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RT @tombarfield: @paulbradshaw credit big issue for @demotix – theme of recent @frontlineclub event, <30% of images in papers get cre …
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Small-Town Gossip Moves to the Web, Anonymous and Vicious – NYTimes.com: http://t.co/K9uGp0aT
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With WSJ Social, the Journal is purposely “navigating the content within the app around people,” Baratz told me, and making “every user an editor”; the app, in large part, she says, is about “elevating the role of people as curators of content.” The end result: “When you walk into the app, you have this very curated publication,” Baratz says — one that could, if done right, provide users with a nice mix of personalization and serendipity.
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All the websites will include touch-screen enabled elements, for instance a slide show (also known as a rotator) on the homepage of Good Housekeeping, which is manipulate by a mouse click when accessed via P.C. but is touch operated when accessed via smartphones and tablets. Hearst is one of several media operations who have leapt to the possibilities provided by HTML5. The Financial Times and The Boston Globe have both launched HTML 5 versions of their site in order to get around Apple's mandatory 30% cut of all sales through their app store- and the fact that Adobe flash technology has long been banned from iPhones by Apple. What will Apple make of that?
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Spending the day with MA Online Journalism students at the Birmingham Post & Mail's #hyperlocal day [pic]: http://t.co/mlrX5pRw
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RT @dandavies23: RT @heatherAtaylor: beta version of the BBC's new homepage: http://t.co/4QmMdQSP Iwhat do you think? #BBChomepage > …
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"Repeat after me: the European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution" http://j.mp/nRzEYq
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beta620 | Welcome to beta620: At The New York Times, our software engineers, journalists, product managers and d… http://t.co/uswp0rI6
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Cooking the data – O'Reilly Radar: The first problem open data advocates run into is that of getting real info… http://t.co/uCdDCfrU
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At The New York Times, our software engineers, journalists, product managers and designers are constantly striving to create new and innovative ways to present news and information and interact with our readers. Yet it’s often difficult to try out new inventions on the world’s largest newspaper Web site. That’s why we created beta620, a new home for experimental projects from Times developers — and a place for anyone to suggest and collaborate on new ideas and products.
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Photo: (via Lies, damned lies and statistics » Blog Archive » If you condensed 3.4 billion Internet hours… http://t.co/FhmLhwDr
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The first problem open data advocates run into is that of getting real information. Look at Greece: 324 Athenians reported having swimming pools on their taxes. When the government used Google Maps to try and count how many there really were, they found 16,974 of them — despite efforts by citizens to camouflage their pools under green tarpaulins. So even if activists can use widely available data to create change, that data may be wrong.
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In fact, that’s nearly all there is to the site. You can upload up to 16 video files, add a title and soundtrack — select from available tracks or add your own — and then sit back and wait for an email to notify you that your mini movie is ready to be shared (in testing this took 20 to 30 minutes, depending on video file size).
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Guest post by @jerryvermanen: Dutch regional newspapers launch data journalism project RegioHack http://t.co/A1W7BNDJ
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The amount of pension money being invested in Guernsey by British ex-pats has been revealed for the first time.
A freedom of information request to tax authorities in the UK shows the island is the biggest player on the planet so far this year.
And it's all down to QROPS – which stands for Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Schemes- a type of pension for people from the UK who are permanently moving overseas. Where the money goes, and how much it is all worth had been a bit of a mystery. But the lid has been lifted for the first time following a freedom of information request to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs in the UK. -
A COP did so much overtime last year he almost TREBLED his pay to £109,000, The Sun can reveal.The Metropolitan Police sergeant claimed an incredible £69,000 on top of his basic £40,000 salary.
Meanwhile, a Met constable clocked up £55,000 on top of a £30,000 wage. A Freedom of Information request revealed other forces are also paying out huge overtime sums. -
Photo: (via Yoda pie chart) http://t.co/XuHs5icD
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Video: Presenting Photography Threat Level Advisory (by jmcolberg) http://t.co/RaWTteEc
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The solution is presented as a visually compelling ‘Concept Map’, depicting the salient Concepts and their relationships, which can be readily interrogated at either the Theme, Concept or Thesaurus level – with drill-down capability to the supporting text. There is an equivalent Concept Tag Cloud, various xml and csv export reports, an interactive log-book interface and an innovative new Insight Dashboard, specially designed to get immediate insight into the data and solution characteristics – at the press of a button!
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This file documents awk, a program that you can use to select particular records in a file and perform operations upon them.
