can subscribe to the traffic reports for your area, and get twits when something new pops up. Will this work? Possibly — seems like exposure will be Commuter Feeds biggest challenge. Do newspaper-dot-coms have the same exposure challenges for the web apps and communities they launch? No, no they don’t.
So while some news organizations (such as my employer) are getting busy doing the shovel-dump publish of their headlines onto twitter, well, there are other people out there looking for ways to share and make local information more useful to the folk who live there.
Posted in Journalism, Local, Online.
Ken Otterbourg, managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal (where I was working before I came to Denver), has a tale of an awesome photo of the lunar eclipse that a reader submitted:
A reader submitted that photo, which looks great. But, when the photo editor was readying it for print, well, the image told a different story:
Read the full story at Otterblog.
Related: Hackzine posts on how to detect forged photos algorithmically. Also, Ken Otterbourg wrote a part-two to his eclipsed post.
Posted in On The Job, Participants, Readers.
For valentine’s day, for love, and for the lack thereof.
Valentine’s Day: Before the 14th
- Got plans for Valentine’s Day?
( No, and I’m not making any / No, not yet / Yes / Yes! / I don’t know / I don’t care )
- How many Valentine’s Day cards are you writing?
( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
Valentine’s Day: In General
- When was the last time you sent or received flowers?
( Inthe past week / The past month / the past year / the past three years / the past ten years / I don’t know / I don’t care )
- How much do you believe in Valentine’s Day?
( None / A little / Some / A bit / A good amount / A lot / Tons / I don’t know / I don’t care )
Love
- How many people have you told “I love you” in your life?
( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
- How many people have you told “I love you” in the past year?
( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
- How many times have you been in love?
( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
- How many times have you had your heart broken?
( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
- How many hearts have you broken?
( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
For those who are married
- Do you still believe in Valentine’s Day?
( No! / No / Yes / Yes! / I don’t know / I don’t care )
- How many times have you thought about leaving your spouse?
( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
Posted in Features, Online Polls, Stuff You Can Use.
January! 2008! This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from January.
- Cincinnati Post Goes Online Only
- Nieman Reports: Going Hyperlocal at the Chicago Tribune: Highlight Stats: TribLocal has 7 producer / journalists; more than 1,500 people have registered with them (that seems really, really low); pageviews have increased by double digits every month.
- When it comes to online staffing newspapers should play to win
- Throw ‘em overboard if they need training?: “If you’re a software developer and you need someone to explain Ajax or REST APIs to you, be prepared to ask: ‘Do you want fries with that?’ I won’t offer similar advice to journalists, because those who need it will never see it.”
- Google apps for your newsroom
If you want to subscribe to this link feed, you can do that here…
Posted in Features, Most Popular.
I started writing this post Monday, and in the meantime Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock site launched, which is all about answering the “where” part of information.
It’s funny — I was talking with my coworker Doug today about how newspapers forgot to ask how the “Who / What / Why / Where / How” questions change when you’re publishing information online. In print you can be reasonably sure who your readers are. Online, not so much.
Anyway, so this post is about the “Where?” question, and three ways that online changes that question.
- Datelines mean less: Anybody from anywhere in the world could be reading you, and a reader from King, North Carolina, has little clue what it means for news to happen in Commerce City, Colorado.
- Context matters more: Nobody expects an essay on Commerce City’s history, people, and flora / fauna to accompany an article about news that happened there. However, that information would be useful, somewhere. In the article, no. But in a related page, perhaps of the wiki variety, yes. Why? Well, because I might be reading this article from King, North Carolina — or I might have just moved to Denver — and I might want to learn more.
- Maps are free: No longer does it take X amount of hours for a designer to whip out a locator map. With the right CMS, locator maps can be automatic. Why is this important? Once you start pinpointing the latitude and longitude of the news, you give your local audience the ability to find out what happened close to where they live not just by happenstance, but by technology.
Got any others?
Posted in Context!, Google Maps, Journalism, Local, Observations, Online, Practice, Print, Storytelling, Themes, Tools.
Tagged with Context!, datelines, Journalism, maps, Questions, where.
These a a few local internet / hyperlocal web app ideas that have been stuck in my head:
- How The Locals Fared: I went to Portland in December for the holidays, and I was leafing through the sports section of the Oregonian when I ran across a column of agate titled “How The Locals Fared.” In it were stats for pro athletes, and what connection (high school / college attended, mostly) the athletes each had to Oregon. Well, the 2008 Beijing Olympics are coming up, and what better way to localize the events than a database-driven web app that keeps track of the performance of those who have called your town “home.” Better yet, get your corporate parent to build / update this app — that way they can repurpose it across all their properties, large and small.
- Fix My Street: Okay, so this isn’t a new idea — it’s ripped right off from FixMyStreet.com, a British site that takes reports of poor streets and sends them to the appropriate municipality. But it’s a good one, and a useful one, and one that’s way too easy to duplicate.
- The Photos Near You: Any newsroom that shoots photos can geotag their photos. If you want to be fancy, you can even get plugin doohickeys that record the lat/lon of the photos you take (Sony’s GPS thing). Geotag your photos and publish them online — then allow people to get the photos that happened 1 mile / 2 miles / 5 miles of their home emailed / RSS-fed to them. It’s a great hook for news: This Is An Image Of What Happened Right Near Where You Live. And, on the advertising side of the coin, what happens when you start organizing your information by the exact-specific pin-point place it happened? That’s not hard to see. But, I imagine, the challenge here is corralling photo / ad departments into participating.
