From Zooming In on Online Video, a toolbox of advice to “help newspapers of any size develop profitable video applications”.

It seems Seesmic is already fulfilling its promise as ‘the next Twitter’ insofar as it’s being used for previously unforeseen purposes. Last night I was able to post a video comment on a blog post thanks to a teamup between Seesmic and the comment tracking service Disqus.

There is a clear distinction to be made here between the benefits for commenters and those for readers. Some readers will not be willing to play a 30-second video that they could have scan-read in a fraction of the time. Or will feel frustrated if they do play something that turns out to be pointless waffle. But others will respond to the personal relationship. As Russell Cooper commented: “I imagine that it would create “closer”, more personal networks than text comments alone.”

Generally, you might expect people will only click on video comments by people they recognise or that have generated large responses.

For commenters the benefits are more obvious. Some will be more comfortable with posting their comment by video – I, for instance, find it physically easier. CostPerNews (who broke the story) point out that “some people prefer firing off a quick video rather than typing out a response. While I’d rather type out comments on most blogs, I do see tremendous value in encouraging people to participate in whatever way they feel comfortable.”

Then there are the visual benefits. Robert Scoble uses the examples:

“When we have something visual to talk about. Want to see what my kitchen looks like? Want to learn how to cook a meal? Want to see the injury my kid sustained and you’re a remote doctor? Heck, wanna see what my kid looks like right now? How about can I show you my new cell phone’s UI?

“Want to buy my car based on only my text? How about that piece of art hanging on my wall? Etc.”

As Howard Lindzon says: “For us stock guys, I think it’s a great idea for referencing charts and arguing. At the very least it’s cool and we need to work out the kinks for the good of mankind.”

The biggest problem, for me, is Disqus. Blogan makes a series of points about its limitations:

“Disqus doesn’t yet support any meaningful export of the comments out of Disqus and back into the WordPress database. The longer you stay with Disqus, the more you’re held hostage to the commenting system.”

Gary Denness adds: “Who owns these comments? Where do the search engines direct comment derived traffic to – Disqus or the blog? What happens to the comments if Disqus goes under?”

To see it in action, Robert Scoble has a list of sites that have the Disqus/Seesmic commenting feature turned on:

• http://loiclemeur.com/
  
• http://louisgray.com/
• http://shegeeks.net/
• http://winextra.com/
• http://avc.blogs.com/
• http://howardlindzon.com/
• http://scripting.com

If you want to install the facility yourself You can find the WordPress plugin for Seesmic video comments here. There’s also talk of equivalents for MoveableType and Typepad.

See this video and respond on Seesmic

I’ve recently been playing with Seesmic once again, having briefly dabbled with an alpha invite a few months ago and stupidly written it off as a vague video blogging platform.

It isn’t.

It’s social.

And I think that’s very important.

Seesmic is, for me, a symptom of how media is changing. It is a symptom of how video has become as inexpensive and disposable as email. It is a symptom of a generation of people who are completely comfortable with visual media, and how they are rewriting that grammar.

It is also a new and important part of the personal distributed media ecosystem that we are gathering around us, and which stretches from a person’s Facebook profile to their Twitter account, their blog, and Flickr and YouTube accounts. Just as not everyone is on Flickr, not everyone will end up on Seesmic, but many will, and you’ll need to know how to talk to them.

But don’t mistake Seesmic for another YouTube. Seesmic is to YouTube what Twitter is to blogging. Key to this is the fact that Seesmic works with your Twitter account – so that new Seesmic posts are cross-posted on Twitter, and video replies are even cross-posted @ the other person’s name (allowing you to discover them on Twitter). And I wouldn’t be surprised to see it integrated with other social media platforms in the future.

Finally, it is an expression of the intimate, personal nature of web video, and how that is a world apart from the impersonal, broadcast nature of television. If you’re involved in communicating the news in any way, you need to learn the language of web video, and Seesmic provides a perfect space to do so.

And it’s for all of these reasons that journalists should try it out.

