May 13, 2005
Google Gets Socially Mobile
Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service that allows users to identify what friends happen to be close by based on information entered into their cell phones, announced that it has been acquired by Google. With this new mobile social networking technology, will socially networked mobile news be too far off? Google may soon allow users to receive news feeds based on their physical location and forward such news on to friends who happen to be near by.
Here's some thoughts from an old NYU professor of Dodgeball's co-founders.
Posted by aludwig at 1:19 AM | Comments (0)
May 2, 2005
Open Media Network (OMN)
Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, launched the Open Media Network earlier this week. OMN puts publishers' content into a peer-to-peer distribution network similar to bit-torrent, which helps ease bandwidth issues, and according to their press release, the goal of the free service is "to give users worldwide access to public television and radio programming, movies, podcasts and video blogs, while fully protecting the producers’ copyrights."
Posted by aludwig at 3:53 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2005
Framing Bird Flu in terms of SARS
Recent outbreaks of avian influenza (aka “bird flu�) are often directly compared to SARS, which captured the fear of Americans as it received wide media attention as a travelers worst nightmare and the next potential global pandemic. The fact that both SARS and avian influenza are both respiratory diseases originating in south east Asia has likely facilitated the media’s framing of bird flu as the next SARS. The comparisons are often highly dramatized, (for instance, stating that “SARS will be nothing compared to the avian influenza pandemic.�), and focus on a potential crisis that could occur if national governments and international organizations do not mobilize to contain and fight the disease.
Posted by aludwig at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
Rojo
Rojo.com, an interesting combination of social networking and news...
Rojo's slogan boasts that it provides "your news, your way." It offers users the ability to share specific stories or RSS feeds (i.e. blog feeds, which are like subscribing to a specific blog and having each entry fed into your customized web page) and allows them to share those stories and feeds with friends and other members of their "social network." It also allows users to tag and comment on news stories, which facilitates discussion and can provide users with unique perspectives from people they care about.
Rojo was recently taken out of a beta version that I had participated in and was launched to the general public on April 22, so many of its features have just been added or improved in recent weeks. Here’s a look at its new interface:
And here’s a list of some of the most interesting features highlighted on Rojo’s tour, along with my comments about each:
Tagging: Lets you use a keyword to categorize a story--a tag is just a keyword that can be applied to an object, such as a blog post. Story tags are useful in a couple ways. First, by tagging a story you can easily keep track of it and return to it later. But most interestingly, you can view tags from your contacts and from all Rojo users to see what's capturing people's attention. Tags used more often appear in larger fonts, and those used less often appear smaller.
Flag: Lets you save stories for your own use or for later reference. This function is similar to the tagging feature, but allows users to assign a story a greater degree of importance, rather than simply assign it to a category.
Email a Story: Lets you email stories to anyone. Many major news sites now feature this capability (often in the form of a small link at the bottom of a news story that offers to ‘send this link to a friend’), but Rojo is specifically designed to facilitate such referrals.
Share comments: Lets you comment on and share stories with your Rojo contacts. This innovative yet simple feature essentially allows users to jot down notes and commentary on any particular article and share those comments with friends by posting or passing along their annotated copy.
Frequent Feeds: Jeff Clavier observes in his blog that “Right now [Rojo’s frequent feeds] are wired to any explicit gestures you make: clicking on the story link, flagging, tagging, emailing, or clicking the feed itself. Each click or action produced a vote for attention, generating an interactive list of the top 20 feeds.� This is particularly interesting in the context of your social network, as you can see what news items are most popular among your friends and contacts even if they have not specifically tagged, commented, or referred and news to you.
Rojo Buzz: as Rojo’s web site states, this feature allows users to "See what your feeds are linking to" to “quickly identify links and stories that you shouldn't miss.� Your “feeds� are the RSS feeds (i.e. news sites or blog that you subscribe to), so this feature allows you to view the news that your own favorite news sources seems to consider the most noteworthy, as reflected in their links.
Rojo Wizard: lets people specifically find feeds that their contacts subscribe to by topic or publisher and then group them using the Rojo tag system.
