When Google Labs released their News Timeline feature, it prompted Mathew Ingram at Harvard University Nieman Journalism Lab to call for more creativity from news organisations. Mathew wrote:

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? … Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing?

In the comments, people pointed out projects that news organisations had done such as the a graphic visualisation of recent news at NineMSN in Australia. I pointed out time-based navigation at El Comercio in Peru. Mark S. Luckie who writes the excellent blog about journalism and technology, 10,000 Words wrote:

It’s kind of sad showing off innovative technologies over at 10,000 Words, knowing it will be years before most newsrooms adopt them, if at all.

Another commenter, Dan Conover, said, “I wish it wasn’t this simple, but the truth is that the newsroom culture is, and has been for years, overtly hostile to the geek culture.”

Getting past the frustration, how do we bring more innovation to news organisations? It’s something that Suw and I write about frequently here at Strange Attractor.

1. Journalists, editors and senior managers need to learn about the software development process.  
   I often say that journalists think that technology is like Harry Potter. Many believe that developers need only to wave a magic wand and voila, faster than an editor can drain a cup of coffee, we have a new interactive feature. Web and software development is more like the Matrix. It’s a rules-bound world. Some rules can be bent, but others cannot be broken. Also, just like in life, some choices preclude others. Web technology is not a blank canvas. A good, dedicated developer can do amazing things, but no developer can do magic. They can’t rewrite the rules, rewrite a programming language or rebuild your CMS in a day.   
   Most editors don’t need to learn how to code, but editors do need to learn the art of the possible. Some things can be done quickly, in a few hours. Other projects take more work. A basic understanding of what is possible on a daily deadline is essential.
2. Develop a palatte of reusable digital elements
   When I first started doing online journalism, we often built one-off projects that took a lot of time and had a mixed response from our readers. We were still learning, not only how to execute digital journalism projects, but also we were learning what type of projects people found engaging. We soon learned that ‘evergreen’ projects often were best, things that had a life-span much longer than most news events. Besides, there are very few editorial projects that merit huge one-off investments, and most news orgs can’t afford this in 2009.
   At the BBC, when I started, we had a limited palette of things that we could add quickly to primarily text-based news stories. The News website was still very young. But over time, we built on that limited palette. Our Specials team built things, and they tried to determine what worked and what didn’t. The things that worked were added to the ongoing list of elements that journalists could add to their stories.
   Modular interactive elements are easier in the Web 2.0 era. For instance, we often build maps, not just locator graphics but actual maps that draw on data (for instance one could create a map using data of the H1N1, swine flu outbreak). More news organisations are using Twitter and other third party services that call external APIs and cache the results.
   If you’ve got limited resources (and who doesn’t), you must think in a joined up way. Think of elements that will add value to your entire site not just to a certain section. Think of elements that will work in many areas of coverage.
3. Interactivity is a state a mind and doesn’t always require technical development
   Much of this isn’t even about software development. It’s about a state of mind. Interactivity isn’t just about the web. It’s still about letters and phone calls. It can be about text messages. When I worked for World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service, Americans called or sent emails. Listeners in the UK mostly called, and Africans sent text messages by the hundreds. The first and most important step isn’t about developing a technology strategy but about developing a philosophy of collaboration with your audience.
   Everything will flow from that philosophy because there are many non-technical ways to get your audience involved. One of the most powerful things on World Have Your Say was getting people around a microphone in Africa to talk to Americans who had called in. The marriage of mass media and social media can be an extremely powerful combination.
   Add to all of this no-cost of low-cost web services, and you can do many things on a daily deadline.
4. Strategic projects require long-term vision
   When I was writing the post for the Guardian about Google News Timeline, I found out that Google had begun creating a historical archive of news content in 2006. News is ephemeral, but as news is the first draft of history, news stories put in context can be a fascinating look at history. Google decided that archiving this content might have some value.
   There are a lot of things that take a strategic decision and not only long-term development but also a long-term commitment from a news organisation. I think that geo-tagging is one example. It’s a choice that takes a bit of development but actually more commitment from editorial teams, but the addition of a small bit of structured data generated by journalists creates a lot of opportunities, some which might have revenue.