But this recommendation comes with a number of caveats:

• Firstly, Seesmic is very much in the early adopter phase. For this reason it is good for social networking if you’re in the technology field, but not great if you want opinions or feedback from anyone else, so don’t expect amazing results, and I wouldn’t recommend spending huge amounts of time on it. But the user base will change, and being there now will make a difference as it grows. Just ask people who’ve been blogging or twittering for longer.
• Secondly, being video, Seesmic as a whole is not searchable – and the user search is pretty poor, as it only searches usernames and not profiles (I’m onlinejournalist, by the way). Phil Campbell has created this website which allows you to search titles and authors. This means you can’t scan-read it, it means search engines will not index it as well as text, and it means accessibility issues. But video search is improving all the time, so again expect this to change.
• Thirdly, Seesmic currently lacks the sort of support enjoyed by bigger players such as YouTube. So whereas WordPress.com-hosted blogs will allow you to embed YouTube video, most WordPress bloggers will not be able to embed Seesmic video (there is, however, a plugin for WordPress.org hosted blogs). It’s for this reason that I’ve recorded my video blog about Seesmic on… YouTube. Ouch.
• Likewise, your video is normally recorded straight to Seesmic, so you have no backup copy and no way of getting one unless you use an FLV ripper.
• And the site doesn’t appear to tell you how many views you’ve had, which isn’t great for persuading people that this is a valuable way of, for example, distributing news. And it doesn’t allow for responses from non-Seesmic users, which reduces its interactivity (although you could tweet the person that’s not intuitive).
• Finally, it’s worth noting the usual blurring of public-private boundaries. Journalists using material on Seesmic should bear in mind the lessons of Virginia Tech etc. – just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s yours.

These are still early days, though. Crunchbase’s entry on Seesmic promises that:

“In the future, seesmic users will be able to record skype conversations, video and chat. seesmic will incorporate RSS feeds for individual users similar to Facebook’s newsfeed. Finally, [founder] Lemur sees seesmic partially becoming a crowdsourced Online TV with the most popular producers receiving revenue share.”

What do you think? Do you see other potential? Have you found it useful yourself? Come on, give us a comment. (or respond on Seesmic)

UPDATE: Alison Gow posted a video response on Seesmic, making the excellent point that Seesmic allows for a better interview experience – using the analogy of how face-to-face interviews are always better than telephone interviews. It’s a great point. She also suggests that it might work well for debates and conversation alongside news articles and issues.

The great thing about Seesmic is the way it breaks down barriers – people seem to feel more comfortable and confident, somehow, sending a stranger a video reply based on their video post than they would sending an @reply in Twitter, I would say because of the implicit intimacy of web video.

UPDATE 2: If you’d like to try out Seesmic – just add @getseesmic as a friend in Twitter and DM it with the word “get” to receive an invitation.

Dennis’s online-only (and hugely successful) magazine Monkey is set to launch another website next Wednesday (at MonkeyMag.co.uk) with a focus on the social. It’s “for readers”, you see.

A press release says the website

“will be centred around the same type of great video found in Monkey, while also encouraging readers to interact with the site by posting their own ratings and exchanging comments on the clips. The website will also offer daily content not found in the mag, competitions and exclusive chances to vote for what you want to see featured in upcoming issues.”

Richard Downey, Publisher of Monkey is quoted as saying:

“The launch of the Monkey website is an integral part of growing the Monkey brand. We want the website to really add value to the reader’s ‘Monkey’ experience, hosting fresh content and providing a way for readers to share their own comments, and ratings. Monkey is all about interaction and this site is a really important part of that. It will be an extension to the weekly magazine, keeping the conversation going with our readers between each issue.”

What’s weird about this is that Monkey already is a website – and yet Downey talks as if it is a print product. In many ways it is: the experience is very much like those PDF or Flash magazines and newspapers, complete with animated turning pages (in fact, you might say it is an application rather than a website, which is probably why it’s easier to launch a completely new site than adapt the magazine).

