As Dan Gillmor suggests, a better name would probably be Living Topics. The service, which is an amazing technological feat, groups news stories and deconstructs them for better online viewing. Google says the automated initiative, which it launched in co-operation with the New York Times and the Washington Post, does three things:

• Puts the entire coverage of a story under a single URL
• Chunks up the story elements by theme and form
• Customizes the reading experience so each person sees story developments new to them
  

The main benefit appears to be that it automatically generates context for stories by creating bite-sized content summaries and aggressively linking between them. For example, users can sort the story content by subtopics, major characters, quotes, external links, images, graphics, video, audio, etc. The size of the story summary also indicates its importance and newness, according to this Google video.

The Living Stories site isn’t optimized for my iPhone in any way. No doubt that’s coming; this sorting and grouping feature would seem tailor-made for mobile users.

Each topic starts with a dynamic topic summary and timeline. But the service doesn’t just reformat existing content. At the story level, there are some subtle differences from the versions that appear on the news outlet’s website. Take the War in Afghanistan Living Story and a story that’s part of it (Afghan Says Army Will Need Help Until 2024) , which is also on the Times’ website. In the Living Stories version …

• a link to Hamid Karzai, for example, goes not to a detailed bio like the one on the Times site, but to a pop-up snippet description
• there’s a link (“pledged to begin withdrawing American troops”) to a related story that isn’t made on the Times site
• an interactive map, which is not in the Times story, shows the location of the capital, Kabul.

The service has the potential to improve the online reading experience in a number of ways:

• by narrowing the inverted pyramid, so stories are less broad at the top — and more to the point — because the context surrounds it
• by including more summaries, which usability advocate Jakob Nielsen says are crucial for online reading
• by more aggressively linking content than human editors can — thereby improving the user experience on small screens

Still, there seem to be limitations. The importance of topic pages would seem to be diminishing as people increasingly consume content at the story level via Twitter and Facebook links. And I can think of many stories that won’t fit easily under topic designations.

But it’s a worthy innovation. I’m waiting for the mobile version.

It live blogged 8 events this past summer during Nova Scotia’s provincial election. Seven were political events — party platform releases or debates — the other was a discussion of the Herald’s use of social media. The Herald used CoverItLive, the leading (free) live-blogging service based in Toronto.

Rick Conrad, editor of thechronicleherald.ca, calls it a “vital” means of engaging readers and its effect is evident in the quality of conversation: “You get a more defined audience – almost a more educated one – because it’s something they are interested in.” He acknowledges the events attracted the occasional “crank” but “99% of the people were there for the right reasons and wanted to have a real discussion.”

Some tips from the Herald’s experience:

• Promote, promote, promote: People need advance notice to schedule a live blog into their day. Conrad promoted them on the site, in print, and on Twitter. The result was some success in expanding the site’s audience: “For the social media blog, I got the distinct sense it attracted people who wouldn’t normally think of picking us up every day or coming to us online.”
• It takes two: If you’re covering an event, you generally need at least two people – one to report and the other to engage the audience. Says Conrad: “With the platform releases, [the audience] would come with a lot interesting — and tough — questions like “What does this mean?” When you’re listening to what the leader is saying and trying to go through the documents, it’s difficult to make a snap analysis.” Conrad suggests bringing a reporter along, if you can. He concedes it’s difficult because a reporter frequently has to file a story as well. But he adds, “Readers really like to talk to a person directly involved in the story.”
• Let the audience lead: When to drive the conversation and when not to? It depends on the topic, says Conrad. If the audience is getting information from other sources it often works best to let them lead the conversation. “With the election night blog, we essentially took the approach that ‘this is their night’ and we would pop in with the occasional comment on the results … Whereas with the platform releases, I found there was more interaction with me because I was their eyes and ears.”
• … but keep it civil: Conrad says he approved the vast majority of comments, but rejected a few: “For me, the reason for doing the live blogs for the election was to give as many people as possible the chance to comment.” However, a few were “nasty” and wildly speculative. “We didn’t think that was appropriate. You want [the conversation] to be substantial and you don’t want it to spiral down.”
• Use it to assess your own efforts: People are especially engaged when they feel they can make a difference. The Herald received almost two comments for every person who attended the session in which it asked how it could make better use of social media. While Conrad acknowledges the difficulty in drawing conclusions from raw numbers, he says the tone of the conversation was spirited. “For me, the people who were involved in that blog were really into it.”
• Keep it available for replay: The number of people who replayed the Herald’s live blog the day following election night was almost twice the number who participated live. Some people don’t have time to follow a live stream — or aren’t available when it’s scheduled. But many are interested in seeing which topics resonated with the audience.

