As soon as I saw the news of explosions in Jaipur, India, I headed off to tweetscan to see what it pulled up, finding yet again that twitter is becoming an indispensible tool for journalists and others seeking immediate first hand, eyewitness accounts of of breaking news story.
Twitter user 2s was 20 feet away from one of the Jaipur blasts:
Perhaps I'm not the first to spot this, but dopplr, a social networking service that allows users to store and share their trips, has added a carbon footprint calculator (here's mine).
The flaw in this is that it most people are unlikely to input their daily commute and other small journeys that people frequently take but tend not to view as interesting enough to post on dopplr.
Also, the service dopplr uses to make the calculations appears to assume that all journeys are made by plane rather than forms of transportation with lower carbon emissions. But, for the global jet-set at least, it is a useful way of seeing at a glance the impact of longer flights and other journeys.
I've posted a few times before about turning processes into content but wanted to try to pull it all together in a new way - combining it with the presentations I give that talk about unsustainable models of audience engagement and participation - in advance of the keynote presentation I'm giving at (G)local 2.0 in Skopje on Thursday morning.
"How long does all that blogging take you?"
It's a question I'm frequently asked but still find difficult to respond to because it's equally true that I spend my entire work day, and none of my work day, blogging. That's because I have integrated social media tools and techniques into my job in a way that makes it possible for me to turn the process I undertake into content.
Over the years, news and media organisations have come up with several models for encouraging audience participation and submission of content. The build it and they will come model involves the creation of online discussion spaces where audience members can participate in discussions, occasionally meaningful, with others. The send it to us model is used to gather what the media industry calls user-generated content, or UGC, usually in the form of photographs and eyewitness accounts of breaking news stories or comments about a programme, story or article.
Both of these approaches are resource intensive and carry very real technical, editorial and legal risks. These approaches also don't scale well - as usage, and user numbers, increase, so does the amount of resource required. Ironically, the amount of "noise" also seems to increase so greater participation can actually lessen the editorial link, and thus value, between participation and the programme, article or other content.
But there is another reason why these approaches don't scale well - because most media organisations still think of websites as something additional to their other content channels, as if they have a programme with a website hanging off it. Last year, Kate Adie, one of the BBC's more widely recognised news correspondents, illustrated this point well when she told the European Broadcasting Union's Michael Mullane,
"You are blogging to a peer group - that's all right - I can understand there is a demand for that. But journalists shouldn't have any time to blog - there are too many stories waiting to be told!”
It's obvious that Adie, and I'm sure many others at the BBC and other companies primarily in the business of journalism or broadcasting, wouldn't see creating content for the website as something that's part of their role. The website is something different. Something tacked onto the back of their programme or other content.
We've all heard or seen it before - "That's all from us here in the studio but if you want further information, or would like to comment, visit our website at w - w - w ..."
This all changes when the website, and indeed social media, is part of the production process from the start. Effort put into engaging with the audience becomes part of the programme. It becomes not an additional burden upon the shoulders of already overworked production staff, but an essential part of the programme making process. In this way, blogging and social media takes all day and yet takes no time away from programme making at all. As I said in a recent post,
"Social media isn't something you add to a website, it's something you do. When I look back over the social media projects I've been involved in over the years, it's obvious that the key variable upon which success, or failure, is dependent is to what extent to which social media has actually been integrated into the overall editorial proposition."
In addition to the online community and send it to us models above, many media companies - indeed, organisations and businesses engaged in just about any kind of business - are increasingly using existing third party social networking and content sharing services to engage with audiences (or consumers). There are two ways to do this - as something additional which, in time, will become burdensome for staff whose time could probably be better spent elsewhere, or through the integration of social media into the production process, generating (and widely distributing) content along the way.
Using social media as part of the production process makes it more authentic, honest and ultimately successful. It's also sustainable - even if journalists and production staff spend all their time doing it, it's equally true that it takes no time at all.
Today I've been working on a tool - I've dubbed it UGC Finder - for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites.
I'm rapidly developing a serious case of Yahoo Pipes addiction but with good reason - if you've got a good idea it's remarkably easy to knock together an almost working demonstration, which is what I've been trying to do today.
Historically, when a news story broke, journalists either went to the scene themselves or phoned one of their contacts who could go out to confirm the story and gather interviews, photos and other content.
