:Journalistopia

Lisa Williams has written what may be one of the best posts about how to adapt to an increasingly technology-driven journalism world.

Lisa, the Placeblogger founder who has a foot planted in both media and technology worlds, impressed the heck out of me at the ONA conference in Toronto when she illustrated how journalism is becoming a high-tech industry. Now I know you’re thinking right now: “Well, I already know we’re becoming high-tech,  Danny. I’m always looking around for new web tools I can use for our site.”

However, journalism becoming a “high-tech industry” doesn’t simply mean we’re using the latest gizmos and knick-knacks to deliver news. It means we’re experiencing a fundamental change in our values, culture and business practices — changes that are more pervasive than you may initially realize. Check out Lisa’s post for some prescient advice on how to deal with it.

[Lisa Williams: Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry]

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Head on over to the conference site for South by Southwest (SXSW) for free video from the media and entertainment conference. You’ll want to particularly peruse the Interactive Coverage. And yes, the much-maligned Zuckerberg/Lacy interview is there too.

I wasn’t one of the fortunate souls who made it out to Texas for the conference, so if you have any specific recommendations on what to watch, do share in the comments.

And to think I just got Netflix this weekend, and I’ll be spending a couple of hours watching tiny pixelated videos of guys talking about media nerd stuff…

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Just got an e-mail letting me know that audio from the Future of Web Apps Miami conference is available. Woot!

For us online news types, these talks are a great chance to get exposed to what’s happening in web technology and to think about how we can apply it to our situation.

These were the talks I thought were the best IMHO:

Cal Henderson from Flickr talks about the software development process and gives boatloads of excellent advice you need to hear if you’re developing applications.

Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV talks about the importance of passion in growing a community (this one really applies to news sites).

Kevin Marks from Google talks about Google’s OpenSocial and the future of social networking.

Blaine Cook from Twitter talks about the future of Twitter and its architecture.

Leah Culver from Pownce talks about opening your web app to the masses (something news sites need to get better at, without jeopardizing their revenue that is..)

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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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MySpace today unveiled a developer platform designed to facilitate the creation of third-party apps for MySpace, ala Facebook applications. If your team has at all been interested in developing Facebook applications, then make sure you’re taking a look at this.

The Official Developer Platform site is here.

Details from the Wall Street Journal on why they’re doing it and why it took so long here.

Story from PC Magazine here.

And the ground rules for monetization, from PaidContent:
– Developers can monetize their canvas page (the page where usrs add these apps to their profiles) and keep all of the revenue
– Developers can use any form of online monetization: ads, sponsorships, product sales, etc.
– MySpace will add in its “HyperTargeting” and “SelfServe” ad products over time.

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Has your news site gotten down with Facebook yet?

Facebook recently launched product pages, where businesses can create profiles to promote themselves. While this has, until recently, been the realm of marketers and club promoters, it’s also a great opportunity for news sites to connect with readers and help shed some of that stale online image.

The Poynter Institute has a page (and yes, I’m officially a “fan”). I noticed some fellow online media bloggers are already fans as well. The New York Times has a page (with 7,000+ fans), as do we here at the Orlando Sentinel (minus the plethora of fans, of course). Searching around shows a few other news sites have hopped aboard.
Whether this is a big traffic driver or not, let’s not forget that a major role of a newspaper is being an important presence in the community. That should include online communities as well. So take a little time out of your day, and get your news site a page on some social networks.

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First, the Allentown Morning Call generated lots of buzz with its popular Breeders and Kennels search widget. Now, they’ve gone and done it again with a new 2007 elections tool that allows users to search a plethora of local elections and embed a widget of the results on a Web page.

Run a search, and check out the “Create a Race Widget” link (it’s small and to the far right) to get some embeddable iframe code. The widgets are available for each race.

[UPDATE: Jeff Johns over at Mccall.com comments: “We have widgets built into our project requirements, we try not to launch a project without a widget. We feel it really connects more users with our content.]

Taking that extra step to create some simple widgets can be easily forgotten in the scramble to get data features up. But widgets are a great opportunity to really serve your online audience and have your content reach more people. Don’t pass it up!

