February 5, 2012
Significant and Silly at BuzzFeedBy DAVID CARR
When a Web site called BuzzFeed broke the news on the night of the Iowa caucuses that John McCain was endorsing Mitt Romney, more than a few readers scratched their heads and said, “What is a BuzzFeed?”
They’re about to find out.
BuzzFeed is the creation of Jonah Peretti, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab with an expertise in content that is likely to be “liked.” He took those skills to The Huffington Post, where he was the wizard in back of the curtain, brewing a bubbling cauldron of tatty celebrity news and goofy cat shots behind a front page of serious news and commentary. Using search optimization, he knew what people wanted almost before they did.
Mr. Peretti started BuzzFeed as a laboratory at first, making it less about what people were searching for and more about what they might share. He developed technologies that allowed BuzzFeed to determine very quickly what media content was being posted and shared — items that were contagious, the kind of thing that ends up on one person’s Facebook page and then suddenly, many other people’s. When The Huffington Post was sold to AOL last year, Mr. Peretti left and began working on BuzzFeed full-time.
With its mix of oddities, listicles and Web memes, BuzzFeed was at first something like The Huffington Post without the pretension of producing news and commentary. But in December, Mr. Peretti hired Ben Smith, the highly regarded blogger and columnist for Politico, to be his editor in chief. Right after he started in January, Mr. Smith broke the news of Mr. McCain’s endorsement of Mr. Romney for the New Hampshire primary. The message was clear: BuzzFeed was a player in news. (Mr. Smith still writes his weekly column for Politico.)
Soon afterward, BuzzFeed raised $15.5 million from Kenneth Lerer’s Lerer Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Hearst Interactive Media, Softbank and RRE Ventures. Mr. Smith immediately began hiring reporters, including Matt Buchanan from Gawker Media; John Herrman from Popular Mechanics; Rosie Gray from The Village Voice, and Doree Shafrir from RollingStone.com. BuzzFeed wasn’t just hiring brand names to serve as lustrous hood ornaments connoting credibility, the way Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington have. The hires at BuzzFeed were more like maypoles: young writers native to the Web who become pivot points for contents because they are bathed in both the ethos and practice of social media.
After a week in which Facebook announced an initial public offering that could end up in valuing it at $100 billion, it’s clear that the social Web — Facebook, Twitter and their ilk — will rival search — Google, Bing and their ilk — as a force for helping people find content. The average person’s Facebook feed, just like BuzzFeed, is a mix of the comical and the consequential, functioning as a kind of human-enabled RSS feed that belies the traditional architecture of media outlets.
In a sense, Mr. Peretti is reverse-engineering the HuffPo formula. At The Huffington Post, he used search optimization to create a gaudy funhouse behind a serious front page. At BuzzFeed, the funhouse was the point of it all. The main headers on the home page told the story: “LOL,” “cute,” “win,” “fail,” “omg,” “geeky,” “trashy” and “wtf?”
But with the addition of Mr. Smith and his new hires, BuzzFeed is growing some serious news muscles under a silly, frilly skin, and added the header “2012” for election coverage. (More traditional news verticals will be rolled out in the coming months.) It’s gone well so far, with comScore showing 10.8 million unique visitors in December, more than double that of the same month in 2010.
Its business model, in part, capitalizes on the mix of high and low content; instead of banner ads, BuzzFeed works with companies like Pillsbury to create content ideal for sharing, including “10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do With a Crescent Roll.”
If it is successful, BuzzFeed will generate the kind of traffic that will rival behemoths like, yes, The Huffington Post. Mr. Peretti says that BuzzFeed makes a profit some months, but given the level of investment and growth — there are now 78 people in its Flatiron offices — the burn rate on that new chunk of capital is significant. “It’s fun to watch them make all these hires,” said Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl site and a veteran of the New York Web scene. “But it’s important that they don’t overspend. Web ad rates are what they are and that isn’t going to change.”
Mr. Peretti says he is not, and won’t be, competing with The Huffington Post, in part because that would be awkward since he and Mr. Lerer were among the founders of that site. Sitting in the coffee area of BuzzFeed’s offices on West 21st Street in Manhattan, he pointed out that there is nothing more viral than news that no one else has, so it makes sense to create some. With Mr. Smith sharing the table, he said that BuzzFeed is a natural response to a changing ecosystem.
“As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world?” he said. “And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.”
As the consumer Web has matured, readers have become minipublishers, using social media platforms to share information they think will entertain and enlighten their friends. No longer is it just about so-called sticky content that keeps readers around, or even clicky content that causes them to hit a link; it’s also about serving up content that is spreadable.
Hit the right note, and your readers become like bees, stopping by your site to grab links and heading back out on the Web to pollinate other platforms. That behavior has tapped into something visceral, a kind of game in which the person finding something delicious gains social capital for sharing it.
“I can remember when I first had lunch with Jonah, he talked a lot about the social Web,” Mr. Smith said. “I left thinking he had just filled my head with jargon, and then it gradually dawned on me that it is actually where I am just living.”
Before he went to BuzzFeed, Mr. Smith was a force on Twitter, with about 60,000 followers. He was known as a reporter who not only broke news on Twitter but also served as a signal tower, providing links for the news made by others.
Now he is overseeing an editorial world where there are still articles like “The Cutest Boys With Dogs” (not to be confused with “30 Cats Sitting Like Humans”) and “50 Things You Will Never See in Real Life,” which includes a picture of a Chihuahua wearing double cheeseburgers for shoes. That odd numerology is an update of the ancient dark arts in publishing. For some reason, putting a number on something makes it irresistible. For decades, women’s magazines have been telling you about “101 Sure-Fire Ways to Lose Weight” and “18 Secrets to Winning His Heart.”
But those numbers riffs now sit side by side with serious news about fraudulent mortgage foreclosures. “I am hiring people who don’t just want to waste their time reporting other people’s work,” he said. “No one is going to care if we come up with a story that is almost as good as someone else’s scoop four hours earlier.”
Mr. Peretti already had a team of editors who knew how to take commodity content and refashion it into something new, but he wanted more. News is the killer app, and does not depend on search optimization: The Web immediately points at your site when you have an actual scoop. That’s where Mr. Smith and his team of digitally enabled journalists come in.
So now Mr. Peretti has high and low, news and fun, all ready for sharing. “People are now used to having everything mixed together in a Facebook newsfeed,” Mr. Peretti said. “A story about the Arab Spring will be next to a picture of your sister’s new baby. Why not have a publishing site that embraces those colliding worlds?”
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ By NICK BILTON
February 5, 2012, 11:00 am
Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ By NICK BILTON
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg NewsMark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook, spoke at a Facebook conference in September.FacebookTwitterLinkedinShareShareCloseRedditTumblrDiggE-mail
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SAN FRANCISCO — By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50.
Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look like a scene from the postapocalyptic movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: bleak, desolate and really quite sad. (Or MySpace, if that is easier to imagine.) Facebook surely would never be valued at anything close to $100 billion, which it very well could be in its coming initial public offering.
In the company’s S-1 filing, submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, Facebook boasts about its statistics: annually, people “like” one trillion things; 91 billion photos are uploaded; half a billion people use Facebook on mobile phones; and hundreds of millions are annoyingly “poked.”
So all this leaves me with a question: Where’s my cut? I helped build this thing, too. Facebook laid the foundation of the house and put in the plumbing, but we put up the walls, picked out the furniture, painted and hung photos, and invited everyone over for dinner parties.
So why am I asking for money from Facebook and not Google? Although there have been hundreds of technology-related I.P.O.’s over the last decade, Facebook is the first real social-media public offering, where the content on the site is entirely created by its users. (The closest, LinkedIn, had additional business models, including premium payment subscriptions.) “The idea that a business benefits from social interaction is not so strange or new. A lot of cafes and small restaurants will let people hang out because they attract other people,” said Yannis M. Ioannides, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “What is unusual and new is that Facebook takes access to information about these people to make its business more powerful.” He added: “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money.”
Mr. Ioannides suggests that Facebook and other social Web sites could create a two-way financial street. Facebook, for example, could pay the people who create content on the site. The company could then make money by matching the content with advertising, as it does now. As an alternative for more private individuals, people could pay to use Facebook if it promised not to sift through their personal information. This way, everyone wins.
I for one would feel more comfortable with Facebook looking through my phonebook, wallet and underwear drawer if I knew I was going to get paid for it.
Jaron Lanier, one of the deepest thinkers on the impacts of technology on society and an “innovator in residence” at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, worries about companies like Facebook and Twitter not paying their users while the people lucky enough to work for them become rich from free user-generated content. Mr. Lanier says that as more money flows to those who build these networks, society distorts and divides. Those without the skills needed in this new economy — other than to tweet and post pictures — can fall further behind economically.
“The value comes from the people; none of it is self-created,” Mr. Lanier said in an interview. He warns that if society doesn’t devise economic solutions to social networks, there could be “serious social blowback.”
Sure, $50 might not seem like a lot of money right now, but if Facebook continues to grow as it has in the past, its $4 billion in annual revenue could be in the tens of billions of dollars in a few years. If that happens, I should be expecting a dividend.
So, Mr. Zuckerberg, feel free to message me on Facebook, and I’ll give you my address so you can send me a check — unless, as I suspect, you already know where I live.
Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ By NICK BILTON
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg NewsMark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook, spoke at a Facebook conference in September.FacebookTwitterLinkedinShareShareCloseRedditTumblrDiggE-mail
SAN FRANCISCO — By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50.
Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look like a scene from the postapocalyptic movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: bleak, desolate and really quite sad. (Or MySpace, if that is easier to imagine.) Facebook surely would never be valued at anything close to $100 billion, which it very well could be in its coming initial public offering.
In the company’s S-1 filing, submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, Facebook boasts about its statistics: annually, people “like” one trillion things; 91 billion photos are uploaded; half a billion people use Facebook on mobile phones; and hundreds of millions are annoyingly “poked.”
