www.josschuurmans.com

Dugg: PressThink: Filter the Best Stuff to the Front Page: A Demo | Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen wrote on June 16, 2008:

"(...) OffTheBus and NewsTrust.Net ran a little test two weeks ago. It's a crowdsourced week in review feature for high quality John McCain coverage, June 2 to 9. Here's the background and results. (...)"

What I find more interesting about this blog post than the content of the experiment or indeed the ensuing US-centric political flame war in the comments is the concept of the experiment, as well as Jay's reference to Dave Winer's rivers of news, and the concern that filtering may not keep pace.

(...) The mission of NewsTrust—it’s nonprofit and non-partisan—is to be a “guide to good journalism.” The site offers a “range of tools to help you find and share” the best work.

(...) Sites like NewsTrust take it for granted that expansion in media space is a good thing. But filtering and forwarding systems must keep pace.

(...) In this connection, I point you to NewsJunk.Com, a new site. Dave Winer, with some co-conspirators, created a river of news intended for serious users of political coverage. It’s designed to be radically inclusive and selective. (And fast.)

(...) Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online—a “find new voices” project that’s working—said he was concerned that tools to organize the flow and make it practical for people to use were not keeping pace with expanded opportunities to publish.

(...) For a more intelligent and flexible filter we can trust in pro editors to adapt to the Web. We can turn to bloggers (they edit the Web for us and always have.) Or we can try the participation route, also called social media. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Video-interview of Rupert Murdoch | Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher / D6

"(...) video highlights from the first part of the D6 interview of Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO, News Corporation, conducted by conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. (...)"



(part 1 - 07:00 minutes)

Asked by Mossberg if newspapers have much of a future left, Murdoch says:

"(...) Over the last 10 or 15 years they've made every economy possible in production, with computers and so on, but not in journalism. Now they have to turn to journalism.

(...) Every story in the (...) [Wall Street] Journal currently is, on average, touched or edited by eight different people. That is ridiculous. (...)"

(part 2 - 6:15 minutes)

read more | digg story

Dugg: Dan Gillmor: Principles of a New Media Literacy | Publius Project

"(...) In this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust?

How we govern ourselves on the Web depends in significant ways on the answers. To get this right, we’ll have to re-think, or at least re-apply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways.

It comes down, in significant ways, to some principles, both for media consumers and creators. They add up to a 21st Century notion of what we once called “media literacy.” But media literacy has generally lacked the kind of participatory piece that is so essentially a part of digital media. (...)

• Be skeptical of absolutely everything.
• But don’t be equally skeptical of everything.
• Understand and learn media techniques.
• Ask more questions.

(...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Reuters' "mojo" experiments with Nokia | Jemima Kiss

"(...) Reuters' journalists are experimenting with the potential of mobile journalism through a project with Nokia's research centre. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Blogging as a Form of Journalism | J.D. Lasica / OJR

"(...) Weblogs offer a vital, creative outlet for alternative voices (...)"

When cleaning up my paper (sic!) archive the other day, I came across a printed article in two parts, by J.D. Lasica for the Online Journalism Review (OJR), published on May 24 and 31, 2001. Just before I'm throwing this away for the benefit of the paperless office, I'll quote what I highlighted back then:

From: 'Blogging as a Form of Journalism', May 24, 2001:

Dugg: Lawyer: U.S. teen had no warning of Finnish school shooter's plans | CNN.com

"(...) NORRISTOWN, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- A Pennsylvania teen jailed on suspicion of plotting a Columbine-style attack on his old school exchanged e-mail with the disturbed student who killed eight people in a similar shooting in Finland, the boy's lawyer said Monday.

But J. David Farrell, the attorney for 14-year-old Dillon Cossey, said his client had no warning that Pekka-Eric Auvinen was preparing the rampage that left eight people dead at his high school outside Helsinki. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: YouTuber Warned of Finnish Gunman in June, But No One Listened | Wired.com

"(...) months before the fateful video was posted, one prolific YouTube user known as TheAmazingAtheist called for the police to investigate Auvinen and others who had been posting videos glorifying the Columbine shooters and Timothy McVeigh, saying they were showing warning signs of being more than simply infatuated or interested in violence.

