May 07, 2012
Engin Erdogan
An infographic for choosing the right graphic
April 09, 2012
Engin Erdogan
Development Workflow With Git
March 15, 2012
Engin Erdogan
Moving Statistics | Make Moving Simple
The percentage of moves in a year occurring in any given summer month peaks around 11% – 13%, compared to 8% or less for other months.
March 04, 2012
Chris Keller
Wired's use of GitHub to publish an article about GitHub reminds me of Jordan Wirfs-Brock's Knight-Mozilla idea
At Wired offices, you hear the question over and over again as we work on stories like the one you’re reading now: “Are you out of the story? I want to go in.” We have a version control problem. We publish Wired.com on WordPress. It’s a decent publishing tool, but when two people change a story at the same time, one of them doesn’t get her changes onto the final story.
We published our GitHub story on GitHub because it was meta-cool. But we also did it to see if GitHub might actually help us solve our problem.
via wired.com
Because Jordan Wirfs-Brock worked through the idea of a collaboration system for journalists last summer as part of the Knight-Mozilla Journalism Learning Lab. I think it had legs then and I think it has legs now...
February 21, 2012
Engin Erdogan
How Much Money Should a Startup Have in the Bank?
There are two important questions to ask when raising money:a) Is the person you’re taking the money from smart?
b) Is the valuation good?Once you answer both, here’s your roadmap:
1. If those two answers are yes, take the money.
2. If the one of the two answers is yes you should consider it, but keep looking for two yesses.
3. If both answers are no, don’t do it.
via launch.is
February 06, 2012
Engin Erdogan
Susanne Stage
Susanne Stage
Susanne Stage
February 01, 2012
Engin Erdogan
?
January 30, 2012
Engin Erdogan
Major Email Provider Trends Update: Gmail Pretty Much Caught Up | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog
January 21, 2012
Engin Erdogan
YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?
via ycombinator.com
January 20, 2012
Engin Erdogan
Expletive Inserted » Stripe’s New Online Payments Service: Where’s the Catch?
January 16, 2012
Engin Erdogan
Activist Technology Demo Day
January 12, 2012
Engin Erdogan
2011'de Türkiye’de gerçekleşen internet sektörü birleşme ve yatırımları
January 05, 2012
Engin Erdogan
YUGODROM
Amazing vehicles
December 30, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Blade Runner Sketchbook (1982)
December 28, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Startup Quote - Daily Wisdom about Startups
<="" a="" width="500" height="500">December 23, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day | TechCrunch
If these companies are so clueless about technology that they think SOPA is a good idea, how could they be good investors?
via techcrunch.com
Thank you Paul Graham
December 21, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Targeting through Facebook
- 1. Go to Facebook Ads
- 2. Click on the Create an Advert button
- 3. Fill in dummy Design Your Advert information (it won’t be live)
- 4. Play around with the Targeting parameters.
via janchipchase.com
December 20, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Finding out which things to throw out - Morten Just
December 13, 2011
Engin Erdogan
A VC: Burn Rates: How Much?
A good rule of thumb is multiply the number of people on the team by $10k to get the monthly burn. That is not the number you pay an employee. That is the "fully burdended" cost of a person including rent and other related costs. So if you use that mutiplier, my suggested team sizes are 5, 10, and 25 respectively for the three development stages listed above.
via avc.com
Building Product Stage: 5p
Building Usage Stage: 10p
Building The Business Stage: 25p
December 12, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Reverse engineered db map of FB
December 11, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Why not "intuitive"?
Raskin discouraged using the informal term intuitive in user interface design, claiming that easy to use interfaces are often due to exposure to previous, similar systems, thus the term 'familiar' should be preferred.[11] Aiming for "intuitive" interfaces (based on reusing existing skills with interaction systems) could lead designers to discard a better design solution only because it would require a novel approach.
via en.wikipedia.org
December 06, 2011
Engin Erdogan
git ready » pushing and pulling
November 28, 2011
Engin Erdogan
ScraperWiki Competitors
I really like the idea of ScraperWiki, it can make programming accessible to so many people.
November 12, 2011
Engin Erdogan
My US air travel network diagram since 2002
November 09, 2011
Laurian Gridinoc
Visualising My News Diet
On Sunday, at the Visualize Your Media Diet learning lab at the Mozila Festival ran by Nate Matias, Matt Stempeck and Dan Schultz from the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media, the participants had to draw how would they … Continue reading →
November 08, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Cleveland Clinic
Laurian Gridinoc
Timeboxing the News
This Saturday at the Touch the News design challenge at the Mozilla Festival, I was in team 6 with Heather Lesson, Peter O’Shaughnessy, Carlo Frinolli, Nick Smith, Gavin McFarland and Chris Warring. We focused on how people consume news on the iPad with regard to location, time of … Continue reading →
October 31, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Stuff
I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
via paulgraham.com
Inspiration for Itemology comes from the man himself
October 12, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.
via raw.github.com
A rare moment of truth unintentionally disclosing the competitive disadvantage of Google. "Facebook is different for everyone" is a key point here, envisioning so many use permutations in an offering is a product of genius.
October 07, 2011
Matt Terenzio
Innovation key to sustainability in journalism
It’s all still settling in, but my experience last week in Berlin has caused my outlook on the future of journalism to go from one of great concern to one of great promise.
I was honored to take part in what we have come to call Hacktoberfest, a five day hackathon sponsored by the Knight Mozilla News Technology Partnership or MoJo (Mozilla Journalism).
Twenty developers and journalists joined a bunch of Mozilla folks and members from five participating news organizations (Boston Globe, The Guardian, Zeit Online, Al Jazeera English and BBC).
What transpired was an incredible “mosh pit of brains.” I may be misquoting someone on that, but you get the idea. (also not to be confused with a Bad Brain Mosh Pit)
I learned a lot. I learned about Wiener Sausages and German beer, for sure, but also about the sausage making necessary for news innovation. The collaboration which ensued turned good ideas into great ones and even spawned completely new projects out of common desires and needs. It was the fellowship of the thing.
But it wasn’t just academic discussion about futuristic dreams. We addressed questions like “how can we fix the broken comments model on news sites and the web in general?” And, “How can we pay for investigative journalism when sites rely on a page-view model?”
In fact, sustainability and business model ideas permeated the discussions that surrounded the hacking. All of those ideas seemed to accept that innovation was a key part of building a successful news business, both now and in the future. It’s hard to believe we still need to beat that drum in 2011, but we do. More of the same will not c
ut it, even if it is more profitable in the short term.
The most recognizable feature of the Berlin skyline is The Fernsehturm, or television tower. It was built in the late sixties to symbolize the the power of the German Democratic Republic. As I wandered the streets beneath it, I couldn’t help but think that this metaphor for Communist Berlin had a lesson for news industry.
It can either use its resources to convince the world from high up that it is strong, necessary and omnipresent, or it can join the democratic revolution of news happening on the ground. Because, for better or worse, it’s happening. The metro has left the station.
I’m reminded of a scene in Citizen Kane that serves as a lesson for what stagnation can do to a company, and that there are those who would rather just let things wind down naturally.
“You’re right,” says Charles Foster Kane, “I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in . . . 60 years.”
Unfortunately most newspapers don’t have that luxury.
But that shouldn’t make them short-sighted. It’s a cold but undeniable truth that news companies have two paths.
One is to slowly decline, maintaining as many of the employees that rely on the print product for as long as possible.
