The Uncharted Backwaters of the Unfashionable

links for 2008-11-17

• TypePad - Why Blog - Journalist Bailout Program
  This is great. Journalism independent of corporations. I have to say I'm intriuged.

links for 2008-08-17

• Get Started With Django - Webmonkey
  Another Django tutorial.
  (tags: django)

Eight Ways to Get Interactive Data on Your Site

One of the most confounding things about the permeance of Caspio is how totally unnecessary it is. Many news sites opt to shell out $8/database/mo. to this service, ignoring a myriad of better, cheaper alternatives.

Part of the rush may be attributable to the, ah, “me too” mentality of the industry. Part of it, I assume, stems from ignorance.

There’s not much mere mortals can do about tweens at the mall. But I can do something about ignorance. And so, without further ado, I introduce the Abolutely Incomplete, Horribly Biased List of Ways to get Interactive Data on Your Website. The entries are listed from easiest to implement to most complex, so figure out where your organization can make hay and do so. Please.

For the record, the example pages I made myself are quick and ugly. I’ve left in obvious errors and haven’t optimized anything. Almost all of them are capable of doing much more, and there is lots of documentation and help available on all of the options listed.

Abolutely Incomplete, Horribly Biased List of Ways to get Interactive Data on Your Website

Zero programming solutions:

1. Zoho Creator. Zoho has been impressing me since Day 1. If Caspio represents the closest you’ve come to programming, you’ll be right at home with these guys. They provide a friendly GUI that allows for embedding into any webpage. They offer a wide range of tools to make your data useful outside of the constraints of the database. An API and coherent documentation of their weird scripting language (Deluge) gives these guys a clear leg up.

• Drawbacks. Cost, first and foremost. But Zoho’s pricing, IMHO, is more fair than Caspio’s bizarre cost-per-”datapage” method, instead charging for the amount of data you store. Like most of these options, Zoho also doesn’t reload the page every time the user performs a search. That’s better for the user, but if your expect the majority of your data traffic to come from repeat searches, it may result in a page view nosedive.
• Example: Missouri State University salaries.

2. Google Spreadsheets. You knew they had to make an appearance, right? Google Spreadsheets allows for embedding a bunch of data-backed “Gadgets” into a site. One option is a simple table, complete with filtering and sorts right of the bat.They also offer other basics and not-so-basics, like maps, org charts, timelines, etc.

• Drawbacks. It’s a table. A dang table. And that is all it’s going to be. The charts offer other opportunities, but this isn’t the sort of stuff you’re going to write home about.
• Example: State populations.

3. Dabble DB. Their video can explain it better than me. It’s fast fast fast.

• Drawbacks. Pricing scheme is still at work here. Again, it’s a cheaper, more reasonable setup than the datapage method. I have no experience with this system, but the web is mostly devoid of complaints. Tried it yourself? Tell me how it went.
• Example: Couldn’t find one, but they say it’s embeddable. Watch the video.

4. IBM’s ManyEyes. This is kind of a departure, since they do NOT offer your basic embeddable-search-and-report table as an option. They do, however, offer a pretty extensive collection of data visualizations, including everything from pie charts to cool New York Times-like block histograms and wordles.

• Drawbacks. One big pageview the whole time it’s loaded. Great if your shop is forward-thinking enough to charge advertisers by time-spent.
• Example: Click the links above!

Psuedo-programming solutions:

5. jQuery. According to Wikipedia, jQuery is a “lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML.” It’s also the object of my undying affection. Javascript is one of the things that makes Web 2.0 so neat, allowing for all sorts of rich, interactive changes to a page (think Gmail, many facebook applications, etc.) It’s also hard for me to wrap my head around. No more. A variety of plugins abstract what used to be a time consuming job. FlexiGrid and Tablesorter make HTML tables interactive with little code. Once TableSorter is installed, for instance, you just drop a five-word javascript function at the top of a page, and the plugin takes over from there. Easy peasy, and good looking, too!