On June 7,2007 TheAmazingAtheist, whose real name appears to be Terroja Lee Kincaid, posted a rant filmed in his garage entitled "Columbine Killers, Mental Midgets & Social Darwinism." About 7 minutes into the video, which drew plenty of comments in June, he says:

(...) We are always talking about warning signs. Well if you want to talk about warning signs, there they are [pointing off screen to a list of URLs of YouTube profiles, including Auvinen's old profile NaturalSelector89]. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Finland changes course on EU firearms directive | Helsingin Sanomat

"(...) The Finnish government decided on Friday to propose a change in the law on firearms, restricting the acquisition of guns by those under the age of 18. Until now guns have been available to children 15 and above, if a parent approves. (...) There were denials from government ranks that the change had been prompted by the Jokela (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Police detain teen over YouTube massacre plot | NEWS.com.au

"(...) FINNISH police detained a teenager who allegedly posted a video on YouTube threatening a massacre similar to the one last week at a high school in Finland, police said.

The 16-year-old was arrested on Friday in Maaninka, about 400km north of Helsinki, and questioned yesterday, a local police spokesman said. Authorities also seized his computer.

(...) “He says that it was a joke, that he had no intention” of carrying out a massacre, according to the spokesman.

(...) Eight people, including five boys aged 16 to 18, the 61-year-old headmistress, a 42-year-old female nurse and a 25-year-old single mother, were killed in Wednesday's shooting at Jokela High School in southern Finland. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Finland shocked at fatal shooting | BBC NEWS

"(...) Gun ownership per capita in Finland is the third highest in the world, although incidents of this kind are extremely rare in a country that prides itself on very low levels of violent crime.

An attack by a young suicide bomber on a shopping mall in Helsinki in 2002, where seven people died, including the bomber, is the only such incident of this kind that has occurred in Finland in living memory. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Profile of Pekka-Erik Auvinen, the YouTube killer | NEWS.com.au

"(..) PEKKA-ERIC Auvinen sat among the chaos he had caused at Jokela High School, pressed a .22 calibre pistol against his skull and pulled the trigger. He had done what he had come to do.

He had killed seven students and a teacher in the small town of Tuusula, in southern Finland. The killing spree came just hours after he posted a final video on YouTube, the last chapter in a grim catalogue that foreshadowed his deadly intent. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Teenage Killer Leaves Suicide Note | Newsvine - AP

"(...) A bullied teenage outcast with radical views scribbled a suicide note bidding farewell to his family before unleashing an indiscriminate killing campaign at his high school, police said Thursday. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: School Shooter Kills 8, Self in Finland | Newsvine - AP

"(...) An 18-year-old gunman opened fire at his high school in this placid town in southern Finland on Wednesday, killing seven other students and the principal before mortally wounding himself in a rampage that stunned a nation where gun crime is rare. (...)"

read more | digg story

Bowling for Jokela (English - latest take)

(TAKE 3: Mäntyharju, Finland, Thursday, November 8, 2007; 11:05 hrs. Finnish time; 09:05 hrs. UTC/GMT)

Nine people died in a shooting incident on Wednesday at Jokela High School, in Tuusula, Finland, close to the Finnish capital Helsinki.

The victims include the head master of the school, a health worker and six pupils: five boys and a girl.

The killer, 18-year-old pupil Pekka-Erik Auvinen, went from classroom to classroom, firing at people. After shooting his eight victims, he shot himself through the head. Auvinen died in hospital on Wednesday evening.

Ten people were admitted to hospital with lighter injuries.

Already earlier this week, Finnish and English-language videos appeared on YouTube ('Jokela High School Massacre'), in which Auvinen expressed his intentions.

After the massacre today, the young man was described by one of the school's teachers as an "extreme-right, militant type".

The videos were removed from the YouTube service on Wednesday afternoon.

Finland's Prime Minister, Matti Vanhanen, called de shooting "terrible and tragic", adding that it was extremely difficult to prevent incidents such as these.