The other is to make a bet on the future, which may hasten the termination of some employees but will enable those companies to garner a stake in the future of both journalism and marketing on the web.
I choose the latter.
It’s not margins that will save these companies but innovation.
October 06, 2011
Marian Liu
Steve Jobs RIP
His death hit me hard.
Like many, my iPhone is precious, so precious that if I lost it, I would be...
Engin Erdogan
RIP Steve Jobs
October 05, 2011
Dan Schultz
Back from Berlin
Last. Week. Was. Awesome.
I just got back from a trip to Berlin as part of the Knight-Mozilla learning lab (MoJo). Twenty of the participants from the previous round (the month long lecture series) were invited to spend a week in Germany getting to know each other while attempting to churn out some code for the rest of the world to see.
I arrived Sunday morning and quickly learned why it is never a good idea to get to a country before hotel check in. No recovery naps for me! The first thing I did was meet up with Saleem Kahn, Nicola Hughes, and Laurian Gridinoc and take a trip to the Bauhaus where I learned that people have been making things for a long, long time.
——–
Let me pause to quickly explain. I grew up, like most of you, using lots of things. When it came to making I was stuck with Legos and the like until one day I discovered programming and started making digital things with that. Fast forward 15 years and I’m at MIT taking How to Make Almost Anything and I say “oh awesome! Hardware isn’t just magic!” But once the course ended I, for the most part, reverted back to my comfort zone of software (still empowered with the potential to carve out circuits and molds, but not seizing immediate opportunities to utilize that empowerment just yet).
Bauhaus is the rest of the picture and got me excited about making again. The series of shops (I attended the one in Berlin) which closed with the rise of the Nazis, were basically buildings dedicated to modernist design (i.e. creating objects that are both beautiful and functional). As I walked around the museum I realized that I don’t have to make things that are super high tech and based on circuits to be making almost anything, I just have to be making things with a unique purpose. Hackable life for the win!
No time to worry about making things now (sponsor week and thesis proposal deadlines are looming), but I sure am ready to build stuff instead of buying stuff.
——–
After Bauhaus we went back to the hotel and I crashed and burned (and woke up just in time to meet up with Mark Boas and have some good old fashioned German Asian food since most things were closing up by then!).
The next morning was the beginning of what ended up being an INCREDIBLY packed four-day schedule of programming, talking, eating, walking, and sleeping. The hackathon (a term used to refer to these kinds of get togethers where people sit around and code) itself took place in a building called the Betahaus, located in Moritzplatz (aka “Makerplatz” since it is the hub of Berlin’s Maker community). The room was awesome – the fourth floor of a stark concrete building, full of tables, chairs, soda, lots and lots of wifi, and random posters of wildlife on the walls. Now that I think about it I wouldn’t be surprised if they hosted fight clubs on weeknights.
As the 20 of us pondered statements like “nothing should be anything” we started milling around and getting to know one another. Some people were designers, some were journalists, some were hackers, and some were mutts but sure enough project clusters slowly sprung up and by the second day people were nose deep in their laptops.
It was around this time that I realized that my project shared a very common need with most of the others: the need for metadata extraction from pieces of media! Thus was born the Meta Meta Project.
——–
I’ll write more about Meta Meta in another post somewhere on the Internet, but the basic idea is that there are a lot of tools out there which can extract information from images, videos, and text. For instance maybe you want to know all of the locations mentioned in a news article, or maybe you want to find all the words that appear in an image.
A lot of projects would benefit greatly from having access to this information, but to use the tools out there takes a fair amount of time setting up, implementing logic, and generally re-inventing parts of the wheel. Rather than having everyone need to become an expert in the tools, the Meta Meta Project is an API suite which will make it dead simple to put in a piece of media and get back the information you want.
Like I said, I’ll have to post more on that somewhere else.
——–
By day 3 the news partners arrived – there were representatives from BBC, The Guardian, Zeit Online, Al Jazeera, and The Boston Globe. They were there to get to know our work and us, but more importantly they were there to get to know one another. The idea of open collaboration still seems to be a somewhat foreign concept among the professional news industry. This is a pity because there is surely a lot of room for mutual benefit and it would surely free up lots of resources for one another. (Hey news rooms! Hop on board the Meta Meta Project!)
There is so much more to write about but there is so little time so I’m going to wrap up with some quick points:
- I had never attended a hackathon before this one and I’m now totally hooked.
- I had never attended a Mozilla event before and I’m now totally hooked.
- Berlin, and Germany in general, is a surreal place to be. The whole city is marked with the painful memories of the past, and it is just so interesting and tragically beautiful to walk around and see memorials, broken pieces of walls, and intentional marks designed to ensure that things aren’t forgotten.
- I came to realize that America isn’t really as young as everyone makes it out to be. When you think about how both Germany and Spain have had radical change in government in the past century it’s almost as if they’re the newbies.
- Germany pulls off maker punks.
I want to end with my favorite memory from the trip (I stuck around for three days after the coding portion just to see the city). A small group of fellow stragglers and I were wandering around a part of Berlin that I would never wander around on my own. This was by no means a place for tourists. As we passed by doorways of punk clubs blasting out dance music we crossed a well-lit alley blasting a different kind of music. At the other end of the alley was a small band with a gathering crowd behind it. No vocals, just tones, and the energy slowly built. We got caught in the sounds and just watched as they wailed away and eventually climaxed.
In the words of Chris Keller: if someone did that in Manhattan they would probably be carted away.
Katie Zhu
#Hacktoberfest: In pictures
These past two weeks have been insanely awesome. Between #ONA11 in Boston and #Hacktoberfest in Berlin (and you know, school), I really haven’t had much time to digest and reflect on the experiences.
I continued hacking on Roundtable at Betahaus (where the hackfest was held) — and had the pleasure of working with two awesome guys, Andy and Stijn, to refine the idea and code. So far it’s still running locally, TBD (to be deployed) within a week, I hope. Code is up on GitHub.
I promise a longer, more well-crafted narrative review at a later date. But I am über jet-lagged. Plus. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Right?
Note: All these fotos stolen from around teh interwebz. Thanks to Neil Dawson, Phillip Smith and Tathagata Dasgupta.
Presenting at #Hacktoberfest to news partners from Al Jazeera English, BBC, Boston Globe, The Guardian and Zeit Online.
October 02, 2011
Trina Chiasson
Reflections on Hacktoberfest
Last week I worked from the Betahaus, an innovation and startup center in the heart of Berlin. With multiple floors full of startups and a reputation for giving ideas and communities a place to grow, the Betahaus was a fitting location for … Continue reading
September 30, 2011
Engin Erdogan
gladwell dot com - creation myth
The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn't necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. "Quality," Simonton writes, is "a probabilistic function of quantity."
via gladwell.com
many many results from lots and lots of intake
September 24, 2011
Marian Liu
Breaking News
Folks keep asking me if this announcement is a secret or public yet, so I’ll go on the...
ASNE DIVERSITY SUMMIT: Day 2
Sept. 20, 2011 @ NYT, 15th Floor conference center
Full day of workshops are Storified here.
And...
Chris Keller
Thoughts for #moznewslab and #hacktoberfest ... via @joehewitt: Web Technologies Need an Owner
The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform acquires cutting edge capabilities in a timely manner (camera access, anyone?). The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform makes real developers happy and productive. The Web has no one to ensure that it is competitive with other platforms, and so increasingly we are seeing developers investing their time in other platforms that serve their needs better.
via joehewitt.com
Interesting argument and discussion point for #moznewslab and #hacktoberfest participants... How to balance open-web with need for "point person" or "champion." Better yet, do we need to balance that? And aren't we all striving to help fill that "leadership vacuum" through open-development and collaboration?
