BBC Relaunches Mobile Site

The BBC has unveiled a beta version of its latest mobile site boasting new customisation and localisation features.

Users can adapt the homepage so they can directly access their favourite content and can also create a localised version of the news, weather and TV sections.

In addition, the site appears in different forms and image sizes depending upon the users’ handsets and network capabilities.



The site “is the first milestone in an ambitious roadmap for the development of our service to be contextual, social, personal, immediate, device and location aware,” said Ulyssa MacMillan, executive producer for BBC Mobile.

Richard Titus, BBC future media controller, also stated that the corporation’s next step would be to adopt locative media tools for its mobile offerings.

He told The Guardian: “In a way, the BBC is one of the safest organisations to share your location with.

“We take privacy very seriously and there’s no malicious or commercial intent - we just want to make the experience better.”

Reuters To Launch Markets Channel

Thomson Reuters subscribers are set to receive a new markets service heralded as the next generation of multimedia coverage.

Codenamed Reuters Insider, the online video service will offer coverage of money markets, breaking news from the financial sector and analysis of events.

These reports will be available in both real-time and as on-demand content, and customers will be able to personalise channels so they can receive only the news relevant to their sector.

According to Reuters, the new offering represents the “future of news dissemination” as it encompasses both narrowcasting and vertical programming.

The Reuters definition of narrowcasting: “Delivering focused, fast, intelligent and relevant information to make our clients and customers smarter and more successful.”

As for vertical programming, global editor of multimedia Chris Cramer explains it like this: “The key to our success is that our programming will not be linear - one program after another - but will be vertical and will provide the kind of rich content and analysis our clients need.”

Press Gazette reports that Reuters Insider is set for a full launch this summer.

More details about Reuters Insider can be found in this pdf profile of one of its key creators, who was recently named one of the agency’s top journalists of 2008.

Mon Figaro Launched

Personalisation is the buzz word at French daily Le Figaro after it has launched a new site powered by Netvibes.

Mon Figaro is a networking site with a choice of widgets which users can chop and change as they like.

According to The Editors Weblog, the site offers a range of additional services to members including a full history of comments they submit to the news website.

Netvibes enables users to create their own personalised homepages from content that’s relevant to them – such as websites, blogs, email services and social networking accounts.

Online - "Community Is King"

New research reveals that young web users are not lone surfers but like to feel part of an online community.

Writing on Poynter Online, Maryn McKenna says a Californian study of teenagers and their use of digital media shows that “community is king” among the younger generation.

And it’s a point that she says should be noted by news providers and reporters with regards to their future consumers.

In addition, McKenna states that the three-year project funded by the MacArthur Foundation contains other conclusions that the news media would do well to consider.

They are the “remix culture” and the adage that “multimedia rules” when it comes to online content and destinations proving popular with young surfers.

Regarding this remix culture, she writes: “Teens respond to information and culture by appropriating, sampling and remixing it. They then look to their communities for reaction.”

The report - entitled “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” - was produced by staff at the University of Southern California and the University of California in Berkeley after interviewing some 800 young people and parents.

Researchers also observed teenagers using sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

The full report and an executive summary are available on the Digital Youth Research website.

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.]

ITN Unveils Maps Mashup

Visitors to the ITN website can now access international news via a Google Map application.

British users are presented with a UK map and a search facility where they can manually request to view articles from global locations.

Results when opened provide a picture and introduction to the geotagged story and a link to view it in full.



And Firefox users automatically receive news from their area on visiting the page as the Google Gears Geolocation API “reads” their location.

Further information on this and other mapping applications can be found on the Google Maps Mania blog.

[Hat tip to Martin Stabe.]

Trinity Launches Local M-Sites

Mobile sites are now available for a number of Trinity Mirror titles including the Liverpool Echo and Birmingham Post.



According to Guardian.co.uk, the publisher is in the process of launching ten m sites for its local newspapers following the unveiling of the new mobile site for the Mirror.

The Western Mail and South Wales Echo are among the first group to launch their own mobile offering through the WalesOnline brand.



Other Trinity titles now providing web pages tailored for mobile phone users are the Liverpool Daily Post and the Newcastle Chronicle.

Like the Mirror.co.uk mobile platform, these new sites have various personalisation options enabling users to create home pages displaying content of interest to them, from local sports reports to weather forecasts and what’s on guides.

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…

Mainstream Sites ‘Embrace The Link’

Linking to external sites is becoming a more common practice among mainstream news websites, according to the New York Times.

Writer Brian Stelter points to recent innovations by the Washington Post, NBC and the Times itself as evidence that we are in the middle of an “attitude shift” towards linking out.

Unveiled last month, the Post’s Political Browser points to the best on the web, and this includes scoops on rival websites.

And the New York Times is soon to launch an “alternative home page” which will contain hyperlinks to its competitors.

While this month saw TV network NBC open beta versions of local websites which have links to other sites.

For example, its current Chicago site has links to local news articles on the online versions of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Southtown Star.

NBC’s local media division president told the Times: “We’re looking at the fragmented local market and saying, ‘We’re going to provide a destination where you can come and search across different segments.’ ”

John P Wallace also said that this latest project represents “a change in mindset” with regards to linking to the competition.

Stelter’s article, entitled Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites (may need to register to view the article), also features comments from blogger Scott Karp and has a brief round-up of examples of mainstream sites learning to link.

Mirror Goes Mobile

The Daily Mirror has unveiled the new mobile version of its national news website, reports Journalism.co.uk.

Among Mirror Mobile’s content categories are Celebs, Live Football and Your Life, which currently offers diet and culinary tips.

The site also has several personalisation options within each category to enable users to select offerings relevant to them.

For example, mobile users can choose their star signs for horoscopes and their own locations for weather.



The head of Trinity Mirror interactive and mobile, Rick Gleave, said: “The launch of Mirror Mobile takes the Mirror into new territory with new users and new audiences for advertisers.”

He added that the addition of a mobile site to the print and online edition “is further proof that we are a growing multiplatform media business”.

Must-Have Digital Tools For Journalists

Personalised news applications prove a popular addition to Alfred Hermida’s list of “31 Essential Online Tools for Journalists” for 2008.

The blogger and academic includes no less than six RSS software and online feed readers, including FeedDemon for Windows, NewsFire for Mac operating systems, and Google Reader on the web.

Hermida’s guide also comprises four personalised news page services (such as Netvibes and MyYahoo) and news alerts offerings from Google and Yahoo.

And under the heading of Web 2.0, the former BBC journalist reckons a digital journalism toolkit would not be complete without a social bookmarking website like delicious and online storage services like Wuala and Box.

Hermida, who is programme leader at the University of British Columbia, said of his list of essential tools for 2008: “What is striking is how much these tools have developed in the past year.

“Some fall by the wayside and new ones spring up, such as sites that mine social network sites for personal information.”

The full list is available on Hermida’s reportr.net blog and he welcomes any additions to his 31 essential tools.

Picture: Results Through Training

NYT Launches iPhone App

The New York Times has unveiled a new application to optimise its web offerings for iPhone users.

A press release states that the NYTimes iPhone Application has been designed specifically to work with the navigation and features of the Apple device.

The application downloads the latest news articles so users can then browse stories offline at their own convenience.

It also offers several personalisation options and includes adverts as both click-throughs and display units.

A review of the new application is available on the Eat Sleep Publish blog from social media consultant Jason Preston.