So all this leaves me with a question: Where’s my cut? I helped build this thing, too. Facebook laid the foundation of the house and put in the plumbing, but we put up the walls, picked out the furniture, painted and hung photos, and invited everyone over for dinner parties.
So why am I asking for money from Facebook and not Google? Although there have been hundreds of technology-related I.P.O.’s over the last decade, Facebook is the first real social-media public offering, where the content on the site is entirely created by its users. (The closest, LinkedIn, had additional business models, including premium payment subscriptions.) “The idea that a business benefits from social interaction is not so strange or new. A lot of cafes and small restaurants will let people hang out because they attract other people,” said Yannis M. Ioannides, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “What is unusual and new is that Facebook takes access to information about these people to make its business more powerful.” He added: “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money.”
Mr. Ioannides suggests that Facebook and other social Web sites could create a two-way financial street. Facebook, for example, could pay the people who create content on the site. The company could then make money by matching the content with advertising, as it does now. As an alternative for more private individuals, people could pay to use Facebook if it promised not to sift through their personal information. This way, everyone wins.
I for one would feel more comfortable with Facebook looking through my phonebook, wallet and underwear drawer if I knew I was going to get paid for it.
Jaron Lanier, one of the deepest thinkers on the impacts of technology on society and an “innovator in residence” at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, worries about companies like Facebook and Twitter not paying their users while the people lucky enough to work for them become rich from free user-generated content. Mr. Lanier says that as more money flows to those who build these networks, society distorts and divides. Those without the skills needed in this new economy — other than to tweet and post pictures — can fall further behind economically.
“The value comes from the people; none of it is self-created,” Mr. Lanier said in an interview. He warns that if society doesn’t devise economic solutions to social networks, there could be “serious social blowback.”
Sure, $50 might not seem like a lot of money right now, but if Facebook continues to grow as it has in the past, its $4 billion in annual revenue could be in the tens of billions of dollars in a few years. If that happens, I should be expecting a dividend.
So, Mr. Zuckerberg, feel free to message me on Facebook, and I’ll give you my address so you can send me a check — unless, as I suspect, you already know where I live.
Thursday, July 08, 2010
The Medium Is the Medium By DAVID BROOKS
The Medium Is the Medium By DAVID BROOKS
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.
Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.
This study, along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books. We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.
Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.
This study, following up on others, finds that broadband access is not necessarily good for kids and may be harmful to their academic performance. And this study used data from 2000 to 2005 before Twitter and Facebook took off.
These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.
Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.
But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.
The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.
A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.
A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.
It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.
Perhaps that will change. Already, more “old-fashioned” outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.
Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.
This study, along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books. We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.
Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.
This study, following up on others, finds that broadband access is not necessarily good for kids and may be harmful to their academic performance. And this study used data from 2000 to 2005 before Twitter and Facebook took off.
These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.
Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.
But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.
The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.
A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.
A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.
It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.
Perhaps that will change. Already, more “old-fashioned” outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Refining the Twitter Explosion By NOAM COHEN
Link by Link
Refining the Twitter Explosion By NOAM COHEN
DOES Twitter have a T.M.I. problem?
And, no, I don't just mean the Twitter users who share too much information about their lives, social, medical or otherwise.
Simply put, there is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio Signorini, a researcher at the University of Iowa. By October, he reports, there were 26 million tweets a day.
Why should we care about information overload at Twitter? Isn't Twitter about the individual experiences — a Tweeter and her followers — not the totality of millions of Tweeters around the world?
Perhaps this is true for most users. But the promise of Twitter — the reason Google and Microsoft have paid to be able to search millions of Tweets — is that it gives the best approximation of the pulse of the world: How popular is the new iPhone? Did Kanye West make a spectacle of himself at an awards show? Or, more ominously, what is it like when there is a shooter loose on an Army post?
•
Until lately, the main way to make sense of an urgent outpouring of tweets on a particular subject was to use text searches: look for the phrase "Fort Hood," for example, or maybe an agreed-upon label, "#fthood," within tweets. Yet during events like the shootings on Thursday at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead, this method is useless. Hundreds of "relevant" tweets pop up every minute, most repeating the same news reports over and over again or expressing concern from far away.
Which is why a new feature that Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — "geolocation" — holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.
The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location.
"Proximity can be this proxy for relevance," said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a "fairly small team" of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. "We are about delivering the right information to the right people."
Even now, before the geolocation feature has been released to developers, visitors to Twitter.com have been able to limit searches by location based on the profiles that Twitter users provide when they sign up.
That simple filter made a huge difference in what a visitor to Twitter's search engine discovered about the Fort Hood shootings. After limiting searches to those from within 15 miles of Killeen, Tex., a town near the Army post, you easily find messages sent by soldiers describing what it is like to be on lockdown or worrying about their children at school on the post.
The tweets from one, RicoRossi, can suddenly leap to the top, even while Fort Hood remains locked down — "a soldier i treated here said he was waiting in line @ SRP when another soldier stood up and started shooting," one early tweet read, using an acronym for the Soldiers Readiness Program, where the attacks occurred.
In response to questions from his Twitter followers, he quickly replied with "idont want 2 b 2 graphic so ill stop there, he was there ... it was like something out of a movie he said im paraphrasing of course."
Another Twitter user, JKsTinkerbell76, described the scene at Scott and White Hospital in nearby Temple, Tex., during her lunch break (around midnight late Thursday): "Still on Lockdown. Police and Security everywhere."
And DaTriggerMan, Killeen, Tex, tweeted Thursday afternoon, "We just got cell phone services back here on ft hood! And I am good thanks for all the concern!!!" And then, four minutes later, "what happen cuz I aint been in front of a tv? We had some shooters on post we good now tho!"
•
Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like "local trending topics," a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.
Because GPS will provide the ability to become very "granular" with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.
There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two "opt in" decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.
For the technological optimists, the cures for information overload, in essence, are better filters and greater context. The more you know about a message — who sent it and why — the better you understand it.
The open-source project Ushahidi, which takes its name from the Swahili word for "testimony," was quick to understand this. The software allows text messages to be mapped by time and location. It was developed to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008. Suddenly mere words can create a moving picture of where violence started and where it intensified.
More recently, through a program called stopstockouts.org, the Ushahidi software tracks a range of medicines for shortages across Africa.
Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge, said Erik Hersman, a co-founder of Ushahidi who has been in contact with Mr. Sarver's team at Twitter.
"We have more update-type of information," he said. "The stream is getting wider and wider."
Link by Link - Refining the Twitter Explosion With GPS - NYTimes.com (19 November 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/09link.html?sq=Refining%20Twitter%20Explosion&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/tbdqj
Refining the Twitter Explosion By NOAM COHEN
DOES Twitter have a T.M.I. problem?
And, no, I don't just mean the Twitter users who share too much information about their lives, social, medical or otherwise.
Simply put, there is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio Signorini, a researcher at the University of Iowa. By October, he reports, there were 26 million tweets a day.
Why should we care about information overload at Twitter? Isn't Twitter about the individual experiences — a Tweeter and her followers — not the totality of millions of Tweeters around the world?
Perhaps this is true for most users. But the promise of Twitter — the reason Google and Microsoft have paid to be able to search millions of Tweets — is that it gives the best approximation of the pulse of the world: How popular is the new iPhone? Did Kanye West make a spectacle of himself at an awards show? Or, more ominously, what is it like when there is a shooter loose on an Army post?
•
Until lately, the main way to make sense of an urgent outpouring of tweets on a particular subject was to use text searches: look for the phrase "Fort Hood," for example, or maybe an agreed-upon label, "#fthood," within tweets. Yet during events like the shootings on Thursday at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead, this method is useless. Hundreds of "relevant" tweets pop up every minute, most repeating the same news reports over and over again or expressing concern from far away.
Which is why a new feature that Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — "geolocation" — holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.
The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location.
"Proximity can be this proxy for relevance," said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a "fairly small team" of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. "We are about delivering the right information to the right people."
Even now, before the geolocation feature has been released to developers, visitors to Twitter.com have been able to limit searches by location based on the profiles that Twitter users provide when they sign up.
That simple filter made a huge difference in what a visitor to Twitter's search engine discovered about the Fort Hood shootings. After limiting searches to those from within 15 miles of Killeen, Tex., a town near the Army post, you easily find messages sent by soldiers describing what it is like to be on lockdown or worrying about their children at school on the post.
The tweets from one, RicoRossi, can suddenly leap to the top, even while Fort Hood remains locked down — "a soldier i treated here said he was waiting in line @ SRP when another soldier stood up and started shooting," one early tweet read, using an acronym for the Soldiers Readiness Program, where the attacks occurred.
In response to questions from his Twitter followers, he quickly replied with "idont want 2 b 2 graphic so ill stop there, he was there ... it was like something out of a movie he said im paraphrasing of course."
Another Twitter user, JKsTinkerbell76, described the scene at Scott and White Hospital in nearby Temple, Tex., during her lunch break (around midnight late Thursday): "Still on Lockdown. Police and Security everywhere."
And DaTriggerMan, Killeen, Tex, tweeted Thursday afternoon, "We just got cell phone services back here on ft hood! And I am good thanks for all the concern!!!" And then, four minutes later, "what happen cuz I aint been in front of a tv? We had some shooters on post we good now tho!"
•
Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like "local trending topics," a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.
Because GPS will provide the ability to become very "granular" with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.
There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two "opt in" decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.
For the technological optimists, the cures for information overload, in essence, are better filters and greater context. The more you know about a message — who sent it and why — the better you understand it.
The open-source project Ushahidi, which takes its name from the Swahili word for "testimony," was quick to understand this. The software allows text messages to be mapped by time and location. It was developed to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008. Suddenly mere words can create a moving picture of where violence started and where it intensified.
