I’d been wanting to play host to a Carnival, and got my wish for February, thanks to Carnival overseer David Cohn. Here’s the question:

“What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead? And how do you see it playing out in terms of application by journalists, and impact?”

Got an opinion? A good answer? A contrarian point of view? Please consider participating! Here’s my original post introducing this month’s Carnival, which has all the details about how to take part.

So, I’ve made it 15 days straight so far with posting (to my Posterous photo blog) a photograph a day, using only my iPhone4 and its built-in camera. As I’ve gone forward with this little side project, I’ve made some decisions about self-imposed “rules” for my daily photos:

• I will only post photos taken with my phone; no “real” cameras. (This presumes that I don’t lose my phone during the year, and that it doesn’t stop working and require an overnight visit to Apple for repairs! In that case, I’ll switch to my point-and-shoot camera temporarily.)
• I can use any number of iPhone photography and image-manipulation apps.
• Photos will be posted to Posterous from the iPhone and never will their pixels land on my Macbook laptop or any other device before landing on my Posterous blog.

Why am I doing this? Well, I remember giving a talk quite a few years ago to a group of journalism educators and touting the idea that the fledgling, low-quality cameras showing up on mobile phones at the time would, soon enough, become ubiquitous and that the phone-cameras’ quality would improve to be useful as journalistic tools. In those days, I was met with some incredulous looks.

But in 2011, we’re there. The iPhone4 that I carry does not have the best-quality camera among the smartphones on the market, but it’s decent. So I hope to prove that you can produce pretty-good photos with a phone-camera, aided by a number of photography apps that make manipulation and enhancement of photos possible and downright easy on the phone itself. So far, I’ve used these apps:

• Camera+
• ColorSplash
• ToonCamera
• PS Express

And I just purchased SlowShutter and am looking forward to experimenting with blurred-motion effects.

It’s been a worthwhile experiment. At the least, it’s reignited a long-ago interest in and passion for photography. And when I go about my daily activities, I now observe what’s around me looking for photo opportunities — dispensing with my too-often former obliviousness to my surroundings.

First, some quick background:

• NYTimes.com has announced that it will put up a “metered paywall” on the site in early 2011. That means that site visitors after viewing an as yet unspecified number of stories in a month will be asked to pay to subscribe to the site or otherwise pay to access more Times content. It is likely that web users referred via links on Google, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. will not be counted against the monthly free allotment. (In other words, it’s a porous paywall, unlike the “hard” paywall that’s on Rupert Murdoch The Times (UK) website; that paywall allows no free content, and only paying customers can see beyond the headlines.)

Kachingle’s founders don’t believe in paywalls for general news websites, and they think that they have a better idea: Get readers of news across many sites and blogs to band together, pay $5 a month to Kachingle, then have Kachingle distribute that money based on individual users’ tracked visits to sites and blogs that they like (and that display Kachingle “medallions”).

The Kachingle guerrilla marketing campaign has specifically targeted the 50-plus blogs published on NYTimes.com, by allowing Kachingle’s paying member (I’m one) to “Kachingle” or support any of those blogs — without NYTimes.com’s cooperation. (I regularly read some of the NYT blogs and have Kachingled the ones I like. So, when I visit those blogs from now on, some of my $5 a month will start going to NYTimes.com bloggers — that is, if they choose to sign up to collect it.)

Since the Times doesn’t appear to want to do business with Kachingle or support its donation scheme, Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos and CEO Fred Dewey had their staff create browser plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome that allow a Kachingle member to support the NYTimes.com blogs. With the plug-in installed, when you visit one of the blogs, a thin Kachingle medallion banner appears above the page, pushing down the rest of the NYTimes.com page. That’s how you can “Kachingle” a specific NYTimes.com blogger. … NYTimes.com visitors who do not install the Kachingle browser plug-in will not see the medallions.

There’s also an automatically updating “Leader Board” that shows which NYT blogs are getting the most Kachinglers (i.e., financial supporters). As I write this, Paul Krugman’s blog is leading the Bits Blog and David Pogue’s Posts blog. The numbers aren’t much, but the campaign was launched only last night, and paying Kachingle members and some journalists and bloggers were notified today.

