A lot of bloggers on mainstream news sites already do ‘live blogging’, often on a regular day and at a regular time, and this tool could make their lives a little easier. Even if not working with an already clunky CMS, managing a live blog can be difficult at the best of times.
I like the ability to embed the live discussion within a blog’s post page - or on any page - and then easily manage things from the Cover It Live interface. A three-pane view shows additional functions (like inserting a poll), the content box, and incoming comments.
The Media Library is a great tool. You can permanently store content in folders (audio, video, images, polls, links, ads and prewritten text), then drag relevant content for a specific live blogging session into a prepared show folder. (see demo)
The benefit of this is preparing a live blog with what you already plan to say and present. Many mainstream media blogs don’t really provide the functionality or interactivity of an actual live conversation. A blog post is made, and then the live blogger takes and responds to comments, with no real further addition to their initial post it is essentially a statement up for discussion. With Cover It Live, that can be spread out in real time, inviting more interactivity.
Image function could be improved. During the live blog session you can post images or video that the participants will be able to open and watch. The way Cover It Live works, images at this stage can’t be too detailed as it looks like they’re restricted to about 330 x 220 px. A full screenshot, for example, is difficult to view, whereas a portrait image of a person comes out looking fine. In image selection, general web thumbnail standards should apply - crop tight.
Different templates can also be created that will show your branding before the blog goes live, while in progress, and once the live blog session has ended.
Cover It Live is probably best served covering a live event, and that was probably its intent. I can see the downside for mainstream news bloggers who take the statement-response approach would be that newcomers to the conversation have to try and catch up with what has already been said.
I can’t believe it’s been almost six weeks since I last posted…
My Reading List, in the right sidebar and here, continues to be tagged with followup items every day, hundreds of which I am yet to follow up on. At some point I’m going to have do delicious those items or incorporate the feed into this blog so it doesn’t look like I’m doing absolutely nothing!
In the meantime, the new post is above, on Cover It Live.
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1. Avoid jargon
2. Use analogies
3. Talk results, not process
4. Link to additional resources
5. For proposals and reports, use visuals
6. Have ready access to case studies
7. Refer to related events or issues that have been brought up by mainstream
I’ve ported the blog portion of my site to be the main repository of all things earley edition, so instead of earleyedition.com/blog, the blog now shows on the front page of the site.
Things looked to have worked fine initially, but now I seem to have lost all style and formatting associated with the site.
So apologies for the bare bones look, I’m not quite sure what happened.
From now on, earleyedition.com/blog is redirecting to earleyedition.com, since there is no real difference between the ‘blog’ and the rest of the content of this site.
I hope you continue to come back, and that it starts looking like normal again some time soon!
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I’ve just logged into my iStockphoto account for the first time in over six months, and am mildly surprised to see I have earned some money.
I only have three images available for purchase in my portfolio there. Admittedly they’ve been there for quite a long time but I wonder if the hit rate is because of good keywords, because there are a large number of purchases comparative to views on one of the photos.
One of the images has been purchased by one out of every five people who have viewed it in the last 18 months, while the other has only seen 1% of viewers purchasing.
In the case of the second image, the higher number of views could be a result of more keywords associated with the image, and therefore less specialised searching allowing people with too many interests to view the image. In the first example, a specific few keywords means only people who want that kind of image are seeing it.
Anyway, I thought it interesting that so few photos added to iStockphoto are still giving some sort of a ‘return’, no matter how small.
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How’s this for awesome? I am of course buying into the hype that is everything Apple, particularly the iPhone, which is yet to be released in Australia.
Vodafone announced today they have signed a deal to sell the iPhone in ten of its global markets, including Australia, ‘later this year’.
Tuesday 6 May 2008
Vodafone to offer Apple’s iPhone in ten markets
Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.
You have plenty of other multi-purpose phones - smart phone, PDA phone, Pocket PC phone - all of which do lots of good things. Is the iPhone the best? How does it rate against the others?
The mobile world is advancing towards that mythical ‘all-in-one’ device that can not only effectively meet the demand for multimedia use of phone, video, audio, image and web, but also realistically meet the needs of those publishing content on the go.
It’s a mobile revolution. The Nokia N95 can’t be bad if it’s the mobile platform of choice for the Reuters Mojo team, so does the iPhone live up to the hype?
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Personally, I like the idea of geo-tagging content so that readers can get a map view of their news across the city, state or country, and then be able to pick out what news to follow in feeds based on particular regions.
I’ve been experimenting with Yahoo!Pipes in trying to do that with news content that hasn’t specifically been prepared to be ‘locative’. It’s certainly time-intensive experimentation while I teach myself, and is yet to yield the results I’d like.
The list linked to by Paul Lamb is by LoJo connnect, who are also conducting a survey of news outlets and their offerings/experiments in locative media.