September 23, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Badges - MozillaWiki
September 21, 2011
Marian Liu
ASNE DIVERSITY SUMMIT: Day 1
Leadership in Diversity: New Models for Growing Audience, Talent & Revenue; Sept. 19, 2011 @...
September 20, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Hilary Mason Wants To Get You Started With Big Data
The first step is setting up a proper environment
Second, you need to obtain a few test data sets that you can start to manipulate.
Third, you need to start thinking about how to make your data sets smaller
Now comes the fun part, exploring your data
Next comes the mathematical modeling portion of the program.
Finally is interpretation.
via readwriteweb.com
A step by step guide to setting up and getting started with playing with big data.
September 19, 2011
Chris Keller
As #hacktoberfest approaches, it's a good time to reflect on the tasks at hand for news teams: learn, do, lead and repeat
UPDATE: This post came in response to a question posed to the Knight-Mozilla group headed to Berlin that asked what drew us into the MoJo project, and what we would expect if offered a fellowship abroad.
Really, I don't know what to expect, and if I start to think about the details -- the "how would I do this", or "how handle this" -- I get somewhat paralyzed. So I'm headed into the process with an open mind toward anything and everything.
Big picture-wise, what would I like to see happen? Safe to say, in both experiences, there would be a lot of learning, opportunities to teach others, and a lot of fumbling around to see what might work. Teams will evolve, each of our ideas about what is possible will be challenged, and when we leave we will know a lot more about ourselves and our motivations. If we all can achieve that, no one will be left behind.
In one week, 20 of us hacks and hackers will convene in Berlin, Germany to spend five days hacking together new ways of gathering and presenting the news thanks to a news/technology partnership between Mozilla and the Knight Foundation.
We'll be joined by -- among many others -- leaders from Zeit Online, Al Jazeera, the Boston Globe, the BBC and the Guardian, news organizations offering five fellowships. That's right, five out of 20 will be chosen to go abroad for a year to implement digital tools for journalists, work with newsroom staff and -- above all else -- learn.
And as I stare at the calendar, as the start of #hacktoberfest creeps closer, I can't help but begin to feel nervous about so many things: How did I end up here? Do I know what I am doing? What if my skills aren't good enough? What if no one is interested in my project? Am I in over my head?
All of these feelings are natural, and probably even healthy.
My background is in print journalism, but three years ago I was dropped into the media of digital news content and platforms. So just as I had when I made the jump from sports to news, or reporter to editor, I started to learn everything I could about where the news industry was at, where trends pointed, and where newsrooms could/should be in terms of digital platforms.
And this May, when given the opportunity to submit a MoJo project, not only did I see it as a chance to dust off old battle plans and ideas, but as a chance to sincerely pitch something that I had come to view as sorely lacking in the world of news: A contextualized news environment that catered to the different levels of news consumers, but also afforded a journalist the opportunity to current an issue from 10,000 feet as opposed to writing story after story.
Somehow, someway my project pitch was noticed and selected, which allowed me to move on to the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab, where for four weeks of lectures and informal discussions I found some of my theories were spot on and others weren't fully baked. I found I knew a lot about some things and nothing about others. And as such, my thinking evolved as did my project.
The evolution came after I found that while there are plenty of folks focusing on and addressing the user end of news -- how it's presented, user interaction & engagement, etc -- there are tremendous opportunities to build tools and applications for the newsroom and journalists that don't receive as much public attention, but are starting to more and more and more.
So with the possibility of a fellowship in front of me, it's this area that motivates me, this chance to learn from other journalists and from other newsroom cultures, be influenced by other systems & workflows and work together to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, and will allow newsrooms to add value and utility to content in an efficient manner.
Specifically, I am interested in finding answers to the following questions:
- How does the staff go about gathering news and information?
- Once gathered, how can value and utility be added to news and information before it's packaged for digital and print platforms.
- Once packaged, how can news and information be maintained, updated and re-focused?
I know going in that the answers aren't simple; there are a lot of moving parts, political obstacles and organizational challenges. It's something I found last year in helping to lead the pilot, test and implementation of a new content management system that had the ability to merge print and digital production.
But I feel more confident in my knowledge and my ability to lead than I did even just six months ago. If anything, the MoJo process has helped foster this feeling through critical thinking about what is possible, reflection and exposure to ideas from a wide-range of wicked-smart individuals.
And perhaps most importantly, I know that no one person has all the answers. But a "small group of committed people?" Well they might have enough answers to change the world... or at least the news business.
Engin Erdogan
Citizens or Customers?
It feels like what America has been doing for the last century, cultivating a vibrant immigrant culture based on realizing one’s dreams and hence development at scale, is becoming the norm for every wise country in the world. I believe we will see more and more countries providing incentives for attracting the brightest from all over the world in order to jumpstart their development and economies. So, where it used to be the monopoly, America has competition now.
I think this is a big tectonic shift in global economy of human resources, and it will lead to new consumer behaviors. We are not citizens of countries anymore, we are customers of cities. We can live in SF or Seoul or New York, but we don’t need to emotionally commit to any of them. Shifting where we live is bound to replicate shifting from AT&T to Verizon.
Of course, we are emotional beings with a lot of baggage (like memories and children
and are movements will be limited to a certain extent. But can these really stop the global tectonic shift where we are becoming nomadic consumers? We will adapt, not sure how in all detail.
Take a look at Charter Cities (http://chartercities.org) for how architecture and city planning may adapt to this new order. Also, Seasteading (http://seasteading.org) as an extreme example where people believe new world development is ALL about economy and natural selection.
via log.shilman.net
This is the comment I wrote to my friend Michael Shilman's blog. It summarizes some of my thinking about the global shift in human resources and how it might lead to new consumption behaviors.
September 18, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Is Interface Design Still Copywriting?
I came across this post at bokardo.com, arguing interface design is prototyping. The post quotes a presentation that is largely based on a 37 Signals blog post written in May 2005.
Interface Design is Copywriting. Designing an interface is largely exercise in choosing the right words. When you lay out a page, you’re choosing copy for the headline, subheadline, call-to-action, content area, graphs and analysis areas, error messages. All of these design elements are built out of words. Are you an aspiring wordsmith? I hope so…because you’re choosing some very important words!
I sense some nostalgia here. Ok, copywriting is important, it's basic communication, not going away. In 2005, text may have been the dominant media. Now, we have exciting native browser technologies evolving very fast to unfold new and interesting interactions. Motion, inherently time-based, is about to hug it out with interaction design, another time-based discipline. LA meets SF.
So.
Is interface design still copywriting? I don't think so. If anything, interface design is becoming motion design. It's time to move on.
September 16, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Dan Shapiro » Don’t ask for introductions to investors
Step 1: Do your homework. Before you meet your contact, have an explicit list of 1-4 people you would like an intro to. And this is definitely about people – it’s better to ask for an intro to Bob Smith than it is to ask for Acme Investors.
Step 2: Pitch your contact first. Treat them like an investor, even if they’re not. Good first-pitch rules apply: don’t teach them; tease them. Show them just enough to get them to want more. Be sure to hammer your one or two line summary a few times so they know it.
Step 3: The ask. Say, “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d really appreciate introductions to A, B, and C. Can I shoot you an email with a one paragraph summary of the business that you can forward along?”