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RT @newsbrooke: RT @mandyldewaal: #APAI Announcement made on the launch of the Pan-African media network project: http://t.co/oRuSlhCu
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But the nature of the surrounding community affected these decisions. The higher the voter turnout in an area around a plant, a proxy for residents’ political power, the greater the facility’s reported reductions in air carcinogens. Yet not all the reports of pollution reductions may be real. When you compare TRI reports of pollution releases with actual measures of nearby pollution, for heavily regulated chemicals such as lead and nitric acid it appears that firms are not accurately reporting their emissions.
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The paper (full title: “Opening the Political Mind? The effects of self-affirmation and graphical information on factual misperceptions”) shares findings from three experiments that asked participants to assess sets of controversial data: on the U.S. troop-level surge in Iraq in 2007, the jobs market under the Obama administration, and global temperature change. From those, it draws two big conclusions about the psychology of misinformation: First, that external affirmations of “self-worth” — essentially, the buttressing of people’s sense of their own values and worldviews — can actually reduce misperceptions among the people who are most likely to resist information that runs counter to their already-held beliefs; and, second, that graphical presentation of corrections (and of controversial information in general) can be more powerful than their textual counterparts in terms of convincing people to amend their misperceptions.
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Though these pro-state users present a worrying development, the overall trend is toward a diversity of views. As George Washington University professor and Middle East blogger Marc Lynch observed in 2007, the Arab blogosphere is "chipping away at the encrusted structures of the Arab punditocracy." Social networking sites serve a similar purpose while encouraging quick updates and communication. While blogging allows for reactive punditry, Twitter and Facebook allow for rapid-fire commentary. Their use during major events is often immediately corrective, providing context or amending errors in mainstream journalism.
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Mark Nigrini shares the story of physicist Frank Benford, a man whose curiosity about a book inspired a bizarre discovery. Benford's Law, as it is now known, reveals a cosmic preference for certain numbers. Then Darrell D. Dorrell, a forensic accountant, describes how he uses Benford's Law to bust crooks.
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This odd phenomenon is Benford's Law. If a set of values were truly random, each leading digit would appear about 11% of the time, but Benford's Law predicts a logarithmic distribution. It occurs so regularly that it is even used in fraudulent accounting detection. See the Wikipedia article for a more thorough discussion. This is a simple experiment to see how many large, publicly accessible datasets satisfy Benford’s Law.
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For example, in every country in Asia-Pacific, aside from China and Japan, Facebook is the preferred social media channel. In China, video sharing is more popular, while in Japan, blog platforms and video sharing are more popular than mainstream social networks.
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The latest seven to appear on the official list are: the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Latvia, Peru, South Korea, Sweden and Ukraine. The list is: Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Peru, Slovak Republic, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania, Turkey and Ukraine.
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Pinterest hasn't gotten a lot of press before, though. That could be because it's a visual bookmarking site used primarily by women (apparently) , and the male-dominated tech press is just less likely to notice success in that sector. It's a great looking service though and a lot of fun to use. There are certainly ways it could be improved, but it's clearly catching on.
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Speaking at the Royal Television Society in Cambridge on Friday, Sir Martin said that social networks were "not the right context" for commercial advertising because they interrupted something that was supposed to be fluid and informal.
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Molleindustria is an app developer who makes a line of controversial and political games. Some of its more well known games include McDonalds Videogame, Operation: Pedopriest, and Oiligarchy. It just recently announced and released its latest game, Phone Story. This particular game takes the player through the cruel world of smart phone production using a series of mini games depicting the mining of coltan from the Congo using child labor, the suicides in the Foxconn factories and, of course, e-waste disposal in third world countries.
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The tools are sensitive enough so that even a few seconds of a song can trip them and the major content producers are very active in seeking this content out and getting it removed from the various video hosting sites, especially YouTube. Unfortunately, the aggressiveness of this enforcement combined with the sensitivity of some of the tools means that not all of the takedown notices are accurate or fair. So, as a video blogger, you need to be aware of your rights, make sure that you use content within the bounds of fair use and, if needed, stand up for your rights.
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New York, September 14, 2011–U.S. diplomatic cables disclosed last month by WikiLeaks cited an Ethiopian journalist by name and referred to his unnamed government source, forcing the journalist to flee the country after police interrogated him over the source's identity, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. It is the first instance CPJ has confirmed in which a citation in one of the cables has caused direct repercussions for a journalist.
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RT @VirginTrains: UPDATE: Delays between Milton Keynes Central and London Euston / Clapham Junction expected until 11:00 http://ow.ly/6x …
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@HelenaBengtsson thanks for doing the interview – now edited and up at http://t.co/4S3VaYut
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grep -lir "some text" * The -l switch outputs only the names of files in which the text occurs (instead of each line containing the text), the -i switch ignores the case, and the -r descends into subdirectories.
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I imagine you're using the Text To Columns wizard, right ? If so, then, in the "Other" field, press your Left "Alt" key, and in the Numeric keyboard type 010 if that doesn't appear to work, try with the number 013 that should do what you need.
