Archive for September, 2010

I’ve been neglectful of this blog for nearly a month (till posting about Paycheckr yesterday), but perhaps I can get back into the groove. It’s just that I’ve been working hard at driving forward the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. And since the School is going through a “discontinuation review” and might be reinvented or replaced by a new School (or other form of academic entity) designed to be more interdisciplinary in addressing the complexities of today’s journalism and media realities, it seems like an important time to push forward on leveraging emerging technologies in the pursuit of better journalism and better informing communities.

At the Test Kitchen, we just debuted a new website, SlicesofBoulder.com, that fits that bill. Working with Toronto-based Eqentia Inc., a CU team (journalism instructor Sandra Fish, journalism master’s candidate Jenny Dean, and me) worked over the summer to produce an extensive taxonomy of the city of Boulder and its surrounding area, and find all the news and information sources online producing content about Boulder. (I.e., not just websites and blogs that fit the traditional definition of “news,” but also the information flowing out of scientific institutions, government agencies, police and fire departments, key local companies, local bloggers and tweeters, etc.)

The result is SlicesofBoulder.com, powered by Eqentia.com, which processes and slices and dices links to the content flowing from hundreds of local sources, plus finds news coverage about Boulder from non-Boulder (state and national) news sites and selected credible blogs.

What’s exciting for me about this project is that it is, I’m pretty sure, the most in-depth curated news and information site in existence about any city. (Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.) The site can serve in an in-depth manner the ongoing news and information needs of any Boulder resident with a specific topic interest (city politics, Boulder crime news, the local rock climbing scene, a specific local company like Celestial Seasonings, a specific neighborhood, and so on). It continually tracks Boulder news and and information digital content flow, and provides links to the original content. (Users can create a personalized Boulder news/info page; receive a personalized daily e-mail; subscribe to fine-grain RSS feeds; etc.)

The site could be described as a “hyper-local” aggregator in that it identifies fine-grain content feeds from sources that Google News, Yahoo! Local, Topix.com, and Outside.in don’t get to.

It’s not a creator of original content, of course, but rather a curated aggregator of local sources — so my hope is that it will help new hyper-local blogs and news outlets in and around Boulder be exposed to new users.

In addition to being just plain useful (to keep citizens informed at either a local overview level or deeply on specific local topics, and to give local journalists story ideas), I’m fascinated by the research potential of the project. It gives us a snapshot of the Boulder digital media-sphere today, and we’ll use the site to watch as the Boulder digital media landscape evolves in the coming years. (My prediction: further decline in news output by traditional local news media, and growth of small local and hyper-local news providers to make up for that.)

Boulder is a university town with 100,000 or so residents, so researching and finding all the local online sources of news and information was a doable task. (I know we haven’t found them all, and expect that the team will discover more, and that community members will suggest additional sources.) The research work to find all the sources in, say, Seattle or the San Francisco Bay Area, which both have a thriving online independent local and hyper-local media scene, would be daunting; though perhaps crowd-sourcing plus dedicated researchers would make it possible.

The surprise for me was in finding fewer individuals providing news about Boulder’s neighborhoods than I’d expected. I thought we’d find more people using the free publishing tools of the web to keep their neighbors informed, a trend that’s common in some other cities. Perhaps it has to do with demographics: Boulder’s population is one the most highly educated in the U.S., and I’m wondering if that has something to do with it. (We’re all mostly too busy to do volunteer work like run neighborhood blogs or websites?)

If you’d like more information about the SlicesofBoulder.com project, feel free to contact me. A backgrounder about the project and site is here.

If you mouseover the “PayCheckr” widget above, you’ll see an early version of a donation and payment model for digital content that I find intriguing. You can create your own beta PayCheckr widget and play around with it now, as I did with the widget above, though this is a “lite” version and the customization is limited.

The concept is simple enough to understand. I think of it as a payment and/or donation widget that is very much like the ShareThis widgets that you see on many websites and blogs; at the beginning or end of an article you mouseover a ShareThis icon which expands to offer multiple options for you to share a link to it with others via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail it to a friend, etc.

