Can Google Wave transform journalism?

A report on Mashable has taken an in-depth look at the impact that Google Wave is having on journalism.

The real-time wiki collaboration platform is still in its preview phase and can be used by invite only, but already some media companies are using the tool for community building, real-time discussion, crowd-sourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom and for cross publishing content, according to the report.

What Google Wave has done is to have pulled together the component Google applications that people use and allow them to converge. Users can share photos, embed videos, and add in other apps such as Google Maps and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content.

The report has plenty of examples of how journalists in the US are using the tool in just these ways. The Chicago Tribune’s RedEye blog, for instance, now has a daily “wave” during which readers give feedback and discuss the cover story of the day.

Redeye’s web editor Stephanie Yiu told Mashable: “It’s a lot more live than Twitter because it’s like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other.

“It’s really about connecting with our readers on a new platform. We’re learning with our readers and moving forward together.”

Meanwhile, Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms for the Los Angeles Times described how his own recent experiments highlighted the potential that Google Wave has for crowd-sourcing.

He said: “That experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it’s a valuable tool for small-team collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least.

“People quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.”

(Via Martin Stabe)

Echo Readers Create Unique Gallery

Life in Dorset is captured by the impressive collection of photos posted in response to an appeal from the Daily Echo.

The Bournemouth newspaper is encouraging readers to contribute to its Flickr group - A Dorset Year - as part of its aim to create a gallery showing a year in the life of the county and its residents.

All the photos are also published on the Daily Echo website and selected pictures feature in the newspaper.



Digital project co-ordinator Sam Shepherd told HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk that the gallery represents the newspaper’s efforts to interact with people in the area.

“There are so many people out there on the patch using Flickr so it was a way of getting them to engage with us,” said Shepherd.

So far, the group has attracted over 1,000 photos to its photostream and has more than 150 members.

Guardian Crowdsources Plinth Project

Readers are being asked to help the Guardian capture every moment of the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square.

Designed by Antony Gormley, the public artwork will see human statues take to the plinth every hour for the next 100 days.

Photographic coverage of such an event represents a “massive undertaking”, said the Guardian, and therefore crowdsourcing is the newspaper’s chosen method for tackling it.

A Flickr group - Plinth Watch 2009 - has been created so users can post their pictures alongside those taken by Guardian photographers.



The editor’s picks of these readers’ pics will later be published on Guardian.co.uk and some could possibly be printed in the newspaper too.

Reporters have also set up a Twitter feed dedicated to updates about events on the plinth throughout the day.



In an article appealing for content, culture editor Alex Needham pointed out that the crowdsourcing approach reflects the spirit of the work itself.

Needham said: “One and Other is a work of art which will be created by the general public.

“It would be brilliantly apt if our coverage of it could be made in a similar spirit of mass participation.”

NPR Crowdsources Who’s Who Pic

The audience is helping American reporters identify political lobbyists from a series of photographs.

National Public Radio (NPR) decided to crowdsource the task after finding it hard to identify many of the people representing health lobby groups at a senate committee meeting.

Spokesperson Andrea Seabrook told Poynter Online that the photographs were taken with the original intention of enabling journalists to pick out faces.

However, when this only resulted in several identifications, the audience was called on to help.



“We’ve been watching various groups use crowdsourcing to mine and process data, and when it turned out to be harder than we’d originally thought to ID lobbyists ourselves, we thought we’d give it a shot,” said Seabrook.

She added: “We’re very glad we did. It seems to be making the story more interactive and engaging for our listeners, and we’ve already gotten quite a few great leads.”

The crowdsourcing effort forms part of NPR’s Dollar Politics series, which is looking at the impact of lobbying on US legislature with regards to healthcare, banking regulations and energy.

Next Step Journalism

The death of Neda Soltani, the young Iranian woman who has become the tragic human face of the nation's post-election turmoil, demonstrates the process involved in what Bill Mitchell of the Poynter Institute calls "next step journalism."

A distraught bystander captured video of the killing on his phone and e-mailed it to a friend in the Netherlands. Within five minutes, the video was on YouTube and Facebook -- and became international news.

Mitchell says our news increasingly will be shaped by a similar process, one that begins with an event and is characterized by the collective sharing and enhancing of information. The process "provides lots of opportunities for journalists and non-journalists alike to assess what a story needs next, figure out what he or she is best equipped to contribute, and move the story along."

In Soltani's story, he identifies seven elements of this kind of storytelling, some more in need of professional journalism skills and values than others. Their common thread is the importance of collaboration.

* Documentation: Two cell phone videos captured the crucial moments after Soltani was shot Saturday evening, including the frantic efforts to save her. The low resolution of the videos and chaotic movement of the cell phone cameras did not get in the way of telling this critical part of the story, Mitchell points out.

* Context: The videos left many questions unanswered. But Soltani's fiance provided some context in an interview broadcast by Aljazeera, describing her views on recent events in Iran and explaining why she happened to be on that street corner.