Conrad says he would like to live blog a provincial budget release and he hopes to experiment with the tool at a concert or a live arts event.

Google Fast Flip interface for mobile.

So this is it.

In April, Sharon Waxman reported a conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which he told her:

“In about six months, the company will roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it” … one in which users “will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them” … and which Google “will be able to sell premium ads against premium content.”

Google Fast Flip appears to be all that.

The company claims the visual news finding tool “personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like.”

Make no mistake — this is an application built from the ground up for mobile. (In addition to being available in Google Labs on the web, Google offers it as a mobile site for iPhone and Android devices.)

Reading stories from multiple sources isn’t easy to do on a mobile device right now. Neither is search. Done right, personalized, visual news could truly be a killer app.

As Scott Karp says, it’s “a new UI (user interface) for news.” Further, it’s Google re-asserting its claim to the browser, not the app, as the viewing space for mobile content.

Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times told Ken Doctor, “We’re trying to find out how users relate to a visual interface.” There’s certainly much to learn — and there are quirks with Fast Flip. But, the interface, with a firm nod to Apple’s Cover-Flow, is an excellent fit for mobile devices.

That’s great for consumers. And, as Nisenholtz points out, it’s the brand presence news publishers have wanted. But it also gives Google the upper hand in yet another news viewing space.

Colour-coded lines show traffic congestion in Google Maps for Mobile.

“It’s stop and go on the bridge.” “Watch out for that deer on the 102.”

The voices are a staple of local radio — listeners calling in to report traffic conditions. On-air updates build audiences, involve listeners and bring advertisers to morning and afternoon shows.

But Google believes it can deliver traffic reports faster and with more accuracy by harnessing the power of mobile users.

Google announced today it was bringing the power of crowd-sourced data to its Traffic layer in Google Maps, currently available only in the U.S.

Users of Google Maps for Mobile have to allow Google to see their location first. But when they do, they contribute traffic data anonymously and effortlessly as they travel. Their GPS-enabled mobile phone contributes their location and aggregates it with others to form a live picture of traffic in the area. Its announcement states:

When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.

Google also announced it was expanding its Traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterial roads.

Google has the leading mobile map app. While it’s competing with standalone GPS providers such as TomTom and Garmin in providing driving assistance, the division between smartphones and standalone devices is already starting to fall. TomTom released its turn-by-turn maps as an iPhone app 10 days ago — the first company to do so.

Google’s move is yet another grab at services traditionally provided by news media — services that bring revenues to support local newsrooms. While newspapers have had their audiences slashed by aggregators of news and classified listings, radio has remained relatively unscathed by advances in online technology.

The move puts radio producers on notice that they too need to find other ways of strengthening listener interaction.

Shakeups such as this don’t happen often — especially when they are related to publication of a single story. (That said, the T-J, under editor Shawna Richer, made a number of questionable moves in recent months.)

The New Brunswick news outlet, controlled by Irving-owned Brunswick News, announced this morning “there was no credible support” for the paper’s July 8, 2009 report that Prime Minister Stephen Harper “slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call ‘the host’ into his jacket pocket,” during a funeral mass for former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc. That’s bad enough. But the paper went on to apologize to the bylined reporters on the story for adding “inaccurate” statements “in the editing process” without their knowledge. Wow.

Still, I’m waiting to see what the paper does with the original story in its archives.

The July 8 story has no note either on the T-J’s site or in the NewsScan archive database that I referenced early on July 29. No mention of the correction or the apology. And no hypertext link between the two. Granted, it’s been only 18 hours since the T-J issued the statement and a notation could still be coming in a data dump. However, the paper should have made any change in conjunction with its public statement.

How should news media deal generally with stories they have determined to be substantially wrong?

Reuters released its style guide, called the Handbook of Journalism, on July 9, 2009. It outlines its internal filing procedures when “the story is fundamentally flawed” and notes that “this will alert our online colleagues to pull each version of the story from websites and to contact online customers to ask them to remove it.”

But simply removing all online evidence of an egregious error may not be the best practice. How can the audience be convinced an apology is comprehensive if the source document no longer exists? How can future researchers learn of errors in published stories? Would it not represent a step backward from the days when microfilm gave us the full published record, warts and all?

