Social media

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week participating in the “Upgrade to Digital” workshop at the brand spanking new Boulder Digital Works at CU facility in downtown Boulder, a bleeding-edge training program to teach advanced creative, tech, and business digital-media skills. (Disclaimer: I attended on a free pass since I’m working on building a digital-media initiative for CU’s Journalism & Mass Communication School.)

What was especially great about the experience was that the workshop was run by Scott Prindle and Joe Corr, VP/director of technology and senior technical lead, respectively, of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the white-hot ad agency with offices here in Boulder and in Miami. Other CPB personnel also floated in and out (plus other special guest presenters), so attendees were treated to being taught, and critiqued, by ad agency rock stars.

Since I’m focused on the news industry and its transformation, I had a different perspective than most of the other workshop participants; I was thinking of how what we were seeing and learning could be adapted and/or applied to news (from digital techniques, to business models, to technology). In this and perhaps more blog entries, I’ll share a few take-aways from the last two days, as viewed through my news-colored glasses.

1. It’s the utility, stupid! Those companies savvy enough to be on the digital forefront (enough so that they’re spending money with CPB) are experimenting with smart-phone apps and web applications that emphasize utility for the customer, not just trying to get a brand message across. A phone example is Nike’s Nike+ running shoe with an embedded chip that communicates data with Nike+ on an iPhone (or iPod). There’s a website and social training community built around the product and its personal data from you, so that you can do stuff like time yourself time on a specific route, then compare it to a friend who runs the same route at a different time — a virtual competition. The phone and online components are meant to sell Nike+, certainly, but they provide the Nike+ customer with a great training log and social tool. It’s not just about selling, but improving the shoe buyer’s life. Utility.

Apply this to news: When developing mobile apps, think utility, not just presenting news. An app that keeps track of local road construction projects and finds re-routes around them could be handy for local commuters, for example. It might be introduced one time to accompany a big story about all the local road projects under way due to the federal stimulus money coming into the community — but it could be used by commuters and residents long term, and re-marketed each time there’s another road-construction and traffic-delays story.

On the web, CPB presenters showed us their NCAA Final Four Bracket-o-matic Flash project created for Coca-Cola Zero. (Link is to video.) The idea was to make the NCAA basketball championship grid easy to fill out; instead of picking teams and inputing them into the grid based on who you think will win, there’s a series of sliders along the top that fills out the grid based on 8 variables that you adjust.

What struck me about this was the thin line between a soda company doing this vs. a news company producing the same sort of thing and selling advertising around it. The Bracket-o-matic would feel OK as an editorial online feature. Again, it provides utility as well as fun. Why did an advertiser do it and not a media company? Coca-Cola had the money to pay CPB to create it; most news companies don’t have the technical chops to pull something like this off.

More take-aways later. … Off to a meeting now…

This is from the Tweetcloud service. Try it yourself; pretty cool. … No great surprises for its overview of my Twitter posts…

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been playing around with alpha and beta versions of some content payment and donation solutions. Today I deactivated Payyattention, which added a widget at the end of article pages asking for a quick, voluntary payment if you liked what you read and want to monetarily support me. (This was a trial, and no actual money was accepted.)

The developers of Payyattention have been working on several concepts all generally revolving around the mission of identifying and funding the best online content. A tipping system, even if it’s simpler than previous ones that have come and gone over the years and containing a social-signal component, apparently isn’t the way to go, they’ve decided, so the Payyattention widget is about to expire.

According to Steve Farrell of Payyattention, he and his partners are moving in a different direction that might best be described as “emergent authority structures.”

That geeky-sounding description can be simplified. Farrell says that his team’s future direction will focus on providing or pointing online users to the highest-quality news and entertainment and bringing it to a wider audience. This will be selected by “aggregating the sum of thousands of individual decisions about who and what is worth paying attention to,” he says. (If that sounds akin to Digg, ponder that the two y’s in Payyattention were inspired by the two g’s in Digg.)

An example of this is HourlyPress, a project of Payyattention that uses the linking behavior of a selected group of influencers on a particular topic to identify, each hour, the most important stories published recently online. The first example of this is NewsAboutNews, which has been operating for a few months now and tracks the Twitter link behavior of seven thought leaders on news and media who are frequent Twitter posters.

NewsAboutNews lists the top 10 articles about news and media as determined by article links that the seven selected influencers (“editors”) have included in tweets, combined with tweets and retweets by other “sources” (people who the editors follow on Twitter). A more complete description of the process of best-story selection can be found on the HourlyPress homepage.

