:Journalistopia

Kathy Sierra talked about creating passionate users earlier today, but Gary Vaynerchuk talked about creating passionate OWNERS.

Vaynerchuk, host of the popular Wine Library TV online video show, worked his way into the hearts of the crowd here at the Future of Web Apps conference by sharing his passion for his community (and boozing us up with a little wine passed out to the crowd).

You should pay close attention to what he has to say if you operate a news site. Vaynerchuk is not a computer expert (“I built a 15 million-dollar liquor store on Control C and Control V”); he’s a wine expert. And he’s passionate, passionate, passionate about his community:

“I fly all over the country just to drink wine with people.”

“You’ve got to have the DNA of your community.”

“There needs to be a face to your company. You have to take care of those people until your bleeding out of your f***ing g****mn face.”

“You need to love your community more than you love yourself.”

“You’ve got to have someone in the trenches. Someone people can touch.”

I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say that perhaps doesn’t sound like your ombudsman — if your news operation even has one any more, that is. Some news sites have hired “community managers,” usually to manage message boards and community-contibuted content.  But is that person a visible presence on the site? Have people seen his face? Does the person have public conversations with readers? Does that person really love where he works?

And most important of all, are you making an effort to brand that person as being a community resource, or is he just another mysterious byline? Do people know this person exists? Vaynerchuk said it best:

“You always hear ‘content is king’. The fact of the matter is marketing and branding is the queen, and we know who runs the household.”

If people can’t name your community manager, if they can’t relate to that person or get an e-mail returned quickly –then really, what’s the point?

It’s become increasingly clear that tomorrow’s web is going to be shaped by openness — OpenID, open standards, open business practices, etc. Consequently, your news site is going to need someone reliable to whom people can go for answers.

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Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users is on the mic right now talking about how to engage users and make them passionate about your web app.

While Sierra’s talking about software development, I can’t help but think that much of what she says also applies to print newsroom staff who are trying to embrace the online medium.

Sierra talks about a “suck threshold”, the point at which a person is unskilled with a particular tool, and a passion threshold, where a user really begins to understand how to use a tool and can really begin loving it.

In newsrooms, folks often experience lots of initial excitement about a particular web technology — usually things like  Flash, Soundslides, recording audio and video, working in the content-management system, Twittering or any other number of things. But what happens when they start getting into the nitty-gritty of Flash and realize how freakin’ hard it really is? Or they start using Twitter, don’t get followers and kinda wade in the dark on how to use it?

That “suck threshold”, as Kathy says, is the time a user is most likely to give up on any skill. It’s at that time that your Web staff and power users need to step in and really guide the print folks in becoming comfortable with a technology.

Oftentimes, we think selling them on using a tool is the biggest battle. It’s important, but it’s not the end of the war. Your staff must overcome that often-difficult learning curve before the battle is won.

SOME TIPS:

-Once a technology is identified, have regularly scheduled training for it.  Do a monthly training with the tool or colaborate regularly with a mentor at another publication. The biggest sin I see is editors sending a staffer to this-or-that intensive two-day workshop to learn Flash. The staffer returns, starts playing with the tool, produces one quick project, and then eventually gives up when they don’t get practice and can’t advance their skills to the next level.

-Focus on creating a project, not on learning a tool. How many of you sit there and say “This is SO awesome; I’m going to spend my whole day learning how to use this power saw!” Using a saw is boring. Using a saw to create a custom cabinet for your house is awesome. Focus on the end result, and you’ll learn the skills along the way.

-Have patience. The first projects a new user creates are going to be pretty lousy (I know mine are!). Let your staffers know you expect them to fail sometimes, and that it’s OK; they’re learning. If you provide regular training and encouragement, you’ll reap the dividends.

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The Orlando Sentinel Posse is here in Miami for the 2008 Future of Web Apps Conference, where he hope to figure out how we can peer into the future of web technology and apply it to the media.