The New York Times sets a higher standard on these matters. The Times website still hosts the full stories published by Jayson Blair, the reporter the Times revealed in 2003 as having committed “frequent acts of journalistic fraud.” In addition, it annotates each page of his stories with known inaccuracies. For example, this 2002 story on the investigation into the Washington-area sniper contains a long list of corrections.

Many news organizations still lag in fully linking corrections and apologies to the originally published items. Many more succumb to the temptation to simply wipe clean the source of the embarrassment. I hope this won’t be the case here. There is an opportunity for the T-J to turn a major embarrassment into a minor source of pride.

Source: Google News

Give Associated Press President Tom Curley credit for grabbing people’s attention.

A New York Times story today quotes him stating that online references to AP stories containing as little as a headline and a link require a licensing agreement.

The interview follows AP’s announcement Thursday that it will begin a two-pronged approach to tracking sites that re-use AP content. The first initiative will be to include new metadata in news stories to identify key attributes of the story such as the author, the placeline and usage rights attached to it. The second will be to maintain a registry of stories and use software to track the content across the Internet. The goal is “to be paid for any use.”

Calling the registry a “declaration of war,” Erik Sherman calls the move “so stupid, so clearly self-damaging that you have to wonder whether someone inside the corporation is trying to torpedo it.”

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg chimes in, calling the effort “foolish and self-defeating.”

Most observers have focused on Curley’s comment concerning licensing for short chunks of text. But, in the Times article, Curley was coy as to how AP would go about enforcing its claims, adding, “We’re not picking the legal remedy today … Let’s define the scope of the problem.”

The prospect of suing people en masse for refusing to send money is indeed crazy. Curley’s claim would seem to ignore provisions of fair use in the American copyright act, not to mention the nature of the Internet. His intimation of enforcement would suggest he hasn’t learned much from the American recording industry’s efforts.

A story by the Nieman Lab’s Zachary M. Seward states that the New York Times’ top lawyer himself doubts aggregation is a copyright issue. Even if it is, as Google deftly pointed out to testy European publishers last week these companies can easily remove themselves from most aggregators’ reaches. Rosenberg argues in an excellent post that the real danger is the issue will end up in court where a judicial ruling could narrow the definition of American fair use provisions in its copyright act.

Too bad AP botched its PR on this.

There is actually much to admire in AP’s efforts. It’s the first major news organization to make a serious effort at tracking the use of its stories on the Internet. AP says it is using copyright-protection software made by Attributor Inc., which offers a Google Analytics-type interface for “finding copies of your content in near real-time.”

The company states, interestingly, that 30-40% of the excerpts it tracks fail to contain a referring link. That in itself indicates value in tracking egregious copyright violations and raising public awareness.

Update: Comment from AP on all the coverage

The phrase “mobile usability” is pretty much an oxymoron. It’s neither easy nor pleasant to use the Web on mobile devices. Observing user suffering during our sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994. It was that bad.

Sure, Nielsen is a curmudgeon on this stuff. But his analysis is generally bang on. The worst aspect, he states, is half of the problems with the devices are structural and are unlikely to be substantially improved.  The primary issues include:

• Small screens. They force users to remember more because less information is displayed at any one time. They also make interactions difficult because the work area is smaller.
• Awkward input. Doing anything – entering text, clicking a link or scrolling – is slow and prone to error.
• Download delays. Wireless service is still slower than a landline.
• Poorly designed sites. Most sites are designed for the desktop, not mobile. In fact, the study showed that the success rate for people who used sites that were designed specifically for mobile devices was 21% higher than that for the same sites desktop users see.

One of the key findings was that mobile users spent 38% more time on tasks such as finding the weather and TV listings than they did in 2000, when users had fewer choices. Why?

Today’s mobile users are highly search-dominant. When we don’t specify which site they should use (and often even when we do), they turn first to their favorite search engine. Again, this means plenty of typing, which is slow, awkward, and error-prone on mobile devices.

What’s needed, says Nielsen (not surprisingly), are more sites designed specifically for mobile devices.

The study is unclear as to whether smartphone applications provide substantial benefit over browser-based sites tailored for mobile. That’s the argument Google Engineering Vice-President Vic Gundotra highlighted on Friday with his comment, “the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters.”

Still, on that note, Nielsen offers a telling anecdote:

In our current study, one user did really well — an iPhone user who had a weather application installed on the phone and used it to get the weather forecast in only 18 seconds (1/3 of the fastest speed from 2000).