PayCheckr likewise expands to offer the web user multiple options — as chosen by the site or blog owner — for paying for or supporting a website or blog, or specific content (article, video, service, etc.). The site or content owner can configure the widget to contain multiple options:

• Collect money…
• for a subscription
• for a one-time purchase (say, to trigger a PDF or software download, or access premium content)
• as a donation from the user
• Ask for non-monetary support by…
• viewing a sponsor’s message
• viewing an advertisement
• taking a survey
• Point users to other sites that earn you money, such as…
• affiliate e-commerce pages (e.g., Amazon.com or an online store) where purchases by your users earn your site a commission
• a marketing-firm survey that you receive commissions for participant referrals
• a barter-exchange program

For now, PayCheckr “Lite” offers limited functionality. I can’t yet put my own logo or otherwise customize how the widget looks in its closed state, or change the default language of “Many ways to pay.” The fields to enter my options limit the number of characters too much, so that when I tried to put in the names of my “sponsor” sites, they wouldn’t fit and had to be shortened. But it’s enough to envision how it might be used once the PayCheckr service is fully featured:

1. Access to full article after user action – Let’s say a news website wants to encourage some form of “payment” before showing the user more than the first couple paragraphs of a story. Rather than a typical paywall (i.e., pay now to view more or go away), a PayCheckr widget (properly designed to explain its purpose) could permit access to the content when the user selected any of the options set up by the site owner. Let’s say, either (1) make a donation, (2) pay for a subscription for future premium-content access, (3) watch a 30-second video ad and then get access to the rest of the article, or (4) visit a sponsor’s page that shows as a pop-up while the rest of the article appears on the screen below.
2. Give payment options up front for a purchase – Let’s say that you’ve got an e-book that you want users to pay for, but you want to give them multiple options. Rather than require the buyer to fill out a credit-card order form as the only option, your PayCheckr widget could offer multiple payment options: PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon or iTunes account payment, direct payment from bank account, standard credit card form, payment with frequent-flyer miles, charge to mobile-phone account, etc. The benefit would be that if one of the choices is quick and convenient for the individual buyer, he or she is less likely to bail out of the purchase than if the only option is to fill out a long credit-card form.

Since PayCheckr is in early beta state without some of its planned features implemented, I can’t give it a good trial run yet. But it represents, to me at least, a softer approach to getting users to “pay” for digital content (especially news). If I as a web user I run across, say, an interesting research report that the publisher wants me to pay for, I might click on by if the only option is paying actual money. But if that valuable report can be viewed by non-monetary means — taking a marketing survey, or watching a 30-second sponsor video — then the report’s publisher is earning some money from me when with the money-only option I’d mean zero revenue.

PayCheckr also offers yet another model for soliciting donations. If I’ve got a special report online that I want everyone to see, but I’d still like to get some willing people to donate in thanks for the work I’ve done, perhaps a PayCheckr widget could offer multiple donation options — again, to make it easy for the potential donor to toss some money my way by selecting a donation option that’s simplest for him or her.

I also might want to put a PayCheckr widget in a permanent position on my blog, such as I’ve done with my Kachingle donation-network medallion in the left column of this site. (I’ll likely do that once PayCheckr offers more customization of the widget’s look and wording.)

Finally, since I work in an academic environment (University of Colorado at Boulder School of Journalism & Mass Communication, running the Digital Media Test Kitchen), I’m interested in PayCheckr from a research angle. I’m reminded of the Miami Herald’s website experiment late last year when it put a “donate” button at the bottom of all stories, but the only option for those wishing to donate money to support the Herald’s journalism was to fill out a long credit-card payment form. I’d love to know if a similar experiment would work better (the Herald killed its donation experiment quickly) if potential donors had multiple options for supporting the Herald, a la the PayCheckr approach.

(Disclaimer: I’ve been following the development of PayCheckr for some time, and have volunteered for solo focus-group sessions to aid the development team, led by PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving.)