Posts tagged aggregation

Flipboard’s Personalized Magazines I finally played with the new version of Flipboard’s iOS app, which allows users to create their own magazines. In the first 24 hours, over 100,000 were created by users.  Here’s much more info about the new app. FJP: Sort of a dream come true for me. My media habits are generally to bookmark things to read throughout the week on Pocket (formerly Read Later), which is a prettily designed place to store bookmarks and access them across devices. But at the end of a week I never get through what I’ve saved and thus have a backlog of tons of articles. Flipboard’s magazine works in a similar way—you can create content specific magazines by bookmarking things from all over the web or within your Flipboard readings. So, planning to try this out by creating a weekly magazine of my to-reads. Look out for an in-depth review once I get more playtime on this thing.—Jihii Image: Screenshot of the beginnings of this week’s magazine by @jihiitea

Flipboard’s Personalized Magazines

I finally played with the new version of Flipboard’s iOS app, which allows users to create their own magazines. In the first 24 hours, over 100,000 were created by users. 

Here’s much more info about the new app.

FJP: Sort of a dream come true for me. My media habits are generally to bookmark things to read throughout the week on Pocket (formerly Read Later), which is a prettily designed place to store bookmarks and access them across devices. But at the end of a week I never get through what I’ve saved and thus have a backlog of tons of articles. Flipboard’s magazine works in a similar way—you can create content specific magazines by bookmarking things from all over the web or within your Flipboard readings. So, planning to try this out by creating a weekly magazine of my to-reads. Look out for an in-depth review once I get more playtime on this thing.—Jihii

Image: Screenshot of the beginnings of this week’s magazine by @jihiitea

Making the News (more) Mobile

A new mobile news app called Circa has dedicated itself to aggregating content and slimming it down to the facts and nothing but — all to present bits of information from several sources on a mobile screen without exhausting its users. 

Ben Huh of Cheezburger fame has a lot on his mind, news-wise, and he’s a co-founder.  So are Matt Gilligan and Arsenio Santos, and the rest of the team and their investors can be found here.

It’s a fine idea, and the presentation fits mobile’s tiny screens. Some, however, may scratch their heads at it as they did at fellow newcomer Quartz for its reliance on aggregation.

via PandoDaily:

Galligan and Huh believe to save journalism you need to kill the article. Instead, news from Circa is arranged on digital flash cards you page through on your mobile phone. “Stories” are simply facts strung together across these cards, and most of those facts link to a third party original source.

The art of creating a good Circa piece is in finding news and piecing it together, but there is no writing, per se. There is no analysis and there is no reporting either. Galligan’s view is there’s too much of that in the world. It’s original work in that the “stories” are written by Circa’s newsroom of about a dozen people, but the facts are all aggregated from elsewhere. There are no bylines, which isn’t a big surprise since the innovation here is sucking much of the reporting and writing out of journalism.

Storytelling in 140 characters Convincing people that an issue is important is hard work. Harder still is the job of informing those who are interested. Such are the difficulties facing @NMSyria, a Syrian activist who spends his days tweeting on the civil war in his country, which is entering its nineteenth month this week. But he’s done something very interesting lately — he’s remixing a human rights report by Save the Children containing stories of children and families affected by wartime violence. He’s taking quotes by those featured in the report and tweeting them as short stories. One example can be found above, and many more are posted in his feed. I had a conversation with him on Facebook, where we agreed that Twitter is a difficult platform to advocate anything that’s unfamiliar: What can I say, sometimes it’s like I’m writing for the benefit of myself more than others Message of Syrian refugees doesn’t spread farther than our ‘twitter group” It’s not that it’s an echo chamber. I think it’s a contextual issue. People who aren’t interested now would be, I bet, if they were led to the right kinds and amounts of information necessary to convince them they aren’t being misinformed or duped. I’m thinking about this Jeff Jarvis article, which suggests we stop relying on articles in favor of more versatile, moveable content. I’m also thinking about how journalists and advocates need to think about how to repackage and rewrite for different platforms. And finally, I’m thinking about this Guardian roundup and roundups in general — their role in introducing topics and keeping people updated. - Blake

Storytelling in 140 characters

Convincing people that an issue is important is hard work. Harder still is the job of informing those who are interested. Such are the difficulties facing @NMSyria, a Syrian activist who spends his days tweeting on the civil war in his country, which is entering its nineteenth month this week.