We’ll have to wait and see what the reaction is from NYTimes.com executives. As I see it, they can ignore this innovative but perhaps annoying (to NYT) ploy by a small Internet donation start-up, and it will either catch on with web users who think it’s a good idea, or die quickly. Or the Times execs can make a stink and try to force Kachingle to halt the campaign.

My experience with big media companies is that they often can’t help themselves from the latter approach: Call in the lawyers and send out the cease-and-desist orders! That would not be wise, since it will turn Kachingle’s guerrilla marketing ploy into a David-vs.-Goliath saga that could get lots of attention in the blogosphere and on Twitter.

Hey, what better way for a small business struggling to catch on with the public than to get a boost by being threatened or sued by New York Times lawyers! And it will raise more questions about the NYTimes.com paywall strategy.

I should learn more later, so we’ll see where this goes. In any event, it looks like fun.

(Disclaimer: I have written about Kachingle in the past as a former columnist, and in this blog; I’ve also done a small amount of consulting for the company.)

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.)

Click on the button and you can financially support this site AND support a charity that you choose. But don’t worry: You will not spend a dime (or a cent) by clicking.

The money comes from sponsors, whose messages show up in a pop-up box after you click “ThankThis.” Money earned when a visitor to this blog clicks on an ad in one of these pop-ups goes into the system, and is later distributed among:

• The site publisher (in this case, me)
• The charity that the visitor selects when he or she has accumulated enough points
• Twixa.com (which collects a small portion to run the service)

ThankThis is in private beta currently, and the ads you’ll see are from Google, so for now we’re not talking about much money changing hands. But if the service takes off and is able to sell enough sponsorships (or better, targeted advertising), I think this could turn into a nice extra revenue stream for online publishers.

ThankThis charity donation choices

When you get enough points to be ready to donate them, you click the “Donate Points” link and are presented with several options for spending them on a charity listed. (See the image accompanying this post.)

I like this idea, because … well, most people are cheap. They don’t want to donate money to a website that asks for a donation, and they most often ignore calls online to donate to charities. But with ThankThis, of course, donating money — yes, money — to a charity costs nothing.

Charity giving for cheapskates … what could be better?! (Count me among those online cheapskates, for the most part; but I do pay $5 a month for a Kachingle account and €2 a month for a Flattr account. Those services similarly aim to support multiple online publishers with user donations, but they distribute website users’ money while ThankThis distributes money from sponsors and advertisers.)

Will this work? I don’t know, but I like the concept and think that it has a chance of working. It’s not likely to support large newsrooms or anything like that, but, again, it might provide some extra money for the budget.

I’m disappointed that Kachingle and Flattr haven’t taken off in a big way yet, and I fear that ThankThis may suffer the same fate. If some BIG web publishers implemented any or all of these systems for networked user donations and put some marketing smarts into them, I suspect we’d see more money flowing. (I mean the likes of you, HuffingtonPost.com, About.com, et al.)

@steveouting

@dmediakitchen

It’s pretty easy to set up. @Anywhere gives you a few lines of custom Javascript to add to your site or blog; I simply added it to the end of my WordPress header.php file.

I like it so far. Notice the “more…” link in the pop-ups; they give you more info on the Twitter account that you’re hovering over. … I’ll explore and add more @Anywhere features later, when I have some free time.

In the last few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of comment spammers getting past Askimet and into my comment approval queue. What’s both annoying and amusing is that the way these spammers are getting past my anti-spam measure is that they are writing personalized notes, which also include a link to some spammy website.

Here’s an example I ran across in my web travels today, on another site:

That one is of the generic “That was a terrific post! I’ve bookmarked your blog!” variety. Comment spam filters catch most of those, though not that one.

The ones that do get through to my moderation queue on this blog actually refer to what I was writing about. Someone (I’m imagining a low-paid Nigerian with at least rudimentary English skills working in a comment-spam sweatshop) is banging out inane comments but actually reading bloggers’ posts, or at least headlines, and tayloring the spam comment to the blog post it’s aimed at.

I’d post an example, but I usually click the “spam” button to delete them. I decided to write about this after twice today coming across on other sites these kinds of spam comments that got through to publication — because those site owners don’t moderate or vet comments before they’re published online, relying solely on a comment spam filter to catch this crap. But if the spammers are personalizing the comments to what you’re writing about, it’s unlikely that a filter will catch those.