Print circulation showed another dramatic decline in the US in figures released on Monday.
As Louis Hau from Forbes says in the article linked from Romenesko, circulation decline isn’t the biggest problem, it’s monetising an increasingly online readership.
The industry’s most pressing problem isn’t the state of print circulation, which has been in decline since the mid-1980s. Instead, it is figuring out how to generate more advertising revenue from both its shrinking but still lucrative print product and its growing online properties.
Is it the beginning of the end for newspapers? Not likely, since dropping circulation has been ‘the beginning of the end’ for the last 20 years according to Hau’s quote above.
It’s just the beginning. Smaller community newspapers will continue to provide local news, including in a web presence. Larger metropolitan dailies may become media outlets, of which their newspaper is a component of the news distribution methods they offer, rather than their defining characteristic.
Until someone comes up with an effective monetisation strategy for web and mobile content that can either match current print advertising revenue, or at the very least break even, the doom and gloom outlook for newspapers will continue.
Print newspaper circulation continues on its steep downward slide Editor & Publisher
Some ABC FAS-FAX numbers for the six-month period ending March 31, 2008:
* New York Times down 9.2% on Sunday, 3.8% daily
* Washington Post down 4.3% on Sunday, 3.5% daily
* Wall Street Journal up 0.3
* Los Angeles down 6% on Sunday, 5.1% daily
* USA Today up .27% to 2,284,219 * Boston Globe down 6.4% on Sunday, 8.3% daily
Social Media Optimisation, or SMO, is gaining momentum as the new content distribution buzzword. Content is increasingly shared, and news content particularly is delivered through social networking sites. Will SMO replace SEO, search engine optimisation, as the way news organisations get their content seen by a wider audience?
A New York Times article last week tried to explain the future of news distribution by describing how ‘the young’ share news online via social networks.
SMO, or Social Media Optimisation, is one of the most important stories of the new media campaign - for several reasons.
MSM (main stream media) are beginning to understand that social content distribution is a serious threat to their current distribution methods
MSM in the main were disrespectfully late in adopting SEO, and
It’s only now, well into the Facebook boom, that people are starting to take notice of the value of SMO.
While SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, will remain very important to news gathering and searching methods, it could soon be superceded by a much more important player in news distribution channels and strategies - Social Media Optimisation, or SMO.
How do people share information online? How do they find it? How does social media facilitate this?
What the New York Times article shows is the acceptance, if only partial, of the concept of SMO - that news is no longer force-fed, it is now shared, social, viral, and word of mouth.
Young people expect to see video with campaign stories
New York Times
“And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message,“ says Huffington Post’s Danny Shea. Brian Stelter writes: “Younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading the Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.“ via Romenesko
Like it or not, for traditional news media the news is a commodity that must sell. For it to sell and make money, it must be traded, clicked, monetised, and advertised. When content went online, MSM (mainstream media) very slowly caught up to the idea of SEO - making content user and search engine friendly.
Arguments from MSM - and let me be brutally honest here - dinosaurs, have been that using SEO techniques in news media is simply bowing to a digital master. Many in MSM have for too long bucked at what they call ‘writing headlines for a machine’.
That argument represents a fundamental lack of knowledge about how the future of information distribution will be shaped, and does not bode well for the necessary rapid uptake of SMO - integration with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, and numerous other variety of social networking startups.
People use the internet to search for information. When doing so, people looking for a story about the conclusion of the divorce trial between Heather Mills and Paul McCartney would most likely use the search terms, heather mills divorce, or paul mccartney divorce, or heather mills paul mccartney divorce, or even add the word settlement to any of those searches. They will not search using a print headline like “Damnation of Her Ladyship“ or “Lady Liar“, from the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror respectively, both on March 19.
People use a search engine to find what they are looking for, so writing page or article titles that assists them to do that is by no means writing headlines for a machine - it is writing headlines that will help real people find information using a machine.
But as MSM has only recently grasped the importance of doing this, and just as they catch up and start optimising content for search, the rules of the game gradually begin to change again.
MSM need to not be left behind this time. News in the new world of digital media is shared. Social media is word of mouth advertising. Social media is recommending a product to a friend, and whether that be viral video or a news story, it is a link to content of mutual interest, shared among a community of friends, a seperate community of family, another community of professional contacts, and innumerable other communities that gather around hobbies.
That MySpace, or Facebook, may be the flavour of the social networking month and gone tomorrow as another new social networking site enters the friend-swapping fray, is no good reason to neglect to stay in the game. If you’re only just starting to embrace MySpace as the skyrocketing Facebook begins to face new competition from bebo, you’re two full lengths behind the leaders.