But he’s done something very interesting lately — he’s remixing a human rights report by Save the Children containing stories of children and families affected by wartime violence. He’s taking quotes by those featured in the report and tweeting them as short stories. One example can be found above, and many more are posted in his feed.

I had a conversation with him on Facebook, where we agreed that Twitter is a difficult platform to advocate anything that’s unfamiliar:

What can I say, sometimes it’s like I’m writing for the benefit of myself more than others

Message of Syrian refugees doesn’t spread farther than our ‘twitter group”

It’s not that it’s an echo chamber. I think it’s a contextual issue. People who aren’t interested now would be, I bet, if they were led to the right kinds and amounts of information necessary to convince them they aren’t being misinformed or duped.

I’m thinking about this Jeff Jarvis article, which suggests we stop relying on articles in favor of more versatile, moveable content. I’m also thinking about how journalists and advocates need to think about how to repackage and rewrite for different platforms. And finally, I’m thinking about this Guardian roundup and roundups in general — their role in introducing topics and keeping people updated. - Blake

Our talk with Benji and Matt We emailed the Guardian’s Benji Lanyado about a new project he and Matt Andrews have been working on called Top 5 News, which lists the most popular articles by the most popular news orgs in the US and UK. Here’s what we talked about, short and simple:FJP (Blake): What is Top 5 News and how did it come together? Benji: top5news.net (and its British cousin top5news.co.uk) pulls from a number of different news sites, displaying their most popular pieces of content every 15 minutes. We wanted it to be a snapshot of what people are actually reading, rather than the latest news, or editor’s choices. To some extent, it’s an automated Drudge Report.  FJP (Blake): How does it work? What was used to make it work? Matt: The site is a fairly customised use of the PHP framework CodeIgniter. It goes off to fetch the page HTML of the source websites every 15 minutes and scans through the code for the relevant links. We store an archive of links as well as the most recent ones so that over time we can attempt some data visualisation to show trends and spikes. Finally, on the front end we use CSS3 media queries to give the site a responsive design so it works well on mobile too. FJP (Blake): Is it “just” an experiment or is it something you plan to build off of? Benji: For now, it’s a minimum viable product… we want to see how popular the idea is, and gather as much feedback as possible. After that… who knows. FJP (Blake): Besides that, your work at the Guardian and all your interactive traveling (a la Kerouapp) is very cool. Any plans to expand upon this previous work? Benji: Yeah, it was a lot of fun working on Kerouapp, and its been great to see Jon Henley, one of the Guardian’s feature writers, using it for his trips across Europe. It’s also been used by the BBC and Time Out, which is great. I’m actually travelling a lot less these days, but would love to see other news organisations use the tool and run with it. FJP (Blake): Please tell me about any other plans you might have, and what you’d like to do in the near/distant future. Benji: I’m very keen to keep working on projects like this with developers, both inside the Guardian and outside it. I’m actually starting an intensive front end development course myself in a few weeks, so I can potentially knock together prototypes myself in the near future. I think basic programming skills are going to become an essential skill for future journalists. Photo: The Guardian.

Our talk with Benji and Matt

We emailed the Guardian’s Benji Lanyado about a new project he and Matt Andrews have been working on called Top 5 News, which lists the most popular articles by the most popular news orgs in the US and UK. Here’s what we talked about, short and simple:

FJP (Blake): What is Top 5 News and how did it come together?