A few quick tidbits: Josh Hallett of Hyku is at the front of the room snapping away, so catch his Flickr photoset and many others tagged fowamiami2008 throughout the day. Sentinel tech writer Etan Horowitz will be blogging today on the new Etan on Tech blog. And, catch Sentinel designer and Twitterholic extraordinaire Bill Couch’s feed here.

More in a bit.

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A heads-up, mostly for fellow Floridians: FREE registration for BarCamp Orlando is open today!

What is BarCamp? Event organizer Gregg Pollack says it best:

BarCampOrlando is a community building event, which happens twice a year to bring together people from different backgrounds to share and learn from each other. There will be people who know Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, and other technologies coming together for Dev Day, and there will be people who know film, music, photography, graphic design, podcasting, and even other new Media coming together for Media Day.

Yours truly was there last year, and it was uber cool. It’s a fantastic opportunity to meet local tech folks and learn about cutting edge stuff, some of which you’ll soon be seeing in newsrooms. And best of all, it won’t cost you a dime.

So seeya at BarCamp Orlando!

[NOTE: Speaking of nerd conferences, I'll be at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami tomorrow, along with Bill and Etan.]

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Think MySpace and Facebook are the be-all and end-all of social networking? Well, that’s not the case if you live in France, Brazil, Russia or any other number of countries.

French news site Le Monde has put together an interesting infographic on which social networks are most popular in which countries. While MySpace and Facebook are clearly the most popular, other sites such as Orkut, Bebo, Cyworld and Skyblog are more popular elsewhere.

And, on a sentimental note, my old blog service LiveJournal is the most popular in Russia. Folks, my pals and I in high school were using LiveJournal back before blogging was called “blogging” (come to think of it, what DID we call it back then? Journaling? LiveJournaling? *shrug*). Ah, we all dispersed so much teenage angst out on the Net…

[Hat tip to Mashable]

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The Newspaper Association of America announced the winners of the 2008 Digital Edge Awards. (Hopefully an Edgie for PolitiFact will help my ol’ pal Matt Waite get over his recent Web host meltdown). And the winners are:

This year’s Online Innovator Award went to Dan Shorter for his work at PalmBeachPost.com. As of this week, Dan is moving to the Star-Tribune in Minnesota.

The winners of the 2008 Digital Edge Awards are:

Best Overall Newspaper Web Site

LJWorld.com, The Lawrence Journal-World/The World Co. (circ. < 75,000)

Knoxnews.com, Knoxville News Sentinel (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

PolitiFact.com, St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly (circ. > 250,000)

Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site

Lawrence.com, The World Co. (circ. < 75,000)

Austin360.com, Austin American-Stateman (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

Vita.mn, Minneapolis Star Tribune (circ. > 250,000)

Best Local Shopping and Directory Strategy

LJWorld.com Marketplace, The World Co. (circ. < 75,000)

Mobile Shopping Directory, The Palm Beach Post (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

ChicagoTribune.com Shopping Channel and Metromix Boutiques, Tribune Interactive (circ. > 250,000)

Best Digital Advertising Program

I Lassoed Lance, Amarillo Globe-News (circ. < 75,000)

Online Carousel, Dayton Daily News (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

Homepage Experience Campaign, Minneapolis Star Tribune (circ. > 250,000)

Best Digital Classified Innovation

No winner (circ. < 75,000)

Increase Renewals with Automated E-mails, The Palm Beach Post (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

Real Estate Video Tours, The Dallas Morning News (circ. > 250,000)

Most Innovative Multimedia Storytelling

24 Hours in Lawrence Lawrence Journal-World/The World Co. (circ. < 75,000)

BrokenTrust, Sarasota Herald-Tribune (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

A People Torn, Minneapolis Star Tribune (circ. > 250,000)

Most Innovative Use of Interactive Media

PigskinReview.com, Amarillo Globe-News (circ. < 75,000)

Ultimate Local Band Site and Text Voting Contest, tbt* Tampa Bay Times (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

The Issues Tracker and HD Video Podcasts, washingtonpost.com (circ. > 250,000)

Most Innovative Visitor Participation

Creating a Two-Way Conversation with Our Community, Savannahnow.com/Savannah Morning News (circ. < 75,000)