• Drawbacks. Absolutely none. Out-of-the-box, some limitations may be that the table has to exist on the page, which would probably drag out load times. But jQuery is an open-source solution, which means if there are drawbacks (like the no-page-view-for-you syndrome) someone, somewhere, can edit them out (or in, as the case may be). Ludicrously apropos.
• Example. The flexigrid link above, Example #3, shows what jQuery is capable of.

6. The Simile Project’s Exhibit. I’ve toyed around with Simile’s TimeLine offering before, but Exhibit was new to me. This is another great example of abstracting wonky code, leaving just the useful stuff. It only takes a handful of files to get up and running, and most of the work has been done for you. Because data is in one file, and formatting in other, Exhibit makes it possible to do just about any visualization of your records. Very slick.

Note: For me, the hardest part was understanding their data format. Luckily, they provide a tutorial for another tool, Babel, that takes care of even that.

• Drawbacks. Quickly slows down as the record count mounts.
• Example. How about a whole page?

And I’d be silly to leave out the heavy hitters. Actual Programming:

7. PHP (or any other scripting language). There are tons and tons and tons of templates that claim to be able to build searchable, sortable tables and web forms with ease. But honestly, they may be over complicating matters. PHP and MySQL go together like milk and cookies, and some good people have made local installation a snap. Why not just go pick it up yourself with one of the myriad of tutorials out there?

• Drawbacks. PHP is plenty powerful. But the learning curve is the same learning curve any non-programmer faces when they first start dabbling with this stuff. I should know — I still barely understand what an include does. That said, there are some great “Getting started” resources out there, and most every community college offers an intro weekend course. Journalists are compulsive learners; put that compulsion to good use.
• Example. Name something cool on the Internet. There’s a good chance it’s done in PHP. TechCrunch, Facebook, feedburner, iStockphoto, Vimeo, YouSendit… the list goes on and on. As for news databases using it, check out the Arizona Republic’s ASU Salaries and dog registration databases.

8. Django/Rails. My “sort by difficulty asc” might have these and PHP flipped, depending on your learning style. If you need to know how things work through and through, PHP/MySQL is your fit. If you just want to get things done, a framework is what you need. These guys are all the buzz in the news industry now for good reason. They allow for rapid development, which works well with the no-holds-barred news cycle. My own experience with them is limited to desktop installations and mucking around, but I’ve been plenty impressed. Friendly script repositories make it easy to stand on the shoulders of giants, further streamlining the process.

• Drawbacks. Like PHP, this is real, live programming. And that has its own initial complications. But fear not! For Django/Python, there’s a handy guide called How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, available for free online in its entirety. I’m sure there’s a Ruby equivalent, too. Since they aren’t nearly as omnipresent as PHP, so finding local classes is probably going to be tough. IRE’s newest boot camp fills that void.

As the title implies this is by no means a complete list. I’ve missed a lot, and probably done an injustice to a few more. If you have anything you’d like to add, drop me a note and I’ll add it to the list or leave it in the comments.

links for 2008-08-06 [delicious.com]

• iPhone SDK Tutorial: Build a Simple RSS reader for the iPhone | The Apple Blog
  (tags: iPhone)
• Lobdell's OC: 42 things I know
  More on this point: If I were publisher, I'd have a clear mission statement for The Times' editorial department (if you ask 100 journalists at The Times about their mission, you'd likely get 100 different answers).

Speaking of, how does your in-house polling stack up?

Today Salon published a piece about a flawed polling procedure ad what it could mean for the November election. Because the majority of pollsters  only place calls to landline phones, the article argues, key demographics are being under-represented:

“…(a) sample that’s predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners (Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a Starbucks Obama thing to me) — and, for good measure, includes a higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population does.”

Seems like a pretty boneheaded move. But I have a hunch many newspaper companies are making the same mistake, skewing our research and leading us to make poorly-informed decisions based on false majorities.

