Falling Off A Blog

dConstruct

Today I'm in Brighton, at the dConstruct conference organised by ClearLeft. Ahead of me is a whole day discussing how to build the next generation of web experiences.

Hack is back

Ian Reeves, the former editor of Press Gazette, has reappeared with a blog about video journalism.

I thought Ian was a strong, innovative editor during a tough period for Press Gazette. I've added him to my long list of feeds.

We're in today's Guardian

Katie Allen has done a great piece in today's Guardian looking at the online initiatives of my employer, the business publisher Reed Business Information. Katie spent a morning with me and some of RBI's bloggers and online editors last week. I think the passion and enthusiasm of our people really comes across.

Emap's Web 2.0 move

Mobile and video are two of the sexiest topics in online publishing. Emap has made a move on both fronts by buying YoSpace, which produces software and services that allow people to upload video from their mobile phones. Emap isn't saying much about what it plans to do with its new toys, but it can't be long before we see some of Emap's magazine websites offering mobile-uploaded user videos.

Links 4 Feb 2007

• Martin Stabe on the difference between blogging and journalism
• Forrester recently produced a report on the ROI of blogging for companies. Unfortunately you have to pay for the report, but one of its authors, Charlene Li, has blogged about it
• Chuck Olsen's 2004 documentary, taking an in-depth look at blogging, has been put up on Google Video. Long (over an hour) but worth watching.
• Much shorter is this great little video about web 2.0

Training for 21st century journalists

I'm back in the loop after a couple of weeks of heavy workload. Got a backlog of things I want to talk about.

But I'll start with something I saw today. Danny Sanchez on Journalistopia has put together a short list of useful links to training resources for online journalists, and invited additions.

One link I'd certainly add is to the BBC's journalism college website, which has just been launched to the public according to Press Gazette. It has a bunch of online courses, covering radio, video and web journalism, and promises that there is more to come.

Journalism 1.0 fights back

Joel Stein over at the LA Times has written a great column today taking a stand against the emerging new orthodoxy of Journalism 2.0/participative journalism:

Here's what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don't want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don't listen to them either. That sound on the phone, Mom, is me typing.

I don't agree with a word he says, but he talks rubbish in such an entertaining way.

Get it while it's hot - links

• US newspaper executives have been working hard on their strategies to revamp print and re-invent their online offerings. Rick Edmonds at Poynter Online has produced a roundup of the stories that they have been pitching to analysts and investors.
• Want to know which websites are read by the 100 most prolific "diggers" on Digg? Here's a lists.
• Wikia, a wiki from the people behind Wikipedia, has announced a new service called Openserving that offers "FREE software, FREE bandwidth, FREE storage, FREE computing power, FREE content over the Internet, and GIVING AWAY 100% of the ad inventory and revenue". So how are they going to make money?
• A nice side-by-side comparison of 61 video sharing services.
• How to find free-to-use pics on Flickr to illustrate your blog posts or news stories.
• A rather grandly titled manifesto to save American journalism from Geneva Overholser of the Huffington Post.
• Publishers have spent millions developing online publishing systems. Now anyone have have one for free, thanks to PublicSquareHQ, whose new online software allows you to publish stories, create your own design, manage citizen journalists and edit their copy.
• A nice review of the top web technology trends of 2006 by Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb.

Growing communities

Rich Gordon at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, has written a great piece on the opportunity for newspapers and magazines to build online communities.

Gordon says:

Online communities, it seems to me, are still mostly a missed opportunity for newspapers and most other traditional media companies

One key reason is that media companies have the "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. These companies consider themselves to be content publishers, so they've seen the Web primarily as a publishing medium. It's people and companies unencumbered by a publishing mindset that have built the great online community sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Slashdot, and eBay (a community site as well as an auction site).

Another problem for publishing is an unwillingness to devote real resources and expertise to online communities. News organizations seem to think that content creation is the only job worth devoting staff time to. But enabling story comments or establishing message boards isn't enough. Communities, online or off, need staff attention. Without one or more people to provide leadership, guidance, support, and a willingness to respond to or delete off-topic or hostile comments, many online communities lie barren or descend into name-calling and profanity.

This issue of devoting adequate resources to community interaction is a serious one for publishers. They employ lots of people (journalists) who define their value in terms of the content they create. Ironically, these people have many of the skills needed to build and run communities - the ability to communicate clearly and in an engaginging way, to see patterns and pull out the key points from large buckets of information, to persuade people to tell their stories. But they need to change what they do if they are to use these skills to build communities. As well as creators of content they need to be curators, guiding users to the good stuff, and "sowers of seeds", stimulating and nurturing discussion and debate.

Gordon points out that the success of communities usually depends on the activity of a small minority of the community, the "super-users" who are the most active contributors and who help to nurture and police the community. Learning how to attract and "grow" these super-users is critical.

Gordon finishes off his piece with some pearls of wisdom and a list of resources for community builders.

Semantic Web explained

If you've mastered PageRank (see my last post) why not try getting your frontal lobes round the Semantic Web?  I've just come across a month-old post on Richard MacManus' Read/WriteWeb blog which does a pretty good job of explaining in simple terms what the Semantic Web is all about, and the various approaches to making it a reality (obviously this is my week for finding good backgrounders).

Sometimes referred to as web 3.0, the Semantic Web is the familiar bottomless bucket of web pages that we know today, but described in a way that enables search engines and other web software to actually understand the meaning of what's on those pages, rather than just knowing what letters, colours etc they contain. So you should be able to ask unstructured questions such as "where can I drink in London after 2am?" and get sensible answers (such as "don't be stupid, it's a work night, go home and get some sleep"?).

Incidentally, I have an alternative candidate for the label "Web 3.0". But I'll save that for another post. (No, it's NOT mobile)