In recent years, the "citizen journalist" model has developed, with journalists and news organisations pro-actively asking their audience to submit their accounts, photos and videos from the scene. The proliferation of cameraphones has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of such content submitted by eyewitnesses, often flooding news organisations with vast quantities of mostly unusuable quotes and photographs.
One way of dealing with this is to return to the old method of going out, finding and speaking with eyewitnesses in the places where they participate online. Or, as Jeff Jarvis brilliantly put it, to keep our antennae up wherever conversations are taking place:
"And so the key skills in a newsroom will not be to get reporters to the scene — that will come later, after the news happens — but to have antennae up to listen and find news reports as they happen, as people link to what’s happening. You can’t possibly have enough reporters, editors, producers to do that on your own. You need to have lots of friends who’ll alert you: When I put up a link here to something I find compelling — or even embed and broadcast it here, live — will I also alert CNN? I don’t know. Would you? Do you have such a friendly relationship with CNN? Maybe that will happen but that, too, is insufficient. So you need to use every tool that’s available — the Technorati of the live video web — to see what’s happening in the world."
Today I've been working on a tool - I've dubbed it UGC Finder - for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites.
I've set up keyword searches for:
On the following services:
I've truncated the content from each of these, and applied several filters, in an attempt to find a good balance between usefulness and being drowned out by irrelevant results. I’ve set it up so that, where possible, I’ve filtered out non-unique results.
We had the chance to test UGC Finder this afternoon when there was an explosion at a pub in Leeds. It did, as I'd expected, find some reaction on twitter and livejournal but updating with new posts was a little bit on the slow side. But as an easy to use tool for journalists who might not know much about using the internet beyond sending an email and searching on google, it does seem like I've come up with something useful.
One shortcoming I realised when building the tool is that adding more search terms would be arduous but necessary if I ever wanted to be able to track breaking news not involving an explosion, evacuation or bomb.
With a bit of help from Chris and Ryan, I've been trying to come up with a way of taking the BBC News Breaking News RSS feed and extracting key words from that, then plugging those keywords into the tool so as to have new search terms created, on the fly, by our coverage of breaking stories.
I've managed to achieve this with a second pipe which:
What I'd really like to do is figure out a way of combining these so that the BBC News RSS is used to create keywords which are then plugged into the content searches I created for the first pipe above. This would create a tool which would be fairly automated and easy for any journalist to use. On top of this there could be a search box, like the one Martin Belam has used for Chipwrapper (which lets you keyword search ALL UK based news feeds), so that users could configure their own searches as well.
You could also add location into the mix by, for example, combining the above with a geo-annotated news feed , TwitterLocal and the geofeed rss functionality of flickr.
I've just about hit the ceiling of my Yahoo Pipe making capabilities so here's the idea, and above are some links to my demonstrators - now it's over to you to make something really cool out of it. Drop me a line when you do.
This morning I spent an hour and a half showing a group of journalists at the BBC World Service how I use RSS, social networking services, social bookmarking, my blog and other tools. As I did, it dawned upon me that I don't use google anymore.
I'm no huge fan of Google. I think they own far too many pieces of what many users consider to be essential parts of the internet - search, gmail, blogger, feedburner, adsense and more. And because most of us use these tools, often every day, Google knows a heck of a lot about us. But this isn't a post about hating Google or, for that matter, any other search provider.
Social media has not only made me less dependent upon web search tools, it has set me free from them. I quite honestly can't remember the last time I searched for something online yet I use the internet every day all day, from the time I set foot out of my house and use my mobile to get online whilst on my commute to work, whilst at work, then on my way home and often late into the evening. Instead of searching, I now ask my contacts on twitter or facebook and, if time isn't of the essence, I might also check del.icio.us. The same is true with browsing. I don't mindlessly wander the internet looking for stuff anymore, I let my contacts, followers and friends online suggest content. And, just occasionally, my usage of a social networking site will lead to them showing me an advertisement that is actually well enough targeted that I click, although this is rare.
Is this the end of search? I seriously doubt it. But it's a big change in the way I use the internet and I'm sure it's not just me who doesn't bother with - doesn't need - to visit a web search page anymore.
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:
Here's a couple of twitter applications which could be useful for those working in journalism or broadcasting:
PollDaddy makes it easy to create and run multiple choice polls on twitter. To use it you simply author a question, set up the answers you want to make available and enter your twitter username and password. Here's my first experiment...