More recently, through a program called stopstockouts.org, the Ushahidi software tracks a range of medicines for shortages across Africa.
Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge, said Erik Hersman, a co-founder of Ushahidi who has been in contact with Mr. Sarver's team at Twitter.
"We have more update-type of information," he said. "The stream is getting wider and wider."
Link by Link - Refining the Twitter Explosion With GPS - NYTimes.com (19 November 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/09link.html?sq=Refining%20Twitter%20Explosion&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/tbdqj
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace By PATRICIA COHEN
August 5, 2009
Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace By PATRICIA COHEN
Like a lot of new ideas, Media Cloud started with a long-running argument among friends. Ethan Zuckerman and a handful of his colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School found themselves in endless disputes about the mainstream media and newer digital variations. Who sets the agenda? How is public debate shaped? What topics are covered or ignored?
Anecdotes favoring one side or another were as plentiful as pop-ups, but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.
The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered, said Mr. Zuckerman, whose official title is senior researcher, though he acknowledges that a more accurate label would be computer geek and international development specialist. (At the moment only a small sample of Media Cloud’s tools are on the public Web site.)
The findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage. Users get to “do the fun part, which is analyzing the data,” Mr. Zuckerman said, “while we do the hard part of this, which is collecting it.” Eventually users will be able to compare the top 10 news events covered by Fox News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the BBC, for example, or chart the terms that appear most frequently in The New York Times, compared with leading blogs, or create a world map showing which countries receive the most media attention, or follow the path of a particular report to see if it dominates the news or dies out.
For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”
There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources. (A meme is anything — an idea, a phrase — that spreads by imitation from one person to another.)
Its graphs, which can be viewed at memetracker.org, display the reports that are competing against one another for attention on a given day, as well as those that have staying power or quickly disappear. A recent paper on MemeTracker’s experience during the presidential campaign was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work.
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a news-coverage index, which is laboriously compiled by having 14 people sample leading reports produced by 55 outlets. Media Cloud is much less exact, Mr. Zuckerman said, but it can automatically scan hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sources.
Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director of Pew’s journalism project, said Media Cloud “offers the public a great opportunity to play around with looking at a wide swath of media at more of a surface level.” But, she added, it cannot really capture the nuances of the news agenda of the news media. “There are certain things that computer algorithms cannot do that individuals can,” she said.
Since every method has virtues and drawbacks, she added, “I think there is tremendous value in having both approaches.”
What Media Cloud offers that no one else does is a tool anyone can use to answer all sorts of questions about the media landscape. One topic that Mr. Benkler and Mr. Zuckerman have long been debating is whether the Internet has helped open up the public sphere to more voices, or whether it just serves as an echo chamber, simply repeating information and views that the mainstream media already circulate.
Mr. Benkler is using Media Cloud to test his theory that digital media is widening the circle of voices somewhat. Sites that he characterizes as “one link out” from the most visible (like The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Instapundit) are entering into the conversation, he argues.
Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.
Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, first raised the idea in September 2008, but it was a cluster of influential economic and political bloggers like Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias who kept the idea alive. After the subject disappeared for a couple of months, the bloggers then resurrected it early this year as Washington began discussing the details of a bank rescue plan. To Mr. Benkler, this preliminary evidence suggests that the network of public media has given a voice to some people who in the past may have had useful ideas but were, as a practical matter, unable to inject them into the national conversation.
“If you’re actually trying to map where an idea starts and how it moves through the public sphere, you need a database like we’re developing, with time-stamped data,” Mr. Benkler said, explaining that services like Google and Lexis/Nexis are not as comprehensive or do not provide that level of detailed information. Media Cloud also enables more fine-grained analyses by examining language and context. “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?” Mr. Zuckerman asked.
Some of his colleagues, for example, have been tracking the frequency of the words bailout and stimulus to pinpoint when one term overtook the other. Media Cloud mapped the results to show how the term bailout, used constantly in the news in the fall, eventually gave way to the word stimulus after President Obama took office. The results were graphed, illustrating precisely when the two lines crossed — where, as Mr. Zuckerman would say, “one meme took over from the other.”
Media Cloud’s founders have put out an open call on their Web site for research ideas. The system provides a platform, Mr. Zuckerman said, on which others can build using their own kinds of tracking software. The point is to start with facts rather than impressions.
As Mr. Zuckerman noted, a lot of anecdotes don’t necessarily add up to the truth.
Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace By PATRICIA COHEN
Like a lot of new ideas, Media Cloud started with a long-running argument among friends. Ethan Zuckerman and a handful of his colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School found themselves in endless disputes about the mainstream media and newer digital variations. Who sets the agenda? How is public debate shaped? What topics are covered or ignored?
Anecdotes favoring one side or another were as plentiful as pop-ups, but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.
The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered, said Mr. Zuckerman, whose official title is senior researcher, though he acknowledges that a more accurate label would be computer geek and international development specialist. (At the moment only a small sample of Media Cloud’s tools are on the public Web site.)
The findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage. Users get to “do the fun part, which is analyzing the data,” Mr. Zuckerman said, “while we do the hard part of this, which is collecting it.” Eventually users will be able to compare the top 10 news events covered by Fox News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the BBC, for example, or chart the terms that appear most frequently in The New York Times, compared with leading blogs, or create a world map showing which countries receive the most media attention, or follow the path of a particular report to see if it dominates the news or dies out.
For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”
There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources. (A meme is anything — an idea, a phrase — that spreads by imitation from one person to another.)
Its graphs, which can be viewed at memetracker.org, display the reports that are competing against one another for attention on a given day, as well as those that have staying power or quickly disappear. A recent paper on MemeTracker’s experience during the presidential campaign was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work.
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a news-coverage index, which is laboriously compiled by having 14 people sample leading reports produced by 55 outlets. Media Cloud is much less exact, Mr. Zuckerman said, but it can automatically scan hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sources.
Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director of Pew’s journalism project, said Media Cloud “offers the public a great opportunity to play around with looking at a wide swath of media at more of a surface level.” But, she added, it cannot really capture the nuances of the news agenda of the news media. “There are certain things that computer algorithms cannot do that individuals can,” she said.
Since every method has virtues and drawbacks, she added, “I think there is tremendous value in having both approaches.”
What Media Cloud offers that no one else does is a tool anyone can use to answer all sorts of questions about the media landscape. One topic that Mr. Benkler and Mr. Zuckerman have long been debating is whether the Internet has helped open up the public sphere to more voices, or whether it just serves as an echo chamber, simply repeating information and views that the mainstream media already circulate.
Mr. Benkler is using Media Cloud to test his theory that digital media is widening the circle of voices somewhat. Sites that he characterizes as “one link out” from the most visible (like The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Instapundit) are entering into the conversation, he argues.
Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.
Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, first raised the idea in September 2008, but it was a cluster of influential economic and political bloggers like Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias who kept the idea alive. After the subject disappeared for a couple of months, the bloggers then resurrected it early this year as Washington began discussing the details of a bank rescue plan. To Mr. Benkler, this preliminary evidence suggests that the network of public media has given a voice to some people who in the past may have had useful ideas but were, as a practical matter, unable to inject them into the national conversation.
“If you’re actually trying to map where an idea starts and how it moves through the public sphere, you need a database like we’re developing, with time-stamped data,” Mr. Benkler said, explaining that services like Google and Lexis/Nexis are not as comprehensive or do not provide that level of detailed information. Media Cloud also enables more fine-grained analyses by examining language and context. “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?” Mr. Zuckerman asked.
Some of his colleagues, for example, have been tracking the frequency of the words bailout and stimulus to pinpoint when one term overtook the other. Media Cloud mapped the results to show how the term bailout, used constantly in the news in the fall, eventually gave way to the word stimulus after President Obama took office. The results were graphed, illustrating precisely when the two lines crossed — where, as Mr. Zuckerman would say, “one meme took over from the other.”
Media Cloud’s founders have put out an open call on their Web site for research ideas. The system provides a platform, Mr. Zuckerman said, on which others can build using their own kinds of tracking software. The point is to start with facts rather than impressions.
As Mr. Zuckerman noted, a lot of anecdotes don’t necessarily add up to the truth.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)By Ian Shapira
The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)By Ian Shapira
Sunday, August 2, 2009
A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post.
I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace. Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.
But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?
* * *
The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.
I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.
Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.
The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.
Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)
After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.
The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.
After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?
I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. "Probably took me," he said, "you know . . . a half-hour to an hour."
* * *
After I first saw Nolan's post, I shifted into modern self-promotional reporter mode, trying my best to keep spreading the story into the digital ether. I posted the story on my Facebook page and tweeted it on Twitter with all the appropriate symbols: "Gawker has a great posting on my #WashPost story on the #millennial guru." I hadn't had my outrage stoked by my editor yet and was still happy for the attention.
Gawker was the second-biggest referrer of visitors to my story online. (No. 1 was the "Today's Papers" feature on Slate, which is owned by The Post.) Though some readers got their fill of Loehr and never clicked the link to my story, others found their way to my piece only by way of Gawker.
Even if I owe Nolan for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?
More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.
The Post just completed its fourth round of buyouts since 2003; and although the company reported on Friday that it had returned to profitability in the second quarter, the newspaper division, which is pretty much us, continues losing money. Standard & Poor's expects that the company's gross earnings will drop by 30 percent this year. Gawker Media, on the other hand, reported last week that its revenues in the first two quarters of 2009 were up 45 percent from the first two quarters of last year.
David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores "unfair competition rights" -- which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if "parasitic" free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.
News organizations once had such protections against the replication and resale of their work because of a wire service showdown in the early 20th century. In 1918, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Associated Press in a complaint against a rival wire service that had been ripping off its stories, Marburger said.
When Congress was revising copyright laws in 1976, it decided to abolish all other laws that functioned like copyright, while maintaining an exception for that Supreme Court ruling. The Justice Department objected to keeping the ruling alive, arguing that it gave media organizations a "boundless monopoly" over the news of the day. Congress then dropped the exception.
Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others' work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.
Marburger compared my article and the Gawker posting and concluded: "This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don't change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive."
That may be far-fetched. And after all, newspapers aren't entirely unwitting victims; they knew about the Internet very early, knew about the power of the Drudge Report in the 1990s and failed to innovate.
The Washington Post Web site has successfully sued several media companies, including Total News, Free Republic, GoSMS and Gator Corp., for exploiting Post content (and in several cases, selling ads against Post material). In a statement, Post general counsel Eric N. Lieberman said: "In general, we believe that there is a very important line between appropriate quoting and linking, which contributes to free expression, and inappropriate free-riding, which diminishes free expression."
Recently, the Associated Press announced that it will track illegitimate uses of its articles online; and a California startup, Attributor, has devised a new way for newspapers to share in the ad revenue from any site that copies their articles, although the idea needs cooperation from big ad networks to succeed.
Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, which owns not only Gawker but sports and technology blogs such as Deadspin and Gizmodo, told me that he'd "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint his company's stories and headlines. But newspapers, he said, are not sin-free, either. "I'd like newspapers to pay us too, while we're at it," he told me over Gmail chat. "For instance, the New York Post lifted our Deadspin story on [ESPN reporter] Erin Andrews and splashed it on their front page. A brief credit -- but they didn't even link from the web version."
So Denton balks at the appropriation of his reporter's work about the illicit videotaping of a popular sports reporter. But what about Gawker's riff on my Post story?
"That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," he said.
* * *
The popular saying in the industry now is that it's important to "save journalism" -- not necessarily newspapers. I agree, but newspapers are still the most common organizations that pay a large staff of reporters, providing them with a living wage, health care and a retirement plan.
Nolan, 29, the Gawker writer, told me he feels he has hit a ceiling in the business. "It used to be that people would get a job at Gawker, do it for a year, then go off and get a great job at New York magazine," Nolan said. "Now those jobs are gone, and I feel like there is nowhere to aspire to. But I'm pretty happy."
Nolan, who is considered an independent contractor, gets paid $4,000 a month, and thanks to Denton's acknowledgement that people should have incentives to make an impact, he gets bonuses for exceeding his Web traffic expectations. Does he see the Catch-22 he's inflicting on himself -- and everyone else? "I don't generally feel bad about doing this. I am trying to put in a highlight reel of the stories. It's like doing movie previews," he said.
After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators -- newspapers included -- are more transparent about whom they're heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.
So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I'll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: "Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article"? Oh -- one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?
shapirai@washpost.com
Ian Shapira is a local reporter for The Washington Post who writes about the millennial generation. He will be online to chat with readers at 11 a.m. Tuesday. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post.
I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace. Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.
But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?
* * *
The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.
I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.
Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.
The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.
Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)
After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.
The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.
After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?
I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. "Probably took me," he said, "you know . . . a half-hour to an hour."
* * *
After I first saw Nolan's post, I shifted into modern self-promotional reporter mode, trying my best to keep spreading the story into the digital ether. I posted the story on my Facebook page and tweeted it on Twitter with all the appropriate symbols: "Gawker has a great posting on my #WashPost story on the #millennial guru." I hadn't had my outrage stoked by my editor yet and was still happy for the attention.
Gawker was the second-biggest referrer of visitors to my story online. (No. 1 was the "Today's Papers" feature on Slate, which is owned by The Post.) Though some readers got their fill of Loehr and never clicked the link to my story, others found their way to my piece only by way of Gawker.
Even if I owe Nolan for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?
More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.
The Post just completed its fourth round of buyouts since 2003; and although the company reported on Friday that it had returned to profitability in the second quarter, the newspaper division, which is pretty much us, continues losing money. Standard & Poor's expects that the company's gross earnings will drop by 30 percent this year. Gawker Media, on the other hand, reported last week that its revenues in the first two quarters of 2009 were up 45 percent from the first two quarters of last year.
David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores "unfair competition rights" -- which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if "parasitic" free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.
News organizations once had such protections against the replication and resale of their work because of a wire service showdown in the early 20th century. In 1918, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Associated Press in a complaint against a rival wire service that had been ripping off its stories, Marburger said.
When Congress was revising copyright laws in 1976, it decided to abolish all other laws that functioned like copyright, while maintaining an exception for that Supreme Court ruling. The Justice Department objected to keeping the ruling alive, arguing that it gave media organizations a "boundless monopoly" over the news of the day. Congress then dropped the exception.
Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others' work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.
Marburger compared my article and the Gawker posting and concluded: "This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don't change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive."
That may be far-fetched. And after all, newspapers aren't entirely unwitting victims; they knew about the Internet very early, knew about the power of the Drudge Report in the 1990s and failed to innovate.
The Washington Post Web site has successfully sued several media companies, including Total News, Free Republic, GoSMS and Gator Corp., for exploiting Post content (and in several cases, selling ads against Post material). In a statement, Post general counsel Eric N. Lieberman said: "In general, we believe that there is a very important line between appropriate quoting and linking, which contributes to free expression, and inappropriate free-riding, which diminishes free expression."
Recently, the Associated Press announced that it will track illegitimate uses of its articles online; and a California startup, Attributor, has devised a new way for newspapers to share in the ad revenue from any site that copies their articles, although the idea needs cooperation from big ad networks to succeed.
Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, which owns not only Gawker but sports and technology blogs such as Deadspin and Gizmodo, told me that he'd "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint his company's stories and headlines. But newspapers, he said, are not sin-free, either. "I'd like newspapers to pay us too, while we're at it," he told me over Gmail chat. "For instance, the New York Post lifted our Deadspin story on [ESPN reporter] Erin Andrews and splashed it on their front page. A brief credit -- but they didn't even link from the web version."
So Denton balks at the appropriation of his reporter's work about the illicit videotaping of a popular sports reporter. But what about Gawker's riff on my Post story?
"That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," he said.
* * *
The popular saying in the industry now is that it's important to "save journalism" -- not necessarily newspapers. I agree, but newspapers are still the most common organizations that pay a large staff of reporters, providing them with a living wage, health care and a retirement plan.
Nolan, 29, the Gawker writer, told me he feels he has hit a ceiling in the business. "It used to be that people would get a job at Gawker, do it for a year, then go off and get a great job at New York magazine," Nolan said. "Now those jobs are gone, and I feel like there is nowhere to aspire to. But I'm pretty happy."
Nolan, who is considered an independent contractor, gets paid $4,000 a month, and thanks to Denton's acknowledgement that people should have incentives to make an impact, he gets bonuses for exceeding his Web traffic expectations. Does he see the Catch-22 he's inflicting on himself -- and everyone else? "I don't generally feel bad about doing this. I am trying to put in a highlight reel of the stories. It's like doing movie previews," he said.
After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators -- newspapers included -- are more transparent about whom they're heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.
So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I'll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: "Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article"? Oh -- one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?
shapirai@washpost.com
Ian Shapira is a local reporter for The Washington Post who writes about the millennial generation. He will be online to chat with readers at 11 a.m. Tuesday. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Staying Informed Without Drowning in Data By JENNA WORTHAM
December 18, 2008
Basics
Staying Informed Without Drowning in Data By JENNA WORTHAM
I'M a reporter and I write about the Internet. I write about its culture, its latest developments and the people and companies involved. You may think this means I spend a lot of time watching videos of advice-dispensing ninjas and funny photographs of cats but that, sadly, is not the case.
What I do spend a lot of time doing is scouring the Internet for information and news. This is great because the Internet makes this easier than ever. This is also a huge pain because the Internet makes this easier than ever. There's a never-ending sea of news sources, and if I just plunge in headfirst, I'll probably get overwhelmed in minutes. And yet to be ahead of the news, I can't just read the big, mainstream publications — I have to dig deeper and find more specialized sites and blogs that are often closer to the action.
The key is to manage the information overflow. This can be done through sites and services that filter and curate the online news-scape into something I can actually digest. With a little time spent exploring and tailoring these sites, you too can get better, deeper information on subjects you care about — and it won't take you days to sort through it all.
With millions of Web sites and blogs, there's no shortage of news, so some filtering is required. Social news sites are one place to begin the culling. They rely on the wisdom of the crowds to determine which headlines are newsworthy by seeing which headlines are being read most. The community of users at sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller and Delicious rank stories in order of importance, creating a list of stories you can refer to at will.
But why skim through the top articles on just one social news site when you can track what's bubbling up across the majority of those sites? NewzNozzl pulls top news stories from the above-mentioned social bookmarking sites as well as Mixx, Propeller and Newsvine to create a prefiltered flow of hot news items. Like Digg and its social bookmarking brethren, NewzNozzl welcomes interested parties to join the service to vote and share stories within the site.
There are pitfalls to relying on a vast community of users. They may prefer to popularize more sensational news headlines like "Former Miss America Pops Out Her Tooth" and "The 6 Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit in Your Shoe)." If that isn't quite what you're looking for, try sites like Addictomatic, Yahoo Buzz or BuzzTracker. These sites eschew the system of ranking user-submitted stories by popular votes and instead, rely on stories collected from a preapproved list of publishers.
BuzzTracker, for example, follows more than 100,000 different news sources as diverse as Boing Boing and The Washington Post, and presents its daily list of offerings in an accessible layout. Addictomatic delivers a compact snapshot of the news from a host of sources. For example, a quick search for the comedian Tina Fey returns top Google News searches, YouTube videos and Flickr photos compiled onto a single page.
If you're feeling particularly adventurous, hop over to one of my personal favorites, BuzzFeed, a site that employs both paid staff and volunteers to create a user-generated hot list of newsworthy items. Browsing the site can be a little risky, as submissions run the gamut from breaking political news to stills from celebrity sex tapes, but BuzzFeed has rewarded me with gems like the Lasagna Cat (vintage Garfield comic strips re-enacted as live-action Web shorts) and newly born Internet memes (like Disaster Girl).
