Category Archives: Uncategorized

Flickr adds embeddable slideshows! Yaaay!

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I use Flickr lots. For sharing little videos in my river blog posts, for finding creative-commons-licensed images to accompany my news stories, and for sharing my pictures with the world so that they might find their way into neat places like the Wikipedia.

And now I can embed slideshows! Woo!

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=58979

Click the little arrows-in-a-box icon for fullscreen.

UPDATE: They also added videos to slide shows. They play automagically. (There are a few videos at the end of this set, if you’d like a demo.)

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=58979

I love Flickr.

(Thanks to ReadWriteWeb and Mashable for the heads up.)

Hate, props, and hotness: restoring journalism’s credibility

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Journalism.co.uk sez:

NewsCred, a website aimed at gauging the credibility of online news, has been launched in a beta. The site, which aims to help users find ‘the highest quality and most credible news online’, has created a digital newspaper of aggregated articles, which are voted on by users.

NewsCred is some really neat shit. It ain’t breaking news that journalism’s got a bit of a credibility problem — okay, a disasterous credibility problem. When we lose our cred, we’ve got nothing! Credibility is journalism’s *only* currency. Who do you believe? Blog X or The New York Times?

Why is our credibility in the crapper?

Hotness. MSNBC, Fox News, and the 24 hour news cycle. Speculation, opinion and spectacle have ruined the news. Every time we report on flag pins, pregnant dudes or autism-causing vaccinations, god kills a kitten.

The news needs way less hotness, fast. That’s why I’m into NewsCred, it’s the Digg-shaped anti-Digg. It’s not about what’s hot. It’s about what’s good.

NewsCred\'s credit and discredit buttons

Jeff Jarvis completely disagrees:

I think these folks are attacking the problem from the wrong perspective. They’re trying to play whack-a-mole with credibility and identify all the bad stuff — just as news people, long accustomed to packaging the world in a pretty box with a bow on top, keep wanting to kill every bad comment on their sites. They’ll fail.

All social apps need to get the secret sauce just right — and most totally fail. Only time will tell if NewsCred has legs, but hell, even if it ain’t perfect, they’re at least barking up the right tree.

(For several examples of new media journalism that’s barking up the wrong tree, check out the DayLife Developer Challenge winners. They were made by lovely people I’m certain, so, sorry for being a hater, but dang — it’s just a bunch of shiny shiny.)

NewsCred is trying to solve a real problem: the disaffected news audience. Yes, this encourages readers to be haters, but they can also give props to the good stuff. Journalism has a credibility problem largely because journalists are producing lots of crap. We need to be vetted.

Zed Shaw says “The Internet needs identity, reputation, and retribution.” Readers know who we are, and rely on our reputations, but comments and letters to the editor are hardly retribution. If we publish junk, we should get buried.

Bring on the hate. No more kittens have to die.

@cnnbrk ain’t CNN, but with >30K followers, he owns the brand

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TechCrunch posted about CNN’s twitterings the other day: Apparently, the feed’s followers were upset about a tweet that spoiled their Olympic viewing experience by revealing golden boy Michael Phelps’ latest feat shortly after he kicked the aquatic asses of the world’s other really freakin’ fantastic swimmers.

But it wasn’t CNN that tweeted. It was cnnbrk, a bot written by news junkie James Cox that simply rebroadcasts CNN’s breaking news email alerts.

cnnbrk on Twitter

Twitter is the perfect medium for a news organization like CNN — they’re the first place you turn to see what’s going on, right now. cnnbrk has gathered 31,502 followers delivering that immediacy on the the most ADD site online, Twitter. CNN’s official feeds lag far behind: their cnn, CNN_Newsroom, cnni, politicalticker, and cnnireport have just over 8,400 followers, combined. (I’m pretty sure these are all maintained by folks at CNN — it’s kind of hard to tell.)