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As with CSV files, at first it seems odd to be scraping Excel spreadsheets, when they’re already at least semi-structured data. Why would you do it?
The format of Excel files can varies a lot – how columns are arranged, where tables appear, what worksheets there are. There can be errors and inconsistencies that are easiest to fix in code. Sometimes you’ll find the data is there but not formatted in cells – entire rows in one cell, or data stored in notes.
We used an Excel scraper that pulls together 9 spreadsheets into one dataset for the brownfield sites map used by Channel 4 News. -
Here's the news quiz the trainees did today by @petersands55 http://t.co/uQ5m6lqF 13.5 to beat.
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Waiting for the 5th and final train of my journey – 1 delay against me, but 1 in my favour http://t.co/CQbx0Yx5
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RT @philipjohn: Phone hacking: Met seek court order to reveal the Guardian's sources http://t.co/3nxrowSu via @guardian
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RT @smfrogers: RT @gabrieldance: we are expanding the interactive team at Guardian U.S. so if you're interested in working with me … h …
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This is the first incident I am aware of in Mexico in which social media users and bloggers, as opposed to journalists working for more conventional news organizations, have been targeted in this manner. One of the messages near the corpses read: This happened for snitching on Frontera Al Rojo Vivo (A Grupo Refroma internet forum created to both inform of and denounce cartel activity)
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EIB data to ignore: http://t.co/yBPJxI9M
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More data you can ignore: http://t.co/kRfEAFlY
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Dataset for my PA trainees: http://t.co/KC3G8lGj #names #data
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I do like this place – but have never had the cheese… (@ The Cheese Shop) http://t.co/aP3XztYE
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RT @carolinebeavon: New project to examine how Wikipedia covers breaking news | CyberJournalist.net http://t.co/dglvE2oe
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A fragment of rainbow in the middle of the sky http://t.co/oecBo3wg
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Overdue – but welcome. RT @jayrosen_nyu: Johann Hari: A personal apology. http://t.co/EFp2WKyX
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Off for my now annual 3 day sessions teaching data journalism to Telegraph trainees http://t.co/HCmST1qS
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Tumblrize crossposts your published WordPress entries to Tumblr and Posterous. All you need is a Tumblr account. Changes you make to your WordPress po
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Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool – it's an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also be used to power a news website. That's exactly what ShortFormBlog does. Launched in January 2009 by Ernie Smith from Washington D.C., the site publishes about 30 news soundbites a day. ShortFormBlog is still a part-time project for Smith, who also works as a graphic designer at The Washington Post. He's hoping to turn the site into a full-time business. And I think he's onto something, certainly in terms of using a tool like Tumblr to change the way news is delivered and consumed. I interviewed Smith to find out more about his Tumblr-powered news service.
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Photo: (via Is the 90-9-1 Rule for Online Community Engagement Dead? [Data] | CustomerThink) http://t.co/kRCWpkp
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NHS Comparators is a national resource and is part of the Secondary Uses Service (SUS), jointly delivered by the NHS Information Centre and NHS Connecting for Health. It provides comparator data for NHS commissioning and provider organisations, enabling users to investigate aspects of local activity, costs and outcomes. It is designed to be supplemented by information available in local systems.
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Interesting investigation into pharmacies vs dispensaries on R4's You & Yours. Shame there's no textual info online http://t.co/DU3sQjH
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UBM’s ABC exit shows how publishers are moving from measuring users to building relationships | TheMediaBriefing… http://t.co/6yA3C0o
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The publication of the first audited circulation figures for digital magazine sales did little to make the case that online subscriptions are the future. Only two magazines have sold more than 1,000 subscriptions – Men’s Health and Hello! And neither of them had sold enough to give much cheer to those who mourn the forests of trees needed to feed the UK’s magazine habit.
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So the news mattered. But so did job advertising. In research, many readers said they read the news before the jobs, or indeed only read only the jobs. So it seemed to me as the journalists returned to work, that it was the entire package that made for successful publishing.
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In what should have very loud alarm bells ringing for media metrics bodies and publishers that put faith in them, Built Environment will now audited by receive data from Pricewaterhousecooper (PWC), in a system similar to the Average Daily Global Audience measure that FT.com uses (please note the helpful clarifying comment from Stuart at the BPA below – PWC is technically not auditing anyone). Unlike the ABC, which splits online and print into different sections, the PWC's methods measures both print and online and does not count duplicates (someone who reads the title online and in print in the same day).