Step 4: The reach. NOW is when you say, “And are there any other investors you can think of that I should be talking to?” You’ve done your homework, they know about your business, it’s OK to ask them to ponder a bit to see if you missed any one. And it’s easy for them to say, ”No, your list is great” – you’re not obligating them to come up with any one.
Step 5: Followthrough. Immediately after you step out of the meeting, send separate emails – one for each invitation request – that say something like:
Hello <contact>! Thanks for taking the time to talk today. Your perspective on the business was really helpful. I appreciate you offering to connect us with <investor> – feel free to forward this email to <him/her>. I’m including a brief description of us below.
<<brief description of business>>
Again, do one per investor, so they can easily forward each one to the right person, hopefully along with a little note that says you’re not a bozo.
via danshapiro.com
Practical self-help grade advice from Dan Shapiro. No big surprises here, except it would have been nicer to know more about the rule of thumb "don't teach them, tease them."
September 14, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Remote User Research
via remoteresear.ch
Various websites and basics of the methodology for doing online usability research. Useful website references toward the end.
September 13, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Goal Setting
- S - Specific (or Significant).
- M - Measurable (or Meaningful).
- A - Attainable (or Action-Oriented).
- R - Relevant (or Rewarding).
- T - Time-bound (or Trackable).
For example, instead of having "To sail around the world" as a goal, it's more powerful to say "To have completed my trip around the world by December 31, 2015." Obviously, this will only be attainable if a lot of preparation has been completed beforehand!
via mindtools.com
It's critical to be intentional as a meta-principle when setting goals or end points for tasks.
September 09, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Expert Performance
For appropriate challenging problems experts don't just automatically extract patterns and retrieve their response directly from memory. Instead they select the relevant information and encode it in special representations in working memory that allow planning, evaluation and reasoning about alternative courses of action (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). Hence, the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982).
via psy.fsu.edu
Experts build custom toolboxes for specific cases instead of trying to find a specific tool to resolve a singular problem
Software project management texts
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David Anderson
Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen
The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Chromatic
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition) by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide by Craig Larman
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks
Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
September 08, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Are jobs obsolete?
Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.
via cnn.com
Douglas Rushkoff asks: why do we stick to the description of 'jobs' circa industrial age? We can redefine it.
September 04, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Elements Of A Viral Launch Page
Here are the basic elements a launch page should have:
- A clear value proposition that interests people. (What problem will you be solving?)
- If your strategy is stealth, then why should people care? (For example, are you Jack Dorsey?)
- A notification form, with a bright call-to-action button.
Some practical tips in this article. Don't forget to call people to action with the bright button.
August 29, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere
via fastcompany.com
{1} Go Into Your Cave
{2} It's Okay to Be King
{3} Transcend Orthodoxy
{4} Just Say No
{5} Serve Your Customer. No, Really
{6} Everything Is Marketing
{7} Kill the Past
{8} Turn Feedback Into Inspiration
{9} Don't Invent, Reinvent
{10} Play by Your Own Clock
August 24, 2011
Engin Erdogan
The Nature of (Pre)News and Event Detection « Recorded Future Blog
August 23, 2011
Marian Liu
Voices through its 20 years…support us for another 20!
August 21, 2011
Engin Erdogan
The bowling pin strategy – chris dixon's blog
How do you identify a good initial niche? First, it has to be a true community – people who have shared interests and frequently interact with one another. They should also have a particularly strong need for your product to be willing to put up with an initial lack of content. Stack Overflow chose programmers as their first niche, presumably because that’s a community where the Stack Overflow founders were influential and where the competing websites weren’t satisfying demand. Quora chose technology investors and entrepreneurs, presumably also because that’s where the founders were influential and well connected. Both of these niches tend to be very active online and are likely to have have many other interests, hence the spillover potential into other niches is high. (Stack Overflow’s cooking site is growing nicely – many of the initial users are programmers who crossed over).
via cdixon.org
Chris Dixon's post about how to overcome chicken-egg problem in initial phases of a startup
August 19, 2011
Engin Erdogan
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
- Single Founder
- Bad Location
- Marginal Niche
- Derivative Idea
- Obstinacy
- Hiring Bad Programmers
- Choosing the Wrong Platform
- Slowness in Launching
- Launching Too Early
- Having No Specific User in Mind
- Raising Too Little Money
- Spending Too Much
- Raising Too Much Money
- Poor Investor Management
- Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
- Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
- Fights Between Founders
- A Half-Hearted Effort
via paulgraham.com
August 18, 2011
Marian Liu
"What is your legacy?"
It is Voices, a multimedia fellowship for college and graduate students that I direct. And while I...
Engin Erdogan
How do you create an option pool from a hiring plan?
To allocate the option pool from the hiring plan, use these current ranges for option grants in Silicon Valley:
Title Range (%) CEO 5 – 10 COO 2 – 5 VP 1 – 2 Independent Board Member 1 Director 0.4 – 1.25 Lead Engineer 0.5 – 1 5+ years experience Engineer 0.33 – 0.66 Manager or Junior Engineer 0.2 – 0.33
via venturehacks.com
August 16, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Twitter's t.co URL wrapper
Twitter's t.co URL wrapper is now on for all URLs 19 characters and greater
via dev.twitter.com
A good example to arbitrary-looking-but-not-really numbers. Other examples include first pricing of an mp3 file, how many computers you can authorize for your tunes etc
August 14, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Gartner Adds Big Data, Gamification, and Internet of Things to Its Hype Cycle
August 13, 2011
Engin Erdogan
Jeff Jonas: Data Finds Data
An organization can only be as smart as the sum of its perceptions.
Our intelligent “data finds data” environment must contain eight essential building blocks:
• The existence of, and availability of, observations
• The ability to extract and classify features from the observations
• The ability to efficiently discover related historical context
• The ability to make assertions (same or related) about new observations
• The ability to recognize when new observations reverse earlier assertions
• The ability to accumulate and persist this asserted context
• The ability to recognize the formation of relevance/insight
• The ability to notify the appropriate entity of such insight
August 12, 2011
Engin Erdogan
What Will Be the Business Skills of the Future?
- Sense-making - The ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed.
- Social intelligence - Ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired intentions
- Novel and adaptive thinking - Proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.
- Cross-cultural competency - Ability to operate in different cultural settings.
- Computational thinking - Ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning.
- New-media literacy - Ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communications.
- Transdisciplinarity - Literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
- Design mindset - Ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.
- Cognitive load management - Ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques.
- Virtual collaboration - Ability to work productively, drive engagement and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.
via readwriteweb.com
August 11, 2011
Chris Keller
"Tweeting" shop, holding the door open and @andymboyle's roadshow "journo" revival
Typing this sitting next to a lime tree at a campground in Big Sur, where -- I have to say -- the time to sit and ponder the world while looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time has been fantastic. As such, can't add too many sleek online formatting features...
...
Talking shop is one of the fine newspaper traditions, those hours you would spend with co-workers chatting about this and that related to journalism, using Adobe Pagemaker vs. Quark 3.1 and the art of the proportional wheel and pica pole.
The conversation would ultimately dissolve into tales of wine, women and song, but you left feeling the answers to the great questions of the day were in reach, and that if you all could just have some time away from the daily tasks and deadlines, you'd be able to achieve the great miracle.
Over the last four weeks -- as part of the Mozilla-Knight Journalism Learning Lab -- a whole lot of talking shop took place with lab participants and lecturers who are doing some really smart things. And over the course of the lab, these have turned into "colleagues", "co-workers" and "co-conspirators."