GroupTweet makes it possible to set up groups, allowing members to send a single direct (private message) to reach everyone following the group. This could be useful for production teams, or those working on a networked journalism project, to communicate more easily and privately using twitter.
I've also been using tweetscan to keep track of the use of various keywords (in particular @Cybersoc so I don't miss any replies and, when I'm at a conference, I integrate the conference tag into my RSS aggregation) and twitterlocal which I've been testing on my blog about life in St. Albans.
[PollDaddy link, like quite a lot of the good things I come across these days, thanks to Paul Bradshaw who has a rather good blog about Online Journalism.]
As part of the BBC's White Season, a week of programmes on BBC2 as well as other BBC TV and Radio outlets, BBC News online hosted an online discussion asking if "white working class people [are] ignored in Britain?"
The first 4183 of the resulting 7000+ comments were then run through a visualiser that makes it possible to see clusters of comments based on emotions shown, intensity of emotion, intesity of feeling, region of participant, and level of agreement. The interface allows users to then filter those results or drill down into them to the level of individual comments:
It's a nice example of how data generated by online behaviour centred on news or current affairs discussion can itself become compelling content. The pattern grouping also make for useful navigation elements. Max Gadney provides more information about the project on the BBC Internet Editors Blog....
Loic Lemeur discusses the different social media services and tools he uses as he takes us on a tour of his social map:
Spotted thanks to Adam Tinworth who has a rather good blog covering journalism and social media.
The other day I met with some work colleagues to discuss their proposal for a new blog related to a weekly regional television programme. When the hour was over they left not with a well formed blog proposal but with a handful of vague ideas about how they might get production staff and journalists working on the programme to actually start using some social media tools, in particular del.icio.us, as part of their process.
The idea is simple: think closely about how you can use third party tools, content sharing services and social networks to create content out of existing processes.
So, for example, a journalist researching a story online is likely to want to bookmark anything they might want to revisit later. Using del.icio.us instead of saving these bookmarks locally in a browser or text file means those bookmarks are (or can later be) shared with others, thus creating content out of the research process with little, if any, additional effort.
Another strikingly simple, yet powerful, example of this model is to, instead of uploading an image, audio or video file to your own web server, upload it and tag it on the appropriate sharing site such as flickr or youtube. Then link back to your own website where the file can be embedded (or cross-posted). This way you reach out to new audiences on other services.
A post today by Paul Bradshaw drew my attention to how one of his journalism students, Charlotte Dunckley, is already using exactly this sort of distributed web strategy. According to Bradshaw, Dunkley looked at the online usage patterns of her target audience of 15 to 30 year old in Birmingham and her findings show that having a web presence, and getting noticed online, requires having content, and participating, in the places where your audience is. Not necessarily in creating a place for that audience to come. Dunkley writes (as quoted by Bradshaw):
“Evidently my target age group lean heavily towards using websites with some kind of social networking element. Another common trend were blogs (yay) - Trash Menagerie, Perez Hilton and Fluokids, to name but a few.
“So - getting exposure via a good web presence, in Birmingham, to our target age group, is perfectly achievable without a website.
“We have the top three most visited websites for our target audience covered - Myspace, Facebook and E-bay… a Flickr account has been set up and is awaiting content - I’m thinking well tagged page layouts, our original photography (where the photographer lets us use them) and images from our events and associated events. Similarly there will be no problem uploading event content from Youtube. We could even look into recording snippets of face to face interviews in future too. "
Bradshaw explains exactly why such an approach makes sense:
"Charlotte had been worried about her technical limitations and the lack of a website. Instead, she quickly realised that this wasn’t important - it wasn’t about building a big solid brick house, but about taking a bunch of caravans on tour, to where her audience lived online."
Bradshaw goes on to ask:
"I notice that students’ first instinct when set a task is to… set up a Facebook group. To connect with people they don’t know. Now how many journalists have the same instinct?"
As little as twelve months ago I would have said that only a very small number of my BBC colleagues had considered a distributed web strategy or participated, with a BBC hat on, in a social networking site, online community or content sharing website. Today? I probably get asked once a day how programmes and programme makers can set up shop off bbc.co.uk. For many it's not yet instinctive but the tide of awareness is certainly turning...
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