Thoughts about how and what will change in news distribution in the next 10 years, by extrapolating some movements that are happening right now.

Let me know how you think about this, and please correct me if you think my assumptions are wrong.

1. Display advertising revenues will keep fading.
Banner supported is not a sustainable business model for news websites. Pageview prices are declining, inventory goes up and banner blindness is very real. News “engagement” is shifting to social networks.

At the same time brands are looking for brand experiences involving customers. They are building their own or public platforms to connect with customers. Display advertising is not adding enough value, even when it’s cheap.

NGO’s are practicing, funding or hosting journalism. They not only hire journalists they are hosting and distributing the stories themselves.

2. Television will take revenge.
With internet enabled television sets, the tv becomes a more interesting medium. There is always something to watch. Social layers will make live events more interesting. Especially news and sports events. Television interfaces need to change. We need new interface thinking for televisions. We need what the iPhone interface did to the mobile interface design thinking of all mobile phones.

3. Mobile becomes the #1 internet device.
Phone users outnumber computer users. Technology fits in phones and the lifecycle of a phone is shorter compared to a computer. The phone is a personal device, most computers aren’t. It’s the #1 communication device and this makes it the best device to share news. Todays modern mobile phone can do most things a computer could do in 2007.

4. Serendipity redefined.
Serendipity was something that belonged to newspapers and magazines. Serendipity was about the stories you found by accident in newspapers and magazines, small surprises. The web brought a new kind of serendipity, you found stuff by browsing. Social networks enhanced this experience. You find stuff because of your network. The “new” serendipity isn’t captured in media, it’s in the people. This is serendipity on a completely new level, it’s personal.

5. Databases become public
I don’t want to go into a discussion of when or if we ever will get a semantic web. What you can see is that more information becomes public and it is more structured. When databases go public more people can combine information to make new information, more people can practice database journalism.

6. Information availability and accessibility explodes
The web is still growing and it will probably never stop. As interfaces, global coverage and search evolve more people get easy access to all of this information. More information is a good thing, all you need is good filters. Those filters can be computers or human.

7. The real time web, we are all continuously connected.
Continuously connected, sharing more and more personal information. Maybe for safety, for fun or for voyeurism. Sharing creates online existence. Everything you do is information, combine this with point 5 and 6.

8. News agencies will no longer lead the discussion
They will keep losing the signaling function, because everyone is a (re)broadcaster in his or her own network. And they will find it difficult to control, lead or own the discussion. Discussions become fluid, you can start them, but you can’t own or host them.

Conclusive thoughts:
News is and will be a more social experience.

Your (social) network will be important to help you make order out of information chaos.

News outlets will act like hubs for people sharing the same ideas.

The media- or informationlandscape polarizes, like magazines. More media will engage on the same level, making them working great together or strong competitors.

Information will be free. All you have to do is connect the dots instead of creating them.

News will be about guiding and analyzing, almost like a curator. If you’re a good curator, you add value.

Curators are often people.

The news eco system will be much more decentralized, making it stronger.

The system how news distribution works right now is just not made for the media of tomorrow. The traditional ecosystem for news will be disrupted.

The new eco system will inform us better.

Some sketches I made a while ago to illustrate what I think a web-based twitter client could look like. I really like the Tweetdeck application, because it integrates lists in the most obvious way, showing all the posts like a dashboard. I think the basics of Tweetdeck could be very well made into a web-based dashboard.

What it would look like in your browser

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The entire page

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Photographs and other media links should be displayed inline. Like Twitstat does.

Reply and retweet should be inline as well.

Social media is becoming a very influential referrer. Website like Facebook and Twitter generate growing amounts of traffic websites. They work best for the live web (news) and for memes. And they are in the race to become serious competition for Google in getting the right people on the right page.

Social media (Twitter/Facebook) is the new Google (making the web more useful with its service). It doesn’t care about page rank. It cares about what people think and how trustworthy and influential people are.

Google and Twitter are very different in a number of ways.

Google

1. Longer URL, the longer the better
2. Getting bigger websites to link to your website
3. Know and find
4. Authenticity
5. Ranking content
6. Optimization
7. The best of time

Twitter

1. Short URL, an URL is waste of space
2. Getting influential online people to talk about your website
3. Follow and discover
4. Creativity
5. Ranking people
6. Lobbying
7. The best of now

What does this mean for news reporting?
The major news websites and publication systems weren’t really designed for SEO. They are still catching up, far behind the current technological state blogs are in.