Posted in Journalism, Local, Online, Storytelling, Stuff You Can Use.
Tagged with Local, olympics, photos, sports, streets, web apps.
The realy difficulty in coming up with something like [insert name of software program] is that it involves fundamentally rethinking all of your basic approaches. This is very difficult for humans to do. We attack any new problem we encounter with techniques we already know, and try small modifications if difficulties turn up.
(emphasis added)
From a Bram Cohen article, “Great Programmers.”
Posted in Snippets.
Online news organizations have plenty of opportunities to launch new products that build on their information, build on their community, or launch distinct information. Many of these products will be useful … not all of them will be successful. For newspaper-dot-coms not sure where to start, I recommend building an app on top of a product that already gets a lot of clicks. Build something on top of your article page.
Sure, many others have talked about how articles are a shabby content crutch in this information age. But until you can afford that brand new pair of Holovaty-brand bionic legs, build on your success…. no, not your home page — that wreck of a page oughta be put to death, not built on. Build on your article page.
Here are some ideas for apps that can harness and extend the power of your article page:
- An in-house article bookmarking tool. This is Ryan Sholin’s idea, and it’s a good one. I mean, what fraction of a percent of people are actually using those social bookmarking links on every page of your article? Sure, this requires some sort of registration system to handle the data, but you have one of those, right? And think, once it’s done, it’s another way to break the page-view vice and figure out what articles your readers are so interested in, they bookmarked it to come back to later.
- Loomia’s “People Who Like This May Also Like...” widget. Now, I haven’t used this so I can’t speak to its greatness, but I can tell you this: it’s free. Well, okay, not really — it’s $50 a month, if you do fewer than one million views. But hey, that’s cheap. And as someone who is probably cheap themselves (kidding, kidding), I’m sure you appreciate that.
- Add your most-popular article lists. Better yet, integrate your section-specific most-popular lists. If you’re feeling adventurous, put your section-specific least popular lists on there — show the people what they’re missing. Don’t have a most-popular app? Do you have any type of site stats package? Well, get yourself a freelancer and fix that problem. It shouldn’t take more than 5 hours for a freelancer to build an awful-but-works app… make that ten hours if they’re the brother / sister / cousin of someone you know.
Got any you’d like to share? Let me know~
Note: I see the a snarky tone in this post. I can’t say I’m proud of that, and I can’t say it won’t happen again. If you have any suggestions for handling the snark (or a good newsroom “I-can’t-believe-they-said-that”-type joke), won’t you throw it my way?
Posted in Ideas, Industry, Journalism, Observations, On The Job, Online, Practice, Step Away From The Article, Storytelling, Themes, Tips.
Tagged with , apps, article, dynamic, home page, Most Popular.
December, December, December 2007. This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from December.
- F*cking programming: “Granted access to billions of lines of code and the awesome power of Google’s search technology, I did what any rational, thinking programmer would do: I typed in some profanity and hit enter.”
- Paid Content on the Web Is Not Impossible, But It’s Hard
- How To Silence Your Mouse
- [Comic] Monsters of the Programming World, and More Monsters of the Programming World: My favorite here’s The Golden Hammer Warrior (leader of the silver bullet army).
- Accenture: Advertising shifting to performance-based
If you want to subscribe to this link feed, you can do that here…
Posted in Features, Most Popular, Storytelling.
- Finished a bunch of details on the Planck Studios Photo site. These details include fun things like indexes of all the photos shot with a Hasselblad 503CW (or the Holga 120 FN), an improved home page layout (the big cropped photo across the top adds a spark the previous site lacked), and, huge versions of every photo on the site. The regular-sized photos are 500×500 pixels, which is okay, but there’s just so much detail in these images that you don’t get unless you try out the enlarged version. Regular-sized Chicago South Central Loop shot vs. as-big-as-your-monitor South Central Loop photo.
- Got the first draft of the Denver Post Ski Report out the door. This app takes snow fall data from Colorado resorts (provided by a vendor, updated every hour), puts it in a database, then spits it back out in a variety of ways on our site. Right now we’re publishing data (both web pages and RSS feeds) for each resort, for the resorts with the deepest snow, for the resorts with the most acres open, and for the resorts who have gotten some recent snowfall. There’s still some cleanup work and fine-tuning left — and there’s one really cool idea we’ve got for another RSS feed — but I’m happy with the database structure and with how the information gets crunched. This was the first time I put a linux shell script to work in a web app (thereby saving PHP for only the things that PHP absolutely had to do), and it’s already not the last.
- Added more detail to the Most-Commented Articles lists on the Post’s site. It’s not elegant, it’s not built out to the nth degree, it’s just what I could whip together with spare corners of time. If you look on the right column you’ll see a new list of the most-commented articles of the past hour (I like the “past hour” part of that — it’s a good picture on what people are chatting about right now). If you scroll down you’ll see most-commented lists for our news, sports, living, entertainment, business, opinion sections.
Posted in Portfolio, Site Stuff.
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