I’d be curious to hear what people learn if they actually go take a look at internal research. I’ll kick it off: Gannett uses landline phones only for the massive readership surveys conducted for all papers.

Why I think the generational nonsense is so much BS

Ryan Sholin, Steve Yelvington, Shannan Bowen and others have been weighing in on the journalism generation gap. Got me to thinking of exceptions.

Tom Warhover, Executive Editor for Innovation (or something like that) at the Missourian. 50ish. Gets it. Wants more multimedia. Wants more data. Wants to provide it in ways that aren’t measured in inches. Gets excited by the new and wants to try it out.

He has the job of teaching the majority of students at the Missouri School of Journalism (and I’m sure are prevalent in other, similar school around the country), who, you know, want to write for a living and can’t see why they need to do all this other stuff. Oh. My. God. To tell you the times I heard these people prater on about their want to write, and travel, and… that’s about the brunt of it. Take photos? Video? Out of the question. The typical reaction to industry layoffs could be summarized as “More jobs for us!” Er, no. Not you, oh clueless one. Can they ever get it? Sure, but being young is by no means the equivalent of being clued in.

Don Wyatt, Executive Editor at the Springfield News-Leader. Gets it in a big way. Instituted online goals for reporters… reporters! Asked me about the feasibility of providing cell phone interfaces to data. Where’d that come from? His subscription to ESPN mobile, of course. (Are we supposed to acknowledge that 50-ish folks have cell phones?) Made sure to work recorders for every reporter into a tight budget, and even instituted some in-house training. Yeah, he’s 50ish, too.

To cast this split as generational is to ignore key truths. It creates a false Us v. Them along age lines that just doesn’t exist.

You can start cooking up ideas no matter your age. You can fail to see their use no matter your youth. There is no easy litmus test, the proof is in the pudding.

</Soapbox>

The “fair use” line in the sand

The thesis of that last post would probably be something like, “Free, useful APIs are routinely overlooked in many newsroom, a policy that should be re-explored.”

APIs offer free content. They’re typically intriguing. And they’re built to be torn apart and rebuilt as you see fit. The negative image of them might be the new thorn in my ass: Sports stats.

“Stats,” in this instance, is all-encompassing. It’s the stats that make up the back of the baseball card. It’s W-L record. It’s divisional standings and game scores, league leaders and historical info. It’s ridiculously compelling, and with so many sources, they’re easy to get and can be rebuilt as you see fit.

The problem is that this time, you’re not getting permission. And that’s a whole new can of worms.
The dichotomy comes into play when we start flipping through the print edition. Vendors typically supply the staples, things like box scores and standings. But the minute we start rolling out aggregated statistics not collected by the vendor, we’re delving into new territory. And often the only way we can do that is by giving credit to the source we stole them from, typically ESPN, FOXsports, cbssportsline, or some other online wealth of sports knowledge. We could even go to the league homepage, where solid, reputable stats are aggregated.

But for some reason, we scoff when the same sourcing must be used for an online application. And that’s a shame. Maybe it’s a residual effect of growing up listening to some version of this before every game:

“This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated, without express written consent.”

Does anyone have examples of getting around this Catch 22? It’s like we’re going thirsty in the ocean — surrounded by sports stats, unable to use any. Sports information seems like it should be the holy grail of online journalism, a creative, telling visualization would almost certainly draw repeat traffic. It’s continually updated information, it’s highly relevant to a specific demographic. If you don’t believe me, try starting a fantasy football league in your office and start batting away the takers.

The possibilities with this stuff are numerous. But our hands are tied.

Where does fair use begin and end? What’s the public domain, what’s proprietary, and is there any middle ground?

Our pride could impede progress

I get a little silly over a good web service. If there’s an API involved, all the better. Programmableweb has a prominent place in my feed reader, and I try to keep fairly abreast of what the rest of the online world is cooking up and how best I can use it.

