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Cartwheel Galaxy

Cartwheel Galaxy: Astronomers Do Flips Over Cartwheel Galaxy
Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian have put images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory into the Commons on Flickr. The whole set is absolutely beautiful.

Picture This: C4 Photography competition

Calling all happy snappers - Channel 4's multiplatform project with Flickr; Picture This' first challenge is on the theme of self portrait. If you're quick and hit the deadline of 2 Jan your photo has a chance to appear on the telly programme. (Vladski and Harlesdon, I'm looking at you here.)

2 Jan is a very early deadline methinks - I wonder how many people will forget it in a blur of hangover. And how many self portraits will involve party snaps from 31 Dec...

A model for the 21st century newsroom

Paul Bradshaw has an interesting post about a possible new newsroom production process. I really like his iterative model. Using media tools as a way of simultaneously communicating and drafting a story is really compelling. I wonder what kind of cultural shift would be needed in a newsroom, or headshift for the staff themselves, to do this? Perhaps I'm being unduly negative, but the old model of getting the scoop to print is well entrenched. Tweeting a breaking news headline may feel to some like giving the game away. Particularly for big media organisations used to having to compete in a particular timeslot around similar agendas. I do love the idea of blogging as a way of (possibly collaboratively) building a story, context, depth etc. which is made into a polished package later on.

There's a lot of food for thought here. I'm doing a lot of thinking around the tension between "traditional" breaking news websites and news blogs. My own view is that they should be more similar than not. But working out the balance is interesting, particularly in a traditional broadcast environment. Interesting times. Oh, and I like the news diamond very much.

Celebrating 20 years in a dying industry

A nice piece from David Callaway on the evolution of news dissemination, and the enduring need for good journalism.

Back in 1987, it was widely assumed that newspapers were dying. The post-Watergate rush to journalism was over. Circulations were down. And new technologies were threatening. At one point, the hot new thing was to deliver news by fax machine, and papers were going to die because readers would be able to get news quicker by fax. They would even be able to tailor the type of news they wanted to receive. Imagine that.

...this is not the beginning of the end for journalism. It wasn't 20 years ago either. It's a bull market for those who can write a sentence and tell a story and know how to do it across the mediums of print, Web, audio, video and mobile. The stories are there for the taking.

Carnival tweets

I'd like to take a quick moment to reflect on something we did at 1Xtra this weekend. We've building up to Carnival for some weeks, covering Leeds and Notting Hill Carnivals on Bank Holiday Monday. We always cover it with photos and video, but this year we also microblogged it with Twitter as well. We registered six presenters, two journalists and seven interactive staff and "followed" them from the 1Xtra profile, giving us a "1Xtra and friends" rss feed. We pulled this into the Carnival minisite homepage on the day using one of their flash badges. We also hooked it up to 1Xtra's mobile system, so listeners could subscribe by texting a key word to 1X's mobile short code and receive our tweets on their phone.

It was a bit of a risk - Twitter is a very niche activity in the grander scheme of things. 1Xtra's presenters and production staff had never heard of it, and it's so far off our target demographic's radar it's untrue. But by pitching it as simple text & web updates, keeping jargon out of it, and just getting presenters to text stuff in we kept it simple and it worked. Nice.

Scrobblevision

You can now embed music videos from last.fm into your webspaces, and scrobble them when they're played. Not sure if this means that you also get the scrobble when/if other people play the video in your page (and therefore sway your music recommendations etc). Either way it's pretty cool, and in a very nice player too. Only problem is the name is a little too close to Chucklevision and I now have that theme tune running round my head. Thanks guys.

 

Amazon seek user photos, and a light touch recommendation

I've just finished reading Nicole Krauss' The History of Love. It's a nice book, didn't blow my mind, but an enjoyable read. Anyway, I bought my copy from my local charity shop. There's no sign on the book of any previous owners apart from a few bashed edges. But as I trundled towards the end I found this passage marked in pencil:

"And then I thought: Perhaps this is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I."

And now I really want to know who marked my copy, and why. It's a fascinating indication of someone else's level of enjoyment, satisfaction or emotional connection with this book. An almost-annotation, showing previous presence but not quite leading me to anything. It certainly made me dwell on that page and focus on that sentence. So a user recommendation of sorts.

And as I went to Amazon to find the link to add to this page, I noticed that they're now asking for users to submit their photos to accompany products. The thinking is that photos of users using whatever the product is, or images taken by the camera for sale, will help to sell the product. I think they're right. People are increasingly more inclined to believe reviews and recommendations from other buyers over reviews by so-called experts. So why not take it a step further - show users enjoying the thing they've bought to really hammer home how great it is. And the bonus for the photo-submitter is the kudos of having their image up there, no doubt improving their rating as a reviewer.

links for 2007-08-01

• Robert Paterson's has a thoughtful piece mapping Starbucks & Walmart growth to public TV & radio's aims
  It's not new in terms of tipping points etc. But identifies a clear set of steps - make the perfect store and refine the system so that it scales before trying to expand. Not sure how far I agree with this. He's right to a point but there seems to be more luck and timing involved than he acknowledges here. Still, it's a useful starting point.
  (tags: tv radio web business)
• AP and Asap
  Why associated press' youth targeted new service failed
  (tags: news youth)
• Google Report
  Not affiliated to google, but uses the search engine to compile a report on any search term from a selection of web resources like wikipedia. For some reason the default is "hip pain".
  (tags: google search aggregator)

Interactive flood map

BBC Berkshire have produced a brilliant google maps mash-up to display the flooding in that area. Includes youtube video, listener pics on flickr and reports from local BBC reporters. It's very cool, and so good to see a mash-up that provides a valuable service.

(via Cybersoc)

Crowdsourcing lessons learned

Jeff Howe's assessment of Assignment Zero - a crowdsourcing project. The lessons learned make interesting reading - with occasional "well, du-uh" moments.

Like the need for a clear call to action for participants. If you want a large number of people to come together to achieve something, you've got to give them clear guidance.

Communities are communities first and project teams second. And any community requires some kind of leader-figure. Whether that's one that develops organically within the group (as it would socially), or is asigned by the project owner. Somebody has to be the central point of contact, the person with the plan. Or at least a plan to have a plan.

And don't forget the many different personal drivers for people who get involved. I'm still puzzled that this seems to come as a surprise to so many. It seems so obvious;

...people participate for a complex web of reasons, including the enhancement of one’s status within the community, the opportunity to learn or perfect a skill, the chance for financial gain or simply the intangible rewards from working with others toward a shared goal.

As well as an enormous passion for their subject of course;

What the interviews make clear is that contributors volunteered to tackle subjects about which they were passionate and knowledgeable. In this they held a considerable advantage over professionals, who often must complete interviews with little time (or inclination) for advance research.

I like this idea of "amateur expert". It's not a new one, but I wonder if it could be harnessed by content providers in a more structured way. Hmm.