Where Monkey has been successful (it launched in November 2006 and has recorded three successive rises in unique users since launch, the latest at 271,667) is its integration of video and links to elsewhere on the Web – and the fact that its content and audience naturally lends itself to those (unlike the almost identical and unsuccessful Jellyfish).

So why shunt your readers off to another website “just for them”? Who’s the online magazine for? (Thinking about this I realise the new site will probably ‘contain’ the magazine in the same way the URL currently does. Not ideal, but not a ghetto either)

Why only publish once a week when you’re not subject to printing and distribution constraints – and then create another space for conversation “between each issue”?

Why can’t they have that conversation on the online magazine?

As long as the money continues to roll in, I suppose there’s no need to ask.

I had an email recently from the Editor of NME.com, David Moynihan, about the News Diamond in practice. I thought it was worth reprinting in full:

“You describe much of what I do for a living: I am the Editor of NME.com and work in a buzzing cross-platform environment that mirrors your theories. Now that the dust is starting to settle a bit more in digital publishing, publishers are really taking notice of websites and web staff in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

“The challenge was always convincing paper staff that we were colleagues not rivals, here to compliment and expand upon their work, rather than cannibalise or undermine it. For the first time, in 2007/08 I have print staff coming and asking me about how they can get more involved with web publishing and asking what they need to know or do. People are really starting to wake up to the exciting future of digital publishing – right across organisations like IPC (or Emap, where I was Editor of FHM.com), from the board to the staff writer. That said, as a web editor I find that the change in processes, skill sets and attitude is still much too slow. The theories abound, but the practice is much more sluggish!

“Your news diamond was fascinating as it fits closely with what we do.

“An example: The Raconteurs (Jack White of the White Stripes ‘other’ band) release a new album today, in an unusual manner. They have side-stepped the usual pormotional and marketing moves and ruch-released the album with no warning, and therefore no reviews. It almost makes journalism redundant. Fan can simply listen to the album online at legal Mp3 download sites – why do they need NME?

“Except they do, it turns out. To mark the release of the album we have done all of the following on NME.com and the traffic speaks volumes about users’ needs:

1. Daily news stories in the run up to the release, covering a number of angles from album artwork, to release details to lyrics.
2. A Photo Gallery of the band to mark the release.
3. An instant review online, written by our writers in ‘blog’ format during their first listen. The full in-depth review and a feature about the unusual method of release will be in (yep, you guessed it) NME magazine, out this week.
4. Updated our Artist page nme.com/artists/the-raconteurs.
5. Streamed the album online with our radio media player.
6. Video to go online as soon as it’s released”

Flickr has announced it will now be hosting video – with a maximum length of 90 seconds. The idea is that these are “long photos”, “capturing slices of life to share”

I’m not sure what the implications are for journalism or journalists (note the distinction). Could we see a July 7 moment, but with short video? Will it be easier for users to upload video to Flickr from their mobiles than it is to upload to YouTube? Can we expect better composed video on Flickr because it comes from a community of photographers? (If that matters to you)

I don’t know, which is why I’m calling for your comments and thoughts on this.

Read what the Twittersphere is saying about the change here

Read more OJB posts about Flickr

A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

From a lecture to a conversation

Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with…

The rise of the amateur

The blogs of September 11; the camcorder images from the Asian tsunami; the mobile phone images of July 7; the Facebook pages of Virginia Tech. If you needed to read about any of these major events, you could do so – if you wished – without opening a newspaper or watching TV.

The spread of cheap camcorders and video- and photo-enabled mobile phones, coupled with blogs and the viral distribution of the internet made publishers realise they were not only competing with each other, but with the readers themselves. And when a big story broke in public, they needed to be in a position to harvest what became known as “user generated content”. Thankfully the NUJ’s suggestion of “witness contributions” didn’t catch on…

Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now

If a newspaper didn’t reach a particular newsagent, or viewers in the Cumbria region were experiencing difficulties, that simply wasn’t a journalist’s problem. Online, however, distribution has become part of a journalist’s job description, whether they realise it or not.