What worries me is how little of it is allowed to translate into my industry. Even more depressing, I think, is the reasons so little of it is allowed to take root. I think they can be boiled down to a simple character flaw: Pride.

Maybe the best example of this is Yelp. Yelp is a great site, which, at its least advanced, is basically a phone book.  But on top of that, it adds a layer of user reviews and social networking, powerful features that have made it the peer-review go-to source on the Internet.

About a year ago Yelp released an API that allows pretty much anyone to bring the site’s reviews, ratings, neighborhood searches, etc. into any other Website.

To me, that’s an application that begs for a newspaper.com to take advantage:

• Few news orgs have truly worthwhile dining/entertainment/calendar sites.
• Almost all, though, make an attempt.
• With resources being what they are, it seems like a natural fit to take what Yelp is offering and use it to cut down the jobs to be done. The cost is zero, and meanwhile, you’ve added a great feature to your site.

In return for having access to Yelp’s data, all a news site has to do is slap a Yelp logo on the results.

And that, unfortunately, is where the wheels fall off the bus. I’ve heard publishers say things like, “If we do this, we’ll legitimize Yelp. And they are the competition.”

Maybe it’s a sign of ow far to the Dark Side I’ve come, but I don’t see it that way. In fact, I see it much the opposite. showing that we are willing to use free data from a “competitor,” when offered, will make us seem that much closer to getting this whole Web thing. Using their data, I think, legitimizes us to the early adopters that have already embraced the useful tool.

To be sure, Yelp is probably the most controversial example of this. Other services based more on functionality than content would probably be an easier sell within a newsroom. But even then, I don’t think we’re taking advantage as much as we could and should.

Take Twitter. Totally, 100 percent free. Great functionality, out-of-the-box SMS support, solid and growing base of users, etc. Those are things any news site could use. Slowly, I think, we’re coming around to that. We tweet blog posts. But there has to be more there, more that’s available to us because, again, they’ve given us the keys.

It seems like a simple script could turn the Twitter API into something much like OhDontforget. Does that have a place on your newspaper’s entertainment site?

There’s another argument to be made here, but I’m late for work. More to come.

If you’re curious

Lots of work done over the past week:

- I did float my own revenue project, and it got a favorable reception. Hopefully I’ll be able to unveil the plan sometime over the next few months, lest anyone think I’m just talking here.

- Rolled out a Suns Draft History in record time. I’d been working on a bell and whistle-laden version to compare NFL draftees from ASU and U of A. It was slated for August. Then someone said, “Hey there’s an NBA draft coming up, can we do something for that?” Two days later, voila.

- Wrestled with Caspio. Tried to make a Google map using instructions on site. Here’s what I got:

-Threw up some working Caspio nonsense, including University salaries, Gas pump violations (again. It’s always in season!) and Executive Pay. Keep an eye on those, as existing non-Caspio templates will be replacing many of them as they are approved.

My conclusion on Caspio is that they do one thing very well. But other, cheaper alternatives do it just as well. Further, to learn to make it do otherwise seems pointless, especially seeing as we would be paying for the luxury of learning to hack it.

And this is just an outright lie. It’s not even as powerful as old faithful, MySQL and PHP.

UPDATE: Wouldja lookit that! ASU salares is already free of its Caspio chains!

Developing a model that works

The news industry is broken. A business model based on 100+ years of being the only game in town has left us slow on the draw, slow to compromise and scared to try anything new without knowing exactly what the results will be.

But we’re merely slow and scared. Not incapable. Lately I’ve seen more ideas bring thrown around and tried out. I hope this becomes a trend.

Last week I met with a couple Marketing/advertising poobahs from the Des Moines Register. They talked, believe it or not, about James Wilkerson — a newsroom journalist — and the work he did to webify their garage sale listings. It’s a pretty cool application that allows people to search for sales in a certain location or with certain keywords and print out matches to a map.

I think it exemplifies an idea covered here about how the Internet might make money. The trick?