* Transmission and Distribution: It was initially unclear how the videos made their way from the street corner to Facebook and YouTube. The Guardian filled in the details above. Other information came from The New York Times and the CBS Evening News, among others.

* Verification: Some of the initial postings about the shooting included a message from someone identifying himself as a physician who said he witnessed the shooting and tried to save her. A series of tweets and re-tweets from around the world confirmed this information and identified the doctor.

* Correction: Some of the details distributed on the day of the shooting, such as the identity of a man standing near Soltani, turned out to be wrong. Within two days, a Los Angeles Times correspondent had tracked down the man and identified him as her music teacher.

* Analysis: Mitchell says the best analysis he has seen of the significance of Soltani's death has come from journalists, particularly highlighting an essay on Time.com by Robin Wright.

* Sense-making: "It's still too early in the Neda story for anyone to be able to provide the perspective and wisdom required by this stage the process," Mitchell writes. "Who will do it best? Journalists? That physician who tried to save Neda? Historians?"

More important than the who is the what, he concludes. This tragic story "has taught us plenty about what this kind of storytelling will require -- and what it can produce."

Channel 4 Crowdsources News-Gathering

Visitors to the Channel 4 News website have been helping its journalists find buried news, reports Journalism.co.uk.

The news editors had a hunch that the recent G20 summit and protests would provide the government with a “good day to bury bad news”, so they asked web users to find stories “that might otherwise slip under the radar”.



“We would like you to help us keep an eye on government departments during G20,” stated the website.

It continued: “If you think there’s a story we’ve missed or a buried statistic or announcement that deserves more attention, then let us know.”

Channel 4 News provided crowdsourcing helpers with links to government department websites so they could dig around for interesting press releases and then email or tweet any findings to the newsroom.

The website later featured an update publishing some of the stories found during the course of the day.

NYT Readers Capture Hard Times

People are sharing their experiences of financial hardship via a new user-generated content initiative from the New York Times.

Picturing the Recession asks readers to submit photos which capture the signs of economic troubles in their homes, neighbourhoods and towns.

The result is an extensive gallery of interesting and often moving photos showing the effects of the global financial crisis on people’s everyday lives.



Subjects vary from empty fridges to closed shops, boarded-up houses and make-shift homes in tents and under motorways.



Pictures are grouped into categories - Business, Home, Sacrifice, Family, Work and Transportation.

The NYT invites submissions from users around the world and asks potential contributors: “How do you see the recession playing out in your community? What signs of hardship or resilience stand out? How are you or your family personally affected?”

[HT – Journalism.co.uk]

The Power Of Networks

Here’s an interesting slideshow about the impact of digital networking upon the ways we communicate in the modern era.

It’s taken from a presentation recently given by David Armano, the vice president of Experience Design at Critical Mass and a new media blogger.

The Micro-Sociology of Networks considers social media and networking, participatory journalism, blogging, and branding among many other aspects of the digital age.

The Micro-Sociology of Networks

View more presentations from David Armano.

[HT – cybersoc.com]

HuffPost Crowdsources Senate Bill

In excess of 350 readers have helped the Huffington Post to plough through two versions of a bill designed to encourage economic recovery.

Due to the amount of material – a combined total of nearly 1,400 pages – HuffPost’s congressional correspondent decided to crowdsource the task of looking for noteworthy differences.

The volunteers were sent emails with instructions and a portion of the bill/s to look through, resulting in hundreds of tips sent to correspondent Ryan Grim via return emails and comments on the website.

Speaking to the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Grim said the HuffPost’s readership enables the execution of such strategies.

“We have readers who are highly intelligent, a lot of them are highly accomplished,” he stated.

Grim added that this form of crowdsourcing is in fact nothing new: “People have always called into newspapers or network news shows with tips - and that’s all this is.”

Visit CJR for the full article.

[HT – Editors Weblog]

Washington Who’s Who Launched

The Washington Post has unveiled a website dedicated to the people and personalities that make up the city’s political class.

WhoRunsGov.com has currently launched in a beta version, boasting in-depth profiles of America’s senators, representatives, Pentagon officials and administrative staff.



For example, each senator profile provides a career biography of its subject as well as information on their views, voting records and key collaborators.

According to PR Inside, the aim is to provide a free online resource holding policy biographies on all the key decision-makers working in politics, law, and the military.

In addition, the site notes that the first group of profiles has been created by a dedicated editorial unit within the Washington Post.

The website’s creators plan to enable users to upload their own profiles of government figures in the future when the resource becomes more of a moderated wiki.

“The site gives political, business and opinion leaders, as well as students, educators and engaged citizens, a destination for crucial, real-time information on Washington’s key players,” said Rachel Van Dongen, the editor of WhoRunsGov.com.

She added: “This is the first phase of a new venture to create a uniquely collaborative and rich information resource that demystifies the individuals behind Washington’s policy-making process.”

The site also includes a regularly updated Washington politics news blog entitled The Plum Line.