Taking a long view is difficult as news organisations face very serious short-term challenges, but the lack of long-term thinking is one of the things that got a lot of news orgs into this mess. Developing a long-term, multi-platform strategy might have goals five years out, but that doesn’t mean developing the perfect five-year plan. It means setting some strategic goals and getting there one day at a time.

Jake McKee begins by talking about ’success by a thousand paper cuts’, which is thinking about the smallest thing possible you can do without approval to get you closer to your goals. He also said that we’ve talked a lot about community, but what we’re really talking about is ’social engagement’. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s difficult.

Rather than talking about building a community that’s crazy about you or your product, he talks about how to throw a great party. We already build relationships with people in our lives. Parties connect, excite and engage. He lists ingredients to create a great party:

1. Your party needs a reason to be. What is this thing? Is your party a 12-year-old’s birthday party or a cocktail party with friends.
2. What’s the higher calling? What are we here to connect about? What is the need we are addressing? What problem are we trying to solve?
3. Your party needs good planning. Every good social effort starts with good strategy. Prep for scale. Make it simple and flexible so you can constantly evolve. Keep in mind the 1-9-90 principle.
4. Your party needs a host. We need leaders in social groups. It gives direction to where we’re going in this social group. It gives accountability and direction, and it builds the culture.
5. Your party needs a few introductions. It doesn’t happen often enough. In the early days of Flickr, every new user was introduced by one of the staff. Every single person who signed up and posted a picture was introduced to others with similar interests. That might not be possible when you’ve got 200 sign-ups an hour, but Flickr had established the culture.
   Not enough communities have mentors, volunteers who welcome people and help them find their way around.
6. Your party needs an invitation. The site needs functionality and tools that make it easy for members to invite other people. Make it portable such as the share this buttons for Facebook or Twitter. Be explicit with the invitation.
7. You need social norms. Guidelines and rule are important. Guidelines are guiding principles. How do we translate guidelines into something that people will pay attention to? He points to Flickr’s community guidelines: “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”
   It is about building culture, not blocking content.
   It creates collaborative ownership. It’s clear and fun. In online environments
8. Your party needs a bouncer. “Be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”
9. Power in n00bs and nerds. It’s so easy in a social group to get caught up in the history and the legacy.
10. You need your attendees to pitch in. People want to be heard, but they also need a something to do.
11. Your party needs you. These things don’t get outsourced.
12. Everybody goes home happy. This is what it all boils down to.

He was asked what it takes to be a good community manager. He says it’s all down communication skills.

As I said, the Community Conference 2009 in Copenhagen is a mix of business, media,

Tommy Sollen talked about how he set up a community for Visit Sweden. While he did this, he set up a WordPress blog to talk about the development of the community and the site. He was working in the open. Tourism organisations across Europe and in Canada, which helped in the development. They developed Community of Sweden.com. It focuses photos and stories. The main goal is to help the members of community to inspire each other. It’s built on the EPiServer content management system.

They have tags on all the content including geo-tags and activities. One of the things I liked is that they also have a tag for the seasons. He talked about how they encourage people to tag photos because the titles provided too little information to properly index. Photo sharing has surpassed their expectations, and they now have more than 12,000 photos (the site was launched in late 2007). He highlighted some of the photos and said that they could easily create an online magazine just with user-generated photos. If they use a photo in their print magazine, they give full photo credits to who uploaded the photos and offer to buy the photo.

One of the users, from Italy, had taken a photo that their print magazine editor thought was perfect for an article. They contacted him and offered to pay him for the photo, but he refused to accept payment.

They do no marketing for the site, but they now have 6,300 registered members, 12,000 photos and more than a thousand travel stories. They have a community and the development blog, but they wanted to know what came next so they integrated Community of Sweden.com more tightly with the Visit Sweden website.

