Quarkbase: "everything about a website"

Thanks to today's "tip of the day" in journalism.co.uk for alerting me to the existence of quarkbase.com which aggregates a whole lot of stuff about a website including a useful "social popularity" section which diplays - in one handy place - number of delicious bookmarks, pages on Digg, references on Yahoo! Answers etc etc.

Love it.

Here are the results for one of our sites - fwi.co.uk

National Post reporter has total Twitter melt down | MediaStyle

I like technology reporters and I like marketing consultants but which is better? There's only one way to find out:

National Post reporter has total Twitter melt down | MediaStyle

It's just too easily done, isn't it ?

Falling Off A Blog: The Web Production Desk

I agree with what Karl Schneider says in Falling Off A Blog: The Web Production Desk and not just because he's my boss.

Also because he's clearly bee thinking about it very hard (for the last nine months, since your last blog post, Karl ? :-) ).

What surprised me when I read it was the impression of just how different web production is from magazine production. I know that seems obvious, but the aims are much the same: to engage readers and to make it as easy as possible for them to assimilate meaning and/or information.

There's a huge gap between the two in terms of basic skills. I mean, a lot.

Data Visualization

We've been doing some work here to try and expand people's thinking about what an "online feature" might look like.

Actually, the issue is more about what an online feature isn't. It almost certainly isn't 1,500-2,000 words with a couple of pictures and maybe a sidebar if you're lucky.

Of all the migrations from print to online, the journey of the Features Editor is perhaps the hardest.

Anyway, our list of ideas for more engaging ways of presenting non-news content grows by the day but even so I was thrilled to discover FlowingData recently, a website dedicated to data visualisation.

Here are its 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year to give you some examples.

Here's an example from the BBC's Britain From Above:

Twitter lies

Bless @StephenFry.

Britain's National Treasure is following 32,014 on Twitter and 88,728 are following him.

In his latest blog post on the topic, he suggests that people should not be offended if he doesn't follow everyone back and doesn't respond to every direct Tweet.

It's a lovely idea. With that many followers, he has more people reading him than there are circulated copies of most of our B2B magazines; he is even following more people than some of the most niche B2B titles.

Two possibilities - both of which may be true - are:

A. There is no point in following 32,000 people on Twitter. It can not be done. Not while you have a full time job as a National Treasure.

B. The publishing system employed by magazines is really rather a lazy form of communication.

Where have all the bloggers gone?

Strange, the number of people who have expressed difficulty in resurrecting their blogging activity in 2009.

I think a lot of people have been distracted by Twitter which seems to have achieved some kind of tipping point here in the UK.

Indeed, this is my first post of the year so I thought I'd start gently with what is basically just a picture taken from Contract Journal's newly launched community - ConstructionSpace.

It's from their Construction Rogue's Gallery - "A selection of photos sent into Contract Journal demonstrating all the 'don'ts' and none of the 'dos' in construction. This gallery is open, and we welcome your additions."

Love it so much that here is another one:

Tableizer: turn spreadsheets into HTML tables

This is wonderful. It's like an early Christmas present. So useful. What a lovely tool.

Of course, I didn't have a need right at this moment so to demonstrate it I just took a spreadsheet at random and had a go. Here's the result:

115	31/07/08	Code Convergence - Phase 1	Prepare a 'cookbook' - a guide on how to set up and install community server for a new market and a comprehensive lists of dos and don'ts for the future
145	03/10/08	Code Convergence - Phase 2	"Code refactor of SRS" [Medium Priority] - Some design issues with our single signon library that have increased the amount of time to identify and fix bugs during the past few weeks. There would be benefit to refactoring this feature but it might also be worth waiting until after the current convergence phase as there may be other changes required when upgrading to 2008/9 anyway.
150	10/10/08	Code Convergence - Phase 2	Flight Convergence - Home page enhancements
172	05/11/08	Code Convergence - Phase 2	SEO bug - in a forum click on a post - the SEO url rewriter creates the wrong url.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

Thought-provoking post by Alison Gow here: Headlines and Deadlines: Achieving a more transparent newsroom.

Alison reports that there were a few raised eyebrows in the newsroom over the decision to be completely open about the fact that the investigative work behind its article "Bullied" Liverpool council staff go on sick was not its own work but the result of a Freedom of Information request made through www.whatdotheyknow.com.

I can understand why journalists would like to preserve the mystique of news-gathering but in the Web 2.0 world that's getting harder to do.

Still, at least the nationals can continue to pass AP items off as their own without people being the wiser.

The very model of a modern major newsroom

Brilliant post from Paul Bradshaw - part six of his model for the 21st Century newsroom.

This one includes six new journalist roles - a brilliant checklist (although in B2B there are of course, quite a few newsrooms which would be happy to have six journalists full stop).

Paul's six new journalist roles are:

• The Aggregator-Sub
• The Mobile Journalist (MoJo)
• The Data Miner
• The Multimedia Producer
• The Networked Specialist
• The Community Editor

Read the entire post here. Required reading for all journalists.

[It also links to this great article on Passive-Aggressive News Gathering which I hadn't come across before.]

Mumbai, twitter and the news

Seems like just about everyone has clocked Twitter as the breaking news-source of the moment.

Techcrunch has some interesting stuff and there's a thoughtful piece by Matthew Ingram about the question of whether or not news organisations should report tweets as fact.

It's something that struck me when looking at The Guardian's (abandoned) live blog which contained the entry:

8:26am:
One of the Australian victims has been named on the microblogging site Twitter.

That's quite a significant statement, especially if you happened to be a relative of the (alleged) victim.

Matthew Ingram argues:

Obviously, no one wants a loved one to be worried by false reports. But at the same time, chaotic situations result in poor information flow — even to the “professional” journalists who are working at the scene. First-hand and second-hand reports on Twitter are no worse. Should anyone take them as gospel, or the final version of the events? No. Obviously, at some point someone has to check the facts, confirm reports, analyze the outcome, and so on. News reporting and journalism are much more of a process than they are a discrete thing. But as I have tried to argue before, Twitter reports are a valuable “first draft of history,” and that is a pretty good definition of the news.

That's true, but I think that what those of us working in new media forget is that millions of people have either no idea or only a vague idea of what twitter is.

If you know what twitter is then you can calculate your response to take account of the cavils and risks; if you don't, and you trust the BBC (for example) as your source of news it's a different story.