newsroomnext

Most recent Alertbox column from Jakob Nielsen, the “King of Usability”:

• On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Why I’m interested:

1. There is still a lot of room for the evolution of how text is presented on a news site, as well as how stories are written. Nielsen broaches this.
2. I wonder what’s after the pyramid.
3. I like CNN’s bullet-point summary at the top of its articles, about which Pat Thornton has written.

I have not read the study (here, but you need a membership for download) cited by Nielsen, so there may be questions about the methodology, such as:

1. Did it look at news sites?
2. Did it consider the reader’s goal when using a site?

Other interesting work from Nielsen on how people read on the Web:

1. How Users Read on the Web (They don’t), which also offers tips on presenting text on the Web
2. Eyetracking Research

Here’s a piece I wrote about writing for the Web.

And a video that effectively critiques videos on financial news sites while making me laugh:

Xoost.com connects you with people searching for the same thing you are (via eHub).

It’s not necessarily creating communities, but creating the awareness of the possibility of a community.

The same principle can be applied to almost any activity. For example, if you have a database of users on your news site, each story can list who has viewed it and how many times, if this doesn’t violate privacy expectations/agreements.

What strikes me about Xoost is the passive nature of the creation of the connection; machines watch you, then connect you to like-minded folks. That’s handy. That’s scary. Make it optional and maybe most people will be OK with it.

No doubt this kind of service will become a standard layer of information experience on the Web. I suppose it is already is with Google (and others) tracking your information habits, though I don’t think Mr. G offers a list of other Googlers who are searching for the same things you are.

Distraction provided by wooden spoons and human skulls:

I. Social: You are what you know and remember, and what others know and remember about you.

1. Forming groups of like interest / coordinate connections
2. Being in the know / personal topic guidance
3. Creating self-identity / ascribe values to information choices
4. Forming opinions / critiquing service
5. Sharing information (conversation, e-mail, clippings, recordings, etc.) to create social bonds / facilitate simplification and effectiveness of networking
6. Commenting upon information and expressing oneself /package user-generated content into media product that can be published, shared, found, marketed, jointly monetized

II. Research and information creation: Finding and making answers.

1. Make new information / writing and editing services
2. Answer questions / how to create good questions
3. Learn ways to allot limited resources (time, money, attention, energy) / lifestyle analysis and achieving information goal service

III. Entertainment: Please get me the hell out of my reality.

1. Distraction
2. Avoid work
3. Relax
4. Satisfy curiosity
5. Explore reality
6. ///// One service for all of these activities: Information health; know when you need to alter information activity to maintain health.

At every step, the information user needs to have the option of altering the type of experience they want with your information: click here and you can access deep information suited to a research task; click there and you can go into scanning (distraction) mode.

It’s a bit like having a pair of shoes that changes according to the weather; the pair of shoes is your story (from sandals for a hot day to galoshes for a downpour); the weather is the intent your customer brings to the information. The feet…are just hairy.

I can sense your RSS overload; you need to change your information activity ASAP. Here’s a free distraction service compliments of YouTube, m0serious and newsroomnext:

EveryBlock, from ChicagoCrime.org’s Adrian Holovaty and crew, fishes local info ponds and databases to create a new standard for the required depth of neighborhood news/information aggregation providers.

Why I like it

1. Making raw data made much more accessible is good journalism.
2. It finds and beautifully displays info from government reports (good source material for deeper stories), an aspect which competitors are failing to execute.
3. It finds geo-relevant news articles.
4. It knows the names of neighborhoods.

Opportunity:

• Machines will dominate the aggregation of hyperlocal news and information, but they can’t provide analysis or judgments of information quality, except through user-generated ranking systems with questionable results due to participation levels and voter intent.
• Info like this creates a need for info that indicates the significance or deeper meaning of EveryBlock’s headlines.

My new hyperlocal news service I’ll use to track Albuquerque while living in Hong Kong is now made up of:

1. EveryBlock (well, once it reaches Albuquerque)
2. Outside.in
3. Yourstreet.com
4. Upcoming.org

More reads on hyperlocal:

1. Hyperlocal.org: Berlin blog “investigating in emerging hyperlocal concepts and their economical, social and cultural impact.”
2. Wired: “Dispatches from the hyperlocal future“
3. ReadWriteWeb: “The rise of hyperlocal information“
4. BuzzMachine: “Towns are hyperlocal social networks with data (people that is)” with interesting excerpt: “I now believe that he who figures out how to help people organize themselves — letting them connect with each other and with what they all know — will end up with news, listings, reviews, data, gossip, and more as byproducts.”