While media and journalist are still blaming Google the second disrupting innovation for their Industry is already taking place. And this time they won’t be able to blaim a company.

What about the editors? Google was about systems, about technology. The current wave of social media is about people. Are the news editors – the current and a new generation – ready?

The link
A news organization in a social media environment doesn’t have to create content, it creates context around links. It directs you. That’s the function of a news organization. Guide you as a customer to the best information you can find. Sometimes this mean (re)writing a summary or story, other times it means linking to other good stuff.

It’s also about value. If you – as a content creator – are not adding much to what’s already out there you can’t expect to have a sustainable business model. If you don’t add much, you won’t get much.

The link is the most important asset of the web. It is for Google and it is for Twitter. In a social media driven web it’s not about the content the link directs to. It’s about who presents the link. Linking builds trust. You have to earn this trust by linking to things that add value for your audience.

Jay Rosen, professor at NYU on the ethic of the link

The Urban Explorers video interface (live report) from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

For the music and art festival Urban Explorers festival I made a special video interface. During the festival reporters uploaded video with their mobile phones. The video was categorized on artists, venues and makers based on the video title. The project used the Blip API.

Give it a try.

The report was done by Eclectro.nl reporters. I was supposed to be a reporter as well, but missed the festival because of the birth of Benjamin.

The process of building the interface can be found here.

Over the last few years I’ve worked on different live reports for different kind of festivals. I like what you can make with (almost) realtime information based on the API’s of other services. For the Urban Explorers festival in May this year I started working on a new interface.

The amount of aggregated information can be overwhelming for people, so I’m looking at how can you keep it understandable for new visitors. Or in the case of Urban Explorers for people who never visited or will never visit the festival. UE is a music and art festival that takes place in different venues in the city of Dordrecht.

Blip API
The idea is to start working with the Blip API. And cover the festival with an interface that only shows video. There will be Twitter coverage and blog posts, but the idea is to create a narrative that can be sorted based on people, performances and maybe venues.

I haven’t exactly figured out what it should look like, but just started to make some interfaces to see what works and what doesn’t. I you have ideas or great examples, please share them in the comments.

Last week the Next Web conference was organized in the Netherlands. This tech conference generates a lot of online media like tagged twitter messages. And was a perfect try-out for working with streaming video and twitter. I combined some old scripts and designs and made http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/thenexthack.

The Next Hack from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

The Next Web live video + tweets experiment – Yunoo presentation from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

I looked at a full screen interface that could work in a pop-up or fill your entire screen. It looks a bit like my old videoblog (http://www.hypernarrative.com/videoblog/index.html). I like these type of interfaces for live events because they are more experience based (click on what you see) instead of search based (like youtube).

Interface Experiment 1 from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

I started moving the video, since all tag result pages will give different amount of results the blocked interface looks nice, but it has limits in what it can show. And it looks weird if you haven’t got enough video to fill the entire interface. Both interfaces below are completely dynamic and can show only one item or 30.

Interface Experiment 2 from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

Interface Experiment 3 from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

I just make interfaces
It’s amazing that all those examples are made on top of infrastructure of other people. Blip is perfect because multiple people can send video using a mobile phone and I can get the source files from the server using the Blip API. It’s pretty weird how much difference you can make with only interfaces.

Last.fm Lovewall
Last year I made the Last.fm lovewall. A bluetooth based installation that matches people based on Last.fm data. This installation or something different build on this technology might find a spot at the festival as well.

Eclectro Last.fm Lovewall (interactive bluetooth installation) from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

CNN videostream with Facebook integration (zoom)

The Obama inauguration was broadcasted everywhere. Every upcoming video sharing-, hosting- or distributionservice did something around the big Obama event.

I think the most exiting and successful combination was what CNN did together with Facebook. CNN had a high quality live videostream with Facebook updates from your friends talking about the video stream.

The power of distribution

Current TV on the web (zoom)

Current TV was also broadcasting the event on television and used Twitter. Which is great for television, because television is a one-to-many medium and you can easily interact with the television by using a Twitter client on your phone or laptop.

Facebook was the best option for the web. Watching video on the web is more a personal and more interactive experience. This is what Facebooks adds. You’re watching the stream, not with the world (like Twitter+TV) but with your friends/contacts.

The computer is much more personal compared to a television and thus the interaction should be more personal as well. My social network is not your social network. It’s a distributed conversation.