[HT - Editors Weblog]

NYT Bids For Crowdsourcing Funds

The New York Times is looking to launch a crowdsourcing initiative enabling the public to read and analyse government documents.

In partnership with the investigative journalism outfit Pro Publica, the Times is seeking $1 million (£640,000) from the Knight News Challenge to fund DocumentCloud, according to Nieman Journalism Lab.

The project would encourage news media to upload their source materials into a document viewer where members of the public could read, share and store pages and paragraphs.

This interactive DocViewer software was developed by the NYT’s technologies team to create a searchable database of schedules relating to Hillary Clinton’s spell as first lady.

According to the grant application, DocumentCloud “will accelerate the daily work of investigative reporters, and will make investigative reporters out of every citizen, by improving the way we find, share, read and collaborate on source documents online”.

[HT – Editors Weblog.]

Americans Take Cameras To Polls

Voters in tomorrow’s US elections are being encouraged to film their voting experiences and post them online.

YouTube and PBS have teamed up to launch the Video Your Vote channel, where users can upload and share their election films.

And the pick of the user-generated content will be broadcast on a PBS election programme, reports CyberJournalist.net.

Users categorise their videos into groups such as “Voter Intimidation”, “Voting Perspectives” and “Polling Place Projects,” and they are then displayed as pins on a Google map.



The channel makes clear that it wants a broad range of videos, rather than just a visual record of people’s votes.

“Shoot a video of your voting experience before or on Election Day. Document the energy and excitement, as well as any problems you may see.”

The channel has a significant number of videos already submitted, many under the “Early Voting” tag.

And among the most popular is this video (almost 90,000 views so far) showing the voting experience of An American Abroad.

SPOTLIGHT – Social Bookmarking II

Following on from last week’s introduction to the world of social bookmarking, this SPOTLIGHT post will be examining how it relates to journalism.

What advantages does it present to journalists? And what possible dangers could be lurking?

These are the issues we’ll be looking at in this post, and we’ll discuss the ways that some mainstream sites are dipping their toes in the waters of social bookmarking.

We’ll also have a list of the ten most popular social bookmarking sites linked to by the UK’s mainstream media.

And at the end will be a list of useful places to visit if you want to find out more about this dynamic and fast-changing online activity.



Bookmarking The News

The early years of social bookmarking have already been marked by innovation and invention as new service providers pop up to the surface like bubbles in a glass of champagne.

And among these are the sites dedicated to the collecting and sharing of online news content links – such as Digg, Reddit and NewsVine.

So do these websites – and their counterparts such as Delicious and StumbleUpon – present journalists with an opportunity or a problem?

Freelance journalist, blogger and social bookmarking superfan David Cohn is firmly in support of the former.

“I think ignoring it is like shooting ourselves in the foot,” is his take on whether journalists should be getting involved in social news sites.

While academic and blogger Paul Bradshaw stated that social bookmarking holds “enormous potential” for reporters.

So here’s an introduction to just a few of the ways that social bookmarking could aid journalists and media groups with the gathering, production and distribution of news.

The Benefits Of Bookmarking

NEWS-GATHERING

Generate Story Leads

According to Cohn, social news websites are a good source of stories if journalists are prepared to dig (excuse pun) for them.

“Often there are great ideas that stay at the bottom because they were presented poorly. Journalists have the time to take those ideas and polish them up.”

While Bradshaw notes that the use of tagging on social bookmarking site Delicious can help reporters to “spot leads or information you would otherwise have missed”.

For example, any member of Delicious can look up a particular theme or topic and see all the page links saved by other users.

Grow Contact Book

Most social bookmarking sites enable you to find people who are prolific collectors of the same content as you.

For example, the Conversation Tracker on NewsVine allows members to follow comment threads of their peers while users can “make friends” on Reddit, create a network of like-minded people on Delicious and receive notice of Diggers Like You on Digg.

As Beat Blogging editor Patrick Thornton puts it: “Social bookmarking is a way to find experts in specific fields.”

Thornton also notes that these contacts don’t always have to come from outside the news world – they could be fellow journalists.

He points to new networking/bookmarking hybrid site Publish2 as a platform that could help local reporters covering a particular beat share sources and information with a journalist from a different location.

Create Extra Content

It’s becoming an increasingly common practice for bloggers to automatically publish their Delicious links on their own pages.



Blogger Martin Belam writes: “Publishing daily lists of links in this way gives a blogger an opportunity to ‘micro-blog’ about items they’ve read but haven’t wanted to or had the time to write a full-length post about, and to add another regular stream of content to their blog.”



NEWS PRODUCTION

Crowdsourcing Research

Social bookmarking websites can also be used during the writing process as they can help point the way towards relevant articles for information.

For example, in writing this blog post about social bookmarking I searched through the most popular articles on Delicious tagged under “social” and “bookmarking” to find useful examples and background material.

NEWS DISTRIBUTION

Draw More Traffic

Just taking Digg as an example, the site passed the milestone for one million registered users back in 2007 and could have almost tripled that figure this year according to one estimate.