This *isn’t* CNN

The Guardian wrote about the brand confusion a couple of weeks ago, check out what Cox had to say:

“I do indeed wield the power of their brand: if I posted right now that Bush is due to be impeached, or that Diet Coke really still contained cocaine – I think the repercussions would be unpleasant. So I’ve been walking a fine line, ensuring that I keep somewhat under the radar, whilst also wishing that it would become even more popular.”

Cox isn’t pretending to be CNN, but the Olympic boondoggle did result in angry tweets directed toward CNN, and TechCrunch reported that CNN was the spoiler source — since then some twitterers have figured out that cnnbrk is not CNN, and TC has corrected the story.

I doubt that Cox will be able to keep this up if CNN decides to drop the hammer — I’m no expert but it seems like his use of the CNN name miiight be against the rules. (cnn follows cnnbrk, so Cox isn’t flying very far below the radar.)

Huffington Post launches first local site: Chicago braces for celebri-blogging

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Chicago’s got several online news sources: The Windy Citizen, Chi-Town Daily News, and Gapers Block, are all excellent and locally owned. And we’ve got network blogs like Chicagoist bringing the snark, but is the city that works ready for Moby?

It had better be, because here come the pretty people: The Huffington Post has invaded Chicago.

Huffington Post Chicago

From Phil Rosenthal’s coverage in this morning’s Tribune:

“I just got a great blog post from John Cusack,” Huffington said. “People who are from Chicago have all these amazing warm feeling and memories of Chicago. … It is tribal. John is in Bangkok making a movie, and he was kind of emotional with this ode to Chicago.”

The local sites have been working the HuffPo model for a while now: topical blogs, original news coverage and lots of links to the mainstream news sources with good news and shitty websites. Can Chicago sustain another?

Good and bad news

The good news is that all the local web sites (of which the HuffPo has an exhaustive list at the end of their home page) ought to see a lot more traffic with a high-profile site like the HuffPo linking to them. A rising tide and all that. Everyone gets more ad revenue. Woo, woo!

Ths bad is that the little guys like Windy Citizen are succeeding because the Sun-Times and Tribune suck at the web. If the HuffPo gets all the online readers and stops linking to the other web outlets, then it’s game over for local online news.

Or maybe they’ll hire the sacked Trib alums, buy the tower, and run the papers outta town.

Disclosure: I write a blog at The Windy Citizen, and occasionally give them a hand with nerdy things.

Dearest journalists, stop being jerks: Why not publish the data too?

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My comrade in arms Ryan Mark sez:

The Sun-Times published the names, salaries and positions of 145,000 Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago employees on their website this weekend. The names and salaries are online in the form of a simple searchable database.

But the data is buried. There’s no way to get to a spreadsheet of this information. On paper there are physical limitations to publishing your data, but online, you’re unlimited. Why not just post the file? Ryan is spot-on:

I want a link to download a csv file. I want to plug it into Many Eyes. I want to run my own reports on it.

If I had to pick the one craziest thing about journalism, it’s this. We closely guard our sources, even from our colleagues at the same organization. We make FOIAs and file them away. And now that we’re online, we don’t link to our source materials, we don’t publish our data, and we’d never, ever link to another news source for background. WTF!?

Centre Georges Pompidou, by Thomas Claveirole
Centre Georges Pompidou, by Thomas Claveirole

We demand transparency and act with opacity

Forgive the n00b if I’m wrong, but from what I gather this attitude is the result of years of fierce competition between (and within) news organizations — we’re trying to scoop the cross town gazette.

Well, quit it!

Journalism needs an attitude adjustment. The house is burning! The ship is sinking! The, um, battlestar is circling the event horizon! Pick your metaphor — the deal is, we’re all in this together. Start playing nice, for chrissakes.

We’re here to help our readers better self-govern, and we’re failing them, because we’re being competitive assholes. And maybe — just maybe — if we give them a proper web experience, they’ll go to us instead of Google and we’ll make a buck too.