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Posted yesterday: The New Online Journalists #11: Jack Dearlove http://t.co/yUcuCIa
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RT @psychemedia: Wondering if any other local journalism folk have done mapping stories around boundary changes? http://t.co/3QMpG6U /vi …
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BuzzData | Blog, BuzzData star: James McKinney: McKinney recalls making the same type of list last year, but the… http://t.co/EU5Z7yr
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McKinney recalls making the same type of list last year, but the experience was different: “I had done something similar for the Open Government Data Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation a year ago, but we were using Google Spreadsheets at the time,” he says. “Google Spreadsheets’ strength is real-time document collaboration, but it’s weak on other social aspects. For example, if you close the spreadsheet, you lose your chat history.
“Although BuzzData is only in beta, already the conversation sidebar acts as a useful backchannel between collaborators and the overview page is a convenient opportunity to introduce editors to formatting guidelines and design decisions.” -
what’s more, it happened over the course of four or five hours, with a couple of technology/knowledge transfers along the way, as well as evolution in the way both news agencies communicated the information compared to the way the Boundary Commission released it.
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News Consumption Tilts Toward Niche Sites – NYTimes.com: Part of the problem is the result of a fundamental shi… http://t.co/4Lafwzc
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“What we’re doing is detecting the user’s screen size when they enter the site and giving them the right layout,” said Jeff Moriarty, the Globe’s vice president of digital products. “It responds on a real-time basis, so if you flip your iPad from vertical to landscape, it will change.”
There are six possible layouts depending on the device’s screen size: a simple one-column page for phones, more columns and complexity for 5- to 7-inch tablets and 10-inch iPads (adjusting for horizontal or vertical orientation), and a large version for laptop or desktop browsers.The layout of BostonGlobe.com changes when an iPad user rotates the device from vertical to horizontal view.The site also detects the capabilities of the device, so a smartphone or tablet user can swipe her way through a photo gallery or a featured content carousel.
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English is one of those 'let's just go do it' publishers who has adopted the tablet platform early on and is continuing to experiment. Tablazine's first magazine, Hoodgrown, has been written about several times on this site, and has garnered a bit of well deserved press. But for that first magazine, English chose to work with Alligator Digital Magazines, the Los Angeles-based company he first read about on this site. For his newest magazine, English is doing more of the work on his own and is experimenting with a different platform, Pugpig.
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Part of the problem is the result of a fundamental shift in Web behavior. Media stalwarts erected a frame around the Web and organized, and sometimes produced, content. Now the frame around content is the Web browser itself, and consumers do their own programming and are more inclined to see news consumption as a kind of voting, selecting smaller brands that reflect their sensibilities.
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Nearly a third of crown court hearings in the East of England which do not go ahead as planned are adjourned due to legal teams not being ready on the day of the trial, the BBC can reveal.
A BBC Freedom of Information request found that the percentage of trials which fail to go ahead varies widely.
In Northamptonshire 3.3% of trials did not go ahead, while in Hertfordshire the figure was 16.6%.
In the East 30.6% of these did not go ahead due to legal teams issues. -
Judge Fiona Henderson ordered Camden Council to comply with a Freedom of Information request from the Advisory Service for Squatters to reveal the list of empty council-managed and private homes in the borough.She was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying publication would "bring buildings back into use sooner and the housing needs of additional people would be met".
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RT @jamescuff: Did you see the iPhone auto-correct short film I made for The Sunday Times? http://t.co/XEiVOmC
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This iPhone auto-correct love song is ducking brilliant http://t.co/2MaZG8H
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Journalists often want to create a thematic web maps, in which geographic areas are filled in with color/shade according to data values, for example:http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/census-2010/Thanks to Google Fusion Tables, creating basic thematic maps and embedding them on a web page is now easy.
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The Boundary Commission for England refused to give us this map – so we've made it ourselves using the raw data showing which wards would sit in which new constituency. What do you think?
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@newsbrooke the MEN have managed to map one constituency http://t.co/oCGgos4 cc/@pdgallagher
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Spool Is Instapaper On Steroids – TechCrunch: But with Spool, you don’t have to think about these sorts of thing… http://t.co/FT7EfJ8
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But with Spool, you don’t have to think about these sorts of things. Any Internet content, including audio, video and text, can be made available for immediate, offline viewing on mobile, simply by using the Spool app, browser add-on or bookmarklet. And because Spool is intelligent, it knows what part of a webpage to save, and what part to discard.
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An easier way to think about it may be as YouTube/Justin.tv mixed with The Gong Show. Or if you’re under 30, maybe think of it as Turntable.fm for live video. Participants go live with either a musical performance or a talk and they’re voted on in realtime. Thumbs-up votes buys the person more time, thumbs-down means they’ll soon be shoved off the stage.