President Tarja Halonen expressed her condolences and sympathy with the victims and their families.

Bowling for Jokela (English - all takes)

(TAKE 3: Mäntyharju, Finland, Thursday, November 8, 2007; 11:05 hrs. Finnish time; 09:05 hrs. UTC/GMT)

Nine people died in a shooting incident on Wednesday at Jokela High School, in Tuusula, Finland, close to the Finnish capital Helsinki.

The victims include the head master of the school, a health worker and six pupils: five boys and a girl.

The killer, 18-year-old pupil Pekka-Erik Auvinen, went from classroom to classroom, firing at people. After shooting his eight victims, he shot himself through the head. Auvinen died in hospital on Wednesday evening.

Ten people were admitted to hospital with lighter injuries.

Already earlier this week, Finnish and English-language videos appeared on YouTube ('Jokela High School Massacre'), in which Auvinen expressed his intentions.

After the massacre today, the young man was described by one of the school's teachers as an "extreme-right, militant type".

The videos were removed from the YouTube service on Wednesday afternoon.

Finland's Prime Minister, Matti Vanhanen, called de shooting "terrible and tragic", adding that it was extremely difficult to prevent incidents such as these.

President Tarja Halonen expressed her condolences and sympathy with the victims and their families.

---

(TAKE 2: Mäntyharju, Finland; 20:00 uur Finnish time; 18:00 hrs. UTC/GMT)

Eight people died in a shooting incident today at Jokela High School, in Tuusula, Finland, close to the Finnish capital Helsinki.

The victims include the female head master of the school and seven pupils: five boys and two girls.

After shooting his eight victims, the killer, a 18-year-old pupil, shot himself through the head. He was hospitalized in extremely critical condition.

Police have confirmed that ten people were admitted to hospital with lighter injuries.

Already before today, Finnish and English-language videos appeared on YouTube ('Jokela High School Massacre'), in which the suspect expressed his intentions.

After the massacre today, the young man was described by one of the school's teachers as an "extreme-right, militant type".

Meanwhile the videos have been removed from the YouTube service.

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen called de shooting "terrible and tragic", adding that it was extremely difficult to prevent incidents such as these.

President Tarja Halonen has expressed her condolences and sympathy with the victims and their familiies.

---

(TAKE 1: Mäntyharju, Finland; 19:50 uur Finnish time; 17:50 hrs. UTC/GMT)

Eight people died in a shooting incident today at Jokela High School, in Tuusula, Finland, close to the Finnish capital Helsinki.

We're in the finals!

(Photo by Andrew Mason shared via Flickr.com under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

Nokia's intranet news service, the News Hub, has made it to the finals of the CiB Awards 2007, by the British Association of Communicators in Business.

We are looking at an award of excellence for 'Best navigation/usability for intranet' (Class 14B).

Thank you RedHouse Lane! Thank you team mates at Nokia Corporate Communications!

As I wrote on April 24:

In the March issue (.pdf) of their Red Current newsletter, communications consultancy Redhouse Lane tell how they worked with my team at Nokia to rebrand and redesign the News Hub, Nokia's global news and conversation intranet site.

"(...) The result is  a striking exhibition of the power of Web 2.0 giving staff the tools to access the information they need, in the way they want - and then encouraging them to comment, contribute and collaborate. (...)"

"(...)The introduction of affiliate program has assisted the small business to run their business profitably as affiliates. The webhosting strategies of famous companies like godaddy cater all necessary attributes with respect to customer’s demand. They can even make a website design according to their customer products and update it with the passage of time. The search engine manager utilizes all strategic techniques of search engine marketing to increase their profits. The rates of internet phone service are very economical along with high speed and quality internet voip. There are different kinds of online website design software or templates to develop website easily. (...)"

Privacy concerns about Smart Digg Button

[UPDATE, May 24, 2007: In his post on HitTail's blog, 'Online Marketing Webinars Coming Soon to HitTail', Mike Levin inadvertently links to the post you're looking at. Instead, the link from Mike's post should really point at: 'Can I talk to you about "northern exposure videos" for a moment?']