So any website which gets its articles on the hallowed pixels of the Digg front page can usually expect a pretty significant increase in traffic.

One newspaper putting this to the test has been the Chicago Tribune, which has created the character of Colonel Tribune to be its representative on social media sites including Digg, Twitter and Facebook.

According to one of its media coordinators, it was the social bookmarking sites that proved to be the most successful of the social media platforms for drawing traffic to the Tribune online.

These kinds of strategies could soon be emulated by news groups in the UK after it was reported that Digg, which tends to lean towards North American news, has plans to launch localised versions early next year.

Attract New Eyeballs

If there’s one demographic grouping that you could say has embraced social bookmarking it’d be the young (see this Hitwise study from 2006 on Delicious).

So social bookmarking websites offer regional news providers an effective way to put their content in front of people who may not visit their neighbourhood news website or read their local newspaper.

POST-PRODUCTION

Show Your Sources

Social bookmarking is also a way to open up the news production process to the audience by sharing links to source material.

For example, Bradshaw’s model for the modern newsroom includes social bookmarking in its list of “Five Ws and a H that should come after every news story”.

Feedback

Most social bookmarking sites allow their users to submit comments on stories and therefore provide journalists with another platform for interacting with the audience and ascertaining their opinions.

Putting This Into Practice

If you want to know how to start putting some of these ideas into practice, this excellent slideshow produced for Journalism.co.uk has some practical tips for journalists using Delicious and Furl.

Journalists and the Social Web 2

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: journalists delicious)

The Downsides Of Bookmarking

Finding What You Want

Social bookmarking websites are folksonomies so there are no hard and fast rules for tagging content and giving names and terms to things.

This means that journalists using sites for research may miss out on articles with unexpected tags or ones with spelling mistakes and so on.

Spammers can also make it hard for users to find what they’re looking for as they could deliberately mislabel content to appear in popular searches.

Cliques Rule

This is an allegation levelled particularly at Digg, where bloggers in the past suggested that a relatively small group of contributors were responsible for submitting a significant share of the front page stories (this Mashable story has details).

It means that in some instances it can be difficult for newcomers and those without an extensive social bookmarking network to get their stories where they can be noticed.

How Wise Are Crowds?

The voting systems on social bookmarking rely at least partially on the actions of its users to help good content float to the top and let poor content sink to the bottom.

However, some say the crowds cannot always be trusted to make the wisest choices and this Read Write Web story has an example of misinformation and herd behaviour in action.

Overloaded and Out-ranked

This occurs when a website’s article appears on the main page of one of the big bookmarking sites and the subsequent traffic influx results in some kind of technical failure.

Whether it’s the Slashdot Effect, the Digg Effect or you’ve been Farked or Drudged – the end result is the same.

Here’s one blogger’s account of their day of mixed fortunes after one of their pieces made the Digg front page.

Meanwhile another blogger tells of his Digg front page experience and points out another potential downside is the fact that the Digg link page then out-ranked his own blog post in a Google search for a certain period.

More...

If you want to know more about what some see as the potential pitfalls of social bookmarking check out this 2007 blog post entitled “Top Ten Reasons Bloggers Should Avoid Social Bookmarking”.


Mainstream Media & Social Bookmarking: Who's Linking Who?

The majority of mainstream news websites in the UK now feature some sort of bookmarking options, encouraging users to share content in the wider world of the Web.



But which bookmarking sites enjoy seeing their little logos adorning the most Share This boxes?

To get some insight into the most popular bookmarking tools I did a quick data collection exercise looking at the share buttons available on 20 UK news websites.

Of course, this is by no means a definite picture of the current situation in the UK but it provides an interesting peek into some possible trends.

With the regional news websites, publishers seem to have installed a generic selection for all their sites so I looked at examples from nine of the 20 biggest groups and also gathered information on 11 national online newspapers.

Ranked according to the percentage of the 20 sites including it among their share icons, here’s the Top Ten Most Popular Social Bookmarking websites:

Digg - 100%
Delicious - 95%
Reddit - 85%
Facebook - 75%
StumbleUpon - 65%
NewsVine - 50%
Fark - 35%
Yahoo! My Web - 30%
Google Bookmarks - 25%
MySpace - 20%

(The Nationals: Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Record, Daily Star, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times.)

(The Regional Groups: Archant, CN Group, Guardian Media Group, Iliffe News & Media, Johnston Press, Midland News Association, Newsquest, Northcliffe, and Trinity Mirror.)

Interestingly, from the ones I looked at only two websites – Express.co.uk and Mirror.co.uk - have the Add This widget function which posts content to over 30 bookmarking sites simultaneously.

(I'm working on a fuller version of this research with results on 15 national news websites and the 20 biggest regional publishers' sites and will make it available soon.)

If you want to compare these results with trends in the US, this Poynter Online article from Ellyn Angelotti has some interesting data on the social bookmarking situation stateside.

While the effectiveness of these social media options has been put to the test recently by Belam.