The only saving grace for MSM in the past is that they have generally formed a pack that lag behind the innovators. Be warned though, as soon as your competition gets a clue and embraces the reality of online content sharing and community building in their news distribution strategy - you’ll find out just how lazy you’ve been when you lose community respect and relevance.
When the editors and owners hit the panic button and ask, “What the hell have you been doing? We’ve been left behind!“ - What will you say?
Integration is not just newsrooms. Integration is leading innovation, or at the very least keeping up with it.
Traditional media no longer control the news distribution channels.
Seed your content. Link out. Allow your video to be embedded, linked to, displayed elsewhere.
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Apologies for the infrequency of posts. The site has been undergoing a protracted redesign, and in the process has seen a dramatic decline in its most important aspect - content.
In the meantime, please take a look at one of the new additions, my Reading List, which has been added to the right sidebar.
It’s my selection of the best and most useful content from a wide array of new media blogs and industry sites that I regularly read.
Updated in real time as I hand-select the most valuable content, you can read the best of new media and online news industry content that I would be blogging about if I had the time.
Alternatively, I have also added related post links to the bottom of each individual post page, through which you can delve deeper into this site’s content.
Enjoy.
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In a rush to get this post out, I buried it in another article, Email Old News to Gen C.
It reappears now because it needed to be republished in its own right as a review of Twitter usage in Australian media and politics.
———-
In Australia, very few news organisations use Twitter. As full disclosure, before I continue, I work at The Courier Mail, a News Limited paper.
An informal audit of a selection of Australian media and their Twitter presence
I am assuming the unused Twitter accounts above belong to these publications, but it’s entirely possible someone could simply be ’squatting’ on the Twitter user names. I set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content.
The Courier Mail’s current crop of 20 Twitter user accounts are providing free SMS/IM updates on topics ranging from sports, to business, to breaking news, all with tinyurl links to the original story content. I’m now trying to find time to play around with a Facebook page for The Courier Mail, although I rarely have any spare hours at home to spend doing that.
During the process of setting up these Twitter accounts, I did a search to see if other Australian news outlets were already using Twitter.
Of News Limited mastheads, apart from The Courier Mail, none of the other existing News Ltd Twitter users have posted.
Of Fairfax mastheads, only The Age has a single feed, last updated in May 2007.
The ABC has two feeds - one of which I follow to receive local news alerts on my mobile phone.
In the UK, the BBC and Sky have a larger selection of Twitter updates that can be followed.
The 2007 federal election was approaching when I was working on the Courier Mail Twitter accounts so, having already written a story about politics and social networking, I had a look at what political parties had on Twitter.
At the time the results were:
Greens: http://twitter.com/Greens
Three updates in total, all on August 2, 2007, that are worth mentioning.
The Greens have established a twitter and are testing it. 04:11 PM August 02, 2007
Do you receive my Greens twitter? 04:26 PM August 02, 2007
Hrrrmmm, if I was 14 I’d know exactly what would happen 06:39 PM August 02, 2007
In 2008, however, the Greens seem to have got their act together with a Twitter page feeding from the Greens Blog website. https://twitter.com/greensblog
I also didn’t find this during the election last year , but https://twitter.com/kevinrudd is another spoof Twitter account.
The possibilities of Twitter as a quick and easy mass distribution method would be well utilised by politicians.
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Well, I was wrong. Don Day at Lost Remote was kind enough to make a post about a new service called OPENhulu, where you can download a third-party application that will allow you to watch Hulu shows.
To do this, you must download Hotpot Shield, free software that makes it look like you are browsing from an IP in the United States, therefore allowing you to watch Hulu content via the OPENhulu website.
It’s not entirely foolproof. On downloading the program for use, you only receive a 10 gigabyte bandwidth limit per month to run through their system, which will limit the number of full-length shows you can watch.
You will want to have some good high-speed broadband to be able to watch Hulu’s NBC shows through OPENhulu. Trying to port video content through the Hotspot Shield has proved nigh on impossible for me, simply because of my broadband speed.
I’m on a wireless 3G internet connection, which claims speeds up to 512kbps but rarely reaches 300.
I don’t think you’re required to watch videos through the OPENhulu site. I was also able to watch videos directly at Hulu.com, but it does run ALL your internet traffic through the Hotspot Shield, so whether watching Hulu videos or not, it will slow down your entire browsing experience until you turn off the filter.
It does work though, and that’s the important thing! The videos started downloading and playing for me, even if that was happening too slowly to actually watch them. There is also no message of death informing you the video is not available in your region.
If you were asking the question, “How do I watch Hulu outside of the United States?”, here is your answer to what has likely been a painfully long search.
Enjoy!
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I just sat in on a live blog using Cover It Live.
I’ve just logged into my 
How’s this for awesome? I am of course buying into the hype that is everything 
Social Media Optimisation, or 
Fairfax masthead sites
News Limited masthead sites
I set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content. 