They have also created Sweden pages on Facebook and a Sweden channel on YouTube. “It’s about placing ourselves in the social media sphere,” he said. They also have created widgets that allow people to add these to their blogs, sites or social networks.

He was asked about the issue of people on Facebook saying that they would come to an event but didn’t. The person asking the question asked if they had tried to offer a coupon to encourage them to turn out. Tommy said that he wanted events but hadn’t got the budget yet for it, but he believes that events would help support the community.

He was asked about how 6000 users was seen as a success. He said that people have spent not just minutes, not just hours but days on the site and had ‘created ambassadors for Sweden’.

I’m at the Community Conference 2009 in Copenhagen. The audience is a mix of media, government, NGOs and business folks.

Lois Kelly of Beeline Labs talks about how she got into the field. In 1992, she became involved in the AOL miscarriage community. “This is what the internet is about. It is about creating ways to connect people.”

In 1998, she launched her own consultancy. She found Alan’s Forums, a community for consultants to help each other with tip on how to market each other and build your business. People were all over the world. People helping people.

In 2001, she and her neighbours joined together to save a local landmark, an old bridge. People wouldn’t show up for meetings or sign petitions. People would go online at night and voice what they wanted.

In 2005, Ning makes communities free. It’s so inexpensive and easy to use that almost anyone could start playing comunities, 900,000 communities in February 2009. There are 4000 new communities a day with almost 40% outside of the US.

Tribal behaviour has been here forever. We want to connect with each other. The biggest challenges are how to attract people and get them engaged. Only 40% of the communities set up on Ning are active.

What makes communities successful:

• Communities need a purpose. They need a clear purpose
• The community needs deeply felt or widely felt issue
• Help and get help. Trust.

People do not trust businesses or governments. They do not want to be marketed to. A Nielsen study found Denmark had low levels of trust in advertising, only 28%.

What drives people’s use of communities

• Ability to help people
• Ability to connect with like-minded issue
• Community focused on hot topic issue

The value of communities to businesses and non-profits is for market insights or research. She gave the example of an ‘employee community’ that saved $5m a year through insights gained in the community. They were little ideas not huge complicated ones.

The unexpected value of communities from a case study:

• Insights and Ideas. The case study company said the community had become ‘an unlimited source of R&D’.
• Sales. They had higher average sales per community member ($1200) compared to a typical customer ($500)
• Customers are creating their own marketing in the community.
• They could cut down their PR or even get rid of their PR.

She suggested the people ask 5 simple questions that businesses need to ask before creating a community:

1. Why are we doing this?
2. How will people (not the company) benefit?
3. Do people care enough?
4. What do we expect to get? (There needs to be business value, which is tied to the first question.)
5. How do we measure?

She suggested the businesses creating communities need to be customer-centric versus product-centric. Focus on ‘behavioural tribes versus demographic segments’. She pointed to how a scissors company had created a community not based on scissors but rather based on how people used scissors, in this case scrapbooking. She also said that companies need to foucs on ‘networks versus channels’. IBM created an internal community called beehive. Employees were able to connect with each other. Employees with really good ideas started promoting their projects. Instead of going through usual channels, employees were going through this network to promote their ideas. People also thought they could get ahead faster - ‘climbing’. She had interviewed a 27-year-old employee who said she was able to advance more quickly because she used the intranet to show off her skills. “Before this, she would have been anonymous,” Lois said.

It allows great talent to network and share.

She found that many companies do not have internal networks but will create their own through Facebook (or LinkedIn, I would say).

She said that businesses with communities need to measure against business goals. New product ideas? Earn customer confidence? Reduce customer service costs? Awareness in category? Reduce training, education costs? Change perceptions? Get votes, get sales? That will help drive design.

Communities are a lot of work. If you want a successful community, you have to put the resources in.

She also said that some companies need to be more ’social’ but don’t necessarily need a community. She showed how Panasonic.com had created customer reviews and recommendations. She compared a number of social strategies - badges, tagging, Twitter and communities. Communities take investment and resources to be successful, but there might be simpler social strategies to achieve your goals rather than creating a community.