For a more tailored approach, RSS subscribers like Google Reader, FeedDemon and Bloglines have long offered ways to collect content from blogs and news sites and put them into a simple combined list of stories that you can check in on periodically. But there's a major pitfall to using RSS feeds: Given the vast smorgasbord of news feeds at your disposal, it's easy to overindulge on news subscriptions. Too many feeds can cause your number of subscriptions to become bloated and unmanageable. (At last glance, my RSS reader has more than 30,000 unread items from 500 different feeds, sorted into a dozen or so different folders.)
Here's where RSS tools can come in handy. RSS filters like ReadBurner and RSSMeme are applications that pick out the most popular links from RSS aggregating sites like Google Reader. They work similarly to Digg, but rather than tally the popularity of an article by votes, they generate lists based on the number of times a particular article has been shared across certain RSS subscribers.
The content streaming down these sites throughout the day tends to be a hodgepodge of random articles and breaking news. Recently, sprinkled in among reports of President Bush's near miss with a pair of size 10 shoes were the equally eye-grabbing headlines "Ms Pacman Tattoo" and "Video Game Design Between 1990-2008." Guaranteed procrastination aids, perhaps, but entertaining nonetheless. And the mixed bag of headlines doubles as a fascinating overview of the news climate — a cross-section of what's capturing the interest of hundreds of Web surfers at any given moment.
LinkRiver is another spin on an RSS filter, but this particular service concentrates your content and bookmarks from a variety of RSS subscriptions — Google Reader, Delicious, Yahoo! Bookmarks — into a single, steady stream of links. More interestingly, LinkRiver lets you read what other people are reading. And not just a faceless community of users, either — LinkRiver lets you browse the pooled content of its members or home in on specific contributors, which include tech bloggers like Robert Scoble; entrepreneurs like Evan Williams, founder of the microblogging platform Twitter; and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape.
Alternatively, you can isolate a handful of your own RSS feeds and transform that data into a format that resembles a newspaper. Tabbloid, created by Hewlett-Packard, rounds up as few or as many news feeds as you like and cobbles them together into a makeshift newsletter or tabloid format, then delivers it in PDF format via e-mail at the desired frequency, either daily or weekly. Feedbooks, an e-Book platform, also offers a version of a digitized newsstand that can be delivered to a laptop or mobile device not only in PDF but also in formats compatible with a Cybook or a Sony Reader.
Finally, don't fear Twitter. Don't worry about learning how to friend and follow on the service — you can transform Twitter into a useful and relatively unobtrusive news ticker. Start by downloading a desktop application like Twirl and subscribing to various news feeds — The New York Times, CNN, The Huffington Post, National Public Radio, to name a few.
Or seek out companies you could use updates on — a recent update on JetBlue, for example, read "Did you know we can fit 5 surfboards in our E-190 aircraft? Orlando to San Jose, Costa Rica, starts March 26." A recent tweet from Starbucks's headquarters in Seattle offered information on drink ingredients and holiday store hours.
But before you get too Twitter-happy, a word of caution: Anyone can create a Twitter account with no identity verification, so take some accounts — like certain celebrity streams — with a big grain of salt. You can often check the veracity with a blog post on a company Web site confirming its existence. After all, if you're going to limit the information you get online, you're going to want to make sure the information you get is right.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?sq=Drowning%20in%20Data&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
null
Basics
Staying Informed Without Drowning in Data By JENNA WORTHAM
I'M a reporter and I write about the Internet. I write about its culture, its latest developments and the people and companies involved. You may think this means I spend a lot of time watching videos of advice-dispensing ninjas and funny photographs of cats but that, sadly, is not the case.
What I do spend a lot of time doing is scouring the Internet for information and news. This is great because the Internet makes this easier than ever. This is also a huge pain because the Internet makes this easier than ever. There's a never-ending sea of news sources, and if I just plunge in headfirst, I'll probably get overwhelmed in minutes. And yet to be ahead of the news, I can't just read the big, mainstream publications — I have to dig deeper and find more specialized sites and blogs that are often closer to the action.
The key is to manage the information overflow. This can be done through sites and services that filter and curate the online news-scape into something I can actually digest. With a little time spent exploring and tailoring these sites, you too can get better, deeper information on subjects you care about — and it won't take you days to sort through it all.
With millions of Web sites and blogs, there's no shortage of news, so some filtering is required. Social news sites are one place to begin the culling. They rely on the wisdom of the crowds to determine which headlines are newsworthy by seeing which headlines are being read most. The community of users at sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller and Delicious rank stories in order of importance, creating a list of stories you can refer to at will.
But why skim through the top articles on just one social news site when you can track what's bubbling up across the majority of those sites? NewzNozzl pulls top news stories from the above-mentioned social bookmarking sites as well as Mixx, Propeller and Newsvine to create a prefiltered flow of hot news items. Like Digg and its social bookmarking brethren, NewzNozzl welcomes interested parties to join the service to vote and share stories within the site.
There are pitfalls to relying on a vast community of users. They may prefer to popularize more sensational news headlines like "Former Miss America Pops Out Her Tooth" and "The 6 Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit in Your Shoe)." If that isn't quite what you're looking for, try sites like Addictomatic, Yahoo Buzz or BuzzTracker. These sites eschew the system of ranking user-submitted stories by popular votes and instead, rely on stories collected from a preapproved list of publishers.
BuzzTracker, for example, follows more than 100,000 different news sources as diverse as Boing Boing and The Washington Post, and presents its daily list of offerings in an accessible layout. Addictomatic delivers a compact snapshot of the news from a host of sources. For example, a quick search for the comedian Tina Fey returns top Google News searches, YouTube videos and Flickr photos compiled onto a single page.
If you're feeling particularly adventurous, hop over to one of my personal favorites, BuzzFeed, a site that employs both paid staff and volunteers to create a user-generated hot list of newsworthy items. Browsing the site can be a little risky, as submissions run the gamut from breaking political news to stills from celebrity sex tapes, but BuzzFeed has rewarded me with gems like the Lasagna Cat (vintage Garfield comic strips re-enacted as live-action Web shorts) and newly born Internet memes (like Disaster Girl).
For a more tailored approach, RSS subscribers like Google Reader, FeedDemon and Bloglines have long offered ways to collect content from blogs and news sites and put them into a simple combined list of stories that you can check in on periodically. But there's a major pitfall to using RSS feeds: Given the vast smorgasbord of news feeds at your disposal, it's easy to overindulge on news subscriptions. Too many feeds can cause your number of subscriptions to become bloated and unmanageable. (At last glance, my RSS reader has more than 30,000 unread items from 500 different feeds, sorted into a dozen or so different folders.)
Here's where RSS tools can come in handy. RSS filters like ReadBurner and RSSMeme are applications that pick out the most popular links from RSS aggregating sites like Google Reader. They work similarly to Digg, but rather than tally the popularity of an article by votes, they generate lists based on the number of times a particular article has been shared across certain RSS subscribers.
The content streaming down these sites throughout the day tends to be a hodgepodge of random articles and breaking news. Recently, sprinkled in among reports of President Bush's near miss with a pair of size 10 shoes were the equally eye-grabbing headlines "Ms Pacman Tattoo" and "Video Game Design Between 1990-2008." Guaranteed procrastination aids, perhaps, but entertaining nonetheless. And the mixed bag of headlines doubles as a fascinating overview of the news climate — a cross-section of what's capturing the interest of hundreds of Web surfers at any given moment.
LinkRiver is another spin on an RSS filter, but this particular service concentrates your content and bookmarks from a variety of RSS subscriptions — Google Reader, Delicious, Yahoo! Bookmarks — into a single, steady stream of links. More interestingly, LinkRiver lets you read what other people are reading. And not just a faceless community of users, either — LinkRiver lets you browse the pooled content of its members or home in on specific contributors, which include tech bloggers like Robert Scoble; entrepreneurs like Evan Williams, founder of the microblogging platform Twitter; and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape.
Alternatively, you can isolate a handful of your own RSS feeds and transform that data into a format that resembles a newspaper. Tabbloid, created by Hewlett-Packard, rounds up as few or as many news feeds as you like and cobbles them together into a makeshift newsletter or tabloid format, then delivers it in PDF format via e-mail at the desired frequency, either daily or weekly. Feedbooks, an e-Book platform, also offers a version of a digitized newsstand that can be delivered to a laptop or mobile device not only in PDF but also in formats compatible with a Cybook or a Sony Reader.
Finally, don't fear Twitter. Don't worry about learning how to friend and follow on the service — you can transform Twitter into a useful and relatively unobtrusive news ticker. Start by downloading a desktop application like Twirl and subscribing to various news feeds — The New York Times, CNN, The Huffington Post, National Public Radio, to name a few.
Or seek out companies you could use updates on — a recent update on JetBlue, for example, read "Did you know we can fit 5 surfboards in our E-190 aircraft? Orlando to San Jose, Costa Rica, starts March 26." A recent tweet from Starbucks's headquarters in Seattle offered information on drink ingredients and holiday store hours.
But before you get too Twitter-happy, a word of caution: Anyone can create a Twitter account with no identity verification, so take some accounts — like certain celebrity streams — with a big grain of salt. You can often check the veracity with a blog post on a company Web site confirming its existence. After all, if you're going to limit the information you get online, you're going to want to make sure the information you get is right.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?sq=Drowning%20in%20Data&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
null
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
What the Search Engines Have Found Out About All of Us By JIM DWYER
December 10, 2008
About New York
What the Search Engines Have Found Out About All of Us By JIM DWYER
Google has released its map of the national brain and appetites for 2008, and it turns out that many, many people across America have been asking the Internet "what is love?" and "how to kiss."
And to tighten the focus, Google has also provided a list of search queries made by people sitting at computers in New York City.