From your Facebook profile to the way you respond to comments on your blog, a journalist’s activity online has formed a key element in any news organisation’s distribution (although few have yet realised this). Meanwhile, newspaper webpages have come out in a rash of ‘Digg/Blog this’ buttons, and Facebook applications from the likes of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have demonstrated how important it’s become for newspapers to be where the reader is, rather than the other way around.

Just a click away

Amidst all the Web 2.0 hype it’s easy to forget the fundamental characteristic of news in the online era: everything is connected; and the reader is only a click or a search away from something else. This has created major opportunities and challenges for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists can now link to full documents, previous reports, and unedited material. On the other, so can the readers. Material culled from wire copy is more easily spotted; and, as Dan Rather discovered, holes in your story can be quickly highlighted.

And while doorstepping used to be between you and the Dear Departed’s family, its digital equivalent is so much more public. The game has been raised – but have news organisations responded?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader – and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.

For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper – or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?

Mapping

2007 saw some real experimentation with mapping in UK newspapers: the Manchester Evening News mapped fatal shootings in Manchester, the Grantham Journal tracked a “killer heron” and the Lancashire Evening Post mapped roadworks and speed cameras. The Shropshire Star used it to map fuel prices.

But 2008 should mark the year mapping and geotagging gets serious. Leading the pack are Archant, with their much-awaited geotag-based website relaunches. Journalists, says Web Editor James Goffin, can now draw on a map when they submit a story, or supply postcodes. He argues it will “make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.” The Telegraph launched the first stage of their dynamic Flash-based political map of Britain, while the BBC are using similar technologies for their proposed local website plans, which looks likely to further increase the pressures on regional publishers.

Hyperlocal, international

The internet has released news organisations from the limitations of physical distribution and broadcast – to the extent that news organisations have seen a new market for their old print products.

The Guardian, emboldened by statistics about website visitors, took its step across the Atlantic in 2003; The Times followed in 2006, and the BBC announced plans to sell advertising on its international site last year. And figures released last month showed visitors from outside the UK outnumbering the domestic audience for the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail.

Conversely, “hyperlocal” has entered the nomenclature of the news executive. Trinity Mirror’s Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news led to print equivalents, and likely extension to the group’s other newspapers.

Databases

The biggest untapped potential in journalism online is that of databases. So far we’ve seen some impressive demonstrations: ChicagoCrime.org famously drew information from a crime database onto a map of the area – and was followed by similar efforts at the LA Times and Washington Post (who added house sales and schools); The Herald Tribune, meanwhile, used databases in their coverage of how complaints against teachers were handled - readers could drill down to data in a specific school.

In the UK it’s The Telegraph leading the way, with football coverage that pulls up player statistics to rival ProZone, an A levels results map, and a recently unveiled political map that presents information on how local services ratings have improved or declined. Developments such as these have generated debate about whether journalists should be taught how to program. The conclusion seemed to be that it was easier to teach programmers how to do journalism.

Measurability

Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Multimedia

If the pen is mightier than the sword, what does that make a microphone, camcorder and laptop… in a wifi hotspot? Newspapers dabbled in podcasts in 2005, before really mucking in 2006 when video took off and print journalists started worrying for the first time about tea staining their teeth. Now print journalists are learning about white balance, and broadcast journalists are learning about local news. And everyone is waiting for an almighty fight.

In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

The adaptable journalist

A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:

• (Hyper)Text
• Audio
• Video
• Still images
• Audio slideshows
• Animation
• Flash interactivity
• Database-driven elements
• Blogs
• Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
• Community elements – forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
• Live chats
• Mapping
• Mashups

This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:

• ‘That story would have real impact on video’;
• or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
• or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
• or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’.

The person who eventually films the video, or creates the Flash element, may be someone else, particularly as news organisations begin to understand that no single journalist can do all these things, or identify individuals and teams who produce the podcast, the video packages, or the Flash interactives, or who manage the community elements. But the ideas should come from every member connected with the online newsroom. And ideas always come first.