Benji: top5news.net (and its British cousin top5news.co.uk) pulls from a number of different news sites, displaying their most popular pieces of content every 15 minutes. We wanted it to be a snapshot of what people are actually reading, rather than the latest news, or editor’s choices. To some extent, it’s an automated Drudge Report. 

FJP (Blake): How does it work? What was used to make it work?

Matt: The site is a fairly customised use of the PHP framework CodeIgniter. It goes off to fetch the page HTML of the source websites every 15 minutes and scans through the code for the relevant links. We store an archive of links as well as the most recent ones so that over time we can attempt some data visualisation to show trends and spikes. Finally, on the front end we use CSS3 media queries to give the site a responsive design so it works well on mobile too.

FJP (Blake): Is it “just” an experiment or is it something you plan to build off of?

Benji: For now, it’s a minimum viable product… we want to see how popular the idea is, and gather as much feedback as possible. After that… who knows.

FJP (Blake): Besides that, your work at the Guardian and all your interactive traveling (a la Kerouapp) is very cool. Any plans to expand upon this previous work?

Benji: Yeah, it was a lot of fun working on Kerouapp, and its been great to see Jon Henley, one of the Guardian’s feature writers, using it for his trips across Europe. It’s also been used by the BBC and Time Out, which is great. I’m actually travelling a lot less these days, but would love to see other news organisations use the tool and run with it.

FJP (Blake): Please tell me about any other plans you might have, and what you’d like to do in the near/distant future.

Benji: I’m very keen to keep working on projects like this with developers, both inside the Guardian and outside it. I’m actually starting an intensive front end development course myself in a few weeks, so I can potentially knock together prototypes myself in the near future. I think basic programming skills are going to become an essential skill for future journalists.

Photo: The Guardian.

The Ethics of Linking II: In Which We Weigh In on the Curator’s Code. In a previous post, the Ethics of Linking, I discussed news organizations’ linking obligations. For example, when reporting a story, should organizations have to say who first broke the news? A hat tip is always polite, but don’t overwhelm your reader with links they don’t need to click-through. The debate continues its way to the blogosphere and at SXSW Interactive festival, nestled itself upon the roundtables of curators and aggregators. David Carr reports on two new efforts to standardize digital content aggregation. The first, spearheaded by Simon Dumenco, along with reps from key digital publications, is a Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation. The second is Maria Popova and Kelli Anderson’s latest project: The Curator’s Code, which offers two unicode characters for attribution (ᔥ means “via”, ↬ means “hat tip”) that are easily pluggable in a post through a bookmarklet. Yesterday, Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, argued that codifying “via” links is confusing and misguided. He writes: That’s how I feel about links in general: the source author creates something worth linking to, and the rest of us can link as we see fit, regardless of how we found it. The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash. (via Marco.org) Marco thinks in-line links are sort of useless, because no one really clicks on them anyway. Agreed. My personal take: Through my time at FJP and around tumblr, I’ve learned to credit a source with an in-line link if it’s not totally necessary to click on it and I’m definitely summarizing the key/relevant point in my post. After quotes or extended paraphrasing, I’ll stick in a via link. For thumbs-up to an organization or reporter that really deserves credit for starting up a conversation, I’ll stick in a hat tip. It would be great if symbols were standardized for these purposes, but at the moment, they do seem confusing and as much as I love bookmarklets, my collection is getting a little too big. In the spirit of helping internet journalism toward a clear and healthy future, at the FJP, we’re all for transparent links, complete with the letters “via” or “h/t”. Michael weighs in: It’s not just a matter of giving transparent credit where credit is due. Transparent linking, and clearly spelling out to our readers where we’re getting our ideas from, is part of a larger effort to expose our audience to valuable primary sources that they may not know about and will hopefully begin to include in their future media diet. To that I’ll add one thought. Credit and clarity aren’t simply the ingredients of good internet etiquette; rather, they are a means of adding value to our internet expeditions, and for journalism to continue to be a public service in the digital era, it might help to think of a blogger’s linking style as yet another tool that can reveal (or hide) much, and thus be harnessed for good communication.  - Jihii Image: Screenshots from the FJP Tumblr

The Ethics of Linking II: In Which We Weigh In on the Curator’s Code.

