Soon, we Flickr users can earn some money on our photos if Getty Images editors like them. So better hurry up and post some new pictures? Well, there are some issues here that are discussed quite interestingly in the comment section. One potential problem that struck me immediately, as well as commenter Stephen:
I wonder what effect this will have on whether Flickr photographers elect to post their images using the Creative Commons license.
The Washington Post has trained 185 of its staff in using video, writes journalism.co.uk. This is a good occasion as I’ll ever find to finally blog some notes I took when videojournalist Travis Fox of that newspaper visited a media conference in Bergen in May. The session with Fox was by far the most interesting I attended, and so much more rewarding than those boring debate panels (they are a waste of time, really). Fox, a few years ago more or less all alone doing video for the big paper’s website, shared experiences and tips. At least for a writing journalist, there was much to learn. Fox works a lot like a newspaper reporter, doing shooting and editing on his own (using a Sony HDV camera and editing on a Mac), not with a cameraman or crew. This gives him full control and allows him to produce “handwritten” stories such as this one from the Katrina disaster. A reason this story stands out is that it is shot from the victims’ point of view. Suddenly their decisions to stay at home sounds reasonable; a perspective you certainly did not get from TV stories shot from helicopters. Fox often works in team with a newspaper reporter, though; sometimes the reporter then does a more traditional stand-up as part of the story.
His productions are usually longer than a typical news piece on the traditional TV news. Do people watch videos that are more than two minutes, sometimes a lot longer? Yes, and if they don’t watch all of it at once, it’s not so bad, Fox explained – usually they will then just move to another part of the website, not disappear from the site altogether. Fox compared this to how people read newspapers – scanning, reading only some of the stories from beginning to end, only the first paragraphs of others, etc.
The stories function as evergreens on the website. Over time, they can attract a sizable number of users. The presentations on the web can have several parts: the video will often focus on characters to tell the story. Panorama photos will provide the visual overview. And they sometimes add blogs to “extend” stories by updating with new information about the characters and allow for interaction with users. Fox warned that starting seriously with video is a big step; post-production takes a lot of time and effort.
One of Fox’s most intriguing points: web video can function as a kind of hub for the media company’s content, and not just for the web:
There is also room for productions that are more like classical documentary, and here Fox showed excerpts from his story about a man who lost his son in the 9/11 Pentagon attack. Recommended.
Yes, we need that. From The Economist, links added:
But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink-not just those chosen by a website’s authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries and web pages fetched by Google, among other things. All that information, of course, can already be accessed by web users willing to root around, opening a series of new browser windows or tabs. The goal of Hyperwords, Mr Hegland says, is “reducing the threshold” of satisfying curiosity, by making the quest faster and easier. Later this year he will release a new version that extends this trick beyond the web browser, turning any word in any window into a clickable “hyperword”.
The story also profiles Cooliris, among other developments.
From September this year, the complete archive of classical music magazine Gramophone will be available for free on its website. The archive goes back to 1923 and includes gems, as the editor explains:
There are some amazing contributions, such as Rachmaninov on the state of piano playing when he was around.
After seeing the latest comments from Metafilter vs. YouTube users side by side, the Freakonomics blog asks if the $5 membership fee on Metafilter is the reason behind the obvious difference in quality. The comments to that question clarify things. The pair is rather odd — it would be more instructive to see similar, competing entities such as newspaper websites side by side – but it’s anyway clear that the entrance fee itself can’t be decisive. As Brandon Blatcher says:
Metafilter’ls success and generally better comments are probably due to a number of factors, and the $5 admission fee is just one. There’ls also the presence of the mods, how they’lre moderating, how many people are posting links, how many people of are posting comments and more importantly, the quality of the those two things (a crappy post of a controversial subject tends explode), timing (if a crappy post of a controversial subject happens when the mods are off somewhere, the explosion tends to last longer, sparking other explosions), the state of the world in general and the United States in particular (most Mefi members are American and with the elections going on, there’ls a tug of war about whether to post political links) and just sheer luck. All of these things and more are at play in particular moment, so Mefi’ls light moderation touch tends to work well. There’ls also a certain X-factor that comes from the mods, in that they actually seem to care about the site and it’ls goals and the sum of those parts make it more than a job, which tends to shine through in the site’ls darker moments. $5 ain’lt got nothin’ on that.
Some web services are just self-evidently useful once you try them out. Goodreads is one of them. Not only because of the chance it gives you to be an amateur literary critic and discover new books through the recommendations of others, in an environment that’s much calmer than the very sales-focused Amazon. No, somewhat buried in there is a “secondhand books club” as well (when you rate and review a book, you have the option to sell or swap it with others). Very smart. Here’s a couple of enhancements I would like to see:
1. A way to compare professional and amateur reviews of titles.
2. A feature that would allow you to choose language. I would like to see reviews in Norwegian only, for example.
The Crimes of War Project has published a new version of the already essential and classic anthology simply titled “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know”. From the press release:
The book is an A-Z guide to the laws of war and their application in today’ls world, written by some of the world’ls leading journalists and scholars, in clear and compelling language. The revised edition includes detailed coverage of all recent developments and controversies, including the “war on terror,” Iraq, Darfur and the rise of international courts and tribunals.
The new edition includes articles on Afghanistan, Occupation, Detention and Interrogation, Guantanamo. Best of all, the book’s articles are also online, so the knowledge has been made easily available. You have to buy the book to see the photographs, and it’s worth it as many of the world’s best photojournalists have contributed.
A friend told me he uses Reddit much as he used his television (before he got rid of it): as a remote control, zapping from story to story as from channel to channel. When you think of it, as the media and the audience/users become more and more web-centric, it is inevitable that our previous habits migrate to the web, but mutate in the process (this must be old news for those spending a lot of time at video sites, but still). Reddit zapping is also a way to reinvent the serendipity of newspapers. And it works! Look what I just found! Another indicator of the web becoming more entertaining as well as analytic and serious is examples like this one from the indispensable Freakonomics blog, about The economics of gold-digging. The comments are half the fun (as at Wonkette’s.)
Jason Kottke goes treasure hunting in the newly opened New York Times archive, and finds gems and more delicious stuff. (via the del.icio.us hotlist).
“Wikipedia isn’t generally useless, but its usefulness is rather limited, especially when one needs information that can be trusted,” Norwegian Associate Professor of philosophy Lars Fr. H. Svendsen claimed this week.
I’m afraid this is a representative attitude among Norwegian scientists and scholars to Wikipedia, if they have an attitude at all. Wikipedia is kept at arm’s length. A study would probably find that few of them know how Wikipedia is edited and how the process of quality control works.
More constructive approaches are possible. German public service broadcaster ZDF reports from a seminar called “Wikipedia-Academy” in Mainz on how some humanities scholars in that country engage with Wikipedia (the German language version is the second largest overall). Translator of literature Josef Winiger (64) received a prize from the German Wikipedia community for his work on the article about the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Now there’s a challenge for Svendsen and his colleagues.
In another ZDF article, Professor Peter Wippermann says that the scholars in reality need Wikipedia more than the encyclopedia needs them. The humanities are facing a growing legitimation pressure — the ivory towers that scholars can retreat to are getting ever more scarce. Because of that, scholars in the humanities need to market their knowledge through Wikipedia, he says: At Wikipedia they can legitimate themselves again and give something back to society. (Thanks to Daniel for the tip).
UPDATE: Svendsen’s article is being discussed at the Tinget (Village Pump) page of no-Wikipedia.
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