cybersoc.com

glocal 2.0 day two: dragan varagic on tracking balkan blogs

  Dragan Varagic is describing the Balkan blogosphere at (g)local 2.0: "In Serbia there are maybe 20,000 bloggers... maybe 50 who are very good bloggers."

The most popular of these blogs websites in the Balkans can have as many as 150,000 visitors per day. [Added Correction: Dragan informs me that he was quoting figures for websites, not blogs. Blogs, he tells me, can get as many as 1500 visitors per day.]  There are busy blogs and influential blogs, according to Varagic, and they aren't necessarily the same.

Dragan's presentation walks us through all the different blog tracking and ranking tools - technorati, alexa, bloglines, google blog searches for links, linkhounds, Brendan Cooper's PR Index, etc - most of which he says are indicative of traffic and influence but none of which are able to give the entire picture on their own. Who is visiting is also important.

Based on Technorati rank alone (approx 92,000) the most influential blog in the Balkans is Borja.org. Dragan's own blog is 6th. But in Dragan's opinion, and he's a leading regional expert in blog tracking, the "most influential" blog in Serbia is probably mooshema, which ranks 3rd out of Balkan blogs on technorati. What I find most interesting about Dragan's research is that although some Balkan blogs are getting large numbers of visitors, they aren't getting very many inbound links - so even the top blogs would rank way behind cybersoc.com.

Paul Bradshaw, who contributed to (g)local 2.0 yesterday via Seesmic, has been doing his own research on the leading UK Journo Blogs. Cybersoc appears in the top five on each of the different rankings he's Paul's looked at - technorati, page rank, alexa, google results and "blog authority", a combination of Alexa and PageRank.

Varagic ends his presentation by saying that metrics related to number of links aren't so relevant, but their combination can give us some answers. The lack of standardised measurement techniques is a problem but by combining the use of different buzz tracking tools and techniques, you can start to understand where particular blogs sit amongst their peers. He says that the key to becoming more visible online is "to know who influence the influencers" to become more visible.

Stats p0rn is useful if PR or Search Engine Optomisation are you're business - as they are for Varagic - and it's kind of fun for us Journo Bloggers to see how we're doing within our peer group, but I'm still quite skeptical of validity or usefulness of this type of information for most bloggers. Personally, I'd prefer to have a small number of highly engaged regular readers who take what they see here and do things with it than thousands of visitors and thousands of random links.

[You can track blog posts, flickr uploads and tweets from (g)local 2.0 using this buzz tracking pipe. ]

glocal 2.0 - skopje, macedonia

  glocal 2.0 - Skopje, Macedonia 
  Originally uploaded by robinhamman

I'm done giving my keynote at (g)local 2.0 in Skopje, Macedonia. I'll upload my notes later but you can find my slides on flickr already. Paul Bradshaw also contributed to the early morning session via seesmic video from the UK - check it out, he makes some good points about creating a distributed web presence by turning processes into content.

Niels Hendriks from Limburg University is giving a presentation about HasseltLokaal, a local citizen journalism project in Linburg, a small city in a largely agricultural area of Belgium. Concentra, the newspaper partner for the project, has always had a focus on region communities - in 1955, Frans Theelen said it should not be a newspaper title, but a programe for the people of the province - eg. community journalism.

The project gets 2200 visits a day, have 30 voluneers and 30 organisations who publish around 7 pieces of content per day. Their policy has been to publish everything, afterall it's tagline was "news for, by and about the people". For contributors it usually starts slowly, publishing text or photos about an event they'd seen. They held workshops to try to help people create more creative content.

One of the problems they had was with contributors wanting contributor cards but then, when given them, abusing those cards by, for example, having a meal then showing the card for a free dessert prior to writing their review.

The project was initiated by the Research and Development department - the IT people at the newspaper group. The journalists didn't respond well, with some feeling their professional status was being threatened,  and the project's leaders couldn't find a viable business model. Moderation was costly, funding ran out. Experiments with advertising to keep the project going put them in conflict with the marketing department. BUT, the project did help increase the paper's willingness to accept articles and photos from readers. So some conclusions:

* each individual needs some identification with the brand ( "let them be proud" )
* find correct balance between empowering and empowering citizen journalists
* not every individual has enough self confidence to contribute
* find room for experimentation within traditional media organisations

I've created an aggregation to help track the conference backchannel.