There was an interesting question about Facebook. They need to pay for the service but communities are resistant to advertising or marketing messages.

Lois: In the US, a lot of us think that Facebook is over and we’ve all moved to Twitter. We’re nomadic tribes. Last year, it was Facebook. This year is Twitter. I don’t know what it will be next year. Value needs to be there for a payment value. (She talked about some of the features that Twitter is considering as a business model including adding a service for business ala Yammer.) Advertising model still has value.

Suw Charman, London Copyfighters’ Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop speeches at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London by Cory Doctorow

For Ada Lovelace Day, it will probably come as no surprise that I’m choosing to blog about Suw, my wife and mad ninja geek soulmate. Suw came up with the idea for Ada Lovelace Day because she often went to conferences where no women were on the panels, even though she knew plenty of incredibly talented, intelligent women who would contribute to the discussion about technology and social media.

As she said when she launched Ada Lovelace Day:

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised.  

It’s not necessarily a lack of women in technology that Suw was mourning, but a lack of visibility.

Suw also wanted to highlight the contributions of women in technology and science so they can serve as role models for girls. I’m from the US, and it’s long been known that girls start school with strong math skills but lose interest in their tweens, mostly due to social pressure. Suw said that the situation is similar here in the UK.

One of the reasons I chose Suw is because I think she’s a great role model for girls who want to study technology and science. When Suw and I first started dating, I remarked to a friend that she was probably the first woman I dated who out-geeked me, and while that might sound like typical male insecurities, I love her for it. Being a geek is not just about skills and knowledge but also about passion, and she has a passion for knowledge, not just in terms of computers and the internet but for all kinds of knowledge, whether it was the geology she studied at university, physics or psychology. Her curiosity is limitless, and if we share a common failing it is that we’re so curious about nearly everything that we sometimes find it difficult to focus on just one thing. She is a keen observer, and she quickly turns from noting a trend or a pattern to asking deeper questions about the underlying causes and motivations driving that trend. She wants to understand the world around her.

She also is a pioneer. I felt like a blogging charlatan when I met her. I started blogging in 2004 at the request of my editor at the BBC. I quickly fell in love with it, but Suw had been exploring blogs and other forms of social media long before. She set herself up as a ‘blogging consultant’, and many people told her that she couldn’t make a living with it. But she has, largely because she was years ahead of the curve of blogging and social media consultants that have sprung up in the past few years, and she remains ahead.

One of the things that keeps her ahead of the curve is not just her knowledge of the technology but also a deep understanding of people’s relationship to the technology and how social motivations influence our use of technolgy. I think the psychology of social media is fascinating, and I think Suw’s understanding that the fundamental human need to not only express ourselves but to communicate drives so much of the current trends online and on mobile.

She’s also a doer, and I think that Ada Lovelace Day proves it. She realised that highlighting women’s contributions in technology is important, and instead of getting frustrated, she did something, something that she hopes to build on. For all these reasons and more, that’s why I have chosen to blog about Suw Charman-Anderson, my wife and someone who I think is not only inspirational to girls looking to become tomorrow’s technology leaders but someone who inspires me.

My esteemed colleague and comrade in digital arms, Jemima Kiss, Twittered this very astute observation, in less than 280 characters, about Twitter and use of the micro-blogging application by news organisations:

jemimakiss: Common mistakes news orgs make with Twitter 1) That it’s all about Twitter, rather than how people are actually using Twitter and..

jemimakiss 2) They get fixed on using a tool, like Twitter, rather than working out what they want to do & finding the best tool for it. That is all.

She’s spot on when it comes to Twitter. There is a tendency for organisations to rush with the herd to a new social media service or site without thinking about what, editorially, they are trying to achieve. I’ve seen the same thing happen with blogs and Facebook. After entering the mainstream, some journalists demanded their own blog. Why did they want a blog? They saw it as a back door to having a column. They had always wanted an opinion column because it was a sign of status and as we all know, blogs are just opinion (sarcasm noted). A typical conversation in the industry might go like this:

Editor: How often are you planning on updating your blog?