Out of the 74 responses to date to Derek van Vliet's Smart Digg Button for Firefox, only one, by Muhammad, expresses concerns about privacy, "(...) as this extension tells Digg about every page you're visiting for as long as it's enabled (...)".

Derek, I'm certain this is a serious concern to many potential users. Would you care to respond?

Digg.com serves "Story of the Century" on my first day

(Image: Our Solar System, from Wikipedia's entry on "Planets", public domain, by NASA.)

As luck will have it... the day I started using Digg.com, it offered me what a journalist on the BBC World Service this morning called "(...) potentially the news story of the century in terms of the future of human kind":

First Habitable Planet Oustide Of The Solar System

(The BBC, of course, have their own version: 'New 'super-Earth' found in space')

Why I started "digging" yesterday was that a colleague of mine - after hearing about some of the stuff I do in corporate communications - had asked me if I'd like to help introduce some new collaborative news selection functionalities to Nokia's intranet.

So I decided to get some first-hand experience with Digg. The concept seemed interesting and so I wanted to get a "feel" for how it works, what works and what doesn't.

Being a novice to Digg, when I came across the "habitable planet" story I wasn't quite sure how serious to take it. After all, I was just being taught by way of Neil Patel's Beginner's Guide to Digg that, in order to get read, submissions to Digg should:

1. Make a statement and do not be dull;
2. Be controversial and make false promises; and/or
3. Use keywords in the title that diggers love and that are also relevant to the story.

But, whoa, am I convinced now! Every news junkie has to hook on to Digg!

By the way, the planet story reminds me of a presentation to Pop!Tech, podcast on IT Conversations, in which Carolyn Porco, Imaging Team Leader of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) makes a passionate appeal to human kind to make space exploration a top priority.

From the podcast description:

"(...) [One of Saturn's moons], Titan, is where the Huygens probe landed in January 2005. From the panoramic images taken during the decent and the all the data that has been collected since, the CICLOPS team is excited to see signs that fluids once flowed over the surface, that the atmosphere has precipitation and that the probe itself may have landed on a shoreline. All-in-all, the Titan moon may give us a significant glimpse of what the Earth was like before living organisms. (...)"

PS: To support the point of yesterday's piece on Wikipedia As A News Medium, the site's entry on Gliese 581 c seems nicely up-to-date.

Nokia's News Hub: Web 2.0 in action

(Photo by Andrew Mason shared via Flickr.com under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

In the March issue (.pdf) of their Red Current newsletter, communications consultancy Redhouse Lane tell how they worked with my team at Nokia to rebrand and redesign the News Hub, Nokia's global news and conversation intranet site.

"(...) The result is  a striking exhibition of the power of Web 2.0 giving staff the tools to access the information they need, in the way they want - and then encouraging them to comment, contribute and collaborate. (...)"

A use case for monitoring

(Photo by LeoL30)

Here's a use case for monitoring. I have to admit it was a mere coincidence that I noticed David Sifry's 'State of the Blogosphere' so shortly after he'd published it in the middle of the night of February 6.

This is an important conversation, I thought, and so I wanted to join in swiftly, while it was fresh. Passionately I read and re-read his piece, made some interpretations of my own and contributed two blog entries on the topic of Blogosphere growth, one immediately and another one the next week:

Does Technorati see Blogosphere growth slowing down? (February 6, 2006)

Are half of the blogs that Technorati tracks dead? (February 14, 2006)

I was looking forward to part 2, but it caught me by surprise. David published it on February 13, and I noticed it only the next day. I blogged my comments as fast as I could, and dropped my first line on David's post after 26 hours. In the end I wrote two blog posts:

The Green Slider, a nifty piece of usability engineering (February 15, 2006)

David Sifry's top-one-percent 'Magic Middle' (February 20, 2006)

So, what I would really like next time is: to be the first to know when David Sifry posts his 'State of the Blogosphere' piece. Now, I could of course drop David a line, but what I'm really looking for is a tool that alerts me, specifically for this purpose, by email or even SMS.

I don't think A Google Alert is going to cut it, as the signal-to-noise ratio will be too low. A Technorati watchlist? What happened to Spyonit?