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Live from the ONA conference in Toronto…

Adrian Holovaty looks at a photo of the world’s ugliest dog and sees 1s and 0s.

Displaying a photo of the hideous animal, Holovaty –the big brain behind ChicagoCrime.org and the Python framework Django– says there are loads of data in the ugly dog image. Who/what is the subject? Who took the photo? Where was it taken? When was it taken? What kind of camera was used? What colors are in the photos?

So how can that image, if tagged with metadata, give your site a big advantage? A good example is Flickr, which allows users to search photos by all sorts of non-traditional criteria. The result is a site that is stickier and allows a high degree of browsability, a trait that users nowadays are beginning to view as essential, Holovaty said.

News organizations have reporters attending city council meetings, high school sports games and covering local crimes — something Google doesn’t or can’t do. But rather than just having reporters gather facts and fuse them into a “blob” that is unreadable by machines (aka, a news story), Holovaty wants to also see news organizations compiling that information into a database format that can be easily browsed by users.

“We have all those killer advantages, but the tragedy is that we haven’t actually leveraged the information we collect,” Holovaty said.

How to get started

Being that crime databases are all the rage these days –no thanks to Holovaty– here is a set of processes and tips to get one rolling:

-Analyze the raw data you get from the police department.

-List the data’s fields (Date, time, crime type, address, etc.)

-Identify the key concepts. If a user clicks on a field, is it useful to that user to see the data sorted by that criteria? For instance, browsing by date ishelpful, but case numbers are unique and not really browseable.

-Make list pages with multiple records that are browseable by a certain criteria.

-Then, make detail pages for individual crimes.

-Every piece of information needs to have a permalink. Linkability/bookmarkability is critical, not just for users but also for search engines. “Your Google juice will go up,” Holovaty said.

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Live from the ONA conference in Toronto…

Lisa Williams, founder of H20Town and Placeblogger, says journalism is becoming a high-tech industry that is moving toward the way technology firms operate.

“You guys have mooched much closer to me,” said Williams, a veteran of the technology industry.

When Williams began H20Town, she took delight at working faster than the local newspaper and gaining an audience “because I could hit ‘Enter’ first.” But now, she says, the local newspaper is publishing breaking news and implementing more Web 2.0 tools.

Williams offered several strategies for media organizations trying to navigate the online world. Among my favorites:

-Take something that used to cost money and make it free. Why let the next Craig Newmark steal your readers?

-The Web rewards “narrow comprehensiveness.” Create a product that is “everything about something” very specific.

-Limits are good. Because newspapers try hard to be all things to all readers, media organizations subsequently port that same mentality to their online products. Instead, focus on creating great, key features that will gain many fans, such as Twitter has done with their service.

I think most mainstream media organizations have slurped the Kool-Aid and realized that we need to embrace technology. But how?

Sitting in this room full of journalists from some of the biggest news organizations in the world, I can’t help but realize that we just might be somewhat like the blind leading the blind. Nearly every group of journalists I come across asks the same questions. We desperately need to seek out the wisdom of other industries to help us navigate through the dark.

Let’s be totally shameless and emulate the ways technology companies operate. Let’s start swiping great talent from Apple, Microsoft and Google. Let’s gain some street cred among technology enthusiasts so they can help us evangelize our journalism. Let’s become educated about the techniques used to develop software. And, as many others have said before, let’s nurture real entrepreneurship in our news organizations backed with actual rewards.

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For those of you living under a Web 2.0-less rock, Twitter is the latest application to take the Internet by storm. Twitter allows users to send microupdates of 140 text characters or less to friends via instant message, RSS, mobile text alerts and more.

Doesn’t this sound like an ideal way to deliver news to Web savvy folks? Of course it does. Poynter has a great column about it here.

But you’re going to hit a road bump if some well-meaning denizen of the Internet has already claimed your news site’s name at twitter.com/yournewssite.

So mosey on over to Twitter (and Pownce if you have an invite), register for an account, and claim your name before it’s too late!

Go do it right now.

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Crime maps of all flavors are the rage nowadays ever since developer/journalist Adrian Holovaty created the now-famous ChicagoCrime.org in May, 2005.