Aspiring columnist: Oh, once a week should do.

Editor: Were you planning on linking to anything?

Aspiring columnist: Why would I do that? This is my column, er, I mean blog.

Editor: Are you going to take part in the conversation and respond to comments?

Aspiring columnist: No, of course not. I’m far too busy for that kind of thing.

Editor: So why do you want a blog instead of a column in the newspaper?

Asprining columnist: *silence*

That’s not to say that the journalist wouldn’t get their own column, er, I mean blog, thus continuing traditional media’s focus on celebrity over interactivity. Some journalists make incredibly good bloggers, but when a blog is used simply to replicate what possible in print, it is an editorial waste.

Functionally, there might not be a great difference between a column-with-comments and a blog, but editorially, there is a huge difference.

• Bloggers post frequently.
• Bloggers take part in the conversation and respond to comments and questions.
• Bloggers link to the conversation on other sites.

Blogs take part in a distributed conversation in ways that columns rarely do, whereas columns - even ones with comments - provide a relatively closed, introspective conversation.

Jemima has flagged up how much the same is happening with Twitter. This all comes down to understanding how social media differs from traditional uni-directional publishing and broadcasting and thinking about the editorial concept and the unique opportunities for engagement.

Adrian Hon - been interested in reading for a long time. Stats seem to show that people aren’t reading so many books [although I don't think that's true in the US].

Anecdote, why don’t people read more books? Because books don’t bleep, they don’t demand attention. Books that people feel they should read are the ones that everyone is talking about, where you want to avoid spoilers. Book clubs, make reading more social activity. The million book clubs in the US. Publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins court book groups. Interesting thing about book groups is that people often don’t talk much about books, they tend to gossip. Adrian never felt like joining a club, didn’t think he’d find a group that would be interested in the sort of fiction that he’d enjoy.

How do you address the problem where you go to the book club, and the club wants to read a book that you really don’t want to read, and this happens quite often? People have specific tastes about fiction. So you don’t want to not go, because you lose out on the social side of things, but at the same time you don’t want to have a miserable time. Book clubs are also timed both too often, or not often enough. Weekly commitment can be hard, and if it’s a great book you want to read it faster.

Book parties. Plan three months ahead. Say you’re going to read five books, and people can then pick their books and there’ll be someone there who’s also read it.

Online book clubs, tend to use forum or blog software, difficult for addressing different sections of the book. Community management problems.

Interesting things done; Golden Notebook, got eight women to discuss the book The Golden Notebook, put the text online, split the pages up, and these women could go and discuss the pages. Was kind of interesting to see all that marginalia and discussion in the marginalia. Problem with this is that’s a closed system. If you’re a member of the public you couldn’t comment on any of the pages. It was also not always appropriate to comment on the pages, sometimes you wanted to comment on the paragraph or on the book as a whole. Used a Wordpress module that was really unusable.

Adrian has been working with a friend who knows Drupal. Wanted to know how to do marginalia and annotations. First try was taking The Moonstone, Victorian thriller. Project Gutenberg. Split in into pages and put it online. Commenting on pages is not a fun way of doing things, plus no social features.

Drupal module where you can comment on individual paragraphs. Other sites can do this, so you can do this on any text you like. It’s free. You can make online margin notes, anonymously or as a registered user. Fun. Can really drill down in terms of comments. Issue is that people are still reading the book separately, not t the same time as each other. Point of a book club is to see the comments of or friends not random strangers.

Next version of this is going to weave in the friend list functionality of Drupal, so you’ll be able to filter the marginalia for your friends’ comments. Can still see everyone else’s.