Farrell believes this is truly significant and points to the future of news:

“We see this approach as being the future, displacing the broadcast model that we’ve all grown up with, RSS news readers, and haphazardly finding things through your friends on social networks.”

If I’m understanding the direction that Farrell and company are heading, it’s in identifying the best content about any topic or area in realtime by using a combination of computer algorithm and the online behavior of a selected group of humans with a shared expertise or interest, and their like-minded colleagues. You might think of it as in between Google News, which selects news stories purely by machine algorithm, and a website like Digg where lists of top stories are ranked by the recommendations of a mass of self-selected online users.

In between, perhaps there’s not only opportunity, but a better way to identify the best online articles and content streaming through the vast, rapidly moving river of Internet news.

For Farrell, it’s about the belief that consumers faced with news and information overload online will begin to look for the best filtering mechanisms.

As for the financial model that can be layered on top of emergent authority networks, that’s the big thing to be tackled. You can ponder that challenge more deeply by reading this post on “retrospective news” by Lyn Headley, one of Farrell’s partners.

Something I’ve been tracking for months now is the wave of new solutions for getting people to pay for online content, either through voluntary donations or mandatory payments. Some are in beta now; others due in the coming months.

Currently, I have a Payyattention donation box at the end of my blog items, and I’ve been playing with early versions of SprinklePenny and BeneVote (though they’ve been removed temporarily due to some bugginess). I’m anxiously awaiting putting a Kachingle medallion on this blog to be part of that voluntary payment network, and will certainly try out others as they go live.

And, of course, there are plenty of options for paying for content where money is a requirement, not a request: Paypal, credit cards, and upcoming solutions such as those from Journalism Online. (The latter also says it will offer donation options as well as various means for required payments and subscriptions.)

As author of this blog, I’d love to have lots of options for readers to send a few cents (or dollars!) my way if they like my writing or find value in it. But this blog could easily get overwhelmed with donation graphics from all the different services!

I’ve been looking for the solution, which is an obvious one: a ShareThis-like widget that aggregates all the solutions for payment and/or donation. The first such solution appears to be PayCheckr.

The concept here should be pretty obvious from the screen shots above. How I might use it to collect contributions on my blog is to have a PayCheckr icon or (ideally) something that says, “Please support this blog,” with a mouseover action expanding to what you see in the top image above — but in my case it would be populated with voluntary donation options — and place it at the end of my blog entries.

For paid content, a site or blog might use PayCheckr to aggregate all the forced-pay options that an online user could use to pay for content access.

You could also get creative. Perhaps you let Kachingle paying network members get access to a special piece of content or area of your site, but non-Kachinglers would have to choose another option, such as paying for a subscription or via a micropayment service.

Also, PayCheckr might aggregate all or most of the options; you still might choose to highlight some options outside of the PayCheckr widget.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for someone to come up with something like this, and PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving appears to be the first. Somehow he evaded my radar, since minOnline gave the fledgling service a write-up in late July.

This strikes me as so funny and unusual, I have to blog it. … So earlier today I posted this to Twitter:

A short while later I notice that I’ve turned up on Columbia Journalism Review’s website on its “The Kicker” blog, where the (short) blog item is actually longer than my tweet!

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this; I’m happy for the exposure of my candid Twitter thoughts to CJR’s audience. It just amuses me that my 140 characters could grow into something more.

(And thanks, Megan, for referring to me as “new media guru” — although I always feel unworthy on the rare occasions that I get described that way. I have learned a thing or two about digital media over the years, but don’t yet feel worthy of the guru moniker!)

I think this post by Robert Scoble today deserves a reading by all journalists: “Steve Jobs’ bad news heralds the real-time web age.” The A-list blogger was watching his Twitter and Friendfeed streams for news from people about the Steve Jobs announcement of the Apple CEO taking a medical leave, and he was amazed at the amount of instant chatter and information being shared about the announcement.

Posted to Twitter & Twitpic

For any reporter and editor when an important event occurs — especially a local one — watching Twitter and/or Friendfeed is a great information-gathering tool. Yes, as Scoble notes, there’s a lot of noise and you don’t necessarily know who to trust. But the more you use Twitter and/or Friendfeed, the more you’ll come to know the people who you follow — so over time you can pick up a sense of what sources of instant Twitter/Friendfeed news you might trust.