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RT @carolinebeavon: How to Focus | Visual.ly http://t.co/4SZmC6v
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RT @kwesth: Fine collection of data gathering and data processing tools for social media http://t.co/lLaBvmN #foj11
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Emap picks data specialist as chief executive – Brand Republic News: http://t.co/V4DaKx7
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It’s clear from the data that companies in the Balanced category achieve the best results overall. They generate 20% fewer clicks per post than Curators, but their conversion rate is 10X higher. I’ll take that trade any day.
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"Estates Gazette and Capita Symonds have joined forces to produce the first-ever augmented reality edition of Estates Gazette. The Capita Symonds advertisements in the print edition on 3 September 2011 can be viewed using the CS AR App downloaded to the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad 2. Read more
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The average UK PR professional is paid £48,247 pa, nearly twice the average salary for the UK workforce as a whole, according to PR Week.
In 2010, the average salary for those in 'all service industries' was £25,855.
According to the survey, press officers average £28,384; senior account mangers £36,514; media managers £39,091; head of comms/external affairs £55,203; PR directors £55,516; chief executives/mds £60,925; and comms directors £83,191. -
The Social Sidekick features “most liked/tweeted” content from Condé‘s mag sites W, Glamour, Self, Teen Vogue, Lucky and the Style.com. The bar kind of hovers over an area on the lower part of a site’s screen and scrolls down when a user moves down the page, along with a plus/minus sign allowing viewers to close or expand it. If you click to expand the bar, it then shows multiple panes that each feature a single title’s article links with Gucci content below.
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Since we last checked in with Homicide Watch D.C., Laura Amico has continued to make good on her site’s promise: Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case. Amico, a former newspaper reporter, has indexed the victims, suspects, and details of every murder committed in Washington, D.C., since September 2010, attempting to collect personal stories along the way.
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High Court clinical negligence claim against Dept of Health for decades of disability caused by false claims of harmlessness of dental amalgam. Come to hearing 6th October 2011 at RCJ in London
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This paper examines the intersection of journalism and open-source software, in the context of the ongoing tension between professional control and open participation in digital media. Through interviews with key winners of the Knight News Challenge innovation contest, this article explores how open source, as a technological framework and a socio-cultural ethic, serves to legitimize and facilitate participation in journalism. News innovators are found to see journalism as an open-source practice to be shared, rather than a proprietary profession to be protected—and news not as a professional product alone, so much as a process of iterative, collaborative de-bugging. The implications of this shift are discussed in light of journalism’s changing occupational boundaries.
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Meanwhile, from a current student: RT @Andy_Watt: A visualisation of this morning's game. http://t.co/OhyzmuC
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RT @cward1e: Extremely well deserved RT @smfrogers Rogers is 'internet journalist of the year' http://t.co/bPIezX5
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New #sftw post: How to use the CableSearch API to quickly reference names against #Wikileaks #cables (SFTW): http://t.co/BCPsC65
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This week’s issue of NME features a unique six-digit code printed on the cover, which can be used online to unlock exclusive content and giveaways.
This week NME Extra celebrates 20 years of ‘Nevermind’, the album that changed rock music forever. Behind the unique code readers can find:
• A classic NME interview with Nirvana from 1991
• A video feature with Arctic Monkeys, Foals and Hurts discussing their favourite ‘Nevermind’ tracks
• A Nirvana photo gallery
• And a competition to win rare ‘Nevermind’ artwork and merchandise
NME publishing director Paul Cheal (pictured) says: "NME was the first music magazine in the UK to use QR codes so that our readers could capitalise on additional digital content for their smartphones. This latest innovation brings additional features, photography and video content direct to our readers' desktops."
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This app is the first to be produced by Dennis’ newly created in-house mobile app development team, Dennis Media Factory. The team features iOS and Android specialists, allowing Dennis to launch the new Profanisaurus app simultaneously on iPhone/iPod touch and Android phones. A version for Symbian powered Nokia phones will follow shortly afterwards, developed by Future Platforms, known for their work on this year’s Official Glastonbury app.
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Mike Newcombe, director of Mobile Sales at IPC, says: “This partnership further establishes P&G's credentials in being one of the first to invest and reap the rewards of the ever growing mobile medium with the product range perfectly complimenting IPC's market leading female mobile user base.
“With 30 sites already live and up to 15% of digital traffic coming organically via mobile, it's evident there is a clear and present demand for our user base to have instant access to their favourite brands across multiple platforms.”
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[The Transparency Register] provides citizens with a direct and single access to information about who is engaged in activities aiming at influencing the EU decision making process, which interests are being pursued and what level of resources are invested in these activities.