It turns out that New Yorkers are looking for something a bit different. On a list of the 10 subjects that posted the greatest increases this year, the country as a whole was looking for Fox News and information about David Cook, the "American Idol" champion.
Neither made the New York list. Then again, the national list did not have 2 of the city's top 10: Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus architecture school, and the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile circular underground tunnel in Switzerland that was built to smash protons into each other at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.
No doubt someone out in cyberspace can explain the surge of interest this year in Gropius, who has been dead since 1969 and has only one structure of any note in the city, the former Pan Am building.
The collider is easier to understand. There were worries that the crash of protons would instantly create a black hole, but in good news that was widely overlooked at the time, no hole appeared — or is it disappeared? — on Sept. 10, the day the machine was turned on. Search-engine interest in the collider promptly dropped off, as people pointed their anxieties and inquiries toward "Wall Street." (The collider is currently on the fritz, as is Wall Street.)
On the surface, these kinds of lists are supposed to reveal what Google calls the zeitgeist of 2008, though it's not much of a surprise that people were interested in Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. But they also provide hints of the level of personal details that people are now turning over to search engines and related businesses without much awareness.
The lists, said Lt. Col. Greg Conti, a professor of computer science at West Point, "are just major tsunami-type activities, big waves in the online searches."
Professor Conti, the author of "Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You?" (Addison-Wesley, 2008), contends that Google's internal tools make it possible to develop detailed pictures of individual interests, not just of masses of teenagers looking for the very latest about Miley Cyrus.
"A complete picture of us as individuals and as companies emerges — political leanings, medical conditions, business acquisitions signaled by job searches," he said. "It would be very scary if we could play back every search we made. Those can be tied back very precisely to an individual. You can go all the way from individual molecules of water up to the tsunami."
INFORMATION on the Web looks free, but it is actually swapped for little bits of data that are useful to businesses. Google records Internet protocol addresses that are generated by each computer, cookies permitted by the users, the kind of browser being used, and the operating system of the computer, said Heather Spain, a spokeswoman for Google.
After nine months, Ms. Spain said, Google starts to "anonymise" the data it has collected by deleting the last two digits from the I.P. address. At 18 months, Google removes parts of the cookie number.
"This breaks the link between the search query and the computer it was entered from," she said. "It's similar to the way in which credit card companies replace digits with hash marks on receipts to improve their customers' security."
Professor Conti said that few people have the slightest idea how much of a trail they leave across the Internet. "People tend to think they're only leaving footprints on sites that they trust," he said, but many Web sites contain invisible code, like Google Analytics, that can track users over swaths of the Web.
The lists of popular searches, Ms. Spain said, are the products of inquiries by millions of people and do not threaten anyone's privacy. The tools Google provides to the public for analyzing searches generally make it possible to look at the inquiries made in a particular state, not by individual cities.
For now, surrendering personal information is the cost for asking questions and getting answers quickly. All of the privacy measures are cumbersome.
"I speak about this at hacker conferences," Professor Conti said, "and if they say something's hard to use, believe me, it's hard. There's really no solution now — except abstinence. And if you choose not to use online tools, you're not a member of the 21st century."
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 11, 2008
The About New York column on Wednesday, about the most popular search subjects on Google this year, misstated the speed of protons accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider, which made the top 10 list of searches in New York City. The protons travel at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, not at the actual speed of light. And the column, quoting a Google spokeswoman, misstated the timing of a step that Google takes to disguise the identity of its users by deleting parts of their cookies from its logs. It does that after 18 months, not after nine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/nyregion/10about.html?sq=Dwyer&st=cse&scp=3&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83jij
About New York
What the Search Engines Have Found Out About All of Us By JIM DWYER
Google has released its map of the national brain and appetites for 2008, and it turns out that many, many people across America have been asking the Internet "what is love?" and "how to kiss."
And to tighten the focus, Google has also provided a list of search queries made by people sitting at computers in New York City.
It turns out that New Yorkers are looking for something a bit different. On a list of the 10 subjects that posted the greatest increases this year, the country as a whole was looking for Fox News and information about David Cook, the "American Idol" champion.
Neither made the New York list. Then again, the national list did not have 2 of the city's top 10: Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus architecture school, and the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile circular underground tunnel in Switzerland that was built to smash protons into each other at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.
No doubt someone out in cyberspace can explain the surge of interest this year in Gropius, who has been dead since 1969 and has only one structure of any note in the city, the former Pan Am building.
The collider is easier to understand. There were worries that the crash of protons would instantly create a black hole, but in good news that was widely overlooked at the time, no hole appeared — or is it disappeared? — on Sept. 10, the day the machine was turned on. Search-engine interest in the collider promptly dropped off, as people pointed their anxieties and inquiries toward "Wall Street." (The collider is currently on the fritz, as is Wall Street.)
On the surface, these kinds of lists are supposed to reveal what Google calls the zeitgeist of 2008, though it's not much of a surprise that people were interested in Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. But they also provide hints of the level of personal details that people are now turning over to search engines and related businesses without much awareness.
The lists, said Lt. Col. Greg Conti, a professor of computer science at West Point, "are just major tsunami-type activities, big waves in the online searches."
Professor Conti, the author of "Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You?" (Addison-Wesley, 2008), contends that Google's internal tools make it possible to develop detailed pictures of individual interests, not just of masses of teenagers looking for the very latest about Miley Cyrus.
"A complete picture of us as individuals and as companies emerges — political leanings, medical conditions, business acquisitions signaled by job searches," he said. "It would be very scary if we could play back every search we made. Those can be tied back very precisely to an individual. You can go all the way from individual molecules of water up to the tsunami."
INFORMATION on the Web looks free, but it is actually swapped for little bits of data that are useful to businesses. Google records Internet protocol addresses that are generated by each computer, cookies permitted by the users, the kind of browser being used, and the operating system of the computer, said Heather Spain, a spokeswoman for Google.
After nine months, Ms. Spain said, Google starts to "anonymise" the data it has collected by deleting the last two digits from the I.P. address. At 18 months, Google removes parts of the cookie number.
"This breaks the link between the search query and the computer it was entered from," she said. "It's similar to the way in which credit card companies replace digits with hash marks on receipts to improve their customers' security."
Professor Conti said that few people have the slightest idea how much of a trail they leave across the Internet. "People tend to think they're only leaving footprints on sites that they trust," he said, but many Web sites contain invisible code, like Google Analytics, that can track users over swaths of the Web.
The lists of popular searches, Ms. Spain said, are the products of inquiries by millions of people and do not threaten anyone's privacy. The tools Google provides to the public for analyzing searches generally make it possible to look at the inquiries made in a particular state, not by individual cities.
For now, surrendering personal information is the cost for asking questions and getting answers quickly. All of the privacy measures are cumbersome.
"I speak about this at hacker conferences," Professor Conti said, "and if they say something's hard to use, believe me, it's hard. There's really no solution now — except abstinence. And if you choose not to use online tools, you're not a member of the 21st century."
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 11, 2008
The About New York column on Wednesday, about the most popular search subjects on Google this year, misstated the speed of protons accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider, which made the top 10 list of searches in New York City. The protons travel at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, not at the actual speed of light. And the column, quoting a Google spokeswoman, misstated the timing of a step that Google takes to disguise the identity of its users by deleting parts of their cookies from its logs. It does that after 18 months, not after nine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/nyregion/10about.html?sq=Dwyer&st=cse&scp=3&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83jij
Thursday, August 14, 2008
The Social Network as a Career Safety Net
August 14, 2008
Basics
The Social Network as a Career Safety Net
By SARAH JANE TRIBBLE
IF you have avoided social-networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook with the excuse that they are the domain of desperate job hunters or attention-seeking teenagers, it’s time to reconsider.
In a world of economic instability and corporate upheaval, savvy professionals like the technology consultant Josh So epitomize the benefits of brushing up your online image and keeping it polished.
When Mr. So, a 32-year-old from Dublin, Calif., learned he had 45 days to find a new job before his company eliminated his division, he turned to friends online.
Within hours of updating his job status on the social-networking site LinkedIn, Mr. So won four job interviews through his contacts there. Within a week, two of the interviews resulted in offers. And within less than a month, his employer counteroffered with a position in another division and a $25,000 bump in his annual salary.
The old business adage that it’s not what you know but who you know takes a twist in the Internet era: it’s what you know about social-networking sites that can get you ahead.
“Build your own inner circle of people you know are good — people you know will get you places,” Mr. So said.
While it lacks the glamour of more popular sites like MySpace and Facebook, LinkedIn “is the place to be,” said the JupiterResearch media analyst Barry Parr, if you want to make professional contacts online. LinkedIn is a “Chamber of Commerce mixer,” he said.
LinkedIn has more than 25 million members, and it is adding new ones at the rate of 1.2 million a month — or about one new networker every two seconds.
With that kind of mass demographic, LinkedIn is hard to ignore. But with that kind of scale, can it be useful? It can be if you use it judiciously.
LinkedIn is intended to appeal to its average user: the 41-year-old white-collar professional with an income of $109,000 a year. User pages are spare: a brief professional summary, a photo and a résumé.
As you create your network, the site shows you people you may know through past jobs or educational institutions. (Facebook also suggests contacts, but it starts with lists from your e-mail or instant messaging accounts.)
And there is a search function so you can find people you don’t know but would like to — for instance, at a company where you want a job.
You might be shy about calling or e-mailing people you have neglected, but the social-networking sites let you avoid that. You are simply renewing the connection when you add a contact.
Bernard Lunn, a Web technology entrepreneur in New York, describes LinkedIn as the ultimate Rolodex.
“I’m no spring chicken,” said Mr. Lunn, 53. “I’ve been in business for almost 30 years. I had lost touch with a lot of people and had spent time in different industries.”
The Web site did the work of finding people for him, providing a list of likely connections by searching its own database of people who had overlapped with him at past jobs. All Mr. Lunn had to do was review the list and select contacts he wanted to add to his network.