So that’s nice, but if you want to read a book together you want to know a couple of things, where people are in the book so you don’t spoil it, don’t want spoilers, but also want to see comments adding to a book that you’re reading. Be nice to see comments announced via Twitter. So system will record where you are, what your latest page is, and be able to send out Tweets to you about comments left on the book by your friends, and ideally, if you’re reading the book away from the computer you can send a tweet with a hashtag and page number and itill add a comment.

The idea is to keep it really simple. All this social functionality is not going to come for a few weeks, probably longer. Probably going to put on a fun book and see how people use it.

This is just about having fun with your friends. Want to give your friends a book, want to read it together, want to talk about it, because the book doesn’t ring. This will let people read together, but not in that clunky “one page at a time” way. Will probably be at “wereadstories.com” [laughter].

</adrian>

What about voice to text, get people to book mark and then do something like Spinvox to send a comment.

Drupal modules will be released for free as it’s open source.

Archive content that the BBC has, such as scripts, such as the old Dr Who scripts, being able to annotate those, read them socially with your firneds.

This isn’t a new idea, but making it easy to do and make it more social.

Bad Movie Club, everyone watch The Happening, and everyone got together at 9pm (at home) to watch it together, people went out to get it. And contributed by Twitter.

That happens with Dr Who, Election. If people are doing that with TV shows, if you can tie the tweets in time back to the original broadcast you’re annotating it.

Annotated video, Viddler, comments on timeline.

Being able to deep tag stuff, at the actual moment, something more immersive, more visual.

Putting text, audio, video comments at different parts of timeline, and make them user friendly so that it doesn’t take away from the original video.

Text annotation, GPL licence mark-up, so they made it so that you could see form the density of the colour of the annotation how many comments there were. Released now as Co-Ment.

Not true that people don’t like reading text online, they do. People read text on iPhones, awful display, when things are good enough they will read it. If you put up something that has sufficient value, social or otherwise, they will read it on the screen. Obviously books on Project Gutenberg are free, but they’re not printed, so putting them in a social system like this might encourage people to read more.

Not just about whether screen is portable etc., it’s also about typography and how things are presented.

Kindle allows people to annotate text, and they will certainly release something that allows people to share those annotation. If they don’t, someone else will.

There’s reading for pleasure, reading the paper book, but there’s the “I need to remember this”, and that’s about looking things up, not necessarily to read the whole thing.

Reason people go to book clubs is to talk. The book is a social object. So you’re linking the conversation back to the book, use the power of socialisation to get people to read books again. Is there room there for people to just chat in general.

Am sure people will leave comments and in-jokes, etc., and to be able to link to say, fan fiction version.

Could work well in education too.

Extending social tools in a better way. None of this stuff is high-tech, it’s just only now that people realise that following someone on Twitter is something people like doing. Easier to put a link to reference something.

Making it easy to put the text in, can just copy and paste from Project Gutenberg, works our paragraph tags and splits on new lines. Atm you need to know how to use Drupal. Thinking about developing an import tool. If one can get properly marked-up text, it’s very easy.

Index an entire book, e.g. if you’re listening to the audio book you want to be able to find where you are. Page numbers don’t mean anything in digital. Golden Notebook has page numbers for US and UK versions, so you have to switch between them.

Ways to tag the content. Could look up the time code, where you are in the audio and if there’s a way of reference it back.

Scenes are the building block for fiction but how would you mark that up semantically? Or even agree with it?

Wide applications for a system like this. Ways to mark up any sort of text.

Technorati Tags: BeeBCamp2

A fun example of structured data from the LATimes, which showed the popularity of dog names in LA County by postcode.

This is from one of the sessions at BeebCamp2, a BarCamp like event for BBC staff with some external folks like Suw, me, Charlie Beckett and others. Charlie has a great post on a discussion he led about user-generated content and what it adds to news, video games and also Twitter and Radio 4.

Eric Ulken, was the editor of interactive technology at the LATimes. He was one of the bridges between technology and the editorial

News organisations:

• We collect a lot of data but don’t use it (We always thought that was a shame. We had a computer-assisted reporting team at the LATimes, wouldn’t it be nice if we used that.)
• What online readers want from us is bigger than ‘news’ in the traditional sense
• We need to be an information soure.