Anyone can do this, of course. When the US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River earlier today, lots of people posted to Twitter, or added eyewitness photos to Flickr, or other social networks. For an editor sitting in a newsroom overseeing coverage of this event, monitoring the social media stream of eyewitness reports could be a useful addition to the staff reporting arsenal already assigned to the crash and calling in details.

Scoble is a fan of Friendfeed, and it is indeed a useful service for something like this plane crash, since it scans a number of social media outlets. For example, check out this Friendfeed search for “Hudson crash”, which includes all sorts of stuff — from short reports by people who witnessed the crash, to an eyewitness on a ferry who took a close-up of the plane being evacuated and posted it to Twitpic via a Twitter post. (The photo became so popular that it overwhelmed the tiny Twitpic service.)

I think Scoble is correct in saying that the now wide popularity and use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the front lines of news. Most of the time for unexpected events, like plane crashes, eyewitnesses are going to be there before professional journalists.

A new role for journalists is to tap into this instant stream of eyewitness accounts. Editors can perform a public service by filtering out the best and most accurate of these early “citizen” reports, saving online users the trouble of combing through all the junk to find the nuggets.

One of the great things about Twitter, of course, is that when a big breaking news event happens, there are often witnesses on the scene with a cell phone who will post some quick tweets about what’s going on, before any reporters can get there. (You’ll remember the Continental jet that went off a Denver runway recently and one of the survivors tweeted about his experience.)

An incident a few days ago proved that’s not always the case. I woke up on New Year’s day and looked at the news on my iPhone to see what was new in the world. Top story in a bunch of places was a crazy bombing threat that shut down much of the resort city of Aspen for much of New Years Eve. By the time I heard about it, the bomber had committed suicide and there was plenty of mainstream media coverage of the story.

But I was curious to see if Twitter was a decent source of news and eyewitness tidbits the evening before, when the craziness was going on and police were roping off city blocks and defusing bombs. I checked out several services (including Twitter’s own advanced search) and looked through tweets sent on New Years Eve by people in Aspen. I was a bit surprised to find not much. Plenty of chatter about sections of the city getting roped off, but nothing from the tweeting witnesses that shed much light on what was going on.

So the local Aspen newspapers got a bit of a break in being the ones getting breaking details onto their websites as their reporters learned what was going on. Columbia Journalism Review has an article that lauds the papers’ coverage: “Aspen New Year’s Eve Bomb Threat Proves—once again—the value of a local paper.”

I’m wondering if this little Twitter experiment I just posted will get any traction. We’ll see.

The amazing thing about Twitter is all the creative (and practical) uses people are finding for it.

Show us your best self-photo!

Last night in Boulder (and not ending till this morning) we had one of our area’s famous windstorms. I saw reports of 80 to 90 mph wind gusts in some areas of the region. (I didn’t get much sleep last night due to the noise, as I’m sure was common for folks around town.)

So what was the first thing I did when I got out of bed? I looked for Boulder Twitter posts to see what other locals were saying, and if they experienced any wind damage. It didn’t occur to me to look in the local newspaper’s website, because I knew that I’d get a good picture of what happened via local tweets.

Lots of journalists have been pondering and pontificating on how to use Twitter to cover news, including me. Last night’s wind storm was yet another classic example. A traditional reporter looking for Boulder residents’ personal experiences could save a lot of time by finding local tweets to pick up tidbits, and contacting some of those Twitter users for follow-up interviews. That surely beats walking or driving around town interviewing people, or calling random residents on the phone.

Here are a few simple ways to find location-specific tweets, such as last night and this morning from Boulder:

1. Use search.twitter.com and search for “boulder winds.” (Skip the quote marks.)
2. Search twitter.local.net for Boulder. (That’ll get you all tweets from Boulder, not just ones about the wind storm.)
3. Many iPhone Twitter apps have search features, which you can use for searching by location and/or keywords. I use Twitterlator Pro and love it.

I’ve just scratched the service. As Twitter use grows, it’s becoming an increasingly useful tool not just for people wanting to keep informed of fast-breaking news, but for reporters looking for eyewitnesses to add to their coverage.

If you’re in the news business and still think Twitter is silly and/or a waste of time, and of little consequence to journalism, this should wake you out of your stupor:

Read his Twitter feed for a survivor’s experience of what he went through and saw — before any reporters could get to interview him and fellow passengers on the Continental plane that crashed on takeoff in Denver Saturday evening.

Also interesting: This short video of the founder of Seesmic explaining how he’s watching CNN coverage of the crash and a spokesman telling reporters there’s no information yet, while the tweeting passenger is spilling his guts already.