Shared Stories: Lets you view the stories that your contacts have explicitly shared with you. The default view shows you the most recently shared stories from all your contacts. By sharing stories, your contacts can see what stories you think are important, and vice versa.
Comments from Contacts: When you or your contacts share stories, you can add comments to them. Any comments will show up just beneath the story content in the expanded story view.
Recommended Stories: these are stories that Rojo thinks will be interesting to you, which will be influenced and refined by what your contacts are reading. This feature is a combination of Frequent Feeds and your own preferences as indicated by the personal profile that you create and the type of news you often read within Rojo.
One particularly noteworthy feature of Rojo that is not highlighted in its tour is its privacy controls, which allows users to decide what they want to share and what they don't want to share: their subscriptions, their profile, their contacts, their tags, their comments.
This is similar to the closed blogging feature of Yahoo’s new Yahoo360 service. Yahoo 360 allows users to “share as much as you want with whomever you want.� In other words, Yahoo360’s highly specific privacy settings lets users limit access to their blog to a select group of friends or contacts within their social network, thereby giving bloggers more control over who can read their blog and providing a higher level of comfort and “security� when creating content.
The Yahoo360 site is still in beta so you’ve got to receive an invitation before you can sign up, but if anyone would like to check it out, just email me (aludwigATprinceton.edu) and I’ll send you an invitation from my account. I myself owe my own invitation to Charlene Li at Forrester Research.
Interestingly, though, Rojo does not actively encourage its users to create their own content that they might refer to friends and contacts, like Yahoo360 does. Is this an oversight, a perception of a lack of demand for such a service, or an indication that Rojo’s creators feel that such user-generated content (as opposed to user-filtered content) may dilute the effectiveness of their service by degrading the quality of news and information being passed through it? Of course, Rojo does allow users to subscribe to any RSS feeds that they chose, so users could hypothetically subscribe to their own outside blog then refer their blog to contacts through Rojo. So the lack of emphasis on user-generated content within Rojo is most likely due to Rojo’s decision to focus purely on socially organizing, distributing, and filtering news, rather than creating new content.
As Jeremy Zawodny notes in his blog, Rojo is essentially based on a human aggregation model (rather than the computer-driven news aggregators such as Google News). This allows users to filter news through their friends, rather than an algorithm. Such a social networking system may even serve as a substitute for editorial decisions, as the collective opinions of peers, friends, co-workers, et cetera point you toward the news that is most relevant to your "world." This social “editorial process� is particularly promising in the case of blogs.
As Aaron Brown remarked during our visit to CNN, “blogging in its current form lacks any kind of editorial process or oversight.� However, blogs within the context of a social network (such as those networks of contacts within Rojo) provide credibility through personal contacts and reputations in the same way that social networking sites such as Friendster have attempted to use trusted friends as a filter for online dating and LinkedIn has used trusted contacts as a conduit for business referrals and employment. Rather than subscribing to a particular magazine, author, or editor, users of Rojo can essentially subscribe to a network of trusted contacts in which they may both actively participate (by commenting and sending news to friends) and passively consume (by reading what others in their social network are interested in). In this way--through socially networked distribution systems--people can regain some of the trust that they’ve lost in the news media.
This form of networked media consumption will increase the personal relevance of news, but some may argue that it also undercuts the function of news as supportive of democracy by filtering an individual’s news stream too narrowly. In the same way that Cass Sunstein expresses concern over the creation of the “Daily Me,� a network system dominated by very tight cliques may create a fragmented news environment in which there is no shared background of information, no common knowledge upon which to base democratic political discourse.
But if networks include just a few bridges between diverse groups (and most do), common threads of information sufficient for political discourse will pass through these networks. And while current research on social networks does indicate that people have some tendency to cluster based on homophily (i.e. people have some tendency to associate and communicate with others similar to themselves) , a greater degree of clustering occurs around geographic foci, where users currently subscribe to local publications such as city or campus news dailies. The presence of these dailies, which have been around for centuries, has not discouraged or the coverage and discussion of national news or preempted the presence of national news media such as a CNN, and there is no reason to believe that socially networked news aggregators/filters will have any drastically different effects.
