This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• How we built Ampp3d in eight weeks
  "Most publishers give their staff massive desktop monitors to work on, using desktop software tools, and a CMS that works on a desktop. And then the majority of users view the output on a mobile. "
  tags: technology future+of+news ampp3d
• Why venture capitalists are suddenly investing in news - Quartz
  "These days, BuzzFeed is rapidly expanding with $46 million in funding. Vox Media has raked in some $80 million in venture capital. Business Insider’s $12 million boost last week makes its haul about $30 million. And feel-good social curation site Upworthy has raised about $12 million since launching two years ago. 1 “Suddenly, the market for content just opened up,” said Sarah Lacy, founder of PandoDaily, which has secured about $4 million in venture capital since 2012. “It’s dramatically changed. I think a lot of it for me was Vice getting valued at $1 billion. No one had seen anything like that in the content space. And they’re trying to speak to a very specific audience that’s hard to reach in a deeply authentic way. It’s certainly not something you’re phoning in. It’s not a pre-written press release. It’s not a listicle.”"
  tags: technology news quartz future+of+news investment
• Spritz
  Text streaming sounds very cool, doesn't it? Spritz looks more than the latest shiny, it looks like it really is going to be the next very big thing.
  tags: technology Spritz future+of+news
• Open door: The readers' editor on… the line between comment and fact in live blogs | Comment is free | The Guardian
  Live blogging is a skill. It involves getting the tone as well as content bang on - and sometimes, as with this reader's gripe - the line between fact and comment gets blurred. The trick is to know what kind of live blog you're doing - and be consistent. 
  From the Guardian Readers' Editor blog: "The latest example was on the website today. Matthew Weaver's "news blog" … included the statement: 'David Cameron continues to try to give the impression of being on top of the crisis...' Now, is that fact or opinion? If you are claiming it is fact, then I am not aware of any objective standard against which one can judge whether the PM is 'on top of the crisis' (whatever that means) or not … As a more general point, what is the status of these news blogs? My preference would be for them to stick to the facts." In an exchange of email correspondence the complainant also said: "I would much prefer a news blog to do what it says on the tin – to give me the news unadulterated by the 'views' of the reporter. I don't mind in the least if that results in a list of updates – isn't that what news is? Opinion isn't fact.""
  tags: audience content liveblog liveblogging
• What Type of Content Gets Shared the Most on Twitter?
  There are some annoying 'sign up for more followers HERE' ads to ignore before you get to the content, but good insights when you do.
  tags: content audience social sharing
• Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile: What You Get Wrong about the Internet - TIME
  "If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again. MORE Here's An Updated Tally Of All The People Who Have Ever Died From A Marijuana Overdose Huffington Post These Disturbing Fast Food Truths Will Make You Reconsider Your Lunch Huffington Post Justin Bieber & Selena Gomez Kiss Over Breakfast, Another Baby on the Way for Christian Bale & More People Fed by Joakim Noah's intensity, resilient Bulls take down Heat Sports Illustrated 'True Detective' finale: Talk about it Entertainment Weekly "
  tags: chartbeat engagement analytic audience

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• Neil Gaiman's Journal: Storms and how they start

  "Twitterstorms are no fun when people are making up things about you or insulting you for things you didn't do or think or say. When scores of people from a group that you consider yourself a part of are shouting at you, it's incredibly upsetting, no matter who you are. "

  tags: Hugo twitterstorm twitter Neil+Gaiman

• How BitTorrent Rewrote The Rules Of The Internet | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

  Fascinating, short read about how BitTorrent's use of Micro Transport Protocol has dramatically grown its user base, and made the net a less congested place. "Under uTP, any BitTorrent transfers you have going on in the background will politely wait for your streaming to be finished before they jump in. Then, in the uncrowded hours of the late night, uTP lets your torrenting get going, soaking up all that suddenly spare bandwidth. Now that uTP is used for 80% of BitTorrent transfers, traffic no longer peaks in that 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot. This is also why the monthly userbase has grown from 60 million in 2008 to 170 million today--all while the share of peak traffic continues to go down. "

  tags: bittorrent internet innovation

• The world's largest photo service just made its pictures free to use | The Verge

  "Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open-embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery. "

  tags: copyright photography photos Getty

• Wrexham.com overturns ban to film council meetings - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage

  "A hyperlocal news website has been successful in overturning a ban on the filming of council meetings. Wrexham.com has published what it believes to be the first ever video of a Wrexham Council meeting following several rejected requests in recent years."

  tags: council transparency democracy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• 14 takeaways from the news:rewired digital journalism conference

  Does exactly what it says on the tin.

  tags: news:rewired

• Crossing the language boundaries across your newsroom: journo to dev and back

  An open Google Doc that considers how traditional reporters and developer reports (for Noah Veltman considers them very similar in their goals) can work together and communicate more effectively. I see huge opportunities for better cross-working with these two groups; sometimes it feels like developers occupy that previous Bad Guy space owned by IT. Better communication and empathy is the start. "the secret is not to treat developers like a service desk — what ProPublica’s Al Shaw calls “the deli counter,” where you just hand in your order. The developers are reporters, too, and you should treat them as such. Communication in particular is hard. Email is bad; tickets are slightly better but still aren’t synchronous. Using chat or direct communication is better. Having time to test things can be very contentious. There are other concerns for developers: Are you going to reuse this later? Is this an ongoing project? Will the data be updated? How is that going to work? How is this going to be maintained? What’s the game plan? What is the minimum viable product, and what can be delayed until later?"

  tags: developers coding hacking editorial

• How To Say “This Is Crap” In Different Cultures - Erin Meyer - Harvard Business Review

  How different nationalities give management feedback. Very good, and also faintly horrifying... "Managers in different parts of the world are conditioned to give feedback in drastically different ways. The Chinese manager learns never to criticize a colleague openly or in front of others, while the Dutch manager learns always to be honest and to give the message straight. Americans are trained to wrap positive messages around negative ones, while the French are trained to criticize passionately and provide positive feedback sparingly."

  tags: management leadership

• The Battle of Little Bitcoin: Native American Tribe Launches Its Own Cryptocurrency - Forbes

  Really interesting read - how MazaCoin is now the national currency of the Lakota Nation. "After signing a joint venture agreement with the Oglala Sioux Tribe Office of Economic Development early in 2014, Harris immediately began mining his new currency to produce 25 million MazaCoins ahead of its launch to serve as a “national reserve” for the Lakota Nation, which can then be used in times of crisis (like the collapse of Mt. Gox) to help stabilize the currency. A number of these coins were handed out to interested businesses and individuals within the community, to encourage them to get involved in trading and speculating ."

  tags: bitcoin cryptocurrency disruption

• Slides, Links & Tutorials from NICAR14 // Ricochet by Chrys Wu

  A brilliant set of how-to tutorials around data, curated from NICAR14 by Chrys Wu. Shows more than ever how even a basic grasp of coding can make you a far more skilled and effective journalist.

  tags: nicar14 coding data how-to tutorials slides

• Some Bot to Watch Over Me - NYTimes.com

  "For a month now, I have been spying on my apartment. I have spied in the afternoon, and I have spied late at night. Since I can see most clearly into the living room, my voyeurism has been focused there. Often I see only an empty room that could use a little art on the walls. Sometimes I catch the cat sleeping on the rug. One night last week, I watched my girlfriend watch TV. "

  tags: technology future scary cool shit

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Social media monitoring and analytics (infographic)

Not 100% sure who I owe a hat tip to for tweeting a link to this infographic about social media monitoring (I suspect David Thackeray though).
It is exceptionally useful, anyway, and I thought I would store it on my blog as it's a reference source I will probably come back to in the future.

The World of Social Media Monitoring and Analytics

Powered by Demand Metric - See more at: http://www.demandmetric.com/content/world-social-media-monitoring-and-analytics-infographic#sthash.MfJdn18b.dpuf

Tweetdeck: A short user guide to getting the most out of it

(Photo credit: estherbester)

I ran my first Webex training session this week; it was a 45 minute run-through of How To Be a Tweetdeck Ninja, which contained my tips for getting the most out of Facebook. 
Ahem.
I've used Tweetdeck for years and I like the Chrome extension very much - I personally find Tweetdeck the desktop tool for Twitter I wouldn't be without (one other being Buffer). 
So when asked to give some colleagues an introduction to Tweetdeck, and others a bit of a power-user insight, it was a chance to sift through what is useful or not to me, and share it. 
Because Trinity Mirror uses Google Apps, I've slanted the presentation to the Google Chrome Store Tweetdeck extension - obviously that isn't a prerequisite to using Tweetdeck. 
Having not used Webex before (other than a nice, safe 'this is how it works'  session between me and the trainer) it was a little nerve-wracking but, used properly it is a great tool for engaged learning. (My main learning outcome was that background noise can hugely impact on the sound quality.)
Anyway, before the session started I did ask the Twitter hivemind for its thoughts on what was good and bad about Tweetdeck, and and then pulled a selection together into a custom timeline* of the responses: 

