:Journalistopia

Just announced: 2008’s Webby Award winners! The Webby Awards picks through the best of the Web and grants awards in more categories than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve pored through the list and extracted the winners from news-related categories, as well as news organizations that won in other categories, such as science or best practices. Here’s the Journalistopia-edited list. Apologies in advance if I missed anyone:

Best Copy/Writing
Wired.com
http://www.wired.com
(Also nominated: HowStuffWorks, Design Observer, NYTimes.com and Slate)

Best Use of Photography
Your Shot - National Geographic Magazine
http://ngm.com/yourshot

Blog - Business
FT.com Alphaville
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/

Blog - Political
The Huffington Post
http://huffingtonpost.com

Broadband
ABC.com Full Episode Player
http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streami…

Magazine
National Geographic Magazine Online
http://ngm.com
(Also nominated: Dwell.com, Makezine, NYMag, Yoga Journal Yoga Journal)

Music
BBC Radio 1 Meet the DJs
http://agencyrepublic.net/awards/…

News
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: BBC News, Wired, CNN and Discovery News)

Newspaper
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: The Guardian, the Independent, the Wall Street Journal and Variety)

Radio
BBC World Service channel site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/

Science
nature.com
http://www.nature.com

Sports
Yahoo! Sports
http://sports.yahoo.com/
(Also nominated: ESPN.com, Nike Skateboarding, Spyker F1 Magazine, Sweet Spots)

Television
HBO Voyeur
http://www.hbovoyeur.com

VIDEO CATEGORIES

Best Use of Animation/Motion Graphics
The New York Times/T: The New York TImes Style Magazine “Circle Squared”
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/20…

Best Writing
Onion News Network
http://tv.theonion.com

Documentary: Individual Episode
Coney Island: An Uncertain Future
Getty Images
http://www.rickgershon.com/gettyi…

News and Politics: Individual Episode
Finding the Way Home
MediaStorm
http://mediastorm.org/0017.htm

Travel (video)
Frugal Traveler: American Road Trip - NYTimes.com/Video
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_s…

MOBILE

Entertainment (mobile)
Cosmo Mobile: 100 Hot Cities, Fake Calls, Dude Decoder & Cocktails!
http://m.cosmopolitan.com

Listing and Updates (mobile)
The New York Times Mobile Real Estate Listings
http://m.nytimes.com/re

News (mobile)
Mobile NYTimes
http://mobile.nytimes.com

Sports (mobile)
ESPN.com (Wireless)
http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wire…

ALSO: Shoutouts to NYTimes.com for their best practices and best visual design/function nominations, Mama Trib’s Swamp blog for best political blog nomination, National Geographic for their best home page People’s Voice award, Consumer Reports for their Guides/Ratings/Review People’s Voice award, the Guardian and Onion for their podcasts nominations, NPR for their politics nomination, NPR and the BBC for their religion and spirituality nominations, Frontline World for their Documentary: Series and Documentray: Individual nominations, U.S. News and World Report for their Best Writing (video) nomination, the New Yorker’s animated cartoons for their animation nomination, CBS for their sports (video) nomination and many more.

Yep, no news site nominees in the navigation and structure categories. We’ll have to work on that…

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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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Perhaps a well-placed lolcat caption can redeem this 1981 TIME magazine cover…

Usually I try to spotlight stuff that news organizations are doing right, but there’s also much to be learned from the downright horrific. So check out TIME’s humorous jab at itself with its list of worst TIME magazine covers ever.

If you’re looking for awesomely bad, my votes go to the 1981 ice cream cover and the 1928 Robert McCormick and Joseph Patterson cover.

And the obligatory Journalistopia Lesson: never underestimate the unlimited potential for re-purposing your old cra …er… archival material.

[Hat tip to SND Update and to TIME]

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Just a quick need-to-know: Microsoft has made available the first public beta of the new Internet Explorer 8.

If you’re a designer for your news site, you’ll want to become familiar with the new browser as soon as you can and start looking at potential problem areas with your site’s design (though keep in mind that IE8 is still in beta). IE8 is touted as being very standards-compliant, so hopefully this’ll be the beginning of less CSS headaches for everyone. If you’re interested in more of the nitty gritty details of how IE8 works under the hood, check out the official IEBlog.

[More: Internet Explorer 8 download page]

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Design blog Information Architects has created a fantastically cool visualization of 2008’s biggest web trends, all pinned to a map of Tokyo’s train system. I know; it sounds strange. But it really is quite awesome. Soon as I get to work this a.m., yours truly is printing this out and tacking it to my offi …er… cubicle wall.

Check out the clickable version and the PDF A4-sized version.

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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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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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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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Christina Luan over at the Virtual Hosting Blog has put together a must-read list of 23 design lessons learned from eye-tracking studies such as the one put on by Poynter.

Read this list. Love this list. You dare not ignore this list. News sites are often the biggest offenders of this list.

Among the lessons:

Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored. Why? Because users assume they are ads and don’t have the information they need.

Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.

People generally scan lower portions of the page. […] Give readers something to latch onto when they’re scanning your page.

Many more here.

And, on an unrelated sidenote, the Audacity 1.3.4 Beta was released with improvements galore. Audacity is the cash-strapped news operation’s audio editor of choice due its many great features and low, low price of “free.”

Hat tip to Download Squad on both items.

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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…

This shall be the year of the “data center.”

Gannett’s online data initiative has hit it big with online news industry types who are now itching to put up databased treats such as school report cards, crimes, property sales, public employee salaries and restaurant inspections.

Easier said than done.

David Milliron, now at Caspio but formerly a data guru at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, provided some insights on what’s needed to get a news organization started putting up great searchable databases.

Of the many things about which Milliron spoke (getting advertising on board, worrying about server load), the thing that struck me the most was the need for getting educated the right way and having a solid network of other pros to lean on. When the crap hits the fan and your site goes down because of a bad query, it’s essential to have the “under the hood” knowledge of how the database and application work. That means understanding the programming language behind the framework, Milliron said.

Furthermore, having a network of pros –whether its at your shop or otherwise–means you tap those other folks’ wisdom, have them give you great ideas on how to write good, efficient code and have them spot-check your work. For some without a mentor in-house, that may mean finding a local users group or joining a listserv (such as the ones offered by NICAR and other organizations).

Some things Milliron says you need to consider before starting database projects:

-Are there other people in your shop or at other shops in your industry developing with the programming language and framework you’re picking?

-Can you get someone knowledgable to review your code?

-If the person developing your applications gets hit by a train or hired away, will you be able to bring in someone else?

-What are the costs and time associated with maintaining the database, not just what it takes to slap it up.

As Milliron said, it’s a rare thing to find one person who knows how to gather data, analyze it, clean it, draw meaningful conclusions from it, put it up on a server, build a rocking database application and then fix it when the thing blows up. And if you do run across such an individual, they probably already have a startup or work at Google…

Now if you want to get your hands dirty with code, Milliron suggests checking out your local community college or professional development programs for database classes. That comment struck me because yours truly has been going to a local community college since August to learn some honest-to-goodness programming (in C++ of all things). I can tell you that after banging my head against a PHP/MySQL book for weeks and making little progress, having a pro hold my hand through those concepts helped me build a useful PHP app for our web producers in about four hours.

Creating interesting, functional, user-friendly databases is a big undertaking. Just don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty, and don’t fear failure. You will probably write a bad query, crash a server and have some whiz kid rewrite your 70 lines of code into seven.

But if it means gaining the knowledge to build great apps, it’ll all be well worth it in terms of page views for your site, value for your readers and –most poignantly– your job security.

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