Belam monitored social bookmarking sites to see how many articles from online newspapers and broadcasters were being featured on them.

And his results for the Metro, local London news sites and ThisisPlymouth.co.uk (looking at Fark only) can be viewed on his blog.

Plus, Belam looked into the help and advice which mainstream media sites offer to users with regards to the often bewildering array of colourful logos.

Internal Social Bookmarking

To finish up, we’re going to take a quick look at a fairly rare phenomenon but one which may become more widespread in the future – that of in-house social bookmarking systems.


For example, The Guardian has a clippings file option which lets registered users not only collect and store articles, but also share them with other members.

According to The Guardian: “Your clippings are publically available at a web page personalised with your username so that you can access them without signing in.

“Anyone can see your clippings so you can send the link to your friends and let them know what you’re reading.”

Each clippings file also has a webfeed so users can receive their own saved stories via RSS or sign up to get a feed of someone else’s, including a Guardian journalist.

While earlier this year the New York Times launched its TimesPeople service, which acts as a social bookmarking meets social networking service for its registered users.



According to the NYT: “TimesPeople is a great way to discover things on NYTimes.com that you might not otherwise have found and to share your discoveries with people you know and trust.”


Resources

If this hasn’t satiated your appetite for knowledge about social bookmarking, there are plenty of resources on the Web.

Dosh Dosh has a good introduction to over 40 social bookmarking sites with a screen grab of each.

Meanwhile, eBizMBA has an up-to-date chart of the 30 most popular ones measured by criteria such as inbound links, Google page rankings and traffic data.

And Wikipedia has a list of various social software sites with links to their home pages.

In terms of practical tips for utilising social bookmarking services, Poynter has a good guide to Delicious for beginners.

And this slideshow from web developer Stuart Marsh is an introductory guide to building traffic by using social bookmarking tools.

Pro Blogger has a post from 2006 with ten tips which have stood the test of time for encouraging a “Digg culture” for your site.

While Cohn’s Columbia Journalism Review article has some good advice for becoming an effective Digger.

Finally, if you want to share your thoughts about social bookmarking and its value for journalists, Cohn has created a social network group for just those kinds of discussions.


So that’s it for this week’s SPOTLIGHT post. As usual, do get in touch if you have any examples of innovation you’d like to share or any topics you would like to see covered in future posts.


[Pictures from top: eConsultant; Martin Belam.]

Are Blogs Changing News Processes?

A new survey provides an insight into how journalists who blog think the online activity is changing the way they work.

Blogger and academic Paul Bradshaw polled some 200 journalists from around the world for the project.

He writes that the research aims to show “the perceptions of journalists themselves of how the blogging has affected their processes”.

Among the areas looked at are how blogging is changing the way stories are generated and gathered, and whether blogs are altering the relationship between journalists and their audience.

The results are now available on Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog in the form of seven blog posts.

SPOTLIGHT – SOCIAL BOOKMARKING I

Welcome to the latest SPOTLIGHT post where we’ll be looking at the world of social bookmarking.

First up will be some definitions of this positively infant topic and then we’ll provide an overview of the current crop of social bookmarking sites and cast a glance at their history and development.

In Part II, we’ll see what all this means for journalists and how they can incorporate social bookmarking applications into their ever-expanding digital toolkits.

We’ll also examine how some mainstream media sites have started to utilise social bookmarking and check out some examples of innovation.

And we’ll finish up with a list of resources for anyone who wants to investigate this area further.


What Is Social Bookmarking?

According to Poynter’s interactivity editor Ellyn Angelotti, social bookmarking websites can be seen as the “virtual refrigerators” of the Web.

“Clipping articles from the newspaper and posting them on the refrigerator just doesn’t cut it anymore. Now social bookmarking sites serve as virtual refrigerators, giving users an unlimited number of magnets and much more surface area.”

This popular analogy captures the essence of social bookmarking – these are links that users can share with friends, groups or even the rest of the world.

So they work like browser bookmarks (such as Internet Explorer’s Favourites) in terms of enabling people to store and collect webpages and content of interest to them, but go a stage further by allowing these collections to be made public.

As usual, Common Craft has come up with an excellent video to show the basics:




Social Bookmarking – A Brief History

The term social bookmarking was coined by probably the best known bookmarking site, Delicious.

Launched in 2003, Delicious allows users to install browser buttons (known as bookmarklets) which make storing and sharing pages easy.

Initially it was used by people to save the URLs of static webpages they frequently visited or of articles of particular interest.

Fast forward a year or so and along came Digg, heralding two major changes for social bookmarking – a voting/rating system and an emphasis on articles with a temporal dimension.

Digg wasn’t alone for long and this trickle of social news sites soon resembled a flood, with each new site proclaiming its own killer features.

Hundreds of social news bookmarking sites now exist, each offering users a place to store, share and rate content and giving news providers a new place to find readers.

Described as “an outgrowth of social bookmarking” by freelance digital journalist David Cohn, the social news media has become a crucial sub-genre of bookmarking.

