Monthly Archives: February 2008

Come and sit at my table – RSS and serendipity

Posted on by
3

One of things about wordpress that is interesting and annoying in equal measure is the dashboard. For those who don’t wordpress: it’s the front page of the admin area.It’s got some useful stuff on there. But it is, for the most part, a feed for WordPress news stories.
Now I often find myself clicking on them as they point to new plugins or bug fixes ( a fact of life with open source software) and one I link I will often click to is Matt Mullenweg who actually created worsdpress.

Why tell you this. Well on his blog he has a syndicate section with all the usual RSS stuff. But he also has the following:

How do I feel about syndication? A long time ago Jeffrey Zeldman said something to this effect:
Q: If you offered an RSS feed, I could read your stuff without visiting your site.
A: If you stored your groceries on the sidewalk, we could eat your food without sitting across the table from you.
I’m not going to force you to, but come sit at my table and we can have jolly good time. There is so much on this site that by its very nature will never be available in syndicated format. Come for the words, stay for the pictures, jazz quotes, and useless contemporia.

Does that make me want to cut my feeds or hack them back so that you need to visit the site to read the full story. No. I know it’s an important way to consume information. But when many MSM organisatiosn are re-positioning themselves as the community hub – the big dinner table- it does make me think. Especially if, as some have predicted, the homepage is dead.

We need to work a little harder at how our RSS feeds work.

Really simple serendipity

One of the joys of a newspaper is the serendipity of news. For every story we want to read we may find one we didn’t know about that is equally interesting.

Feeds aren’t like that. They are usually automated, organised and published with structure in mind. I get a news feed or a specific sports feed.

Perhaps what we need to do is start peppering our news feeds with other content. maybe we just need to syndicate everything ? I’m not sure.

I think our news feeds need to stay organised (that’s how people use them) but maybe they are too much about the contents of our fridge at the moment. Maybe we need to think of them more like menus with free samples (and before the word free is misinterpreted, no that doesn’t mean I support pay walls) to entice people in to sit at our tables.

That means we need to know even more about our audience. After all you don’t want just anyone eating at your table.

Maps, spreadsheets, yahoo pipes and post offices

Posted on by
21

NOTE: I’ve updated this post to show how to do the same thing using Fusion tables rather than pipes 

Over the last few weeks I have been teaching second year students a number of digital tools. This week it was Google maps and I thought I would share the process I went through to create a map/mash up example to show them.

So here is the map.


View Larger Map

Google doc publishNot too interesting I know. It’s a map of post office closures in areas of the UK shown on a website called public servant daily last October. I just did a search around for the list based on a quick think about a geographically relevant story and this was the first site that popped up with data that looked copy and pasteable.

What I figured I needed was a list of postcodes that I could some how convert in to a feed that Google maps would understand. Now you can point the spreadsheet directly at a map via Google maps spreadsheet importer thingy but I didn’t want to do a lot of hand converting post codes in to lat/long information.  There are some tools that will do it, like this one, but they all seem to need some kind of preformatting. So I needed something that would do that ‘more’ automatically. That’s where yahoo pipes came in.

A quick search around pipes found me several examples of postcode conversion pipes to play with.

Setting up a spreadsheet

So to start I cut and paste the data in to a Google spreadsheet. If you look at the sheet you can see it is actually a bit of a mess in places but it’s raw data. Truth be told I went through excel to do some column splitting and then combining to get the postcode out of the address.

Next step was to publish the spreadsheet so I could use the data. You can publish in a number of formats but the pipes examples I had seen used CSV (comma separated values) and that seemed easier than trying to deliver the RSS feed.

 

Publsish the csv

publish your spreadsheet as a csv file

The publish option gives you a URL for the CSV feed. By setting the publish options to automatically update I knew it would be the most up to date.

Yahoo pipes

Yahoo pipes

The postcode to lat/long pipe

Now that I had the feed I needed to get it in to pipes. So the first block is the Fetch CSV (found in Sources) option. This essentially gets the csv feed published from Google docs and spits it out in a list based on the columns in the sheet.

Then a loop block (found in operators) takes each item in the spreadsheet and runs a Location builder operation. To combine the two, you add the loop operator and then drop the Location Builder in to the space.

 

Loop and location

Drop the location builder pipe on the loop

The location builder “converts a description of a place into geographical data.” You can see that is set to use column 4 as the location- that’s the postcode – so we can generate the lat and long information that google needs to plot the points on a map.

The output of that loop are packaged up in the item.loop.locationbuilder results. So the last thing to do is make sure that the results are in a format that Google maps can understand. As far as I understand it Google plays with the Geocode RSS format and fitting with that convention seemed to be the norm on other pipes. So the next box takes each element and renames it in to something more Geocode friendly.

I’ve used column 1, the post office name and column 5, the post office address (or a truncated version) as a description. The lat and long results from the location builder are then renamed to match the requirement for geocode RSS.

The result of that is then plugged in to the pipe output.

Get a feed

RSS from pipesWhen you save the pipe you can then run it and it spits out a fairly plain list. You can subscribe to the list of results in a number of ways including the RSS with all the geocode content. If you right-click over the link you can copy the url.

If you take that link over to Google maps and paste the RSS url in to the maps search box. Hey presto! the results are plotted.

You can then click the Link to this page option and gather the link data to embed on your site. Result!

Conclusion

This may be old hat to some. New to others. What pleased me was how easy this was made by the way pipes allows you to share and edit other peoples work. It feeds my approach of ‘oh, that’s good you could use that to do this..” hacking.