In a previous post, the Ethics of Linking, I discussed news organizations’ linking obligations. For example, when reporting a story, should organizations have to say who first broke the news? A hat tip is always polite, but don’t overwhelm your reader with links they don’t need to click-through.

The debate continues its way to the blogosphere and at SXSW Interactive festival, nestled itself upon the roundtables of curators and aggregators. David Carr reports on two new efforts to standardize digital content aggregation. The first, spearheaded by Simon Dumenco, along with reps from key digital publications, is a Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation. The second is Maria Popova and Kelli Anderson’s latest project: The Curator’s Code, which offers two unicode characters for attribution (ᔥ means “via”, ↬ means “hat tip”) that are easily pluggable in a post through a bookmarklet.

Yesterday, Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, argued that codifying “via” links is confusing and misguided. He writes:

That’s how I feel about links in general: the source author creates something worth linking to, and the rest of us can link as we see fit, regardless of how we found it. The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash. (via Marco.org)

Marco thinks in-line links are sort of useless, because no one really clicks on them anyway. Agreed.

My personal take: Through my time at FJP and around tumblr, I’ve learned to credit a source with an in-line link if it’s not totally necessary to click on it and I’m definitely summarizing the key/relevant point in my post. After quotes or extended paraphrasing, I’ll stick in a via link. For thumbs-up to an organization or reporter that really deserves credit for starting up a conversation, I’ll stick in a hat tip. It would be great if symbols were standardized for these purposes, but at the moment, they do seem confusing and as much as I love bookmarklets, my collection is getting a little too big.

In the spirit of helping internet journalism toward a clear and healthy future, at the FJP, we’re all for transparent links, complete with the letters “via” or “h/t”.

Michael weighs in:

It’s not just a matter of giving transparent credit where credit is due. Transparent linking, and clearly spelling out to our readers where we’re getting our ideas from, is part of a larger effort to expose our audience to valuable primary sources that they may not know about and will hopefully begin to include in their future media diet.

To that I’ll add one thought. Credit and clarity aren’t simply the ingredients of good internet etiquette; rather, they are a means of adding value to our internet expeditions, and for journalism to continue to be a public service in the digital era, it might help to think of a blogger’s linking style as yet another tool that can reveal (or hide) much, and thus be harnessed for good communication.  - Jihii

Image: Screenshots from the FJP Tumblr

‘Huffington Post’ Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine Horrified Workers Watch As Colleague Torn Apart By Powerful Content-Gathering Engine. Via The Onion.

‘Huffington Post’ Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine

Horrified Workers Watch As Colleague Torn Apart By Powerful Content-Gathering Engine.

Via The Onion.

Google News automation fail of the day week month ever. For the unfortunate story, see here.

Google News automation fail of the day week month ever.

For the unfortunate story, see here.

That the presidency ages people quickly is well documented. In a recent CNN article, Dr. Michael Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic says presidents age twice as fast while in office. What’s new, as Google’s automated news algorithm illustrates here, is that the presidency also appears to be able to turn a black man into a white man. Learning something new every day.

That the presidency ages people quickly is well documented. In a recent CNN article, Dr. Michael Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic says presidents age twice as fast while in office.

What’s new, as Google’s automated news algorithm illustrates here, is that the presidency also appears to be able to turn a black man into a white man.

Learning something new every day.

When Does Curation Become Suspendible Aggregation?

Despite its recent hiring spree, the Huffington Post’s bread and butter is content curation. Their rationale to those creating the original is that they’re driving traffic back to the source so it’s actually win-win all around.

Yesterday, Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco took exception to that, writing that what’s really going on is isn’t so much fair use as unethical aggregation. 