Most mainstream media sites have recognised this fact and are now getting in on the act, providing buttons at the end of articles encouraging readers to recommend it to one or all of the various bookmarking service providers.



So who are these providers? And what exactly do they provide?

Some You May Know

There are so many social bookmarking websites that it’s impossible to provide an overview of them all here so we’ve picked out some of the most common to mainstream users in the UK.

We’ve also thrown in a few lesser known ones at the end for good measure.


Delicious

Self proclaimed as the “biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe”, Delicious is probably the best known social bookmarking site and also included as a share option on the vast majority of UK online newspapers.

Delicious allows Web users to share and save content and use their own tags to organise links, which can be shared via networks or kept private.

Visitors can also search all links by tags to find relevant material – for example you can search Delicious for all items to which users assigned social bookmarking tags.

Incidentally, it features as the only social bookmarking application in this year’s list of essential online tools for online journalists from lecturer and blogger Alfred Hermida.


Digg

Along with Delicious, this is the most popular bookmarking site among the UK digital media’s article share icons.

Members submit stories for digging and can help rank content by the digg or bury options.

Submissions which hit the front page reward the user with community ranking points, and reward the source with an influx of Digg traffic.

Cohn wrote this article for the Columbia Journalism Review explaining the appeal of Digg from the point of view of a community user and a news organisation.

And this JP Digital Digest post from earlier this year shows how Digg has now entered the news creation process too.


StumbleUpon

Another permanent fixture on many newspaper’s share buttons, StumbleUpon is a recommendation engine enabling users to endorse content they like and find communities of interest.

This Venture Beat article has some useful information on how it works for anyone interested in the algorithms and human filtering processes used by bookmarking sites.


Reddit

Another mainstay on share options, the social news site Reddit awards so-called karma points to trusted posters and also recommends articles of interest.


Facebook

Yes, it may be a social networking site but as long ago as 2006 Facebook entered the social bookmarking arena.

Its “share on Facebook” icon appears on hundreds of mainstream news websites and allows Facebook members to post text, photos and video to their profile pages.


NewsVine

More common in the US, NewsVine is owned by MSNBC and is a citizen journalism website as well as a bookmarking service.

Users can vote for articles and can also create same interest groups which can be public or private.

[Appears as a share option on regional sites owned by Trinity Mirror, Guardian Media Group and on national websites including DailyMail.co.uk, Guardian.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk and Mirror.co.uk.]

And Some You May Not Know…


Furl

Standing for File Uniform Resource Locators, Furl is more of a general social bookmarking site with the usual rating and sharing options.

It also provides users with their own file space to save pages and clippings which they may have annotated themselves.

[Appears as a share icon on regional sites owned by Newsquest and on Mirror.co.uk.]

Fark

Described as the snarky side of social bookmarking, Fark takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the news with tags such as Dumbass, Strange, Stupid, and Asinine.

It’s often the destination for the weird and the photoshopped and features as a share button on TimesOnline, DailyMail.co.uk, Mirror.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk.

Tip’d

One of the new faces on the bookmarking scene, Tip’d.com concentrates on financial news and investment tips.

Like Digg, members rate articles by tipping it and the most popular make it to the homepage.

NewsTrust

The founding principle of NewsTrust is to promote articles which display “quality journalism”, so members are asked to rate articles against criteria such as sourcing and accuracy.

Add This

Websites can include the Add This widget on their site to enable users to click just one button and send content to a multitude of social bookmarking sites.



It’s not yet featured on many UK sites but one of the few that does have the widget is Mirror.co.uk.

Want To Know More?

Squidoo has this list featuring over 100 social bookmarking and networking websites for you to explore at your leisure.

While journalists may find Cohn’s guide to bookmarking sites a useful resource as he explains their nature through suggesting what print publication it would be (e.g. NewsTrust would be the New York Times etc).

And this Dosh Dosh article provides a useful introduction to social news sites and has some handy tips on how to find the relevant one for your needs and how to become an effective participant.


End Of Part One

So that’s it for Part I of this SPOTLIGHT post. Next week’s sequel will look at how journalists in mainstream media are engaging (or not) with social bookmarking tools, the pros and cons of doing so and some examples of innovation in this field.

In the meantime, please get in touch if you know of any innovative ways that media sites are using social bookmarking sites or if you have any other comments.

Until next time…

Spot.Us Tests Crowdfunding Model

A financing model where a community pays for investigative journalism is being trialled in America.

The Spot.Us project is currently pre-testing a model often known as crowdfunding where lots of people make a small donation towards a specified piece of work.

Spearheaded by Dave Cohn, Spot.Us is taking ideas from residents in the San Francisco Bay area about issues they would like to see investigated.

Donations are then submitted to fund the work of a freelance journalist to look into the topic and the resultant article is made available on the Spot.Us site.

Stories may also be distributed through other channels and via a single news organisation if it purchases exclusive rights.