The source is here (and you can subscribe via RSS). If you're not used to pipes, make sure you click on the list tab to see all the content it pulls up - http://pipes.yahoo.com/cybersoc/glocal20

conference and events i'll be speaking at

I'm going to be speaking at quite a few conferences and events over the next few months. Do drop me a note if you're speaking at or planning to attend one of these:

• 17 April - BBC World Service, Spanish Section (BBC staff only)
• 08-10 May - Keynote at (G)Local 2.0, New York University of Skopje, Macedonia
• 12 May - Meeting with Paul Bradshaw's students at Birmingham City University (UK)
• 22-23 May - Conference twitterer (seriously) at the European Broacasting Union's RN08: The Future of Radio Journalism in the Digital Age, Paris
• 29-30 May - Presentation at Embracing New Media in Your PR and Corporate Communications Strategy, Amsterdam
• 04 June - Presentation at Social Media Influence (formerly Blogging4Business), London
• 12-16 September - Organising and Moderating a Panel on Social Media for International Broadcasting Conference (IBC), Amsterdam

rory cellan-jones (bbc) interviews jim buckmaster (craigslist)

Click to Play

A few days ago, Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's Technology Correspondent, asked on his blog:

"What would happen if everyone, anywhere, could have their own live television station from a mobile phone?"

I guess the answer is, things like this.

Earlier today I bumped into Rory over at BBC Television Centre where he was hosting a lunchtime discussion with Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist. Following the talk, Rory used a Nokia N95 to record an interview with Buckmaster and I streamed it live using Qik.

translate your twitter feed for a global conversation

Yesterday I returned from the DNA2008 conference in Brussels with my facebook and twitter bulging with new friends and contacts. The problem is, I suddenly found my friend feeds full of updates in Flemish, Dutch, French and other languages I can't read.

Not only did this mean there were people in my friend streams saying stuff that I wanted to understand but couldn't, it also rapidly began to diminish the usefulness of having those streams because of all the updates I couldn't comprehend were effectively noise. Not anymore.

I've created a Twitter Tweet Translation Tool using Yahoo Pipes. It works by pulling in the feed of people I follow on twitter, runs it through the "loop" function where I've added language translation modules. I've repeated this about ten times, each time converting a different language to english, and then I've brought the results through some union boxes, essentially junctions that can accept up to five feeds in and output as a single feed. That single feed is then run through a filter that lets only the unique tweets through, meaning there are no duplicate tweets but I can see both the original non-English tweet and it's translation.

I've tested my pipe with Italian (good), Spanish (usable) and Portuguese (not so great) thus far. In the screenshot above, you can see a tweet from ConversationAge in Italian:

"Giornata lunga oggi. Sto aiutando un collega con un esperimento. Cosa sto dicendo in Italiano?"

The translation, after the tweet went through my Yahoo Pipe, came out as:

"Long day today. I am helping a colleague with a experiment. What I am saying in Italian?"

Steve Bridger helped out by saying, in Spanish:

"Just to say hello and I hope that you can read this. Good Luck!"

Which came out, quite understandable, as:

"Single to say holá and I hope that you can read this. Luck!"

Portuguese translation within the Pipe, unfortunately, proved far less satisfactory and really wouldn't enable someone to follow a translated conversation.

I'm not the first person to use Yahoo Pipes to translate RSS feeds which is basically all I've done here. But I do think that this particular application could be quite useful for helping people stay in touch with friends who speak (and tweet!) a major language other than English. It could also be useful for programmes like World Have Your Say, a global radio discussion programme on the BBC World Service.

If you'd like to translate your twitter friend feed into English (or to and from one of around a dozen supported languages) you can copy my Twitter Feed Translation Pipe and customise it by making a copy and simply changing the url in each of the fetch feed modules. If you want to change the languages supported, just use the drop down menus on the translation modules to do that.

For some people it would also make sense to create a pipe that translates from the language you tweet in to the languages used by most of your friends and to then hook that pipe up to one of the various Twitter feed services - giving you language translation on the fly.

I have found that on some occasions the translations don't appear to have worked. This can be resolved by going to the edit pipe view and clicking on language module for the tweet that you want translated.