They did a homicide map, which mapped all of the murders in LA in a year on a map and which illustrated a blog that reported all of the murders in LA County in a year.

The project was well received, and they decided to develop a data desk. It brought together the computer-assisted reporting unit, investigative reporters, the interactive technology team and the graphics team to bring together the data desk. They all sat together in the newsroom. A lot of synergies were created. The Times had 10 to 15 investigative reporters on different desks from different disciplines.

Ten bits of advice:

1. Find the believers.
2. Get buy-in from above
3. Set some priorities
4. Go off the reservation (We had a real problem with our IT department. They had their priorities and we had ours. We invested in a server system using Django.)
5. Templatize. Never do anything once. Do things you can reuse.
6. Do breaking news. There is data in breaking news. They did a database of the victims. They added information to the database as it became available. The database was up in 24 hours after the crash. They had built most of the pieces for previous applications. (There was a question about accuracy. Eric said the information was being gathered, but it wasn’t structured. The information was edited by a line manager.)
7. Develop new skills. They sent people out to workshops. They had hired a Django develop who was also a journalist. He taught Django to others in the office.
8. Cohabitate (marriage is optional). The investigative reporters and computer-assisted reporters still reported to the pre-existing managers, but by being together, they saw possibilities for collaboration without reworking the organisation.
9. Integrate.
10. Give back. They worked to give back to the newspaper.

They used Javascript to add this to other parts of the site. They created these two datasets from the train crash and the homicides, but they also have used publicly available data in their projects. He showed their California schools guide. Apart from the standard data analysis available from state and national educational agencies, they also created a diversity rank that showed the relative diversity of the schools. They did do some reporting on the data. In analysing the schools data, they found discrepancies in reporting about the performance of the schools.

In a slightly more humourous example, he showed dog names and breeds by postcodes.

UPDATE: Eric has added some more details in comments below, and you can follow Eric’s work and follow his thoughts on his site.

This idea has been rolling around in many heads for a long time. Chris Vallance (where is that new blog mister?), Philip Trippenbach and Suw and I have been talking about this for months. My autumn was occupied with the US elections and recovering from it, but Suw marshalled on. Our basic idea was to get past the talking about the future of journalism and just do it. We all talk about the future of journalism, but we felt like it was (long past) time to move things along. We also wanted to spread the future more evenly by bringing other journalists in on the process. We wanted to spread the future a little more evenly and while not turning every journalist into a programmer, help them understand the art of the possible in terms of digital journalism. But this is about the future of journalism, whether you’re a journalist, a programmer or anyone with ideas and an interest.

We had a lot of enthusiasm, but we never quite got around to doing anything about it. It looks like some of our number back in the US have gone out and done it. Introducing, BarCamp NewsInnovation.The goal:

The idea is to get energetic, tech-savvy, open-minded individuals who embrace the chaos in the media industry because the ability to do really cool things still exist. We also need find those people outside of our industry who love to consume news and information and are great thinkers and innovators.

Ok, let’s try this again. As I’ve shown up to this point, I’m terrible at organising anything. Let’s do this. BarCamp NewsInnovation UK. Let’s think outside the box (London). Let’s just get on with it.

barcamp, newsinnovation, uk

David Ardia, on legal liability for comments online from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard, talks about CDA 230, the section of the Communications Decency Act that provides some protection to people who run web sites.

Joshua Benton from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University says:

I wish every managing editor in the country could see this 20-minute video. I’ve heard so many misconceptions over the years about news organizations’ legal ability to police, manage, or otherwise edit the comments left on their web sites. They say “the lawyers” tell them they can’t edit out an obscenity or remove a rude or abusive post without bringing massive legal liability upon themselves — and that the only solutions are to either have a Wild West, anything-goes comments policy or to not have comments in the first place.

That’s not true, and hasn’t been true since 1996.