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China struggles to tame microblogging masses – Gadgets & Tech, Life & Style – The Independent: "This is where pu… http://t.co/A3nWUKQ
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"This is where public opinion is being formed," said Peking University journalism professor Hu Yong. Hu said the decision by authorities in the booming east coast city of Dalian to relocate a controversial chemical plant owed much to a largely middle class public protest one Sunday in August that had its origins in weibo posts. "The Dalian party secretary came out and gave a speech promising to shut the chemical plant," he said. "We seldom see this. This is significant."
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Such data has always been valuable. However, the internet revolution is transforming it into a cashable proposition. The online genealogy market grew from nothing to millions a year, thanks to the availability of family records online. The worldwide satnav market, based on free data from the US government’s GPS system, is worth well over $100bn year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
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Freedom of Information requests are slow, tedious, and as a means of gathering information roughly equal in efficiency to the game Battleships. You fire off a formal request, wait a month for a reply telling you your request was rubbish and off-target, move two squares to the left and fire again, and repeat until you get what you were after, or you've given up, or you've died of old age. Apply this to research data and there's a good chance that even if it's available it may be unintelligible, or in a proprietary format, or undocumented.
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There's a unique anti-business attitude in Europe in relation to FoI. Prof James Boyle of Duke University Law School told me: "European attitudes towards private commercialisation actually work against the idea of openness. In the US if the government hands out weather data for free and people make a ton of money off the back of it, everyone says, 'Great! it's good for the economy, good for us, good for the company' … In Britain there's a sense that the company has got something for free and now they're making money out of it. 'How terrible! They're free-riding.' They don't see the overall economic benefit that comes from sharing information."
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We asked government departments for details of how much they had spent on proprietary software over the past year, and how much open source software they had acquired.
The responses have been dribbling in for months now (available as a Google doc, an Excel spreadsheet or as separate .csv files below), and they've varied from detailed accounts of software and expenditure, to refusals to provide any information on the grounds that it would cost too much. -
In June the commissioner’s office said the university’s reason for refusing to hand over the information, because the request was considered “vexatious”, was not a correct reason and ordered it to issue another response.
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A Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Justice found that in 2005, 1,363 people were convicted while in 2010, it was 2,135.
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BBC News – Victory for Cliff's law: What is surprising about this is that ministers have also approved the findi… http://t.co/wNOas7L
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What is surprising about this is that ministers have also approved the findings of the Hargreaves Review on copyright.
Its central message was that the copyright regime should be tidied up, and enforced where possible, but that its reach should not be extended.
All those music industry bodies which have campaigned so long for this are keeping their powder dry tonight, waiting for the Council of Ministers to rubber-stamp the decision before they say anything. -
According to the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center’s report “Egypt from Tahrir to Transition,” the uprisings in Egypt were “not a Facebook revolution.” While media sources have widely credited online activists for igniting the recent uprisings, the report concludes that the role of social media as a key factor in mobilizing millions is likely overstated. According to the center’s research, based on a nationally representative survey of about 1,000 respondents in Egypt, only 8 percent said that they relied on Facebook and Twitter to get news on the protests. Some 81 percent named Egyptian state TV as their source for news, 63 percent named Al Jazeera.
Fadi Salem of the Dubai School of Government is equally convinced that regional satellite television had an “influential role” in toppling the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. He doubts, however, that television would have been equally influential without videos from YouTube and information from Twitter and Facebook.
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Photo: How big is your New Optimism? This big apparently. (via Egypt From Tahrir to Transition) http://t.co/Ok0N2j6
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The BBC is radically rewriting its approach to the digital world, trimming down its sprawling network of websites to 10 streamlined 'products', an umbrella term which includes everything from BBC radio to the iPlayer. Responsible for Homepage, Search, News, Sport, Weather, CBBC, CBeebies, Knowledge and Learning and 2012 Olympics coverage, Phil Fearnley explains how the BBC is reaching out to audiences across different platforms under its new approach.
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Olapic has a Facebook Application that lets media organizations show photos uploaded by their Facebook community to crowdsourced galleries. Going to use this as an example for my class this fall as a useful tool.
This makes crowdsourcing using your Facebook Pages much easier. Here's the link to the app: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=168450899839635 Also, here's an example of what it looks like on New York Daily News: http://on.fb.me/qit75o
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Faveous is a fairly new entrant into the field, and is very like Trunkly, but the choice is slightly wider in my opinion. Sources are very similar, but you can also filter by all media, images, videos, music and documents. One particularly nice feature is the ability to save your Twitter favourites as well however; it can also delete them afterwards if you wish. There's little to choose between both systems, but since it only takes a few moments to set up, why not use both?
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Did you see downloading and reading newspapers and magazines in there at number five? So only slightly more than half of the people who regularly use the internet read online news publications of some description in the last three months.