And finally, a video of the moment, a new hyperridiculous service I’d like to provide. Today’s pick is the “herding cats” commercial, a classic:

Rather than having 50 million sacks into which you must stuff your data (from personal information to media and more), DataPortability wants the framework for one big sack that brave Web travelers can carry with them wherever they digitally go.

If/once such a structure takes hold on a mass scale, figuring out how to make money in a Web-is-your-Web-site environment will be even more pressing.

So how do we get away from an attention-capturing-and-retaining-and-selling business model?

Show me a newspaper.com information services division. I know I would like the service of transparent information verification, especially as people use data of all types to maintain and enhance their identities.

Would someone buy a “This data verified by newpaper.com information services” stamp?

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

(via influx insights)

After being reminded of Ira Glass’ series on storytelling by MultimediaShooter, I felt inspired to create a static page of videos featuring tips and techniques from Glass and others. Up top, you’ll see the tutorials link.

If you know of other great video tutorials, let me know in the comments and I’ll aggregate, though I’m sure a little looking would bring up many similar collections of wisdom.

What: Five of the 10 best-selling novels last year in Japan were originally cellphone novels.

Freaking out:

“Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.”

“Author” versus “Cellphone Author” reminds me of: “Bloggers” versus “journalists.”

Why I find it interesting: The tools of information production hugely influence the aesthetics and form of information:

“[The five cellphone novels are] mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”

It’s fascinating to watch storytelling techniques develop for different technologies. Could it be that plot and character development are tied to a printing press?

Via IHT (my employer).

With more and more sites getting video crazy, CuePrompter makes it easier for your budding, struggling-with-a-stand-up Web stars to talk to the camera (via eHub). You’ll need a Web connection.

For an offline version, check out Prompt, which is available for Mac and PC.

Video news lessons and resources used for this post:

1. Bill Myers Online
2. CNNfyi.com
3. A cached document from Adobe
4. Cyber College
5. Art Wolinsky
6. Mindy McAdams
7. Tom Schroeppel (who wrote the great “Bare Bones” book)
8. four docs (thanks, Craig Duff)

Update: downloadsquad did a more thorough review of the software here. If you don’t want to follow the link, here’s the graf I found most interesting:

Each prompter session is limited to 2000 characters and requires you to be running MS Internet Explorer 5.0 or above and MS Windows XP, 2000, or 2003 to work properly. We tested it out using Firefox on a Mac and only ran into problems using the mirror and full-screen mode. CuePrompter also seemed to have some minor issue translating apostrophes. One thing that definitely makes CuePrompter different than regular prompters however is you have no way to really control the prompter once its started beyond simple starting and stopping, so once you start CuePrompter you better be ready to go.

The idea that the print newspaper business faces doom made it to “The Simpsons.” Gawker has a clip.

I looked for it on YouTube, but it was removed for copyright infringement.

Found the clip on Dailymotion:

I wonder if Nelson read “$23B zapped in news stock value” by Alan Mutter.

Others who mentioned the episode and a quote from each post:

1. MediaBistro “And Moe also noted how much journos like to drink.”
2. Suchandrika “Print is withering, and it won’t ever fully die, but the change from one system to another will be a protracted process, and probably fairly painful.”
3. Steve Outing “A joke for we media geeks.”
4. My Musings 2.0 “If that’s not reason enough to change, I hope the declining stock shares, tumbleweed infested newsrooms and a distrusting, stimulation hungry audience provide the news media with a much-needed catalyst.”
5. Eaves “You know things are bad when even the Simpsons are making fun of you. It means your (impending) death has permeated the popular culture.”
6. Print CEO From the comments: “Yet as one door closes a new one opens.”
   
7. Your World Today “Yet, most advertisers (specially in Halifax) still utilize print mediums as the main vehicle for their commercial messages.”
8. Media Biz “Now that’s probably a bit harsh.”
9. Rex Hammock “…it’s a rather amusing few seconds.”

Tell Idio your musical likes, and it builds your personal music magazine.

The results don’t excite me as much as the method: Drop in a bit of info about yourself, and out spits media matching (well, trying to match) your interests.

It toys with the concept of information finding us and adds a touch of design and style to the results.

I wrote about being hunted by information when I came across Persai.

I’d like to see Idio track the Web sites I visit and build a musical profile from the pattern. It’s a dream that brings questions of privacy — a huge challenge to the Web’s evolution — to the fore:

1. Who will receive information about me and what will they do with it?
2. How much do I want others to know about my online behavior (seems to be a shifting spectrum of permissions, where certain classifications of people get certain types of access, so far)?

Continue after the break to see an example of an embedded Idio mag. Warning: Music will play automatically.

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