Social media tips/tricks

There was also a powerpoint sent around as an aide memoir, which I've uploaded to Scribd: 

How To Be A Tweetdeck Ninja

* The sad thing about custom timelines is that if someone has padlocked their Twitter account you can't, of course, use those tweets in your CT.  I completely see the logic of it, but as I had some really good insights from users with protected timelines, it was a shame that I couldn't incorporate them

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This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• Olympian Bode Miller: ‘Be Gentle With Christin Cooper’ for NBC interview | Poynter.

  Never a good look when an Olympic hero cries as a result of your question. However, I don't think she was insensitive (although the camera work was too much) "Olympic skier Bode Miller told his Twitter followers that NBC’s Christin Cooper was doing her job when she asked him questions about his brother who died last year. Miller cried and viewers jumped online to complain. ("

  tags: interviewing+techniques

• BBC journalists' interviewing techniques - YouTube

  This is a fantastic interview with Peter Allen, 5Live's wonderful Drive journalist, talking about how to interview. It includes a particularly affecting interview with the mother of murdered Lucy Blackman, and you can hear him trying to maintain a professional interviewing manner, even as her hear audibly breaks on air.

  tags: journalists interviewing+techniques bbc

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Shifting my social media life around

I bit the bullet today and made myself a Facebook page. 
I'd actually created it a few months ago, but I didn't publish it because it seemed a bit, well, extravagant - I have a Facebook profile, I'm on all the usual social networks, plus I have various about.me type pages. What was the point of a Facebook page as well?
But my social media world is starting to become a bit too much of a mashup for me to do anything particularly effectively. 
If you're interested in seeing the page, it's here under the imaginatively titled vanity url alisongow.journalist. 

The need to put a bit more organisation into my social media life is something that's been bothering me for a while. 
Take Twitter: I have used it for more than 6 years now and it's a different beast to what it started out as (of course it is!) but the way I was using it hadn't evolved quite as much. 
So, for example, I've got 5,000-odd followers, some of whom are actually Really Real People (there are also some Really Odd People, and I'd prefer them not to follow me, but that's for another post). 

Some are journalists, some are from what I tend to call In My Liverpool Home, or from Wales, and follow me either because they know me or because we move in the same circles and geographic spaces, as well as the same digital spaces. 
But the intersection of those worlds isn't of that much interest, I guess. 
I've had to change the way I think about Twitter; I genuinely used it as a micro-blog initially, then it became a crowdsourcing tool, then a replacement RSS feed, then a way to promote my news title's journalism. And, of course, it's always been a noise I couldn't live without. 
But, that means I now think of what followers are looking for from me more than before and so the micro-blog part of things has gradually decreased, as as the amount I tweet. 

Often, I can't tweet about work things, interesting as they might be, because it isn't the right platform, or the right time. 
I can't get involved in long tweet-debates any more because I don't tend to be on Twitter as often - I might be in meetings, or driving. 
Also, I notice some people use Twitter in an incredibly focused way - just to talk about journalism, for example. That would drive me nuts - I enjoy posting pix from my days out-n-about, for example, and I'd struggle to be quite so single-focused and earnest.
However, things evolve all the time. 

Then it struck me that while I'm refining the way I use Twitter all the time, I've done little to change how I use Facebook. 
That is a place where a lot of my non-journo life spills out, from the problems of renovating an old property to the perpetual war waged against sheep breaking into the garden, to - yep, sorry - my cats. Look, I never said it was an interesting spill-out of my life.
But I felt that was limiting my potential to use Facebook; having said that, I don't really think my old school friends give a rat's ass about my Thoughts on Journalism. 

So I thought I'd experiment with a page, and it was born today. I suspect it will be very handy too, for mini-blogging, and I've also set up an ifttt recipe to auto-post my Diigo bookmarks to the page. 
My friend Dilyan is very good at cutting to the heart of things with his questions, and he did it again today; I'm not sure I have an answer... 

I'll see how it goes. 

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