Portable Social Networks
These kind of combinations or applications can only be created if social networks are (partly) open and allow services like CNN to use the network. For this event CNN didn’t create conversation tools, networks or any other infrastructure. They just connected the dots of Facebook to the dots of what they do best. Making live television.

This is what happens when services open up. You get the best of both worlds. Portable social networks are the future.

NY Times

The New York Times homepage (zoom)

Ustream

Ustream (zoom)

Joost

Joost (zoom)

Eclectro Last.fm Lovewall (interactive bluetooth installation) from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

Yesterday we had the first Eclectro party. As written in the last post I was working on a bluetooth/last.fm application. And it worked :)

The Eclectro Last.fm lovewall is an interactive installation that uses bluetooth to scan for mobile phones. Visitors are asked to change the bluetooth name of their phone into their Last.fm username.

A laptop scans the room using the open source Roomware software. It connects to random visitors and searches the Last.fm database for similarity. It then shows the similarity on a big screen by showing the profiles. A percentage and five artists both have in common.

Review
The installation worked well and I got a lot of very positive feedback by enthusiastic visitors. A few things I learned.

• It is possible to have a zero percent match but still have artists in common.
• Similar artists are often Gorillaz, U2, Muse, Air.
• It is very easy to join, people see something happen and they think it’s too difficult to join. If you tell them that all it takes is changing the bluetooth name of their mobile phone they are really surprised.
• Explain, explain, explain.
• People like seeing their avatars on a screen. Only showing avatars would probably make a successful application by itself.
• Make the screen dark. I used grey photographs and still the brightness of the beamer lightened up the entire place.
• The internet connection at public places is almost always difficult (unstable/low signal).

The interface with testdata (working demo)

Open in new window

And the photographs

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

This saturday we have the first Eclectro party in De Unie in Rotterdam (which itself is pretty amazing). It’s the first offline event for something (a group of people blogging) that until saturday does only exist online.

To Eclectrofy this evening we started thinking about doing something extra with the location. How can we make the place visually and interactive exciting as well. Without making it too difficult to use or showing computers.

This reminded me about the Roomware project

The Roomware Project is an open-source framework for interactive spaces. It allows developers of multiple origins to enhance any venue or event using technologies such as BlueTooth and RFID.

What I’m making for this saturday
Basically Roomware turns my Mac into a server that is able to read bluetooth names and convert this data into xml. We will ask people at the party to change the bluetooth name of their mobile phone into the username of their Last.fm account. With these Last.fm names an application searches the Last.fm API and extracts data about two random visitors and tell them how much Last.fm similarity they have and which artists they have in common.

Meet new people
The project autorepeats and makes new random matches with names of people that are actually in the room. The results are projected on a screen. Showing public information about people is a gimmick, but it might encourage visitors to meet new people.

Things to do before this saturday

All the technology works. What’s left is finding a beamer, finishing the design and the timing of the interface. The application doesn’t need much time to load, but I’m thinking about adding finctional timing to make it more exiting to watch.

For example first show one player. Show the second player a few seconds later. And finally show the bar (hearth) that indicates the percentages. And maybe add some hidden messages when people have 0 or 100% Last.fm similarity.

Eclectro presents Kettel (live)
The third man (live), Gastón Arévalo (live) & Starborough (dj-set)
November 15th, De Unie, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Entrance € 8,- (order tickets)

I will make a video of the system in action for hypernarrative. You can also visit the party this saturday to play with it youself. We can have a beer :)

More drafts

Based on Twitterpoll by Erik Borra I made this visualization. The animation is created form filtering tweets on content. If someone says he or she voted for Obama or McCain this information is stored and turned into numbers. This creates an election poll based on tweets.

You can say Twitter is pretty much in favor of Obama. To update the results refresh the page.

A point goes to Obama if the regular expression /vote.*?obama/i succeeds, it goes to McCain if the regular expression /vote.*mccain/i succeeds, else it is undecided / unrecognized.

The animations that led to this animation
1. http://www.hypernarrative.com/wordpress/2008/11/02/i-voted-storytelling-with-public-databases/
2. http://www.hypernarrative.com/wordpress/2008/11/03/we-say-twittertalk/

A second version of the first experiment. In this window you can sort Twitter messages on certain words. Try to work with two words or use the more obvious words like McCain / Obama if you want to use more words. Otherwise you won’t get any results.

Another great polling service
Erik Borra created a polling service based on what people say on Twitter. With the service you get results on what people say they voted on Twitter. I’m trying to make a bar graph for this.