These days, everyone from independent designers to large newspaper companies are creating crime maps, causing severe headaches for police PIOs nationwide. So for all your crime map perusing needs, below is a directory of maps pulled together with tremendous help from the denizens of the Online News Association listserv. If you know of any other neat crime maps, drop a note in the comments. Or if you’re shy, just message me at dansanufATyahoo.com.

Some maps, such as the LA Times’ homicide map, only map killings but go into extraordinary detail for each incident. Others, such as Oakland Crimespotting, pull in a broad range of data. Many of the crime maps –and some of the slickest– were put together by small publications and designers not directly affiliated with news organizations. (NOTE: I did not list online maps created by police agencies.)

You’ll find maps here that have been created using the Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping APIs. You’ll also find maps that are created using anything from Ruby on Rails, Python/Django and PHP to using WYSIWYG tools such as Google My Maps, ZeeMaps and CommunityWalk.

(And on a personal note, please make sure to follow good search engine optimization practices if you build a crime map. Some of these maps are really hard to find without a direct link!)

CRIME MAPS

Auto Crime Map & Alcohol Violations: Minors in Possession Map
Lawrence Journal-World
http://www2.ljworld.com/data/alcohol_violations/mip/
http://www2.ljworld.com/crimes/auto/
And the award for most booze sold to minors in Lawrence, Kansas goes to The Hawk at 1340 Ohio St. See it on a map of venues that got busted selling alochol to minors. And, see a Google Map of auto thefts/burglaries, broken down by item value, car type and more.

Arizona Crime Reports
Arizona Republic
Uses a search-form based interface with the Google API
http://www.azcentral.com/CrimeMaps/

Bakersfield.com Homicide Map
Bakersfield Californian
ZeeMaps-based Google Map of homicides with sidebar and multi-colored points
http://www.bakersfield.com/homicidemap/

Baltimore Homicides in 2007
Baltimore Sun
Google Map of homicides only using dropdowns for navigation
http://essentials.baltimoresun.com/micro_sun/homicides/

Berkeley Ca Crime Log
Unknown
ChicagoCrime.org-style interface with multiple pages of Google Maps
http://berkeleyca.crimelog.org

Bloodhound
Northwest Florida Daily News
Google Map with color-coded markers, filtering options and text from police reports
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/crimemap

ChicagoCrime.org
Adrian Holovaty
The original gangsta that started it all
http://chicagocrime.org/

Crime Watch Newport News
Daily Press (Newport News, Va.)
Searchable database and interactive map with way cool tag cloud features
http://dailypress2.com/crime/nn/

Duval County Homicide Data Search
Florida Times-Union
Uses a search-form based interface with the Yahoo Maps API. Maps homicide data only
http://www.jacksonville.com/databases/news/homicides/index.shtml

EveryBlock
Adrian Holovaty and company
Another Holovaty production, this time including highly browseable crime data, inspections, news stories and much more about Chicago, San Francisco and New York.
http://www.everyblock.com/

FresnoBee.com Crime Map
Frenso Bee
Google Map with multi-colored points and a polished interface
http://www.fresnobee.com/static/crime/

Grand Rapids, Michigan Crime Map
John Winkelman
Google Map of crime incidents in Grand Rapids, Michigan created via XML file
http://crime.eccesignum.org/

Houston Crime Maps
Unknown
ChicagoCrime.org-style interface with multiple pages of Google Maps
http://houstoncrimemaps.com

Indy 911 Calls
Indianapolis Star
Yahoo Map of recent 911 calls with description abbreviations and nice police badge icons
http://indy911calls.com

Copenhagen Police Crime Mashup
Døgnrapporten, København
Uses a 100% width and height and overlays the map tools onto the map for a nice visual effect.
http://www.dognrapporten.dk/

LakelandLocal.com Crime Map
Lakeland Local, using CommunityWalk
Weekly links to CommunityWalk Google maps with unique icons
http://lakelandlocal.com/archives/crime_map/

LA Times.com The Homicide Map, Lost Angeles County victims
Los Angeles Times
An intensely statistical look at homicide information in Los Angeles complete with photos and short bios about many of the victims
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/homicidemap/