“Some of them are now doing very useful jobs,” he said.
That’s the point. You don’t have to fear you’ll be perceived as using them; they are on the site for the same reason. They might well intend to use you.
Even so, don’t go crazy trying to connect with everyone you brushed past in the hallway 20 years ago, or friends of friends. Too many people can weaken your network.
“We try to discourage promiscuous linking,” said Kay Luo, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn.
But don’t be afraid to network strategically. You want to connect to people who can get you jobs. “People usually invite up — people above them in hierarchy,” said Ms. Luo. “When you’re talking about a professional network, quality is so important.”
So if the No. 1 tactic is to connect with people who are useful and successful, how do you make sure you’re one of their worthy connections? There are a few helpful approaches.
Ask for recommendations. Mr. So, who so quickly parlayed his connections into job offers, said that having updated recommendations with his résumé on LinkedIn was crucial to being noticed.
“The only way to get recommendations is to go out and ask for it,” Mr. So said. “It’s kind of a weird system. I typically go to my bosses and peers and say, ‘Do you mind?’ ”
The flipside of that system is that it behooves you to be generous. Jeremiah K. Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, has watched the growth of online social media since 2005 and advises social-networking users to follow an 80-20 rule. “Give information and answer questions 80 percent of the time, and 20 percent of the time ask for help,” he said.
When a contact asks for a recommendation, write it graciously and promptly. If you think that person isn’t worth a recommendation, think again about being connected to that person.
And remember the other social-networking sites. If LinkedIn is the Chamber of Commerce luncheon, then Facebook is the after-hours party (and MySpace is the all-night rave, which may make trolling for business connections there a bit trying). “Facebook seems a more natural way of communicating,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst for eMarketer in Seattle. “LinkedIn seems more formal.”
Facebook, which began in 2004 as a way for college students to communicate, has more than 80 million active users. The fastest-growing segment is now those 25 years old and older, according to the company.
The site makes it easy to carry on a casual conversation or ask group questions. The easiest way to use it professionally is to join your employer’s network. And it helps to post interesting links that are relevant to your job.
The site features classified ads in the Facebook Marketplace, and there are job-hunting applications on the site, like Jobster. There are also tools for building a professional profile or online business cards. And you can use one of a handful of applications, liked LinkedIn Contacts, to connect your Facebook profile to LinkedIn.
But the social ease of Facebook makes it easy to look frivolous, all of the experts warned. If you tend to overshare, people in your network will quickly learn about the breakup of your marriage or your love of Jell-O shots. (Facebook now offers fine-tuned privacy settings, on the upper right side of the home page.)
So perhaps the best tip of all for online social networking would be: Keep the social separate from the networking.
Basics
The Social Network as a Career Safety Net
By SARAH JANE TRIBBLE
IF you have avoided social-networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook with the excuse that they are the domain of desperate job hunters or attention-seeking teenagers, it’s time to reconsider.
In a world of economic instability and corporate upheaval, savvy professionals like the technology consultant Josh So epitomize the benefits of brushing up your online image and keeping it polished.
When Mr. So, a 32-year-old from Dublin, Calif., learned he had 45 days to find a new job before his company eliminated his division, he turned to friends online.
Within hours of updating his job status on the social-networking site LinkedIn, Mr. So won four job interviews through his contacts there. Within a week, two of the interviews resulted in offers. And within less than a month, his employer counteroffered with a position in another division and a $25,000 bump in his annual salary.
The old business adage that it’s not what you know but who you know takes a twist in the Internet era: it’s what you know about social-networking sites that can get you ahead.
“Build your own inner circle of people you know are good — people you know will get you places,” Mr. So said.
While it lacks the glamour of more popular sites like MySpace and Facebook, LinkedIn “is the place to be,” said the JupiterResearch media analyst Barry Parr, if you want to make professional contacts online. LinkedIn is a “Chamber of Commerce mixer,” he said.
LinkedIn has more than 25 million members, and it is adding new ones at the rate of 1.2 million a month — or about one new networker every two seconds.
With that kind of mass demographic, LinkedIn is hard to ignore. But with that kind of scale, can it be useful? It can be if you use it judiciously.
LinkedIn is intended to appeal to its average user: the 41-year-old white-collar professional with an income of $109,000 a year. User pages are spare: a brief professional summary, a photo and a résumé.
As you create your network, the site shows you people you may know through past jobs or educational institutions. (Facebook also suggests contacts, but it starts with lists from your e-mail or instant messaging accounts.)
And there is a search function so you can find people you don’t know but would like to — for instance, at a company where you want a job.
You might be shy about calling or e-mailing people you have neglected, but the social-networking sites let you avoid that. You are simply renewing the connection when you add a contact.
Bernard Lunn, a Web technology entrepreneur in New York, describes LinkedIn as the ultimate Rolodex.
“I’m no spring chicken,” said Mr. Lunn, 53. “I’ve been in business for almost 30 years. I had lost touch with a lot of people and had spent time in different industries.”
The Web site did the work of finding people for him, providing a list of likely connections by searching its own database of people who had overlapped with him at past jobs. All Mr. Lunn had to do was review the list and select contacts he wanted to add to his network.
“Some of them are now doing very useful jobs,” he said.
That’s the point. You don’t have to fear you’ll be perceived as using them; they are on the site for the same reason. They might well intend to use you.
Even so, don’t go crazy trying to connect with everyone you brushed past in the hallway 20 years ago, or friends of friends. Too many people can weaken your network.
“We try to discourage promiscuous linking,” said Kay Luo, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn.
But don’t be afraid to network strategically. You want to connect to people who can get you jobs. “People usually invite up — people above them in hierarchy,” said Ms. Luo. “When you’re talking about a professional network, quality is so important.”
So if the No. 1 tactic is to connect with people who are useful and successful, how do you make sure you’re one of their worthy connections? There are a few helpful approaches.
Ask for recommendations. Mr. So, who so quickly parlayed his connections into job offers, said that having updated recommendations with his résumé on LinkedIn was crucial to being noticed.
“The only way to get recommendations is to go out and ask for it,” Mr. So said. “It’s kind of a weird system. I typically go to my bosses and peers and say, ‘Do you mind?’ ”
The flipside of that system is that it behooves you to be generous. Jeremiah K. Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, has watched the growth of online social media since 2005 and advises social-networking users to follow an 80-20 rule. “Give information and answer questions 80 percent of the time, and 20 percent of the time ask for help,” he said.
When a contact asks for a recommendation, write it graciously and promptly. If you think that person isn’t worth a recommendation, think again about being connected to that person.
And remember the other social-networking sites. If LinkedIn is the Chamber of Commerce luncheon, then Facebook is the after-hours party (and MySpace is the all-night rave, which may make trolling for business connections there a bit trying). “Facebook seems a more natural way of communicating,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst for eMarketer in Seattle. “LinkedIn seems more formal.”
Facebook, which began in 2004 as a way for college students to communicate, has more than 80 million active users. The fastest-growing segment is now those 25 years old and older, according to the company.
The site makes it easy to carry on a casual conversation or ask group questions. The easiest way to use it professionally is to join your employer’s network. And it helps to post interesting links that are relevant to your job.
The site features classified ads in the Facebook Marketplace, and there are job-hunting applications on the site, like Jobster. There are also tools for building a professional profile or online business cards. And you can use one of a handful of applications, liked LinkedIn Contacts, to connect your Facebook profile to LinkedIn.
But the social ease of Facebook makes it easy to look frivolous, all of the experts warned. If you tend to overshare, people in your network will quickly learn about the breakup of your marriage or your love of Jell-O shots. (Facebook now offers fine-tuned privacy settings, on the upper right side of the home page.)
So perhaps the best tip of all for online social networking would be: Keep the social separate from the networking.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER
April 17, 2008
Basics
Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER
THE first time Jeannet Leendertse, a freelance book designer, saw the software on the Blurb.com Web site that could automatically produce a book, she was more than a little sad. “I thought I needed to have a stiff drink for the end of my career,” she said.
The software could help anyone turn some text and photos into a bound book in a few minutes.
Soon after, though, she saw an opportunity. “I realized there would always be people who appreciate time and effort going into design. I decided to put myself onto their Web site.”
Today, Ms. Leendertse still turns a pile of pictures and paragraphs into bound books, but instead of working just for a roster of major publishers like MIT Press, she helps individuals create books. She is participating in an offshoot of the scrapbooking phenomena, the hobby of collecting and preserving photos and mementos.
What was once a pastime for mothers recording family memories for their children has blossomed into a new, fertile marketplace of collaboration. People with stories to tell are creating personalized books filled with pictures, blog entries and even business proposals. While some of these glorified scrapbooks are aimed at the world at large, many new titles were never intended to be sold in stores or marketed in any way. For instance, architects submitting bound proposals for their projects have used some of the scrapbooking tools.
The digital tools — the camera, scanner and word processor — have opened the field of book creation to the amateur as the hobby moves away from pasting buttons and rickrack onto pages. But sometimes the bookmakers need a little help. Ms. Leendertse recently worked with the filmmaker Robert Gardner, who told her: “This is the artwork that I have. This is my story. How do you think the artwork tells the story best?”
She said he gave her access to his archives and they worked together to create “The Impulse to Preserve,” a 384-page book on Mr. Gardner’s philosophy of creating films. She organized the content and arranged the pages of the book. Soon afterward, a publisher, Other Press, saw the design and agreed to publish her finished work.
Suzzanne Connolly, a San Francisco-based book designer at Picturia Press (www.picturiapress.com), says couples who want to bind the pictures from their wedding day come to her with elaborate plans. “We decide on the layout, the color, the fonts and the style and the flow of each book,” she said. “We can find illustrators, photographers and writers for our clients if it is called for.”
