web 2.0 – Page 2 – Journalistopia

Viewing the news as data

adrian holovaty at ONA 2007 Live from the ONA conference in Torontoâ€¦

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.

Journalism is becoming a high-tech industry

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. Get more info at carrefour-maires .

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.

Don’t be a twit: Claim your newspaper name on Twitter

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.

Journalistopia online crime maps directory

crime maps

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/

Anniston Crime Map
Anniston Star
Interactive map made with ZeeMaps
http://www.annistonstar.com/crimemap/

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

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

Boston Crime
Boston Online
Violent crime map with nice detail-view pages and ability to comment
http://www.universalhub.com/crime/

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

Copenhagen Crime Map
Features a beautiful fullscreen map of crime data. This is one of the most visually engaging crime maps.
http://www.dognrapporten.dk/

Crime in D.C. (Washington)
Some guy called Tom
http://www.crimeindc.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/

Delaware Crime Map
DelwareOnline/The News Journal
Crime map with various search parameters and polygons delineating neighborhood boundaries
http://php.delawareonline.com/crime/

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

EvanstonNow Crime Map
EvanstonNow
Google map with detail record view
http://evanstonnow.com/crime/map

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

Kansas City Crime
Kansas City Star
A near-exact duplicate of the Fresno Bee crime map (both are McClatchy papers)
http://crime.kansascity.com/

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

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/

Memphis Crime Tracker
Commercial Appeal
Browseable crime data with somewhat of a clunky search/browse interface. Uses the Yahoo! Maps API.
http://www.memphiscrimetracker.com

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/

Nashville Crime Locator
The Tennessean
Simple Google map with date search and limit by crime type functionality.
http://data.tennessean.com/v2/bin/crimeMap/display/index.php

Newark Crime
The Star-Ledger
An in-depth crime map with loads of interesting statistical graphics. Built using the ASP.NET framework.
http://www.starledger.com/str/indexpage/crime/nwkneighborhood.asp

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/

Paso Robles Crime Map
The Tribune
Easy-to-use searchable map with crime details and IRC-channel-esque color palette.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/553/

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/

Philadelphia Homicides
Philadelphia Inquirer
Flash-based interactive map containing age and weapon data
http://inquirer.philly.com/graphics/homicide_map_2007/

PostACrime
Gathers crime reports for various cities and actively encourages users to help catch criminals. Displays mugshots.
http://www.postacrime.com/

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

Richmond-Area Homicide Report
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Capsio-built map of homicides in the Richmond area
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/databases/richmond_area_homicide_report.html

Sacramento Bee CrimeMapper
Sacramento Bee
Crime map with proximity search (nice!) and various other search criteria (funky police bee mascot included).
http://crimemap.scoopytube.com/crimemap/map.html

San Joaquin County Crime Map
San Joaquin Media Group
Nearly duplicates the navigation and look of ChicagoCrime.org (but in a darker hue)
http://www.sjcrime.com/

Seattle 911 Calls
Public911.com
Plots the latest 911 calls on a Google map
http://www.public911.com/911/seattle

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/

SpotCrime
SpotCrime
A national aggregator of mapped crime data featuring reports from nearly every U.S. city.
http://spotcrime.com/

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

WashingtonPost.com LocalExplorer
Washington Post
Interactive map with very useful marker clustering and loads of other community data
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local-explorer/index.html

Wichita Crime Map
Wichita Eagle
Simple Google map showing the last day’s crime reports
http://projects.kansas.com/crime/

***

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

L.A. Times editorial board decries Google News comments

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? You can visit Mitcccny for that.

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:

Looking at the big media picture with Google, AOL, Yahoo

Amy Webb over at MyDigiMedia cuts through the media circus around newspaper acquisitions and has a moment of clarity when she surveys the bigger picture and looks at “who owns what.”

Amy has drawn up a handy chart showing the acquisitions made by IAC, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and, yes, News Corp. Us newsie types like to think newspapers are the center of the universe, but there’s a much larger landscape to be surveyed.

She writes:

“The future of media isn’t only about content, it’s about delivery. While journos are busy bickering about whether or not to allow visitor comments on their websites, other companies are moving full-speed ahead with radically different business models. They’re thinking broadly: aggregator + search + content + mobile + gaming = sustainability.”

In other words: If you’re worried primarily about what to call the lifestyle section on your news site and not about, say, delivering content to mobile devices, then it’s time to take your head outta your arse and start seeing the potential of slot online games.

Knight-Batten Award finalists announced

J-Lab has announced the 2007 winners of the Knight-Batten Awards. The finalists include WashingtonPost.com’s OnBeing, Reuters’ Second Life reporting and the Orlando Sentinel‘s Varsity MyTeam site (woo-ha!).

See the list of finalists here (with links), as well as the 2007 notable entries. The winners will be announced at a Sept. 17 symposium.