And for about the last seven months or so, I've started to "Tweet" shop with others who have been for years. I've tried to introduce myself to as many "colleagues", "co-workers" and "co-conspirators" as possible; those folks who have been planning and plotting and teaching and learning on Twitter; those who are leading the way and "championing" the coming Journalism renaissance.
We're all in the same boat I think, just working to find a little corner of the world where we can get down to the job of doing the things that we know we can do.
I guess it's that sense that caused me to cold-tweet Luke Stangel, a journalist doing some really cool things as a co-founder of Tackable in San Jose.
It just so happened my wife and I were flying into San Jose for our vacation, and I thought why not try to talk shop. To say the resulting conversation was time very well spent is an understatement.
And it helped me realize that it's OK -- to an extent -- if I create nothing more in this world that has my name attached to it. The key is to continue to be in a position to listen to smart people, be influenced by them and their ideas and pass that knowledge and the ability to create on to others who are hungry to grow.
Already, it's an interesting place, and I've only recently arrived.
For one motivation or another, I've always been the someone who wants to "do too." It's human nature after all. But I'm seeing more and more that I can be more effective if I'm the person who can open the door so others don't have to stick their foot in it to keep it wedged open.
Like when Andy Boyle brings up the idea of starting a roadshow of journalists who'll take their knowledge to other newsrooms as a kind of traveling journo-revival.
This idea has merit on so many levels, and could take the form of a webinar, seminar, meet up, etc. But the idea of seeing traveling around to work face-to-face with others fighting the good fight is the kind of grassroots, in-the-trenches sort of tactic that could work miracles in this day of instant information.
And Mr. Boyle -- or anyone I pay attention to amnd listen to for that matter -- shouldn't have to hope to talk shop with co-workers and colleagues face-to-face.
Instead, they can focus on "[Teaching] very, very basics about how they could get into the web development game and augment their daily journalism with tools they build themselves."
It's kinda sweet to know in that in some way, shape of form there's a lot of us in the crazy world of online content development that have found a little corner of the world where we can get down to the job of doing the things that we know we can do.
It's kinda daunting to know that -- anymore -- there really aren't any excuses to not get the job done, only obstacles that can be overcome.
And it's really nice to know there are so many paths to take to get down to work and get the job done.
August 10, 2011
Tathagata Dasgupta
Hacking the newsroom
[This is part 2 of the final pitch, which talks about the newsroom and business perspective. Part 1, detailing the newsreader perspective is here.]
Before anything else, there must be a 90 seconds theatrical promo:
Stop laughing at my amateurish video editing! This is my first ever ... even Bergman, Godard, Fellini started somewhere to be great! Jokes apart here's what REVEAL actually is all about:
Lets consider a hypothetical newsroom which uses REVEAL. A journalist gets hold a huge collection of classified documents that contains potentially sensitive information. Instead of painstakingly reading each line and jumping back to google to search relevant information - she uploads them to REVEAL and hits the pantry for her coffee. Reveal goes to work and automatically parses out names of pepole, places, organizations etc. Using the names it detected, REVEAL affixes thumbnail images with the mappings of the named entities with the documents. The journalist now sits back, sips the coffee and flips through the images looking for someone/something/some place that's interesting and jumps directly to the document when she finds her target.
But that's not all. In order to make the life much easier for the journalist - REVEAL uses the names and keywords from the document, to aggregates semantically related contents from the net - images, video, news, blog, wiki articles using open apis. Making the background context readily available, it allows the journalist focus solely on her analysis of the story.
What follows is an over the top ambitious plan for making lots of money - I mean the business plan.
Unearthing named entities involves doing tonnes of computationally intensive text analysis and for any sizable dataset we need a cloud based solution. While REVEAL will always be Free and Open Source Software, the business proposition is offering it as a service. Be a startup or a news corp, whoever deploys REVEAL at their site - they can offer it as a service to other news agencies/ organizations based on pay by usage model. Different packages can be offered based on when they want to share the information dug out from their documents.
Nothing like REVEAL exists today. The cohesive bond of unknown information on well known personalities and organizations, original content (the documents), expert opinion(journalist's view), user generated content(comments) and aggregated content - will make REVEAL a dream product for generating ad-revenues. Features for lead generation is inbuilt into the system and the karma points based reader appreciation along with the 360 degree view of the world will ensure persistent traffic.
Now get me to Berlin Hackathon!
(398 words)
Most common names detected in Wikileaks cablegate files
Link to an incomplete implementation
Before anything else, there must be a 90 seconds theatrical promo:
Stop laughing at my amateurish video editing! This is my first ever ... even Bergman, Godard, Fellini started somewhere to be great! Jokes apart here's what REVEAL actually is all about:
Lets consider a hypothetical newsroom which uses REVEAL. A journalist gets hold a huge collection of classified documents that contains potentially sensitive information. Instead of painstakingly reading each line and jumping back to google to search relevant information - she uploads them to REVEAL and hits the pantry for her coffee. Reveal goes to work and automatically parses out names of pepole, places, organizations etc. Using the names it detected, REVEAL affixes thumbnail images with the mappings of the named entities with the documents. The journalist now sits back, sips the coffee and flips through the images looking for someone/something/some place that's interesting and jumps directly to the document when she finds her target.
But that's not all. In order to make the life much easier for the journalist - REVEAL uses the names and keywords from the document, to aggregates semantically related contents from the net - images, video, news, blog, wiki articles using open apis. Making the background context readily available, it allows the journalist focus solely on her analysis of the story.
What follows is an over the top ambitious plan for making lots of money - I mean the business plan.
Unearthing named entities involves doing tonnes of computationally intensive text analysis and for any sizable dataset we need a cloud based solution. While REVEAL will always be Free and Open Source Software, the business proposition is offering it as a service. Be a startup or a news corp, whoever deploys REVEAL at their site - they can offer it as a service to other news agencies/ organizations based on pay by usage model. Different packages can be offered based on when they want to share the information dug out from their documents.
Nothing like REVEAL exists today. The cohesive bond of unknown information on well known personalities and organizations, original content (the documents), expert opinion(journalist's view), user generated content(comments) and aggregated content - will make REVEAL a dream product for generating ad-revenues. Features for lead generation is inbuilt into the system and the karma points based reader appreciation along with the 360 degree view of the world will ensure persistent traffic.
Now get me to Berlin Hackathon!
(398 words)
Most common names detected in Wikileaks cablegate files
Link to an incomplete implementation
Katie Zhu
Roundtable | Final Project Proposal
PDFs: Full Proposal | Written Pitch | Design Document | Business Brief
Media: Wireframes | Video Pitch | Time-lapse Prototype
Roundtable is a web platform connecting people, news and ideas.
Readers, journalists and experts are all invited to the table to share their opinions, exchange ideas and resolve issues. Together at the Roundtable, news becomes debate, conversation, an experience.
→ Download the written pitch as a PDF.
Use case and target audience:
Every morning, Nicole wakes up to an inbox full of news alerts.
- Federal Reserve to keep interest rates unchanged.
- Stocks suffer sharpest drop since 2008.
- Apple surpasses Exxon to become the world’s most valuable company.
She’ll glance over the headlines. Maybe skim a few articles in the five minutes she has before class. She’ll sigh when she reads about the London riots, nod in approval as she glosses over an opinion piece advocating a “digital upgrade” for education.
But then, Nicole closes the tab.