One of her projects was a 52-page 7- by-7-inch soft-cover book with black-and-white photos of a man’s huskies, including one that had just died. In another project, she converted a mother’s blog into a 116-page hardcover book.
“She writes practically every day and takes lots of pictures,” Ms. Connolly said. “She wanted to convert her blog into a book so that when her children grew up they would have something wonderful to look at for each year of their lives.”
Scrapbookers have long been haunting sites that sell or give away digital designs, templates and illustrations. The book creators find them useful as well. Some of the most popular are theshabbyshoppe.com, scrappydoodlekits.com, rakscraps.com, peppermintcreative.com and escrappers.com. Some offer free samples while charging for more elaborate versions. Digitalfreebies.com, for instance, distributes a number of free files each Friday while charging $24.95 a year for access to the archives of past releases.
Katie Pertiet, the creative director for DesignerDigitals.com, sells new downloadable artwork for scrapbookers from a Web site she runs with her husband from her home. Last year, she herself created five different books with more than 400 illustrated pages filled with photos and stories about her children and grandchildren.
Every Sunday morning she shares some of these designs with her customers. Some are produced by Ms. Pertiet and others by artists who license their art to the site. She estimates that she sells about 700 packages each Sunday.
Much of the material can only be described as artsy-craftsy and might not work as well for a self-published book on Bauhaus architecture. One set selling for $2.50 comes with images of the alphabet as if it were cut out of felt and sewn on top of red felt apples. Another set selling for $3.99 includes silhouettes of leafless tree branches and spooky birds, “just in time for Halloween.”
A buyer can take these 300-dots-per-inch images and mix them together with their own images or words, cutting and pasting digital versions much as someone would cut and paste actual scraps of fabric and paper.
“What’s popular is creating scrapbook pages that look like they were done with paper,” Ms. Pertiet said. “They get the effects of regular scrapbooking with no mess, no clean-up, no running out of the letter E. They can reuse them over and over.”
Book creators use Adobe Photoshop (about $650), but others find the simpler and less expensive Photoshop Elements (about $100) adequate. Some amateur bookmakers prefer focused scrapbooking software like Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory (novadevelopment.com) selling for about $40. As the name might imply, the package comes with thousands of fonts, illustrations, templates and “photorealistic embellishments” like pictures of buttons, ribbons or charms.
There are also a number of crossover tools that straddle the line between printed works and multimedia presentations. Smilebox.com, for instance, specializes in scrapbooks and photo albums that can be sent by e-mail or printed on paper. Basic templates are free, but the company also licenses premium versions from professional artists. Customers can either purchase a single license or join Club Smilebox, a monthly all-inclusive subscription that costs $4.99 a month.
Companies that print bound books also offer free programs. Blurb.com and Picaboo.com distribute free software with all the tools needed to start a book. They expect to make money when users upload the final versions to their Web sites and order printed versions. A 7- by-7-inch soft- cover book from Blurb.com starts at $13 for 20 to 40 pages, with extra pages additional. Bigger, fatter books like a 150-page 13-by-11-inch hardcover cost $85. There are volume discounts. Picaboo.com sells some 20-page soft-cover books for $10 and offers a variety of bound books including ones covered with linen or padded leather.
Even with those do-it-yourself tools, the services of a professional might be needed. And they can also be found on sites like www.blurb.com/blurb_nation or www.lulu.com/budgetbookdesign. Many have their clients’ work on display. Editors who make simple grammatical corrections start at around $300 while more thorough editing and rewriting can cost more than $750 and up. Simple formatting and cover design can begin at $200. Prices vary widely depending upon the designer and the amount of time that a project might require, but it’s not unusual to hear of projects that cost more than $5,000.
Eileen Gittins, the chief executive and founder of Blurb.com, says that her site is working on nurturing a culture around creating books by cultivating relationships between the amateurs and the professionals. “We’re finding that books are this very interesting way for people who want to meet up. People want to see each other’s books,” she said. “We realized we had the beginnings of a marketplace here.”
Sorry, but they don’t help you find an agent or a publisher.
Basics
Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER
THE first time Jeannet Leendertse, a freelance book designer, saw the software on the Blurb.com Web site that could automatically produce a book, she was more than a little sad. “I thought I needed to have a stiff drink for the end of my career,” she said.
The software could help anyone turn some text and photos into a bound book in a few minutes.
Soon after, though, she saw an opportunity. “I realized there would always be people who appreciate time and effort going into design. I decided to put myself onto their Web site.”
Today, Ms. Leendertse still turns a pile of pictures and paragraphs into bound books, but instead of working just for a roster of major publishers like MIT Press, she helps individuals create books. She is participating in an offshoot of the scrapbooking phenomena, the hobby of collecting and preserving photos and mementos.
What was once a pastime for mothers recording family memories for their children has blossomed into a new, fertile marketplace of collaboration. People with stories to tell are creating personalized books filled with pictures, blog entries and even business proposals. While some of these glorified scrapbooks are aimed at the world at large, many new titles were never intended to be sold in stores or marketed in any way. For instance, architects submitting bound proposals for their projects have used some of the scrapbooking tools.
The digital tools — the camera, scanner and word processor — have opened the field of book creation to the amateur as the hobby moves away from pasting buttons and rickrack onto pages. But sometimes the bookmakers need a little help. Ms. Leendertse recently worked with the filmmaker Robert Gardner, who told her: “This is the artwork that I have. This is my story. How do you think the artwork tells the story best?”
She said he gave her access to his archives and they worked together to create “The Impulse to Preserve,” a 384-page book on Mr. Gardner’s philosophy of creating films. She organized the content and arranged the pages of the book. Soon afterward, a publisher, Other Press, saw the design and agreed to publish her finished work.
Suzzanne Connolly, a San Francisco-based book designer at Picturia Press (www.picturiapress.com), says couples who want to bind the pictures from their wedding day come to her with elaborate plans. “We decide on the layout, the color, the fonts and the style and the flow of each book,” she said. “We can find illustrators, photographers and writers for our clients if it is called for.”
One of her projects was a 52-page 7- by-7-inch soft-cover book with black-and-white photos of a man’s huskies, including one that had just died. In another project, she converted a mother’s blog into a 116-page hardcover book.
“She writes practically every day and takes lots of pictures,” Ms. Connolly said. “She wanted to convert her blog into a book so that when her children grew up they would have something wonderful to look at for each year of their lives.”
Scrapbookers have long been haunting sites that sell or give away digital designs, templates and illustrations. The book creators find them useful as well. Some of the most popular are theshabbyshoppe.com, scrappydoodlekits.com, rakscraps.com, peppermintcreative.com and escrappers.com. Some offer free samples while charging for more elaborate versions. Digitalfreebies.com, for instance, distributes a number of free files each Friday while charging $24.95 a year for access to the archives of past releases.
Katie Pertiet, the creative director for DesignerDigitals.com, sells new downloadable artwork for scrapbookers from a Web site she runs with her husband from her home. Last year, she herself created five different books with more than 400 illustrated pages filled with photos and stories about her children and grandchildren.
Every Sunday morning she shares some of these designs with her customers. Some are produced by Ms. Pertiet and others by artists who license their art to the site. She estimates that she sells about 700 packages each Sunday.
Much of the material can only be described as artsy-craftsy and might not work as well for a self-published book on Bauhaus architecture. One set selling for $2.50 comes with images of the alphabet as if it were cut out of felt and sewn on top of red felt apples. Another set selling for $3.99 includes silhouettes of leafless tree branches and spooky birds, “just in time for Halloween.”
A buyer can take these 300-dots-per-inch images and mix them together with their own images or words, cutting and pasting digital versions much as someone would cut and paste actual scraps of fabric and paper.
“What’s popular is creating scrapbook pages that look like they were done with paper,” Ms. Pertiet said. “They get the effects of regular scrapbooking with no mess, no clean-up, no running out of the letter E. They can reuse them over and over.”
Book creators use Adobe Photoshop (about $650), but others find the simpler and less expensive Photoshop Elements (about $100) adequate. Some amateur bookmakers prefer focused scrapbooking software like Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory (novadevelopment.com) selling for about $40. As the name might imply, the package comes with thousands of fonts, illustrations, templates and “photorealistic embellishments” like pictures of buttons, ribbons or charms.
There are also a number of crossover tools that straddle the line between printed works and multimedia presentations. Smilebox.com, for instance, specializes in scrapbooks and photo albums that can be sent by e-mail or printed on paper. Basic templates are free, but the company also licenses premium versions from professional artists. Customers can either purchase a single license or join Club Smilebox, a monthly all-inclusive subscription that costs $4.99 a month.
Companies that print bound books also offer free programs. Blurb.com and Picaboo.com distribute free software with all the tools needed to start a book. They expect to make money when users upload the final versions to their Web sites and order printed versions. A 7- by-7-inch soft- cover book from Blurb.com starts at $13 for 20 to 40 pages, with extra pages additional. Bigger, fatter books like a 150-page 13-by-11-inch hardcover cost $85. There are volume discounts. Picaboo.com sells some 20-page soft-cover books for $10 and offers a variety of bound books including ones covered with linen or padded leather.
Even with those do-it-yourself tools, the services of a professional might be needed. And they can also be found on sites like www.blurb.com/blurb_nation or www.lulu.com/budgetbookdesign. Many have their clients’ work on display. Editors who make simple grammatical corrections start at around $300 while more thorough editing and rewriting can cost more than $750 and up. Simple formatting and cover design can begin at $200. Prices vary widely depending upon the designer and the amount of time that a project might require, but it’s not unusual to hear of projects that cost more than $5,000.
Eileen Gittins, the chief executive and founder of Blurb.com, says that her site is working on nurturing a culture around creating books by cultivating relationships between the amateurs and the professionals. “We’re finding that books are this very interesting way for people who want to meet up. People want to see each other’s books,” she said. “We realized we had the beginnings of a marketplace here.”
Sorry, but they don’t help you find an agent or a publisher.
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