“The way for Main Street Web ventures to make money is to help other people to make money.”

I like that idea, and think our organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage. The argument is that it’s not enough to simply deliver an audience to your advertisers in hopes they make a purchase, but to cut out that middle process entirely. Sell sales to your advertisers. Instead of something passive like CPM, we could turn it into something far more tangible… CP$?

That idea makes a lot of sense to me. It’s doable. It makes advertising with us valuable in a far more tangible way that a Google ad, TV or radio spot. But it’s far from the only idea out there. And I may be missing that’s a better fit.

With that in mind, I present the mechanisms of Time’s 50 best websites 2008 and the way they make money, thieved fiendishly from Valleywag.com.

• GasBuddy — Google AdSense and a display ad.
• Howcast — Google Adsense.
• iliketotallyloveit.com — Google Adsense
• Omiru — affiliate accounts with vendors such as Amazon and Bluefly
• PsychCentral — Google Adsense.
• TripKick — ValueClick banner ads.
• Wikitravel — Google Adsense.
• Yahoo! Answers — Yahoo display and search results.
• Zeer — Google AdSense
• Afrigadget.com — run by volunteers.
• AskMen.com — Google search ads and Google AdSense.
• ConcreteLoop.com — Google AdSense
• Health.com — Display advertising, served by DoubleClick, sold by Health magazine.
• PopSugar — display ads, sold internally.
• ProFootballTalk — Sponsored by Sprint, Valueclick display ads.
• Rate My Professors — display advertising and Yahoo contextual ads.
• Serious Eats — diplay advertising from BlogAds.com network.
• The Nest — display ads, sold internally.
• Geni — ad-free.
• MapJack — Google AdSense.
• Mint — affiliate marketing.
• NexTag — sells its own search ads.
• Nymbler — Google AdSense.
• Picnik — sells premium accounts
• Pixelgirl Presents — Volunteer run.
• SearchMe — Doesn’t make money.
• TinyUrl.com — Google AdSense.
• Mobaganda.com — Doesn’t make money.
• Urban Dictionary — Microsoft display ads, Google AdSense, Amazon Affiliate.
• Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project — Volunteer-run.
• Hulu — Pre-roll video ads.
• Imeem — affiliate sales, in-house ad sales and video ad networks.
• Kongregate — Google AdSense display ads.
• ffffound.com — Display ads from The Deck ad network.
• Lookybook — Affiliate links to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.
• Someecards — Google AdSense.
• WebSudoku — Google AdSense.
• Penny Arcade — Google AdSense display ads, internal ad sales.
• Gaia Online — Sells virtual goods.
• CarbonRally — Volunteer run.
• COLOURlovers — Display ads from The Deck ad network.
• Apartment Therapy — Glam ad network, AdBrite text ads.
• Digital Vaults — Volunteer run.
• Free Rice — Volunteer run.
• HypeBeast — Google AdSense display ads.
• Kiva.org — Volunteer run.
• Net-a-Porter — Sells clothes.
• Open Source Food — Google AdSense.
• Petfinder — Sponorships, display ads, sold internally.
• WikiSky — Donations.

I’ll also tack on one more link with some ideas.

FINALLY, SOME CONTEXT:

Lest anyone think otherwise, I do commit journalism for a living. I hope to continue doing so well into senility. The recent rash of business-related posts (from a clueless dude whose only business-sense comes from his small-business owner mommy and investor daddy, no less) is because I’ve decided things like this have very little to do with bad work in the newsroom. I don’t think doing more video will save the industry. I don’t think Twittering beat reporters are the magic bullet. The product isn’t broken, just dated, and it’s changing fast.

It’s the business side that’s utterly damaged, and I don’t see enough — ANY — discussion, navel-gazing, twitter updates or general rowdiness because of it. These past few posts have been my attempts to change that. I’ve been dropping my bucket of substandard water into the ocean in hopes others will do the same.