I’m a big fan of public databases, the live web and storytelling. I think they all give new opportunities for interactive and online storytelling. Twitter itself a very interesting database. Because it tells you what is going on and the API is very good.

About “I voted”
The next days American citizens will vote for either McCain or Obama. My guess is a lot of Twitter users will say on Twitter when, and on who they voted. This Flash application uses Twitter Search to see who voted on who. The animation automatically updates with the most recent tweet.

Queries
For this animation I use search.twitter.com (used to be summize.com)
The query: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22i+voted%22+%2B+McCain+OR+Obama+-twitvote

Painting: Jan van de Heyden – inventor of the fire hose – Fire Amsterdam Town Hall 1690 (translated link)

Two major financial losses have we seen in the last two months. Not because of the credit crunch, but because everything in this digital world is connected.

On the web new information is true until proven false. This is something you might like, or not. It is not a choice, it’s the fact of a connected medium that gives everyone a voice. We have to find ways to work with it. And we are just starting to find out the effects of this dense and very well connected network that is continues searching for the next big thing… And the network is trigger happy.

About those losses
Ten billion dollar in total. Last month an old article about United Airlines re-appeared in Google News because of a date failure. News spread across the web in no time. Traders started selling shares, loss $1 billion.

Last week a wrong story about Steve Jobs having a hearth attack made it to CNN iReport. News spread across the web very fast and Apple stock plunged. Instant decrease in value: $9 billion.

Both stories started an online fire that could only be stopped by checking the story. But, when there is smoke in the air, the whole town is already alerted. You can’t hide it. All you can do is report facts as soon as possible.

In a dense societies, like the web, and cities in the seventeenth century. The high speed spreading of information is crucial. If there was a fire in your neighborhood. It didn’t really matter that much if it small or big, you would wanted to know about it. Since all houses were close to each other and stopping a fire was difficult. Alert first, check later.

The web is not paper
Reporting fragments of information is what the web is good at. We still use it as if it is a piece of paper. We publish hypertext, but we won’t alter it, like paper. We give web pages unique addresses, like paper. After all these years we still treat hypertext like paper.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia doesn’t. This is what makes Wikipedia more an internet product instead of a print product. Wikipedia is alive, it uses fixed urls and the content changes all the time. Everything can be altered and deleted. Hypertext is alive. Wikipedia is – like the web – a continues and endless process.

Open Source Journalism
The live web poses not directly new problems for journalism, but it requires more speed and a different way of working. It will eventually require a different approach. Journalists will have to be live reporters. They don’t decide if it will be news or not. They will decide if something will stay news or not.

As a reporter you can’t ignore the smoke in your town. Everyone wants to know what’s going on and it’s the job of the journalist to figure this out, as fast as possible. And the best way to do this is by using the collective wisdom and make his or her knowledge and process public. The open source journalist will be a better informed journalist.

And about the truth?
We will see many more of these short-time information failures in the future and those will probably also lead to large financial losses. We have to find a way to live with it. The journalist that works on the web will be more active as a firefighter instead of a fire starter.

Before the Picnic conference was finished we left for The Hague where the music blog Eclectro & TodaysArt will cover the TodaysArt festival online. A two day festival about art, performance and music (live stream).

On of the things from yesterday that I really love is a projection at het Spui. The projection is made in perfect perspective and project shadows on a white building. It completely distorts your idea of reality. You know it’s an illusion, but it doesn’t look like one. I can’t get enough of this.

zoom

zoom

zoom

I don’t know who the artist is who made this, but will ask around tonight and write his or her name in the comments.

Until friday there is the Picnic conference in Amsterdam. A three day event about creativity, media and technology.

With Roeland from Slandr and Mathijs from Mobypicture we created the Live Report for this event. It is a website that aggregates tagged content on services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Blogs, Mobypicture and Qik. And streams this information live next to a videostream from the main conference hall with the keynote speakers. You can follow the keynotes, but also see what is going on and what people are thinking or talking about.

The Live Report: live.picnicnetwork.org

If you want to join the Live Report, make sure to tag your content with PICNIC08 and use the service you like.

Last year I also worked for the Picnic Live Report 2007 hosted by the VPRO. This friday-afternoon Eclectro will be live reporting from the TodaysArt festival in The Hague, a festival about Art, Music and Technology in the Netherlands. Here we will also use the Live Report

Note: this post ended up in my drafts and should have been posted during the European Championship, sorry :)

Statistics are wonderful and the web as a central mechanism to connect databases creates a great mechanism to share and interact with data.