Among the current pitches for investigation are the feasibility of cutting emissions from cement plants and increasing voter awareness.

Here’s the Spot.Us process according to its wiki:

"How ‘community funded reporting’ works:

Step 1: Anyone can create a story idea.

Step 2: Independent journalists create pitches from community feedback.

Step 3: Community members share the cost of reporting with micro-donations.

Step 4: Spot.Us will work with local news organizations to get the story published in as many places as possible. Or - we will give exclusive rights to a news organization that is willing to reimburse the original donors."



Spot.Us is funded by a $340,000 (£195,000) grant from the Knight Foundation through its News Challenge project.

Further details on Spot.Us and the crowdfunding model can be found in this New York Times article.

Readers Set Questions With Dialogg

A new crowdsourcing initiative from Digg is giving the public a chance to put its questions to some of America’s most powerful people.

Digg Dialogg invites users to post text and video questions online where they can be voted on by the Digg community to create a ranking list.

Then the posers which have proved most popular at the close of play are put to the interviewee.

Concentrating on the current party conventions, the first series of these Dialoggs has seen Digg team up with CNN and its citizen journalism arm, iReport, in a joint bid to enable the audience to have its say.

And first up to face the Digg treatment this week was the speaker of the House of Representatives.

Digg chief executive Jay Adelson assumed the task of putting the questions, exactly as they were submitted, to Democrat Nancy Pelosi in a live broadcast for CNN.



Further details can be found on the Guardian’s Digital Content blog.

10 Ways To Use Mobile Reporting

Here's a second slideshow we've put together with examples of how some newspapers are taking advantage of mobile technologies.

10 Ways To Use Mobile Reporting

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter socialmedia)

SPOTLIGHT - PHOTOS & SLIDESHOWS

Hello and welcome to the latest SPOTLIGHT post where we’ll be examining the different ways that newspapers are using photographs in their online coverage.

Compared to the early days of text-only pages, today’s newspaper websites offer a veritable feast for the eyes with photos and graphics wherever you look.

This trend seems to be growing with many nationals, like the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, recently unveiling relaunched sites featuring heavy picture use on the homepages.



And thanks to multimedia tools, today’s photographers and journalists now have the option of using audio-visual slideshows as vehicles for their stories.

So in the light of all these developments, we’re going to take a look at examples of innovation in the field of online photojournalism.

We’ll also be seeing how newspapers are incorporating photos from their users in interesting ways and how they’re using slideshows as a new storytelling technique.

And we’ll wrap up as usual with links to some useful online resources for anyone who wants some practical tips.


1 - PRODUCED BY PHOTOGRAPHERS


First we’re looking at photographic content produced by photographers and journalists for their own websites.

Galleries

The majority of newspaper websites in the UK and US seem to have a picture gallery of some description, whether it’s a small selection of images accompanying an article or a mass array of photographs grouped by theme or place.

And newspapers owned by Morris Communications have made theirs distinctive with group branding and promotional activities.

The American organisation’s regional news sites have a Spotted section where visitors can browse galleries of pictures from local events.

Meanwhile, photographers hand out “You’ve Been Spotted” cards to people at community gatherings to encourage them to check the site.

And due to its success generating about one in eight page views of Morris’s newspaper web pages, Spotted has been featured as an audience building initiative case study.

Other newspapers feature galleries showing the week in photos, such as the Oakland Tribune, and use themed collections for visitors to browse.

Slideshows

These usually comprise a selection of photos with an accompanying narration or soundtrack and either play automatically or can be moved on by the user.

Slideshows are becoming really popular and there are so many examples of some really great ones that the following is just a tiny sample of what’s happening with this alternative storytelling technique.

The Pulitzer Prize winning feature from the Concord Monitor illustrates how slideshows can be used to tell moving stories as it chronicles the life and death of a young mother.

While this story of a seven-year-old preacher won the best audio slideshow award for the Roanoke Times at this year’s Best of Photojournalism (BOP) awards.

Also picking up an award at the BOP awards was the Chicago Tribune for its use of audio, visual and text to show the plight of today’s urban poor.

Other photojournalists are using slideshows to offer the audience a slice-of-life piece, such as The City Exposed from the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a similar vein is the New York Times’s Riding the Q Train, which shows a “New York Slice of America” on the city’s subway trains.

While others opt to document a moment in time, such as the Birthday Dream Comes True slideshow from Midland Daily News which shows a soldier surprising his young daughter by returning home on leave for her birthday.

According to Martin Stabe, the Michigan newspaper’s multimedia section is well worth a visit for this and other impressive slideshows.

Finally, some newspapers are also introducing some great interactive elements to their slideshows, such as the Top 25 Superbowl Moments feature from the St Petersburg Times.

Each selected superbowl moment is given its own slideshow with audio commentary from a well known sports announcer and users have to rank them in order of their favourites.


2 - PRODUCED BY USERS


Breaking News

It’s now commonplace for most newspaper websites to include user-generated content (UGC) in their breaking news coverage.