After all, she’s a busy college student — juggling classes, work and friends. She reads the news. Loves interactive graphics. Tweets links to WIRED articles. Skims comment threads, but never posts.
And that’s it.
There should be more interaction available to the 21st century news consumer.
Video pitch:
Time-lapse prototype:
The state of comments:
Comments are broken. The system does not foster coherent discussion. Trolls are everywhere.
We must re-imagine how news is consumed on the Web. There’s no medium that fosters elevated discussion between reporters and their audience — commenting implies the reader’s point of view is only supplementary to the reporter’s story.
But news should be bi-directional.
Despite the rise of digital media and growth of interactive journalism, the average reader’s news consumption experience has remained relatively static. In an informal survey about reader engagement with news, sixty-five percent of respondents said they simply “close the tab” after reading an article. Twenty-nine percent will share the article through social media. Only three percent said they would comment on the article. And zero respondents said they would email the article’s author for further discussion.
Clearly, there’s something wrong with this picture.
Changing culture:
Information and technology are converging. News has traditionally been an information product, but how can it adapt and scale effectively to its technology dimension?
The New York Times’ Room for Debate and the Economist Debates are two examples of successful interfaces that leverage Web 2.0 to encourage an exchange of ideas between content producers and consumers.
It comes down to a shift in the underlying cultures of reader engagement and reporter participation.
The concept:
Roundtable is a platform to spark this shift. It’s a tool designed for newsrooms to crowd-source news analysis through online discussion. Roundtable facilitates reader interaction with journalists and experts on relevant issues. Readers can use reporters’ expertise to get answers to their questions and context for relevant issues. Reporters can engage in positive intellectual discourse and get new story ideas, sources and tips.
The Roundtable project provides a framework for discussion that can be implemented by any news organization on their existing website.
Anatomy of a Roundtable:
The outcome of any Roundtable is a resolution to the issue being discussed. Attending the table will be a host (or team of hosts), journalists, experts and readers.
Anyone can host a Roundtable. The newsroom using the platform may organize one, but readers can also apply to host a table with sponsorship from the participating news organization. This process will depend on the organization, though a substantial amount of preparation and background work on the proposed issue will be required.
Roundtable adapts its namesake’s format of discussion to an online setting. Each Roundtable will have five phases:
- 1/ Discover: Pre-table materials. Presents the Roundtable’s issue, background materials, context and any relevant links.
- 2/ Impress: The first phase of the Roundtable. Casual forum-like atmosphere, introductions, general thoughts and opinions. Participants get an unlimited number of posts. Interface: posts are displayed in a single linear thread.
- 3/ Discuss: Response-driven conversation to the issue at hand. One post per participant (which ideally will be their preliminary resolution to the table’s issue) with an unlimited number of replies. Interface: posts are displayed with nested replies.
- 4/ Resolve (Try the timelapse posting feature!): The submission phase of the table. One post per participant — their final resolution to the issue. Interface: posts are displayed in a single linear thread.
- 5/ Vote: Everyone attending the Roundtable gets to vote — there are no restrictions. Participants pick the best resolution which will serve as the table’s consensus on the issue. And because Roundtables are always open, participants can take back their vote and switch to another resolution at any time. This preserves the integrity of the voting system. If a given issue has changed, and public opinion has changed, the resolution should also change.
Site-wide integration:
Roundtable will effectively serve as another “category” or “section” page on news websites. Each table’s “discover” phase will link to relevant articles on the publication’s site, promoting the news organization’s content.
Similarly, after a table has concluded, articles pertaining to the Roundtable’s issue will link to the end resolution in the page’s footer.
Technology:
Roundtable will live and breathe in the Web, using HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery to construct a lightweight, customizable interface — making it easy to integrate into news organizations’ existing websites.
Challenges:
What’s in it for journalists?
Reporters have limited time and resources. Why should they join the table? The opportunity to feature their articles as part of the Roundtable interface could be a motivator. Journalists who are passionate about engaging with readers can be rewarded with a link to their article in the “discover” phase of a table addressing a similar issue.
Who will participate?
Everyone is busy. In today’s digital age of news consumption, appointment television is dead. Everything is on demand. Roundtable compensates for these trends in its implementation — a table is real-time, but with asynchronous qualities. The discussion window is framed wider than an hour, allowing people to come and go, participating at their convenience.
Roundtable users will also have a profile, displaying a brief bio, topics of interest and relevant statistics about their participation in tables:
Newsroom and audience culture:
The traditional “article plus comment thread” model is almost an industry standard — why buck the trend? Shifting the newsroom’s focus from producing content to connecting people requires a cultural shift, but the only way to start the dialogue is to build tools that promote this momentum. On the reader side, not everyone wants to participate. There will always be those who simply close the tab. Roundtable’s mission is to steadily lessen this number, one reader at a time.
Cost of maintenance:
The sunk cost of building the project’s interface and technology is not the biggest point of concern — it’s curating the community that comes afterwards. Roundtable is a platform, inherently diverse and applicable to a wide range of topics. Maintenance costs, such as hiring discussion moderators or manually cleaning up content, have been considered in Roundtable’s user interface design. The structured discussion format and posting limits will work to create a self-selecting participant pool, minimizing the potential for spammers and trollers by maximizing the amount of effort required to post.
Design Document: View wireframes AND check out the “resolve” prototype.
Roundtable counteracts the effects of the “filter bubble,” pushing readers away from consuming media that simply affirms one’s pre-existing notions. It allows interested parties from both sides of the news production/consumption continuum to come together in a roundtable discussion, sharing ideas and exchanging points of view.
The Roundtable project is open-source, open-process. It will be built in the most transparent way possible, incorporating all stakeholders in the newsroom ecosystem — managers, reporters, developers, designers — in a process of agile development. There will be multiple project iterations to learn what works and what doesn’t in the context of a newsroom.
Business Brief:
Roundtable allows newsrooms to build on their existing resources — reporters, readership and content — to generate resolution-focused discussions on a variety of issues and build a collaborative community around their news product.
At its very core, journalism informs the citizenry. Newsrooms serve this goal. The process of “informing” has grown increasingly two-directional, with the rise of social media and the Web. Readers can and should be engaged in the news whole process — not just see the end product.
Industry leaders have built platforms similar in idea to Roundtable — New York Times’ Room for Debate and Economist Debates — exemplifying their forward thinking about changes in news consumption habits. Roundtable is an opportunity to set newsrooms apart, to exercise the power of crowd-sourcing in news analysis to build a community.
Once you have engaged and interested readers, what do you do with them? Readers should be heard. Newsrooms can use Roundtable to build a platform for them to come together and geek out over specific issues. To make reporters more accessible. To build community. To create conversation.
Download the full proposal as a PDF.
Wireframes for my Roundtable project.
Roundtable site map
Roundtable landing page
Roundtable DISCOVER phase
Roundtable IMPRESS phase
Roundtable DISCUSS phase
Roundtable RESOLVE phase
Roundtable VOTE phase
Roundtable user profile
BBC article with Roundtable integration
BBC article with table resolution
Wireframes for my Roundtable project.
Readers, journalists and experts are all invited to the table to...
[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]
Readers, journalists and experts are all invited to the table to share their opinions, exchange ideas and resolve issues. Together at the Roundtable, news becomes debate, conversation, an experience. / Project pitch for Knight-Mozilla’s Learning Lab.
Raynor Vliegendhart
Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab – Software product proposal
Introducing LikeLines
LikeLines unlocks user-sourced video and serves as a building block for rich news story-telling. Interesting bits of a video emerge naturally through community interaction with the video using an intelligent video player, enabling video navigation, browsing, retrieval and linking at the fragment level.