I’m also thinking that the new Google forms thing will make interesting addition to this mix. All it needs is a bit more data and more flexible pipe to make for richer content and things could get very mapalicious. Hope there is something there to play with.

Raw material

Do video to attract video

Posted on by
Reply

Mark Hamilton pointed me to a post by Minimediaguy Tom Abate who picked up on some comscore research on the time spent by users watching video.

Marks take:

Newspapers have to make a serious commitment to good video storytelling — not just getting moving pictures online —, given that there are plenty of others out there also after all those eyeballs.

Tom’s response? Forget it. Spend more time getting that USG stuff.

What are the chances of a reporter getting a video of that? Nil! What are the chances of a citizen with a cell phone grabbing some gruesomely good footage. Pretty darn good though it seems NOT to have happened here. Now here’s the real question for newspapers: if someone had grabbed that video of the tiger attacking the kid, would that person have thought of uploading it to the local paper? And if the person called the damn paper would anyone there (on Christmas Day mind you!) to know what to do to get that video from the citizen’s device, to the paper’s website, and under what terms and conditions of payment or not.

Good points. But I’m not sure that the public can be the great pot content we think they are if we don’t support them.  I would be interested in seeing some stats about the number of people uploading content (the editorially useful ‘life’ video) Vs those who watch. But the point about being geared up for it is a good one.

My argument would be that perhaps the best way to get geared up and also be recognised as an organisation to contact with your video would be to be seen doing it yourself.  People upload to youtube because they see other peoples stuff.

If you want them to show you theirs then you perhaps, need to show them a bit of yours.

Otherwise, and call me naive perhaps the audience may think that you might be a bit exploitative. No?

links for 2008-02-27

Posted on by
Reply

We feel fine – new storytelling

Posted on by
1

wefeelfine

This may be the most exquisite site I have seen on the web – and obviously I’m behind the game since it started in 2005. We feel fine is an aggregation of statements from blogs that contain the word “I feel” or “I am feeling”. It displays them in a number of different ways including a pic/statement mashup like the one above. In some ways it’s the least interesting of the views and any description just doesn’t do it justice. Go and have a play.

Here is the guy behind it – Jonathan Harris - talking about the inspiration and his next project:

If that name doesn’t ring a bell then perhaps his work doe. He is the guy behind an inspirational bit of multimedia called whalehunt.

If that’s all a bit esoteric for your taste then check out his Universe project – He mentions it in the film. Mapping stories as constellations. Fantastic

Universe

Here is one view generated from the word earthquake

 

Thanks to Nic Haralambous for the link

A video strategy – Rewriting the script.

Posted on by
Reply

A heavy time of teaching and prep – I’ve been called to do Jury Service in a week or so – has kept me away from the blog. My stats have been pretty healthy though thanks to my little video contribution to the Carnival of journalism – a video guide to video strategy.

The response has been pretty uniform – this is funny because it’s true.

I’m two parts happy with that because it proves I’m not just imagining the issues. But I’m two parts sad because it proves we still have a way to go.

Of course the videos tale the piss out of the implementation of the strategies rather than the strategies themselves. That’s what is frustrating. There are fundamentally good, proven reasons why each of these strategies (or a mix) will work, it all depends on how they are applied.

In an excellent ‘rebuttal’, Cyndy Green has her own low-fi response.

I couldn’t disagree with anything in that film. The key is the way the thing is sold.

I suppose the biggest illustration of this is not what’s in my videos but what isn’t. The films have no dialogue. There is script but no conversation. The voice dictates to the journalist.

Sad isn’t it that, given the tacit understanding that  radical change in our industry is the move from lecture to conversation, we don’t communicate effectively internally.

So here is a script. Perhaps you’d like to pass it on to your manager and you can role play it.

Scene 1: Mangers and journalists/photographers (journographers) have walked out of a seminar on ‘web awareness’ where a web savvy journo/manager/reader has been showing employees some neat things on the web they may have missed as they are up to their eyes in deadlines for copy.

Manager - that video thing is pretty exciting isn’t it?

Journographer - yeah, but looks tricky. Might be cool though.

Manger: Could make us some money. Why don’t I use my 20% time to look at some similar set ups and how they are doing it and you do the same.

Journographer – yeah, why not.

Scene 2: The manager and journographer have got together a few days later. They are round a computer looking at some of the sites they found.

Journographer: It’s exciting stuff but it could be time consuming. Some places are doing this point and shoot stuff as a quick way of getting it off the ground.

Manager – yeah, but what about the quality?

Journographer – Good point but it seems the high end kit is still pricey  and takes a long time to learn.

Manager: Hmmm. I know. I just don’t think we can wait to get that amount of money cleared…What about if try the point and shoot thing and see if we can get a sponsor. If it works then we can look at investing more.

Journographer: Sounds good. I think there are one or two others who have been doing the slideshow thing who will be up for having a go at something else.

Manager: Great. Look, I know it’s a bit more work. But if you can get a couple of people together I will see if we can find a video person to come in and spend half-a-day with you.

Journographer: OK. Let’s give it a go.

Okay, so it’s all a bit rose tinted. But is that kind of conversation so difficult?  Don’t make me make another video…

Geek note: For those who are interested the vid’s where made with my storyboard moleskine, my Sony Cybershot stills camera, Photoshop (to crop and tweak), FC Express to edit the images together and Garageband to add the spot effects and music. Then Visuahub to convert to a format for Youtube

Oh, and many, many thanks for the complimentary comments. Much appreciated.

links for 2008-02-24

Posted on by
2

links for 2008-02-21

Posted on by
Reply