Almost official: Nielsen drops page views as primary metric

ajax can Various news outlets report today that Nielsen/NetRatings will begin using time spent on a Web site in lieu of the much-maligned page view as its primary metric to determine a site’s success. This move that has been expected for some time now due to the growing use of Web 2.0 technologies.

According to an excellent Computerworld report:

“It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,” [Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings] said. “Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full-page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, ‘How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?’ ”

This means a few things for news sites:

1) An emphasis on user friendliness and engagement will trump site designs that are designed specifically to increase page view numbers (photo galleries that load new pages for each image, multi-page stories, multi-page photo narratives). Which leads us directly to…

2) Drink some of that Ajax-y Kool-Aid (that does sounds rather toxic, doesn’t it?). Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is often loathed by the money people for not bringing in page views since it wonderfully loads content without reloading pages (see Netvibes, the new Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, Google Maps, to name just a few) .

3) Video and engaging interactive features are going to be an even more important component of a site’s success. Big Flash features are notorious for not necessarily getting big page view numbers for the large amounts of staff time to produce them. Perhaps now, they’ll be more worth it — if they’re good.

4) Greater attention needs to be paid to the quality of the content. Getting a reader to go to the end of a long story *may* be more valuable than trying to get them to read lots of three-paragraph stories.

5) Get users talking to each other on your site. Before, a user posting to a message board was just one or two page views. Now, you’ll be able to benefit from the entire time that user is composing and editing his message.

And surely there is much more. I’d love to hear your two cents in the comments.

Digg embroiled in user revolt over DRM postings

The popular news ranking site Digg is currently undergoing a full-scale revolt of its users after someone posted the copyright encryption code for HD-DVD discs.

After Digg pulled the posting with the key, users soon got wind and flooded the site with Diggs on the encryption code. Digg has apparently backtracked now and posted the code (it currently has a staggering 29,721 diggs) along with this message:

“But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, youâ€™ve made it clear. Youâ€™d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we wonâ€™t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”

There’s a lesson here: determined users now have a greater voice and power to make information widely available almost immediately. For better or worst, information –once released– is like Pandora’s Box on the Web. And the masses are using non-traditional media and methods to get that information out there.

Spreading the news You Tube style

Big, big kudos to the Allentown Morning Call for their Breeders and Kennels search widget.Â While there’s nothing especially extraordinary about setting up a searchable database, the Morning Call took it a step further and made their search widget embeddable by way of copy/pasting iframe code.

I could be wrong, but I can’t recall seeing a newspaper site ever do this with a search widget.

One consumer rights group has already embedded the database on their page and called it “groundbreaking.”

Newspapers should start considering this as standard operating procedure immediately. Can you imagine the traffic you’d receive for your local voter guides from bloggers during election season? What aboutÂ dining databases? Chances are, thereÂ is plenty of content already on your site that can be turned into a search widget. And, the advertising of your site in a positive light? The possibilities are ripe.

Thanks to Amy Gahran for spotting this.

When the machines edit your life

It’s like a horrific scene out of EPIC 2014.

E-Media Tidbits’ Amy Gahran highlights the story of Nino Ceritano, a restaurateur whose top Google search was a Roanoke Times story about a murder suspect who worked in his restaurant.

“What do you think when you put in a restaurant [into Google] and a killer comes up?” he asked the Times. [UPDATE: Roanoke Times online editor John Jackson dropped in with a comment today.]

Nino, I think you’re the victim of editing by machine. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately while crunching through Database Nation by Simpson Garfinkel (per the recommendation of Adrian Holovaty). One of the basic premises of the book is that much of your personal information is being held largely by third parties over which you have little to no control.

While a news story about a murder is double-plus public information, is it something that a human editor would choose to highlight as the most relevant thing about this particular establishment? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Is it fair to Ceritano? Is it more important than the amazing Pizza al Pollo? More importantly, if he were to contact Google, would they do anything about it?

It’s possible that they did. The official Web site of the restaurant is now the number one Google search result. Did someone at Google have mercy on Ceritano?

Let’s also take a look at when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tried to exercise some control over the information about himself when he altered his own Wikipedia entry. The crowds were incensed. You can read about the controversy on …well… his own Wikipedia entry!

Whether it’s an algorithm run by a computer or crowds of faceless contributors doing the editing, we must acknowledge that there are some dangers associated with becoming too automated. Crowdsourcing can be a beautiful thing, but we must make sure as journalists that we retain the ability to present information with care and humanity.

And on that note, Nino, here’s some keyworded link love for Ceritano’s restaurant.

[CORRECTION: I previously misstated the nature of the incident at Ceritano’s. Thanks Amy.]

Google Maps mashup based on book locations

Now this is what newspapers should be doing to their stories!

Check out the new feature on Google Book Search, where some mashups have been created to show on a map all the locations referenced in the text of the book. A cool one: Around the World in Eighty Days (scroll down a bit). If only they could pop in a Carl Hiaasen book next…

[Via Download Squad]