To put this in context, 57 percent of internet users and 91 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds used social networking sites in the same period. The people who are soon going to be your ad manager’s target audience already spend more time talking to friends and sharing photographs then perhaps they ever will reading newspapers or magazines online. -
Photo: (via Why it’s dangerous to over-estimate how digital your audience is | TheMediaBriefing) http://t.co/sowqeqX
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Cable Reveals Extent Of Lapdoggery From Swedish Govt On Copyright Monopoly – Falkvinge on InfopolicySince the 1980s, the US has aggressively threatened trade sanctions against countries who don’t give American companies sufficiently large competitive advantages — this is described in detail in the book Information Feudalism about the origins of the TRIPs agreement and WTO, for those interested in gory details. In practice, it works like this: industry associations in the US go to the Trade Representatives, who go to the myriad offices dealing with Foreign Policy, who go to the embassies, who talk to national governments (including the Swedish one) and demand changes to national law to benefit American corporations.
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Video: Tips on investigating people and businesses http://t.co/3i4LGiQ
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With this, HuffPost joins a surge of news organizations that are tapping into their staff expertise and troves of published material for relatively quick and inexpensive e-books. A few examples:
The Boston Globe released a trio on the life of fugitive gangster Whitey Bulger.
The New Yorker recently collected post-9/11 articles for its first e-book.
The New York Times assembled an e-book on WikiLeaks called “Open Secrets.”A People’s History of the Great Recession tells personal stories of economic hardship brought on by the recession.
The fact that The Huffington Post is among these pioneers in repurposing its content for e-books is especially significant for the organization’s reputation, Delaney told me. “It shows that Huffington Post is doing real reporting. People always say, ‘It’s aggregation and unpaid bloggers,’ but it’s not. It’s more than that.” -
"State Governor Jay Nixon recently signed Senate Bill 54, making it illegal for students and teachers to be friends online as of later this month. Now, a Missouri teachers group is fighting the state's new law that prohibits them from being Facebook friends with their students by filing a lawsuit. From the article: 'The Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA) filed a lawsuit on Friday, challenging a new law. MSTA is specifically asking the Circuit Court of Cole County to determine the constitutionality of the law’s social media portion.'"
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An inquiry by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary is examining "alleged corruption and abuse of power" in police relationships with the media, while Elizabeth Filkin, the former parliamentary commissioner for standards, intends to draw up a framework for how police officers handle their relationships with reporters.
The inquiries are both considering whether communication between police officers should be officially monitored and recorded by a press officer.
Three years ago, a case against Sally Murrer, a reporter on the Milton Keynes Citizen, and a former Thames Valley police detective Mark Kearney was thrown out. Kearney had been accused of leaking information to her.
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RT @saulcozens: OSS Sentiment Analysis front-end for R http://t.co/perC0IP – must read more /ht @monkchips @philsheard
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Photo: You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention? (via… http://t.co/7RunTCj
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One of the best features in ArtBabble is that each section (Series, Channel, Artist) has its own RSS feed, so you can subscribe to video content in a very granular way. It also features all of the usual social touches, such as ratings, comments and tag clouds. ArtBabble is an elegantly designed site with a lot of compelling content in it. Perhaps the biggest lesson here for other organizations is that the video content on ArtBabble comes from dozens of art museums, so it is varied and regularly updated. It's not always possible to collaborate with others on content, but for a social site it's always a plus.
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The first is a database of more than 1,100 defendants who have appeared in court charged with riot-related offences. The list, compiled with the assistance of the Ministry of Justice, consists of more than 70% of those who have appeared in magistrate and crown courts. Many will be given the opportunity to take part in the research study in the coming weeks. The second database contains 2.5m riot-related tweets. Executives at Twitter's headquarters in California authorised the collation of tweets, pooled from hashtags relating to the riots and their aftermath, so they could form part of the study. A spokeman for the company said: "Twitter provided publicly available information that is accessible to researchers and others via its API."
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“CMS – the software UX forgot” – Karen McGrane at Content Strategy Forum 2011: If you were an eCommerce operatio… http://t.co/k63jI8i
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If you were an eCommerce operation, you would be rigorously trying to remove the obstacles to conversion on the front-end of your website, because that makes you money. So if you you are a content creation business, why wouldn’t you apply the same methodology to your workflow, and eliminate the points of pain that introduce inefficiency in your business? Usability isn’t about fonts, she said, it is about workflow
We’ve done a poor job, she said, of convincing people of the real benefits of structured content over bespoke digital layout. She compared Condé Nast, who have tripled their workload by needing one print and two bespoke iPad layouts of every article, to NPR who have built an API that makes “Create once, publish everywhere” a reality. A graph she showed of the sales of Glamour suggested that investment in bespoke layouts was sometimes selling less than 3,000 copies of an app – a shockingly poor return on investment. -
National Readership statistics, based on a rolling programme of 36,000 interviews every year, add a lot more bells and whistles, including breakdowns between male and female readers. And if there's one area of readership that has come to define resilience and, in some cases, even growth, then it's the challenge of recruiting women.