While news distributed through Rojo is more likely to be filtered, it is also more likely to reduce information overload and bring readers' attention to relevant news that they would have otherwise over looked if a friend had not noticed it and passed it along. In this way, systems like Rojo may actually broaden the potential scope of media consumption, providing users with a greater breadth of information and sources than ever before. Any blog or small newspaper with something worthwhile to say can spread its information as rapidly as a major publication. For example, a relatively obscure tech news blog, “Boing Boing,� already has 4174 subscribers through Rojo, compared to 557 subscribers to the New York Times editorial page.
Perhaps a more apt comparison than Sunstein’s “Daily Me� would be Robin Good’s fictional “Googlezon� or “Newsbotster�—“a social news network and participatory journalism platform that ranks and sorts news, based on what each user’s friends and colleagues are reading and viewing and allows everyone to comment on what they see.� (sounds a lot like Rojo)
Unlike in Good’s mockumentary, however, it appears that the New York Times may not be standing still as digital media platforms began to gain ground and steal readers away from more traditional media sources. Len Apcar, editor of the Times web site, NYTimes.com, has indicated an interest in online social networking technology, and even visited the San Francisco head quarters of Tribe.net, an online social networking company that has not yet entered the news business, but includes Knight-Ridder and the Washington Post Company among its investors. The two newspaper giants had been interested in Tribe.net for its potential as an online classifieds marketplace, but with the launch of Rojo, it’ll be interesting to see if traditional media begins to reexamine the broader role of social networks in online news distribution, perhaps acquiring an already developed network such as Tribe.net and reshaping it as a news network or perhaps developing original social networking services for their own web sites.
Posted by aludwig at 4:37 PM | Comments (0)
Judging Journalists
The article from this week’s New York Times magazine that Karen cites interestingly notes that more accurate ratings measurements could “tell the producer of a local news show that the audience preferred the sportscaster on a competing channel…by showing how many viewers switched channels at the relevant time.�
With more and more news being distributed and consumed online, such specific measurements already exist to measure the “performance� of many journalists, including those at the Times.
For instance, the Times’ web site NYTimes.com attracts nearly ten times the readership of its print edition, and the extremely detailed statistics that web sites can generate instantaneously offer an incredibly nuanced measurement of what people read—and what advertisers are willing to pay the most for.
Such a system could change the nature of professional journalism by directly relating performance to readership and revenues rather than the approval of editors or awards won. Therefore, such detailed performance measurements will naturally push journalists to write to impress readers rather than to impress their editors as they strive to not just produce good journalism but to produce good journalism that sells.
In fact, one journalist with whom I had spoken about the effects of such nuanced statistical tracking informed me that a reporter at the L.A. Times had recently used such statistics to her advantage; when the L.A. Times reporter received a mediocre performance review from her editors, she brought their attention to the fact that one of her recent stories was the most frequently read piece on the newspaper's web site, latimes.com, for two days straight and the editors subsequently revised their assessment.
So what effect might this pressure to produce journalism that sells have on journalistic integrity and the future of news content? Well, journalists have always grappled with the fine line between reporting news that people should read and news that people will read (after all, what good does an enlightening story do if nobody reads it?), but more measurement will render that trade-off quite explicit, and business pressures may begin to subtly push journalists toward news that many, many people will read, regardless of the content’s “news� value.
Just as the introduction of Nielsen ratings shook up Fox’s assumptions in the New York market, better measurements of news readership could transform what even editors consider news worthy. An article that would normally make page one of the Times may turn out to have mediocre ratings on the web, and therefore similar stories could gradually drift to the inside pages of the print edition or may even eventually disappear from the pages altogether.
Beyond newspapers, as the Internet begins to serve as a convergence point for all media from text to video and everything in between (including digital photo journalism and “podcasting�) the same nuanced performance statistics will also become available for those media. Ed Felten’s all-encompassing media machine will not only have the ability to serve media of every kind imaginable, but will also have the ability to track our media consumption in every way imaginable.