Often it can result in the publication of some extraordinary images - such as the users’ pictures from last year’s failed car bomb attack at Glasgow Airport submitted to the BBC.

Regional news sites are also now well versed in appealing for users’ photos and these can often form some impressive galleries.

For example, The Gazette in Iowa recently documented the effects of flood waters through compiling breaking news galleries of users’ pictures.

(Interestingly, a recent survey from the Project for Excellence in Journalism found a general consensus among editors that weather-related photographs are the most simple and effective forms of UGC.)

Galleries

For examples of some innovative UGC galleries it’s back to Morris Communications where its newspapers’ Spotted features have a You Spotted section dedicated to readers’ photos of anything and everything.

Another effective format for users’ photo galleries can be found at the Bakersfield Californian where registered users can display their pictures in their own photo albums.

While National Geographic has opted for a clean and simple approach with its Webby award-winning Daily Dozen photo feature.



Competitions

Internet-only photographic competitions are becoming more popular with both newspapers and readers.

For example, the Ipswich Evening Star held a contest last Christmas to see which reader had the best festive lights display.

Entrants had to submit their pictures to the website where fellow users would vote online for their favourites.

While the Bluffton Today website has a great little ongoing competition where each day a different readers’ photo is chosen as the site’s banner-head.


3 – COLLABORATION


This final section will look at some innovative projects where journalists and photographers are working together with the audience.


Crowdsourcing


Mentioned on this blog before but well worth another mention is the New York Times Polling Place Photo Project.

According to the NYT, the initiative is “a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year’s primaries, caucuses and general election.

“By documenting local voting experiences, participants can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.”

Another American example of a photographic crowdsourcing work is the Absence of Place project from the Miami Herald.



Subtitled “An Interactive History”, the project asked readers to take photos of buildings and landscapes that used to be the home of something different in the past of relevance to the photographer.

The resultant collection of photos and accompanying captions are displayed online and were included in an exhibition.

Social Media

Photo-sharing websites have become an extremely popular way for people to display and organise their pictures online, often for free.

Some newspapers and broadcasters are now harnessing the popularity and ease of use of sites such as Flickr to create a place where readers and photographers can display their efforts side by side.

For example, the BBC ran a weather watchers pilot project on Flickr with users from Leicester.

Others have simply set up their own group on Flickr and invited readers to submit their pictures of the local area.

The Wrexham Evening Leader did this and more earlier this year when it set up three Flickr groups, including one called Aspiring Photographers to act as a discussion forum for keen amateurs.

Other newspapers have also set up groups based around a particular theme or event, such as the Liverpool Daily Post which created a group entitled Capital of Culture 2008.

The group has attracted almost 300 members and displays some impressive photos of some of the city’s best known sites like the Anglican Cathedral and the Royal Liver Building.



Each photo also appears in the Daily Post’s online “Culture through your eyes” gallery on its own web pages.


RESOURCES

General

The web is teeming with information and resources for photographers so these are just a few examples of what’s out there.

Sports photographers may like to check out the Sports Shooter site dedicated to all things sporty.

The Digital Photography Review has plenty of practical advice and reviews of hardware while the Online Journalism Review (OJR) has a review of the best photo gallery software.

Slideshows

The Interactive Narratives website displays lots of the best slideshows created by newspapers, while judges for a National Press Photographers Association award recently gave their tips on how to create a good slideshow.

Again the OJR has some useful features such as a review of slideshow editing software packages and an article concerning a study about how users actually navigate slideshows.

Blogs

There are plenty of blogging photographers sharing tips and advice to their communities of readers.

Worth a look is the blog from Dallas-based regional press photographer Mark Hancock and this photojournalism blog from Michael Zamora in Texas.

Finally, for an international news perspective pay a visit to the Reuters Photographers blog.



So that’s it for this SPOTLIGHT post. As always, get in touch if you have any examples of innovation you’d like to share or there’s any areas you’d like to see covered in future posts.

Courier To Crowdsource Interviews

Visitors to the Halifax Courier’s website now have the chance to put their questions to some well known faces.

The crowdsourcing experiment is a joint project between the newspaper and interactive website Yoosk, which enables the public to quiz celebrities and public figures.

Registered users can submit their questions and fellow visitors then vote on the five best teasers to be put to the interviewee.

First to face the results from the crowdsourcing initiative will be BBC regional weatherman Paul Hudson.

And among the questions he could be facing are: “What will the weather in Halifax be like in early June 2040?” and “Did you predict the Sheffield floods?”

The final five posers and Hudson’s responses will be available online and in the Courier’s print edition.

Johnson Press’s group editorial content manager told journalism.co.uk that the joint project hands control over to users.

Mark Woodward said: “In print we have always given readers the inside track on what is going on in their community - with this partnership we can take this a stage further and put the reader in the driving seat when it comes to questioning local personalities and people in power.”

He added: “The ability for readers to then rate and judge responses means accountability is also taken to another level.”


[Disclosure: Halifax Courier is a Johnston Press publication.]