School Matters Knoxnews.com/Knoxville News Sentinel (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

cincyMOMS.com, Cincinnati Enquirer (circ. > 250,000)

Best Design and Site Architecture

PrepZone.com, Naples Daily News (circ. < 75,000)

Knoxnews.com, Knoxville News Sentinel (circ. 75,000 – 250,000)

washingtonpost.com, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (circ. < 250,000)

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If you’re not careful, “feature creep” can cause a project to get buried under additional requirements, resulting in big delays and a lousy outcome. Photo by wilderdom

Web development and design blog Six Revisions has a fantastic article on how to prevent “feature creep,” otherwise known as the tendency for managers and clients to tack on additional features to a project at later phases, resulting in significant delays, broken code and –often– an overall crappier result.

The number one solution, according to Six Revisions: Dedicate enough time to requirements gathering and making sure stakeholders understand what the outcome of the project should be. If something is an essential feature, it should be documented from the get-go.

From one of the tips:

Be clear on what it is, exactly, you’re developing for them. Don’t promise a grand, exciting, but ambiguous/ambitious end result. Instead of giving broad generalizations such as “I’ll be developing a search engine optimized website”, try to outline the deliverables that you will provide

Along with my previous post this morning about Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 usability sins, this is another article you should read if you have anything to do with projects for your news site.

Six Revisions: Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep

[Via Digg]

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More great cartoons at XKCD.

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For all you aspiring journo-programmers, Microsoft has a treat for you: free software! Woot!

Microsoft is launching a new initiative, DreamSpark, to offer up development and design software free to students, probably in hopes of weaning them from open-source solutions. The following expensive software will be offered free to students as part of the program:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• XNA Creators Club Online

It doesn’t get any better than pricey software for free, my friends, especially if ASP.NET (Microsoft’s flavor of Web development) is your bag. Kinda makes you want to go take a community college course for that student ID just to take advantage of this free stuff (plus 2 bucks off movies, of course).

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Usability guru Jakob Nielsen published an article yesterday outlining the top 10 mistakes one can make when designing a Web application. Nielsen says:

Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand.

The last one, (c), is most often found on news sites. One culprit (among many) is editors’ desire to spell out as many details as possible to reade…er…users, often resulting in a clunky and convoluted user experience. Folks, a web application is not an A1 news package.

Nielsen covers such usability sins as standard elements (radio buttons, dropdowns) behaving in unexpected ways, small click targets and not having progress bars or other elements to indicate something is going on.

Even if you don’t personally get into the nitty-gritty of designing Web apps, you should take a look at this article. Nielsen’s article will increase your usability IQ and help you provide more insightful feedback on projects that cross your desk.

More from Nielsen here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-mistakes.html

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Editor & Publisher just released Nielsen data for the top 30 newspaper sites.

The nutshell: Tampabay.com, the Star Tribune and Post-Gazette are new to the list. Newsday is down a bit, and Politico is up.

More here.

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Photo by Constantelevitation

Do you ever get upset at the long hours, low pay, public contempt, pinheaded editors or any other tomfoolery that goes on in the newsroom? Well, now you can finally let it all out guilt-free (that is, unless you’re already one of those anonymous Poynter message boarders) at AngryJournalist.com.

There, you’ll find such gems as the following posting:

[Exchange with a newsroom recruiter]
Me: “I just want to be a newspaper man.”
Recruiter: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Me: “What?”
Recruiter: “When you say newspapers people think dinosaur. Let’s not even call it a newspaper, let’s call it a data center .. You know we have a TV studio in our newsroom.”

Go f*** yourself…

Or concise gripes such as these:

bosses sans grammar

And the postings from the students are quite a gas too:

I had to do a story on the janitorial staff in my school and it was a profile. At first they were okay with it, and then they weren’t. I don’t understand why it was so complicated for one thing. JEEZ

Young’un, you don’t know the half of it. Check out AngryJournalist.com for more entertaining rants.

[Hat tip to Will Sullivan]

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