So the use case is: I know something is going to happen (on the Web). I don't know when, but I want to be the very second person to know. Even if it's in the middle of the night - you can wake me up for it. But no noise please, only signal.

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• David Sifry's top-one-percent 'Magic Middle' (February 20, 2006)
• Are half of the blogs that Technorati tracks dead? (February 14, 2006)
• Google Alerts serve The Long Tail (February 1, 2006)

Technorati Tags: Blogosphere, monitoring, news, search, alerts, watchlists

A business model for collaboratively filtered news?

SUMMARY: Amazon.com has demonstrated the power of collaborative filtering when it comes to selling books. But how about a hyper-personalized, collaboratively filtered news offering? The main challenge may be the business model. Would ad revenue be able to cover the cost?

Via 'Wink Search', an entry on Zeevveez's QTSaver blog, I found an interesting review of 'New Ideas in Search (Wink, Gravee)', on Business 2.0's B2Day blog. Erick Schonfeld writes:

(...) Wink is very much a social search engine, since results are based on how other people previously rated and tagged things. The question is: Will a search based on public tags turn up substantially different results than a regular Google search based on link popularity? After all, at their core both are based on humans making their preferences public (one by explicitly tagging a Website with a descriptive keyword, the other by linking to it). (...)

I agree with Erick that one might wonder if Wink can do a better job than Google, considering that both engines rank search results by popularity. (And by the way, when it comes to tagging and searching, del.icio.us does a very good job, too.)

My interest in search is inspired primarily by one use case: hyper-personalized news provision. When it comes to search relevance, I'm convinced that artificial intelligence is the Holy Grail.

So I've been wondering if anyone is working on an Amazon.com for news. RSS feeds rule, tagging is the tool, Google is gool, but the best way to filter news by relevance is by looking at the news preferences of like-minded users.

Think about a collaboratively filtered news offering. If you and I have had very similar patterns of news consumption in the past, and you have already read and rated a particular piece of news, chances are that I will be interested in reading it, too.

There is an important difference between link popularity and collaborative filtering. Link popularity tells us which search results are considered most relevant to a particular search query by "everybody" (that is, anybody who ever published a link or tagged a piece of published content). Collaborative filtering, on the other hand, sorts search results on the basis of what is know about me, compared to people like me.

That's the power of Amazon.com when it comes to selling books.

So perhaps the main challenge with collaboratively filtered news is the business model. It can only work given a critical mass of users. Which means that the service should probably be offered for free on the Internet. Does that mean ads would have to pay for it? And could they?

The unfulfilled needs that Memeorandum addresses

Robert Scoble mentioned it in his interview with ITconversations. And, of course, on his blog. And on my quest for the "right" blogroll, I ran into it again: Memeorandum.

Gabe Rivera wanted Memeorandum to address some unfulfilled needs in online news, he wrote.

"(...) They are:

1. Recognize the web as editor: There's this notion that blogs collectively function as news editor. No, not every last blog on Earth. Tapping the thoughts of all of humanity uniformly would predictably lead to trivial, even spammy "news". But today there are rather large communities of knowledgeable, sophisticated commentators, (and yes) even reporters writing on the web, signaling in real time what's worthy of wider discussion. I want memeorandum to tap this signal.
2. Rapidly uncover new sources: Sometimes breaking news is posted to a blog created just to relate that news. Sometimes the author of the most insightful analysis piece at 2PM was a relative unknown at 1PM. It happens. I want memeorandum to highlight such work, without delay.
3. Relate the conversation: Communication on the web naturally tends toward conversation. It follows from human nature plus the Internet's immediacy. Blog posts react to news articles, essays reference editorials. And links abound. Yet most news sites do very little to relate the form of conversations unfolding in real time. Some seem to deny that a conversation is even occurring. I want memeorandum to be a clear exception.

(...)"

Related posts on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Emily Robbins figures out how to blog (September  20, 2005)
• Google Blog Search - The Algorithm Has Landed (September 15, 2005)
• Technorati tracks the books conversation (August 4, 2005)