So here’s my plea: Start moderating your user comments before publication. It’s a real turn-off to visit a blog or website and see that the owner is letting this happen.

At an increasing number of websites, this latest form of comment spam is adding to the chaos that’s already rampant in comment threads when site owners don’t require commenters to user their real names. So you end up with, as New York Times media reporter David Carr describes them, lots of stupid, often disgusting comments from the “low sloping forehead” crowd.

Here’s a second suggestion, and this one is aimed especially at newspaper websites, many of which are guilty of letting their user comments turn into online cesspools: It’s high time to start demanding that those who wish to comment on a story presented on a website or blog to use their real names and register their personal data (i.e., name and confirmed e-mail address). Those who abide by this rule can have their comments posted immediately and unmoderated.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons sometimes for an online user to post a comment anonymously. But that’s easy to handle, in different ways:

• Set up a “post anonymously” comment form, but have an editor moderate those comments
• Allow pseudonyms instead of real names on user accounts, but always moderate those comments

Too many untended user-comment threads, especially on news sites which are of course filled with controversial content and issues, are starting to really stink. It well past the time to start cleaning out the stench and saying goodbye to the anonymous trolls.

Face it, for many of you right now, your user comments suck. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I’m fond of trying out new technologies and digital services, and I’m often willing to use this blog as a sandbox. So today I’ve installed a new add-on to my blog called Insight App, which allows readers to highlight text and then easily rate it or comment on it, for everyone to see. With photos, like the sample one I’ve included with this blog item, you can click on the little blue icon added to the photo and then you’ll get the various options for rating or leaving a comment.

You probably recognize this photo. Use your mouse to hover over the photo, then click the little blue icon and rate or comment on the famous image.

For now, I’ve only installed Insight App on my article or “single-post” pages, so to try it out please click on the headline for this item (if you’re on my main blog page); if you came directly to the article opage, then the functionality should be visible to you now.

So, what you can do is highlight some text, then you’ll see a small icon in the lower left of the screen, which when clicked gives you various options for leaving your mark or thoughts attached to this blog item. I have the ability to customize what gets asked, but for now it’s just the default options.

I’ve turned off comments on this post so that you can comment using Insight App instead, and tell me what you think of it.

At first glance, I found it a bit confusing, but then grasped the interface. What do you think?

I do think that it’s about time that we got beyond the standard user comments at the end of an article and tried something more sophisticated. It looks like Insight Apps is trying to do that, so give it a workout during its beta testing period.

(Note: After publishing this item and playing with the feature some more, I found the interface for adding my comments and ratings a bit clunky and not intuitive enough. And the default ads are kind of annoying; if I took the trouble to sign up with Insight Apps and got better matched ads and some money-share from the deal, I might not mind so much. The concept looks promising, but I think it needs some tweaking.)

But it’s online, “Goodbye, for Now: Looking Foward.” (My editors rejected my apparently too-controversial suggested headline: “Stop a Lot of the Presses! (Farewell, E&P).”

There’s no place for online discussion of the column on the E&P site, so I hope anyone with an opinion on it will use the Comments area below this blog item to react to what I’ve written.

I chose to go out with a two-part list.

• One is 20/20 hindsight fantasy: what the last 15 years should have looked like if only the newspaper industry’s leaders (and employees and outside analysists and pundits) had reacted to (and more effectively lobbied industry leaders on how to respond to) disruptive change properly.

• The other is prediction: based on the reality of what did happen over that time and the decisions made, what can the newspaper industry expect next and what will the news eco-system look like.

I’ll continue writing on the future of news — and yes, expressing my opinions — on this blog. You’ll also start to see me writing on a blog associated with my newest project, set to launch in January 2010: the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More on that very soon.

To any and everyone who spent any time reading “Stop The Presses!” over the years, thank you for spending some of your valuable time pondering my words. To everyone I’ve interviewed, thank you for sharing your ideas and opinions — and educating me on what’s to become of media in the digital era. And to my editors at E&P (present and past), thanks for allowing me this venue, and for your support over the years. Good luck!