As an example, he looks at the traffic stats for an article he wrote that the HuffPo later picked up. End result, 57 new page views from people clicking through from the HuffPo piece to the Ad Age piece. By comparison, Techmeme drove over 750 page views.

Ender result: Hufffington Post suspends writer, apologizes for over-aggregated post.

In a letter from Peter S. Goodman, Executive Business Editor of AOL Huffington Post Media Group, to Dumenco, Goodman writes:

We have made a very substantial investment in original reporting here, bringing in dozens of new writers in recent months. And while we will continue to curate the news for our audience, what occurred in this instance is entirely unacceptable and collides directly with the values that are at work in our newsroom. We have zero tolerance for this sort of conduct. Given that, the writer of the offending post has been suspended indefinitely.

More broadly, your complaint has prompted us to redouble our efforts to make sure our reporters and editors understand that this sort of thing is unambiguously unacceptable.

You think?

Update: via SoupSoup, Dumenco Writes Back:

I have to say, though, that I’m disheartened by your decision to indefinitely suspend the writer who “over-aggregated” (in the words of Steve Myers at the Poynter Institute’s Romenesko blog) my post at AdAge.com. I’m certainly not alone in feeling this way. I imagine that, like me, you’ve been reading the reactions that have been rippling across the media blogosphere, and you’re finding that there’s general unanimity that HuffPo is singling out — indeed, scapegoating — a young writer for engaging in a style of aggregration long practiced, condoned and encouraged by Huffington Post editorial management.

Comscore confirmed that HuffingtonPost.com traffic for May has surpassed NYTimes.com traffic for first time -- 35.5MM vs. 33.59MM

A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don’t bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.
David Carr of The New York Times on how the Drudge Report has remained one of the most powerful drivers of referral traffic to news outlets for more than 14 years. 

The New York Times

Slate Rethinks its Aggregation Game

Slate’s Slatest has long been a favorite for catching up on what’s happening around the tubes. Even though they’ve done the job well, there’s always room for a rethink and redesign.

Via Nieman Lab:

Today Slate is quickening its pace again with a rethink of Slatest. It has hired Josh Voorhees, formerly Politico’s energy reporter, to be aggregator-in-chief and Slatest editor. Instead of three discrete updates a day, Slatest will be updated throughout the day and more bloglike. And a new Slatest design takes a page from uber-aggregator Huffington Post, with big, graphic-heavy images.

Plotz said the old Slatest was no failure — attracting 2 million pageviews per month by the end of last year and 140,000 subscribers to the email newsletter — but that the art of aggregation had moved forward. “Every site in the world that I can think of, including the New York Times, does something like aggregation,” Plotz told me. He said Slatest will stand out by providing utility to readers with the voice, context, and humanity you might not find on the content farm. “This is an active bet on the notion that voice really matters. Having not simply summary, but summary with analysis,” he said. The new design also gives a home to the Trending News Channel, Slate’s effort at tying quick video production to of-the-moment Google Trends data.

You know what is scarce? Time and attention. People are inundated with abundant information these days, and what they look for are trusted aggregators, curators and filters of that information. They seek those out because it saves them time, and lets them direct their attention more efficiently. In other words, people value the aggregation, because it serves a valuable role when the content is infinitely available, but time is not.

Mike Masnick, Journalists Are Aggregators Too (And That’s A Good Thing)

Plus 1.

Instead of aggregating news headlines, [The Study is] going to aggregate academic papers from universities and think tanks—a genre of writing and thinking that has a lot to add to the world but that doesn’t get much attention from the media. We’re going to marry this academic writing to the day’s headlines, tying together what people are talking about in the world as a whole at any given moment with what various researchers and thinkers have discovered about these topics. Hopefully, if we do a good job, this project will inject some unexpected and valuable perspectives into the political debate.

Richard Just, The New Republic, Introducing ‘The Study’.

Just describes TNR’s hesitation about typical aggregation strategies but the necessity of implementing the practice in general. We think their idea is great and look forward to following as they proceed.