When creating this Pipe, I found the following video quite useful:

 

dna 2008 video: report on cnn's ireport

Click to Play

Cameraphone video of a presentation on CNN's iReport from the DNA 2008 Conference in Brussels. If you have problems with the embedded player you can view it directly on blip.tv or nowpublic.com 

[update: The presentation is by CNN's Chris Press - Journalism.co.uk has a write up]

dna 2008: live streaming video coverage from my mobile

I used my camera phone, and a free service called qik, to stream live video of a panel discussion titled "God is a VJ". The panel included:

    •    Pat Loughrey, Director, BBC Nations and Regions
    •    Tone Kunst, Editor-in-Chief, NRK Nordland
    •    Christian Trippe, Brussels Bureau Chief, Deutsche Welle
    •    Michael Rosenblum, President, Rosenblum TV
    •    Prof. Adrian Monck, Head of Journalism, City University (UK)

It's a bit shaky, and I had to use the lowest quality setting to keep streaming costs down, but it's still sort of watchable. Or at least listenable. Ok, so I'm no VJ, nor am I God, but at a higher quality, and with the phone steadied properly, the results could be much better.

dna 2008: powerpoints, cable and a big carpet

Having sat through a presentation that was clearly pitched at an audience not meant to include the likes of me, and another about the role of cable in bringing broadband to the masses, it's time for a breathe of fresh air.

This rather large logo carpet can be found on the pavement outside the Brussels Marriot, venue for DNA 2008. In the background is the Beurse.

dna 2008: aggregation of related feeds

The panel on "how to survive in the digital news age" just felt it appropriate to spell out the domain name for the Drudge Report. Drudge is a DJ, not a journalist, says the panelist from the Guerilla News Network. His tip for the "survival of news"? Get into virtual worlds and games.

"For big media, it's a struggle... you can't just disrupt your business model... but there are pockets of innovation" says Monique Villa, MD of someone from Reuters Media.  She thinks facebook is going down, "who wants to be on a social network your parents are on..." but believes that the FT's £2000 a year subscription based social network is an idea to watch.

Tyler Brule, Editor in Chief, Founder, Monocle Magazine and Wallpaper Magazine, thinks there on to something and has been looking at running face to face networking events in major cities following a successful trial in London.

They've lost my interest so I've gone off an created an aggregation of feeds to bring me anything tagged with DNA2008 from technorati, google blog search, icerocket, tweetscan and flickr. The back channel is just a trickle. Lots of notepads here.

[update: Monique Villa The person from rom Reuters revealed that they are working with a company that "takes a digital footprint" of all their content and tracks the way it's used and consumed. Not, she says, necessarily to track copyright abuse but to understand things like how people edit their photos and articles, where it's used, etc.]

[update 2: The panel ended with a discussion of the rise of the internet media critic. "7 years ago there were one or two media critics you worried about" said the panel moderator. "It's a daily consideration" responds Villa the person from Reuters]

losing sleep over dna2008 in brussels

I'm in Brussels for DNA2008 (Digital News Affairs... the year is fairly self explanatory).

I hate to sound like an advertisement, but for those who haven't been on it, Eurostar is cool, very very cool. Or so I told my twitter friends on my way over as I streamed video live from my mobile, whilst traveling at over 100 mph, to the web using qik.

I've also uploaded a few photos, including the one below that I took on my way out for a nice dinner with John and Laura from Journalism.co.uk. Unfortunately, I missed Abdu from Al Jazeera  and only just bumped into Andy Dickinson from UCLAN.

Monday is mostly high level stuff about the future of mainstream media and I expect lots of presentations along the lines of:

"Things are changing because of, you know, the interweb, and we've got to act fast..."

I don't mean to sound cynical before the conference even gets underway - the first day should provide ample time to sort out the last few details of my presentation, which takes place on the second, much more practically focused, day.

I've got free broadband in my room and access to the executive lounge but haven't yet found out whether there's wifi in the venue. If so, expect the usual onslaught of live blogging coverage here. If not, watch out for the dna2008 tag on flickr, technorati and icerocket. Ok ok, and if you're really stuck in a rut, google blog search too.

PS. New conference friends go here...