Working on a Web application? Read this.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has the top 10 application design sins, courtesy of Danny Sanchez.

The press becomes the press-sphere

I'm on a Buzzmachine kick today.  Jeff Jarvis does a very interesting job in The press becomes the press-sphere of showing, visually,  how we're not at the center of the news anymore, nor is our work product (stories).  Click the link to see the diagrams. 

Some of the very powerful take aways:

• The separation of content from presentation on web pages means that design, navigation, brand, and medium can change and are not necessarily controlled by an editor’s design.
• Feeds also have an impact on — and can reduce the value of — packaging and prioritization (also known as editing).
• Live reports from witnesses also reduce the opportunity to package and edit.
• The ecology of links motivates us to do what we do best and link to the rest. It fosters collaboration. It changes the essential structure of a story (background or source material can be a link away).
• Links also turn our readers into our distributors.
• Links turn our readers into editors.
• Aggregation, curation, and peer links become our new newsstand.
• Search and SEO motivate us to create repositories of expertise (topic pages) and make news stories more permanent.
• Search reduces the power of the brand.
• We see ourselves not as owners of content or distribution but as members of networks.
•  These networks can be about content, trust, interest, or advertising relationships or all of the above.

Dallasopedia?

In Überpedia lives, Jeff Jarvis talks about how the German publisher Bertelsmann is creating a 'vetted' version of some of Wikipedia.  We've been wondering whether there's a need for a Dallasopedia.  Here's a great way to get it done efficiently:  Take what's there and make it better. 

Restricting sports coverage online

NYT has a great takeout on the growing conflict between news organizations and sports franchises over coverage.  Ground zero is the digital realm, and we've already suffered a broadside here, as you know, from Mr. Cuban of the Mavs.  That is just one shot in what I expect will be an ongoing battle.

Our annual state of the union address

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual survey of the state of the news media has really become the authoritative source for how we're doing as an industry.  This year's fifth annual report delivers once again.  It is a must read.

If nothing else, a glance at the major trends is helpful as we seek to set operational agendas.

• News is shifting from becoming a product to a service i.e. how can you help me?
• News brands are no longer final destinations (we should point elsewhere)
• User-generated content has more limited value than some thought
• Newsrooms are starting to innovate; advertising sales is not

There's a big punch in the gut too -- about that bugaboo we've been concerned about for such a long time:  How can we support our work financially?  The report offers this sobering thought:

The crisis in journalism... may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.

As it is every year, this report is deep, dense and packed with statistics.  But is it a page turner for anyone in our business.  I recommend you click through.

Ted's ten point plan to reinvent the newspaper business

Don't know if you saw this from former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, courtesy of Romanesko: My Ten Point Plan to Reinvent The Newspaper Business. Provocative, to say the least. For instance:

Get rid of senior editors. Turn them into algorithmic managers. Editors are passé. What is needed is a team of people that know how to work and create blog rolls and how to get the content up high into the algorithms so that when a consumer searches the newspaper's content it comes up high in the rankings. Knowing statistically what content gets the best click through across all media is a key deliverable... and having managers that understand the big algorithms in the sky will redefine journalism for our next generation and redefine circulation into syndication.

I think we need both.  In fact we've been trying to figure out how to create an audience manager or traffic manager -- someone who can devote attention to distributing our content better through more effective search engine optimization, and better 'platform targeting,' that is, sending text alerts or seeding links on blogs etc.

Google maps, Wiki style

Google is now allowing anyone in the U.S., Australia, or New Zealand to improve Google Maps by editing places for everyone else to see.

Tracking Web 2.0

There are plenty of new startups looking to make life easier; many have merit, but here’s a few tips to help you know what’s going on from Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch:  Tracking Web 2.0.

Yahoo Buzz: Yahoo reveals stats from the first two weeks

Everyone's buzzing about Yahoo Buzz, including Tech Crunch, the Bible of Silicon Valley, in this post: Yahoo Buzz: Yahoo Reveals Stats From The First Two Weeks.  In short: 

"...it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer. That will keep the Buzz publishers, who must be invited into the service, paying attention."

We certainly are.  Yahoo linked to us 5 times in the past couple of weeks and absolutely blew away our traffic.  As more and more publishers vie for this kind of link, we can expect that we'll be chosen less and less frequently.

The edited Internet

Recently I wrote about Mahalo, the human powered search engine.

Now, we're talking more seriously about how our editing muscle might help make search better. And so is Newsweek. (Thanks for finding this, Bob Yates.)