A “classic� 1997 article by the American Journalism Review tackled the issue of statistical tracking back when acquiring the numbers was the challenge, not deciding how to appropriately use them. In fact Jack Fuller, the president of the Tribune Co. and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner, remarked that ``We need strong and precise measurement so we know how to reach people with this new medium. `The most perfect piece of journalism which fails to reach people is a failure--it's not good journalism." I certainly agree that good journalism is worthless if no one reads it, but I’m surprised that there has been such little discussion—both then and now—about the impact that the development of ultra precise audience measurements might have on the content of the news itself.
In its Handbook of Values and Practices for the News and Editorial Departments, the New York Times states that “the relationship between The Times and advertisers rests on the understanding, long observed in all departments, that news and advertising are strictly separate—that those who deal with either one have distinct obligations and interests and neither group will try to influence the other.� As far as it relates to any particular news story or advertising relationship, this policy is clear enough—reporters should not write to please the paper’s advertisers. But the relationship between news and advertising (both of which seek a large audience) is naturally symbiotic, and when each individual story is tracked so carefully, reporters may feel a subtle pressure to please the masses and the advertisers along with them.
Nowhere does the Times Handbook address this tension that is created by performance tracking. The omission may indicate that the Times believes that any such tension is hardly an ethical dilemma (and they may be right), or simply an oversight of a new issue brought on by new technology. However, it is exactly this type of emerging issue that has the potential to subtly shape our mediascape without much notice, and therefore at the very least warrants our acknowledgement.
Posted by aludwig at 1:47 AM | Comments (1)
March 29, 2005
The Scoop on MGM vs. Grokster
Here's a "quick roundup of bloggers posting accounts of this morning's oral arguments before the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster."
Posted by aludwig at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2005
A Reflection on the Power of News Aggregators to Make or Break Small News Sites
http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=3332
Posted by aludwig at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
Old Media Taking an Increased Interest in New Technology
Three major newspaper companies (Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and the Tribune Company) have recently made a joint investment in news aggregator Topix.net. Topix has developed a comprehensive method of gathering and sorting news from over 10,000 online sources, from major publishers such as the NY Times all the way down to electronic sources of local government records.
The company's sorting technology, which breaks news down into over 300,000 categories in addition to localizing content, has sparked interest due to its ability to feed users extremely specific ads based on these categories.
Some experts are chalking these types of acquisitions (also including the NY Time's acquisition of About.com last month) to the "Google Effect."
Here's some good analysis on what this deal means for the Old Media/New Media debate: http://www.rexblog.com/2005/03/22#a6267
Posted by aludwig at 9:47 PM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2005
Government Agencies Taking Heat for Prepackaged News
According to an article in this morning's Washington Post, the Government Accountability Office and the Comptroller General are reminding federal agencies that they must clearly identify their PR material as government sponsored, particularly when that PR is packaged as "news."
I wonder if this will lead to the federal government to shift away from the popular PR tactic of prepackaged news, and if so, where it may now direct those PR resources...
Posted by aludwig at 6:24 AM | Comments (0)
The New York Times, Take Two
To follow up on Alexandra’s blog post, the New York Times has certainly endured its share of explosive controversies over the past couple years. But as a recent New Yorker article explains, the Times--along with much of the “mainstream media�(MSM)--has also been subject to increasing accusations of political bias, not just from satirical bloggers such as the guys(s) behind adamnagourney.com, but also from political heavyweights like Karl Rove, who recently berated Times editor Bill Keller for what Rove saw as politically biased, liberal coverage prior to November’s election.
And the Times is considering these complaints and accusations with increasing care. For instance, Rove did not need to berate Keller over the phone or during an interview--it was after Keller had explicitly asked Rove (over cocktails) what he thought of the Times’ coverage that Rove launched into a tirade over what Keller recounts as “Bush accomplishments [the Times] had ignored, flaws in the Kerry record that [the Times] had put inside the paper, and a number of pieces [the Times] had done looking hard at the Bush record.�
Adam Nagourney, the Times chief political reporter, also has taken the criticism dished out by bloggers in good humor.