Skills come after, but the online journalist should have laid some foundations in a range of areas.

• They should be able to write well, succinctly, and quickly – for more than one medium, if possible.
• They should be able to find accurate information and reliable sources online and offline, quickly, and they should have a collection of RSS feeds keeping them in touch with their area.
• They should understand some basic principles of video, audio and still images.
• They should have played with editing software.
• They should have played around with examples of journalistic interactivity and web-based databases.
• They should understand online communities like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or their own sector of the blogosphere – if possible, they should already be a productive member of one.

Some of these foundations only require some very light background reading, some just involve exploring good examples of online journalism, or tinkering on free software. The one area that does need time, attention and practice, are the core skills of newsgathering and news production.

The adaptable content

It is not only the journalist who benefits from being adaptable. In the new media age, information needs to be adaptable as well.

Adrian Holovaty, in his article ‘A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change‘, points out that much of what journalists gather is structured information that has the potential to be repurposed by either the reader or another journalist – his examples include:

• “An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.
• “A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.
• “A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.
• “A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.
• “Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.
• “Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.”

Once this information is made adaptable – for example, by inclusion in a database – it can be presented in a range of ways. A level results can be plotted on a map, for instance; sports stats can be displayed graphically; news can be displayed specific to the reader’s own location; or journalists can check to see how many crimes have occurred around a certain location.

The first way an online journalist should be making information adaptable is to tag it. For newsgathering, a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us is essential. These allow you to ‘bookmark’ any online source with a series of tags, enabling them to be quickly found when required (and that’s not touching on the ’social’ element, which allows you to see who else has bookmarked the same page, and what else they are bookmarking, which can lead to some useful leads).

For news publishing, blogging services like WordPress and Blogger have a tagging (or ‘keywords’) facility built in; so do photo-sharing site Flickr and video-sharing site YouTube. And newspapers like the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo are starting to incorporate tagging in all stories.

You might also be working with a content management system that allows metatagging or mapping. These amount to the same thing: information about the story.

Beyond tagging there are a number of other ways to make information adaptable. Databases and spreadsheets are obvious ways. Managing the information on a big story using a spreadsheet can prove useful if you need to make that information public at some point, or need to hand it over to someone else who can work magic with it. In general, it’s just good practice that makes your life easier.

RSS is another way to make information adaptable. If your stories, a subject section or a search is available as a feed others can more easily combine it with other tools (e.g. mapping), aggregate it, filter it and do other things with it.

And of course the simple act of making your content downloadable or embeddable makes it more adaptable. The choice to stream video, for example, prevents users from doing potentially interesting things with it. Allowing a full download – even in different formats – opens up potential for all sorts of creativity from users and other journalists. All of which, ultimately, should drive more people back to your site and your stories.

The team at JournalismEnterprise.com have been busy – here are some of the most recent reviews:

Pownce: a Twitter with bells on.

EveryBlock: Adrian Holovaty’s much-anticipated news mapping service gets a five-star rating.

Newstin: multilingual news search: “Its taxonomy engine goes way beyond the usual keyword and tags approach. For each article, Newstin’s engine is able to tell you what it’s about, who was mentioned, where it happened, etc.“

Gnooze:  satirical daily news show for YouTube browsers.

Skewz: “a political Digg that goes both ways. You can submit any news story and the community can vote on how “liberal” or “conservative” the story is.”

As always, the review is only the start of the process: please add your own comments on the sites. And if you want to review sites for JournalismEnterprise.com, what’s stopping you? Send an email to info@journalismenterprise.com to join.

Last week I interviewed Mike Hill, Deputy Editor of the Lancashire Evening Post, for an article on changing tools and approaches in local newsrooms (due to appear on Journalism.co.uk). Mike has some interesting plans on using surveys beyond the simple reader poll (since reported here), and experiences of the weaknesses of geotagging, among other things. The interview can be heard here - it’s around 10 minutes.