So there may be a bright future for editors after all. And to give proper credit where credit is due, that hopeful thought has been voiced before -- for instance in the otherwise gloomy "Googlezon" video, a tale of the death of newspapers first released on the Internet back in 2005 or so.

Will You Tube announce live streaming Wednesday?

Tech Crunch wonders in this post: What Does YouTube Have Up Its Sleeve? Guess Right, And Win An iPod Shuffle.

Live streaming would be an interesting game changer for TV station Web sites, which currently still own that capability exclusively -- but not for long!  Think what blogging has done to the ability of individuals to compete with newspaper.coms.  This development smacks of the same Alamo for TV.coms.

Later:  OK so they didn't announce live streaming.  It was a set of APIs.  But this is also pretty huge because, as Tech Crunch points out, "YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free."  So we could use You Tube's technology to let people upload videos from our site, comment, etc. and tap into the You Tube audience.  Downside, we don't get to upload ads etc.

Jeff Jarvis is at an NYC media summit, where he reports on what some of the bigwigs of oldline media are saying about change.

They acknowledge that there is a "discussion happening in newsrooms across the country: minimizing commodity effort and maximizing unique reporting value."

Dallas Mavericks bar dallasnews.com blogger from locker room

The Mark Cuban v. dallasnews.com flap is getting some press:

Dallas Mavericks bar dallasnews.com blogger from locker room

Cuban's responded:

Bloggers in the Mavs locker room?

How should we do local business news?

This blog post: Analyst doubts publishers will invest in local business news -- from Ken Doctor frames a question we're working on right now at The Dallas Morning News.  Worth a read.

Mindy McAdams writes about a book that I've got to get called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  In her post, titled An Audence is not a Community she quotes the book's author, Clay Shirkey:

A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation.

Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience.

The implications are profound:  It explains, of course, why user-contributed stuff that we think is meaningless and useless for an audience (such as boneheaded user comments or poor photos) isn't meaningless and useless if considered in the context of community.  It's our collective myopia as journalists used to providing "content" for an "audience" that's the problem.  We're viewing user-generated content in the wrong way.

Read the post.  And I gotta get the book.  On On the Media, I heard Clay talk about his book.  He again made a simple, yet profound statement that helps explain so much.  In the pre-Internet days, here's how we thought of organizing: 

1. Gather people together
2. Share information
3. Act

Now, because of the power of the Internet to tag and organize the data (photos, blog posts, Web pages etc.) the order has changed:

1. Share (as in uploading photos on Flickr)
2. Gather (different people tag photos the same way, which means you can locate other people who've shared a similar experience)
3. Act (do something together as a result)

Clay shows how this works -- click the link above to see the OTM transcript. 

News organizations using Twitter

Danny Sanchez strikes again.  His blog is really a must read.

"Check out this great list from Carlos Granier-Phelps of media outlets throughout the world that are now using Twitter:" URL: List: News organizations using Twitter.

Audio from Future of Web Apps Miami available

Danny Sanchez reports that, "audio from the Future of Web Apps Miami conference is available. For us online news types, these talks are a great chance to get exposed to what’s happening in web technology and to think about how we can apply it to our situation."

Agreed.  Click the URL to get specific links to things like Twitter, OpenSocial and how to use passion in growing a community: Audio from Future of Web Apps Miami available.

100 interactive map ideas

Thanks to the blog Journalistopia, I've been pointed to 100 interactive map ideas. This is a post to clip and save!

Live streaming video: The next trend to watch?

The technology to show live video on the Web is generally limited to desktop cameras or the occasional geared up gearhead who can walk around with a helmut cam.  But in January Robert Scoble pulled off live streaming video 'on the go' with a supercharged cell phone at Davos.  And now You Tube's Steve Chen has let it slip that You Tube will be supporting live video this year.  The new tech trends show Pop 17 grabbed that scoop, which you can see in Steve Outing's post: The next trend to watch.

Newspaper.coms have to start figuring out how to do live video streams.  But while the technology available today might allow for herky-jerky news conferences, the truth is it's going to be a while before anything can supplant  the very expensive TV news microwave  infrastructure to stream spot news.

Digitial Edge Award winners announced

Danny Sanchez (and everyone else) has the Digitial Edge Award winners.   Definitely worth a click to see what's considered top flight at newspaper.coms. 

My first thought:  Tip of the hat to Edgie winner PolitiFact, a skillful blend of good old fashioned journalism and newfangled packaging.  At the News we're subscribing to their feed.