Look at the Mail on Sunday's You magazine in the latest July 2010 to June 2011 release: 2,202,000 women against 1,561,000 men. These are vital counterweights to all that Premiership football, the preserve of young men, or family money pull-outs which men dominate 3:2. Look at the Sunday Telegraph's Stella, with 534,000 women to 323,000 men in a paper where men dominate by more than 50,000, or the Guardian Weekend, 623,000 women to 529,000 men. Look, for that matter, at Observer readership – 605,000 men and 535,000 women overall, but a far narrower 466,000 men against 460,000 women in magazine terms – and 544,000 women to 424,000 men on Food Monthly days. -
First and foremost, the concept of an “editor” at TechCrunch is essentially just a title and nothing more. Generally speaking, neither Mike nor Erick (TC’s two “co-editors”) are overlords that dictate what everyone else covers. With a few exceptions (mainly for newer writers), no one person even reads posts by any other author before they are posted. Traditional journalists may be appalled to learn this. But this is a big key of why TechCrunch kicks their ass in tech coverage. We’re fast and furious in ways they can’t be, because they’re adhering to the old rules. Are there benefits to those old rules? Sure. But in my opinion, the benefits of the way we work far outweighs the benefits of the way they work.
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Infographic: gathering data: a flow chart for data journalists http://t.co/hGoIFcr
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A daily chronicle of Internet,mobile and tablet publishingnews, information andopinion.
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Video: I wasted many hours playing this: The Boss (by UlvYngling) http://t.co/Tt1Muxv
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Nominet, the registrar that handles .uk domains, is moving ahead with proposed rules (PDF) that could allow law enforcement agencies to request a domain be shut down without a court order.The registrar launched the process in response to a request from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). Currently Nominet’s rules don’t allow for domains to be shut down for criminal reasons, though in the past it has blocked domains at the request of law enforcement agencies on the pretext that they provided false contact details.Limited applicationSuspension of a domain will not require a court order but should be limited to circumstances where necessary “to prevent serious and immediate consumer harm”, according to Nominet.
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Gerardo Buganza, the interior secretary for Veracruz state in Mexico, said it could very well be the “Twitter terrorism” caused by two people who allegedly spread false reports of gunmen attacking schools and kidnapping children. Those reports caused such panic when parents scrambled around the city to get to their children that there were dozens of car accidents and emergency phone lines were jammed.The two people, a private school teacher and a radio presenter, now face 30 years in prison for charges under terrorism laws.
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Local Government Lawyer: news, views, analysis, jobs and events covering legal practice in local government and the wider public sector.
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RT @LocGovLawyer When can an authority refuse under Environmental Information Regulations to disclose legal advice http://t.co/d8Kk1BA #eir
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RT @silviacobo: Google Kills Its Fast Flip News Reading Experiment #media http://j.mp/qDPbHk
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Data journalism bootcamp (SQL) with David Donald http://t.co/6DCkb0u
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I couldn’t contain myself (other more pressing things to do, but…), so I just took a quick time out and a coffee to put together a quick and dirty R function that will let me run queries over Google spreadsheet data sources and essentially treat them as database tables (e.g. Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database with the Google Visualisation API Query Language).
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Incredible situation where EU citizens are not allowed to know what position their governments are adopting re:… http://t.co/aSzTXXw
The EU is reforming its rules on access to documents and Access Info wanted to know what position each government was taking on the reform. We asked the Council of the EU on 3 December 2008, and it responded on 17 December. The Council granted Access Info partial access to the documents requested: we were provided with the summary of the discussions but without the names of the countries which had been for or against any particular amendment. -
The most satisfying part of this #datajournalism by @cityjournalism grad @joedyke is how transparent it is http://t.co/hnfcClD
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My belief is that the second chart is a more accurate comparison to the 90-9-1 rule since all users have to be doing some activity to account for the 100% of the sample. So based on the data in that chart, there are a few interesting things we can learn:
All but one online community had more Commenters than the 9% the rule suggests. So, people seem to be more open to editing and commenting on existing information.All sites were higher in Creators than the 1% the rule maintains. One as high as 17%! With more and more people getting comfortable with social networking sites, perhaps people are more comfortable in expressing their opinions.The averages for each area are far higher than the rule suggests. (Well, other than Lurkers, but that is a good thing!)So, maybe we don’t need to be so dire about how many people engage in your online community. Based on this data I would suggest a new rule (with a little rounding):
The 70-20-10 Rule of Community Participation
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