Misdaadkaart.nl
A series of searchable Google Maps using slick icons
http://www.misdaadkaart.nl/

Monitor Cuidadano
Lavoz.com.ar
Interactive crime map of the city of Corboda, Argentina (in Spanish) done using Flash
http://monitor.lavoz.com.ar/

New Haven Crime Log
New Haven Independent
Drills down deep into crime categories with multiple Google Maps, a color-based severity scale and an hour-by-hour time slider
http://www.newhavencrimelog.org/

Oakland Crimespotting
Stamen Design
A slickly designed map using Microsoft Virtual Earth, featuring a chronological slider and e-mail alerts http://oakland.crimespotting.org/

Orlando Crime Map
Orlando Sentinel
Crime map of Orlando incidents, updated weekly, with two ways to search: via Google Map menu or via ChicagoCrime.org-style browsing.
http://www.orlandosentinel2.com/data/crime/
PhillyCrime.org
Joshua B. Plotkin with Amir Karger
Uses data from the Philadelphia Inquirer to map searchable data from 2006 and 1996
http://www.phillycrime.org/

RichmondCrime.org
PharrOut
Uses search forms to navigate a series of Google Maps; also has an interesting crime graph generator http://richmondcrime.org/

Spec’s Police Blotter
Hamilton Spectator
A weekly Google My Maps map of the Spectator’s police blotter
Blotter Link (Click The Spec’s Police Blotter” link under “What’s Hot” at http://www.thespec.com/)

Springfield (Ore.) crime map
The Register-Guard, Eugene, Ore.
Google Map with hand-edited incident descriptions covering the previous week
http://projects.registerguard.com:8080/springfield/crime-map/

TBO Crime Tracker
Tampa Tribune
A map of law enforcement calls using a Django-based back end
http://data.tbo.com/crime/

Toronto Marijuana Grow Operations & Homicides Since 2005
Toronto Star
Two Google Map-based plotting killings and marijuana houses with some custom Javascript in the sidebar.
http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?xml=growops.xml
http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?xml=homicides.xml

***

More geotopia in the Maps category. More lists and tutorials in the Journalistopia Tutorials category.

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The L.A. Times editorial board on Saturday scoffed at the principles of free speech and open information with an editorial claiming that “Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden.”

The Times is upset by the fact that Google will be allowing the people who are written about in stories to comment via their Google News service. It says that Google “isn’t journalism.”

Google is a search engine and content aggregator. This huffing about Google not being journalism is akin to lambasting the guy who drives the newspaper delivery truck for not having a journalism degree.

Nevertheless, the Times does not cite copyright issues in its editorial.

It does not discuss the difficulty in managing such a comment system.

It does not even ask how it will verify the contributors’ identities (never mind that Times editorials carry no bylines — a whole other issue).

But it does assert that “a seemingly heartfelt comment may carry the CEO’s name, but the words will probably have been typed by corporate flacks.” Fair enough, but what about the comments made by experts with thoughtful insights? What about the lady who was inaccurately reported dead telling the world she is, indeed, alive. What about the families of disaster victims who simply want to thank the world for their prayers?

I quote from the Times’ own editorial board mission statement:

On the editorial page, the newspaper sets aside its objective news-gathering role to join its readers in a dialogue about important issues of the day.

The Times is offended by the notion that the people who contribute comments to Google News will be making them “unedited.” This means the comments will not be altered and filtered by people like the writer of the Times editorial, who has such splendid judgment as to compare a medium we use to learn about the world in unprecedented ways as being equivalent to an extremist who murdered nearly 3,000 people.

This is exactly the kind of idiotic hubris that causes the public to hate journalists and, by extension, the journalism they produce. It is also the sort of attitude that could throttle the life out of newspapers online and make the prophecies of out-of-touch opinion mongers come true.

I can only pray that today’s newspaper leaders do not have the same lowly opinion of the Internet and public forums as do the Times‘ editorial board. If so, we journalists are in worst trouble than I thought.

***

More responses from Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review, Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and Amy Webb at MyDigiMedia.

And a reminder of exactly to what the editorial board has compared Google:

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