Design and prototype
LikeLines transforms existing video players into intelligent ones by adding heatmap navigation below the player. The heatmap shows which parts of a video are found to be interesting by the viewer community and allows viewers to jump to these interesting bits right away. A prototype showcasing the heatmap can be viewed below. |
| Click here to try the prototype in action! |
The hotspots in the heatmap are generated through interaction with the video. When a user explicitly expresses "liking" at a particular time point during playback of the video, this act of expression together with the current playback position of the video is stored in the system. The system aggregates over this feedback to derive the "hottest" points in a video. In addition to explicit feedback, implicit feedback in the form of playback and seeking behavior is also used. Information on users playing, pausing, re-playing and seeking in the video can be used to refine existing or discover new hot points.
The LikeLines system consists of two components: a client-side script that extends existing video players and a LikeLines repository server that is responsible for aggregating user feedback and deriving the hotspots in the video. The LikeLines API allows the web application developer to pick any source of videos and any LikeLines repository. The LikeLines repository stores and allows applications to retrieve heatmap metadata (i.e., time-code specific popularity information about specific videos). The key, innovative contribution that LikeLines makes to unlocking video is the collection and management of heatmap metadata, which can be applied in wide variety of use cases.
Integration into existing newsroom infrastructure
There are many examples where LikeLines can be used:Tips bin: If news organizations open up their tips bin such that visitors can see submitted videos, visitors can already begin interacting with these videos (liking/seeking) and thereby annotating them. This eases the task of the news staff of sorting through the submitted videos as they can focus on the highlights.
Archive: When LikeLines is deployed in archives, users can find the most popular past segments, which will fuel ideas for new story subjects. It can be used in both private archives and public archives (e.g., Dutch Footage). Related videos can be linked at the fragment level, allowing discovery of new and interesting patterns.
Web monitoring tools: When LikeLines is adopted externally, e.g., on YouTube, monitoring of these video sites can be improved. Instead of indiscriminately showing everything, snippets based on the hottest parts of a video can be generated and displayed instead.When building LikeLines and these tools, it is important to work closely with both journalists and end-users. End-users need to be able to understand and use the LikeLines interface if we want to generate heatmaps effectively. On the other hand, the metadata coming from LikeLines needs to be sufficiently suitable for the purposes of journalists.
Collaborative power
LikeLines combines eyewitnesses, Internet viewers and news reporters into a strong collaborative workforce. Eyewitnesses can capture news on the street using their cellphones and upload their raw videos onto the web. No editing is needed. Instead, viewers watching these videos are annotating which parts are hot through their interaction with the LikeLines player. News reporters can then process these enriched videos by extracting the interesting bits and weaving a story out of it.Challenges and unknowns
- How to interpret user clicks on the like button and their implicit playback behavior? How to amalgamate and denoise user input?
When a user clicks the like button, it is not certain if the "like" should apply to this position or a position several seconds earlier. A user study involving an early working prototype is needed to address this aspect of the concept and also refine the user interface and determine the optimal algorithm for aggregation of the heatmaps of multiple users. - How to deal with the cold start problem, i.e., unwatched videos?
For new videos, the user-feedback process can be jump-started by generating an initial heatmap, for example using multimedia content analysis (MCA). We need to address the issue of finding platforms with sufficient computational capacity for MCA and motivating them to make the necessary investment to generate initial heatmaps. Further, platforms using LikeLines need to make sure fresh content is highlighted so that the process of aggregating user feedback starts as soon as possible. Attention should be devoted to the development of mechanisms for incentivizing users (e.g., via awards such as access to premium content) to contribute user feedback for fresh video. - How to ensure a large user-base?
The success of LikeLines will requires that the system be used by a critical mass of viewers in order to generate useful heatmap. To ensure a sufficiently large user-base, LikeLines is designed as an open and versatile building block such that it can easily be integrated in existing web applications.
Executive summary
- Gets to the core of news quickly and effectively — as stories are breaking.
- Supports creation of news stories attuned to current viewer concerns by exploiting the compelling story-telling power of first-hand accounts and user-sourced video.
- Solves the problem of time-consuming sifting through user-sourced video, which can be critical under deadline pressure.
- Competes effectively in current user-sourced footage landscape where coverage is low because individuals must filter raw footage.
- Makes it affordable for news organizations to be present along more steps of the user-driven production-through-consumption chain.
Related projects
Juan Gonzalez is working on a dashboard that helps users to quickly scan a large stream of videos. In his Tribal Mix dashboard system, airtime reflects popularity votes for the entire video. Most popular videos are summarized as animated thumbnails. LikeLines could serve as a building block for the dashboard's visual summarization back-end by supplying the underlying timeline-specific popularity weights.
August 09, 2011
Dan Schultz
Learning Lab Final Project: ATTN-SPAN
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Prototype and Development Plan
The Good News: I created a proof of concept prototype of the ATTN-SPAN platform powered by the Metavid project.
The Bad News: Metavid is having a lot of stability issues right now, so you probably won’t be able to use my prototype. I made a screen cast just in case.
Relying on a 3rd party for the most important aspect of an application is a major risk; one that I must mitigate. This brings me to my first batch of design work: the content scraper.
Scraping, Slicing, and Scrubbing C-SPAN
How do you get from a TV channel to a rich video archive and how do you get there automatically? The goal is to convert C-SPAN into a series of overlapping video segments that are identified in terms of state, politician, topic, party, action, and legislative item. Some of this is straightforward and some of it might be impossible, but here’s an overview of the planned nuts and bolts:
- DirecTV offers TV content in a format that is easy to record digitally and VLC is a free tool that can do that recording. Combine the two and we can download C-SPAN streams into individual files that are primed and ready for analysis.
- Once a video file is in our clutches we can use VLC once again to separate out the video from the Closed Captioning transcript.
- Now we have a transcript and a raw video file. Next we register all of this information (in a database) so that we can look it all up later, and then convert the video file in to streaming-friendly formats and store it alongside the original recording.
- C-SPAN consistently shows a graphic on the bottom of the screen that says who is talking, their state, their party, and what is being debated. By using a technique called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) we can pull this text out of the video image. Once pulled, we can add that to our database so that we can access all of this information for any moment in the video.
- At this point we have most of the information we need, but there is still room for fine tuning. We can use audio levels and the closed captioning transcripts to try to identify moments of inactivity, normal dialogue, and heated dialogue.
These steps are enough to split up and categorize C-SPAN footage into an organized video database, but there are still more ways to flag special moments in the footage. For example, we may want to identify changes in speaker emotion in order to give our algorithms the ability to craft more engaging episodes. This is possible through the work of Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Lab, a group which has developed several tools that perform emotional analysis using facial recognition.
We may also want to identify specific legislative action (e.g. “calling a vote”). This could be accomplished by looking for key words in the transcript (e.g. “call a vote”) and possibly through common patterns in the audio signal (maybe there are identifiable sounds, such as a gavel hitting the table). Both of these concepts require additional research.
Creating a Profile and Constructing an Episode
If video events are the building blocks then viewer interests are the glue. The creation of a personalized episode requires two things: A user account, and a context. The user account provides general information like where you live, what issues you have identified as important, and (if you are willing to connect with Twitter or Facebook) what issues your circles have been discussing lately.