The increasing responsiveness--particularly to conservative concerns--may stem from a fear of alienating a broad swath of the American population that lives in the “red� states of the Midwest and South, rather than the metropolitan environment that the Times is so comfortable with. The Times not only has a business interest in serving this population as it expands its national distribution under publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (most recently including the addition of a contracted printing and distribution facility in Dayton, Ohio), but may also have a journalistic motivation for strenuously balancing its reporting as it fears that average Americans may be losing faith in the integrity of MSM outlets like the Times. Karen’s post on American high schoolers who feel that newspapers should be subject to government approval could represent one branch of this concern, but apathy is just as dangerous as people turn to more personal and custom sources of news that fit their own views and preferences.
Sulzberger seems to be preparing the Times parent news corporation, the New York Times Company, for this deflated MSM environment. In the words of the New York Times Company itself, it has “undertaken numerous multimedia, multi-audience initiatives in order to extend its brand globally.� One of the first such initiatives in the mid nineties was the creation of New York Times Television, which produces New York Times branded content for the Discovery Times network as well as material for “Frontline� and various elements of ABC News, including “Nightline," "20/20," and "Prime Time Thursday."
Around the same time as Times TV, Sulzberger also launched an online edition of the Times, which was one of the first major newspapers to do so, completing a set of what Sulzberger has remarked are three key skills in the news business: print, Internet, and video. While Times TV does not yet contribute significantly to the company’s bottom line, NYTimes.com has proven to be a windfall, earning $17.3 million on revenues of $53.1 million during the first half of 2004 and growing at 30 percent annually. Nearly all of that money comes from advertising that companies pay top dollar for in order to reach the web site’s 18 million monthly viewers.
Yet Sulzberger indicates that he may be inclined to switch NYTimes.com to a subscription-based model--not so much because he thinks that subscription fees would outstrip lost ad revenue due to fewer online views, but because (in Sulzberger’s words) NYTimes.com “gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free.� If NYTimes.com does turn subscription-based, it will be an interesting indicator of Sulzberger’s willingness to sacrifice profits in the short term in order to influence the public’s perception of quality journalism’s value--a move that also runs the risk of alienating its online audience just as it fears it may be alienating many conservatives.
Posted by aludwig at 5:40 AM | Comments (0)
February 7, 2005
The Google News Algorithm: Sorting, Filtering, and...Biasing?
Over the past year, I’ve begun to rely on Google News to collect and sort my news for me...
Rather than wade through CNN.com, NY Times Online, or the Wall Street Journal’s print edition (all of which I still do occasionally), I’ve found that Google’s algorithm does a decent job of delivering a wide variety of sources in its results, from the Times of India to our own Daily Princetonian. This vast catalog of news sources allows Google to aggregate groups of articles covering the same issue or story and display them in clusters or pages of related links, which in turn allows—-and even encourages-—readers to get multiple takes on the same topic.
But even without any human editorial intervention in the daily selection and ranking of news stories, Google News still relies on an algorithm that reflects very significant, overarching choices of its programmers. For instance, which publishers does Google’s algorithm deem to be the most important, and how does it weight the relevance of each story within those sources? Although Google pulls news from over 4,500 publications, it seems to draw most of the articles appearing on its “Top Stories� page from only about a dozen sources. And some watchdogs have accused Google of tweaking its algorithm to appease the Chinese government. Due to subtle control that such an algorithm can exert on the information we receive, should Google and other similar info-mediaries be required to disclose their algorithms for public scrutiny?
Sites like Google News also allow users to filter and refine their news searches to very specific sources and subjects, which could lead users to simply seek out the stories that reaffirm their own views and deteriorate citizens’ common base of knowledge. Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, and the James Miller, an economics professor at Smith, take two opposing stances on this issue.
For the most part, I find Miller’s analogy comparing news filters to internet dating (both of which may expose their users to a wider variety of options) to be appropriate and convincing, and I agree that subject-based (as opposed to source-based) filters may actually increase our encounters with opposing view points by decreasing our dependence on a few favorite news sources. However, I can also understand the need for general interest intermediaries that Sunstein espouses—-some level of common news content is important in order to create a general body of public information out of which we may maintain a public forum and off of which we may base public debate.
Update: For my thoughts on the role of a socially networked human aggregation systems as opposed to purely computer-driven news aggregators such as Google News, check out my blog posting on the new Rojo service.
Posted by aludwig at 12:39 PM | Comments (1)