One, who was using the tool to announce new content, said audience engagement was still minimal. Another said they were unclear as to how the organization was tracking any benefit from their effort.

A new study released July 20 suggests the news outlet could benefit substantially by better focusing and communicating its social media strategy — getting more reporters involved and encouraging them to become more personal.

The study found a financial correlation between companies that outperform their peers and those that strongly engage people across multiple channels of social media. It didn’t look specifically at news media organizations but its recommendations would seem to apply widely — especially since it found that media and technology companies were, on average, involved in the most social media channels.

The study is authored by social media analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group in collaboration with social publishing platform Wetpaint. The researchers found:

Social media engagement and financial success work together to perpetuate a healthy business cycle: a customer-oriented mindset stemming from deep social interaction allows a company to identify and meet customer needs in the marketplace, generating superior profits.

The top scorers in the study — Starbucks, Dell … and Thomson Reuters — all engaged the audience on multiple platforms. But the researchers also concluded that focusing heavily on just a few channels can be effective.

The study listed a number of take-away points. One of the key ones was:

Social media is no longer the responsibility of a few people in the organization. Instead, it’s important for everyone across the organization to engage with customers in the channels that make sense — a few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

So, it suggests that while social media editors are important, to become truly effective, news outlets need to spread those tasks much more broadly.

In a post today, Stephen Baker, a senior writer specializing in technology with Business Week magazine asks a similar question – but extends it “far beyond cleaning up copy.”

The question the next (or current) owner of BusinessWeek is going to have to grapple with is whether such attention to detail is worth it, or, alternatively, whether there’s another way to achieve the same goal.

Baker is focusing on editors’ efforts to polish the story into exactly what “the reader” wants. He argues that the final editorial effort in refining a story is labour intensive and ultimately may not be that productive. He terms it “the last 5%” of the editing process:

It involves a large team of professionals engaged in tweaking, polishing, compressing and dressing articles–hopefully giving them the gleam, smarts and clarity of a top-rate product.

Baker’s comments follow a published report earlier this week that Business Week owner McGraw-Hill Cos Inc. wants to sell the publication. He acknowledges that management’s immediate need is to cut costs and make the publication profitable. But he suggests further that the publication needs to refashion itself for “the age of near ubiquitous and real-time information,” including opening itself up to its community of readers.

I know many editors and have immense respect for what they do. I believe the role of the editor is likely to get stronger in the future. But it’s going to change. Perfecting content may no longer be one of the most needed skills.

News is evolving from what Jeff Jarvis and Terry Heaton term the move from product journalism to process journalism.

There is no “reader” out there anymore, if there ever was. There are many readers, with different interests, who want to be involved. Harnessing that energy for this new era is going to be a highly sought-after skill.

Photo: Extra Ketchup/Flickr

Interest in the report authored by U.K. teen Matthew Robson says a lot about how much we fret over how young people consume media.

London-based market research firm Morgan Stanley published the report, authored by their 15-year-old intern, last week. As the Globe and Mail reports today, the paper, “How Teenagers Consume Media,” has since become a minor sensation. Much has been made about the excess of anecdote and lack of research in the report, but it is clear Matthew is a remarkably articulate 15-year-old with an unusual ability to synthesize the activities of his peers.

Why the interest? My guess is a general fear that young people understand something about the Internet that we oldsters don’t.

Matthew’s comment about Twitter use among his peers is the most quoted observation. He states that while most teens are heavy Facebook users, “Teenagers do not use Twitter … They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets” are pointless.” The comment follows barely a month after Nielsen’s announcement that Twitter was the fastest-growing Web brand this spring.

Huh? How do we reconcile that?

Well, 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky makes a fine argument as to why it’s important we not read too much into Matthew’s paper.

Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other … With Twitter, it’s the exact opposite. Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there.

Teens are all about socializing with close friends — an activity well suited to closed networks such Facebook. Twitter is about spreading information far and wide to people you don’t even know.

As Suw Charman-Anderson points out, the most interesting thing is how little seems to be understood about this age group. Every generation struggles to understand young people, of course. But there is a fair bit of research about them (see John Palfrey’s Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives). Charman-Anderson cites danah boyd’s research and suggests that there’s still a strong disconnect between academics and analysts — not to mention the general public — on the issue.

The fact that they haven’t ever had a clear insight into the teen demographic would seem to imply that their existing researchers and analysts aren’t doing their jobs properly. The information is out there, a lot of it is freely available, and all that remains is for someone to read it and write the report.

It would seem there is much work for journalists here too.