The context comes from time and cyberspace. Every night, after congress closes their gates, your profile is used to create a short, rich video experience designed to contain as much relevant content from that day as possible. At this point you might get an email begging you to watch, or maybe you log in on your own because you are addicted to badges and points and you want as much ATTN-SPAN karma as you can get.
There is another way to access this content though, and that is through the web sites you visit anyway. Imagine if you could read an article about the National Debt on the New York Times (or in a chain email) and actually see quotes from your own senators in the report. What if you could supplement the national report with a video widget that lets you browse what your house members had to say when they controlled the floor during the debt debates.
From a technical perspective this isn’t that far fetched. Truth Goggles, one of my other projects, is a bookmarklet that will analyze the web page you are viewing, fact check it, and rewrite the content to highlight truths and lies. This impossible feat is fairly similar to what I’m proposing here.
Adding Rich Information
Once an episode is pieced together we can look up the information surrounding the video to know who is talking and what they are talking about. What else can be added and how do we get it? Existing APIs offer some good options:
- Contact Information – Thanks to the Sunlight Labs Congress API it is possible to get the contact information for any member of congress on the fly. Thanks to VOIP services it is possible to create web-based hooks to call those people with the click of a button.
- Campaign Contributions – The New York Times offers a Campaign Finance API which can help you understand where the person on screen gets his or her money.
- Voting Records – The New York Times also offers a Congress API that will make it possible to know vote outcomes from related bills as well as information about the active speaker’s voting records.
- Truth and Lie Identification – My Truth Goggles project can be easily adapted to work with snippets from video transcripts. This will allow ATTN-SPAN to take advantage of fact checking services like PolitiFact and NewsTrust.
This is a good start, but I would also like to show links to related news coverage and create socially driven events based on community sentiment (for instance to track moments that caused people to get upset or happy). This won’t come for free, but it should be accessible given the right interface design.
Part 3: A Note to the Newsies
So that’s the idea and the plan. What’s the value?
It seems plausible that ATTN-SPAN, a system that analyzes primary source footage and pulls out any content that is related to a particular beat could be useful as a reporters tool, but what about your subscribers? ATTN-SPAN can augment an individual article so that it hits everybody close to home. Suddenly one article becomes as effective as two dozen. Moving past text, for larger organizations with a significant amount video footage ATTN-SPAN can be tweaked to use your programming instead of (or in addition to) C-SPAN.
At this point I have to warn you that this is not the first nor will it be the last project to work with C-SPAN. A 2003 demo out of the Media Lab used C-SPAN as one of several sources of information in a platform aimed to provide citizens with Total Government Awareness. Metavid, the platform I used in my initial prototype, already makes C-SPAN more accessible by enabling searches and filters. The list surely goes on.
So why is this a more powerful project? Well, the real goal of ATTN-SPAN isn’t to get more people watching C-SPAN. In fact I tricked you: this project isn’t about government awareness at all. It’s actually part of an effort to make indisputable fact (“blunt reality” and “primary source footage”) a more prominent part of the media experience without requiring additional effort from the audience. Newsrooms do an amazing job of reporting events and providing insight, but for deeper stories there simply isn’t enough time or money to cover everybody’s niche without going beyond the average person’s attention span.
Thus ends my pitch.
The code for both prototypes mentioned in this post can be found on github: ATTN-SPAN and Truth Goggles. Please forgive any dirty hacks. I would be thrilled if anybody wants to offer suggestions or even collaborate. On that note, please get in touch on Twitter @slifty.
Engin Erdogan
Project LinkingNews
This is a working project outline for LinkingNews, my project proposal at the Mozilla-Knight News Lab.
Summary
LinkingNews is a data-driven interactive timeline platform for journalists and individuals to collaboratively explore links and overlaps between concurrent event timelines containing news-worthy information (raw happenings, news reports, and curated opinions) and create stories based on what’s been happening and what might happen next.
The Problem
LinkingNews addresses a multi-faceted context problem in aggregating, processing, and presenting news:
“Drowning in data” (as stated by Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera):
The speed of the data flow has dramatically increased, while methods for finding signals in the flow have not progressed and not adopted as fast.
"Link business, not ink business" (as stated by Jeff Jarvis):
Presentation of news tend to isolate one event in itself as a stand-alone story and rarely facilitate the non-linear exploration of how an event might be inherently linked to concurrent and past events.
Lack of temporal context:
As the information density and volume of now becomes difficult to manage, new formats emerge for tuning into the current moment (e.g. activity streams). However, the perception of current is increasingly disconnected from its continuum and historical context, resulting in rapid corrosion of collective memories.
The Platform
LinkingNews is a platform for individuals and journalists to collaboratively discover signals in large amounts of on-going data flow.
LinkingNews involves mapping news to timelines in real time and visualizing links and across timelines for collaborative synthesis. It has three main components:
- Aggregation: Dynamic and manual mapping of news to timeline tracks as they happen
- Synthesis: Discover and articulate links, parallels, and overlaps across timelines, and events.
- Scenarios: Speculate and discuss on possible future progressions of events based on the links and overlaps as well as the current ones.
Guiding Principles
The platform will be based on the following principles:
- Real-time / data-driven: Make data available in real-time to everyone including individuals to be synthesized and creatively used as building blocks.
- Collaborative: Invite individuals to explore together. With proper community guidelines, everyone can be generative, creative, and expressive.
- Anticipatory: Encourage looking into possible futures based on what has been happening, both in news rooms and living rooms.
- Facilitated: Transform the role of the journalist from processing data behind closed doors to facilitating a data-driven collaboration platform out in the open.
Who will benefit?
Both journalists and individuals will benefit from this platform.
For journalists and news rooms, LinkingNews can be leveraged as a flexible canvas for tracking and organizing real-time flow of information from various sources, including raw news data, news reports, and public sentiment/opinion. Crowdsourcing and scenario planning upon aggregated data can unlock insights on not only analysis of the current, but what might happen next, better preparing the news room the possible progression scenarios of current events.
For individuals, LinkingNews is a sense-making tool. By visualizing context and possible overlaps, LinkingNews puts current events in perspective. People will take part earlier in the news making process beyond reacting, responding, commenting etc. This heightened sense of agency may transform the role of individuals from spectators into participants, ultimately empowering various viewpoints.
Similar Tools
SIMILE Timeline - Javascript library for creating embeddable timelines.
Chronos Timeline - A tool designed specifically for needs in the humanities and social sciences to represent time-based data.
WikiTimeLine - Displays historic events entered at MediaWiki with WikiTimeLine tags after clicking on their WikiTimeLine links.
Historical Event Markup and Linking Project - Projects pertaining to generalized visualization and markup tools for history
Recorded future - Temporal and predictive analytics engine
HyperHistroy Online - Synchronoptic world history charts
Unknowns
Creating a real-time collaborative synthesis platform is an ambitious goal with social, technical, and organizational challenges. Here are two of them.
What is news-worthy data?
When information flows from everywhere, what qualifies as news-worthy data? Since we cannot process everything, how to capture as much as possible without compromising quality?
How to qualify participation?
The power of a collaborative platform is that it embraces the input of many people at scale both on aggregating news and synthesizing it. What are the guidelines for setting a high bar for participation at large scales?
August 08, 2011
Rhiannon Coppin
MoJo final project: Be anyhwere, be everywhere with ‘Proof’
Download this document as a PDF. Software product proposal: Proof Be anywhere, be everywhere. Proof is a peer-to-peer network of world-wide webcams. For Proof, anything can be considered a webcam, as long as it is able to take and transmit … Continue reading