One great example of statistics is the Castrol Performance Index. For this European Championship the Castrol Index distributes all the games data live on the web. You can immediately see which player played where and how they are doing.

You can compare players, ball possession, shots on goals and more. All this information is live during the game. The exciting part of these kind of websites is that they add something to television that only the web can add. It doesn’t make it more interactive, but it does give it more information depth.

Suddenly the game that looks so simple gets a new layer of data and statistics. I didn’t know that for example the Dutch goalkeeper van der Sar already ran over 1300 meters in the first 34 minutes. Did you know that most of the players run around 10 kilometers during a game.

I can see that players that should be attacking spend most of their time on the wrong part of the field. This information adds context to the video footage, and it is context only interactive media can add. I don’t have to see this data all the time, I can just open it when I’m interested in how the players are doing.

I don’t know if this is what interactive television should be, but I really like how this is adding an extra dimension to live footage.

See also this earlier example by the Dutch Broadcaster NOS

The web is becoming a more live medium, the medium itself isn’t changing it is how we publish to it. I think the ‘live web’ is the most exiting development since the rise of social networks. You write a Twitter notification on your mobile phone, post a picture to the web or stream a live video with Qik or Seesmic. Often recording is publishing.

When you write a blog or create a podcast your entry has context in itself. It has a start and it ends. Most postings on micro blogs don’t have context in the messages. The context is in the stream or in time. For example Twitter messages often make sense in your personal timeline or in the conversation within your personal network.

Twitter and Qik are just the first services. Realtime platform independent micro services, that distribute contextless fragments of information are here to stay.

This sense of a ‘live medium’ is something that is changing the web as it is and how we use it. It will change search, or at least sorting search results and it will change reporting news.

A service like Twitter makes news travel fast. This makes it the #1 breaking news source for a lot of people. Why? Because it is reporting as it is happening. It isn’t always right, but it is reporting, open for conversation and correcting itself. It is live coverage and it is a storytelling experience.

News on the web is presented like news on paper. This is good since text on the web is – apart from certain screen specific style rules – the same as on paper. An article is written, checked and published.

Spreading the news
These services like Twitter are making reporting news a more public process. For example if something happens the first people who notice are there when it happens. Uploading messages, pictures and video, to a personal community or group of friends.

With Twitter people start repeating (or retweeting) messages distributing the news among followers and informing a very large audience within minutes. This is the signaling part. It’s not about being a citizen journalist. It is about telling your friends what you are doing, or what you are seeing.

The signal reaches the audience at the same time it reaches the journalist. A journalist has to check the story, is it true? Should I publish about this or wait until it is checked? The reader is expecting that his favorite news website knows more about it and visits the website after hearing about the news. Often resulting in a bad user experience, since there is nothing on the news website about the subject.

What is the role of journalists and media in this? Should they directly report serious rumors? Should they check for more sources. I don’t know. It has to be somewhere in the middle I think. A situation where journalists are producing with updated versions.

CNN
I think CNN is giving this a very prominent place on the CNN website. Maybe because they are from television and reporting breaking news is what they are good at. They are using storytelling mechanisms on the website. Reporting what is happening right now, and directly updating it when the story turns out to be something different.

These are the breaking news messages CNN showed last week. I heard the news about Hillary ending her campaign through Twitter and CNN was one of the few news websites with the news on it.

CNN message before

CNN message after

Your thoughts
What are your thoughts about this? When should news be published on a web site and should we adapt the design of news sites to make space for a more storytelling ‘as-it-is-happening’ approach? Or does this make news websites vulnerable for misinforming the audience?

This blog post was published on the Online Journalism Blog

While waiting for Murcof at the airport we asked Jimmy Edgar if he would like to improvise something on an old Casio keyboard. Recorded on the roof (full recording) of Schiphol (Amsterdam airport / AMS)

The festival was a great success. Exhausting, but really great. During the festival we made around 400 posts on the special microblog.

What worked
Mobile services worked very well. Sending a photo through Mobypicture and directly sending an audio file through Gabcast give a really strong storytelling experience. Twitter messages are like SMS. Great to keep context in the timeline without actually having ‘to produce’ something.

I think our idea to connect everything you post to an avatar (like Twitter), and make the coverage as personal as possible really helped keeping it clear for our viewers. At least for how much this is possible given the enormous amount of information produced. Organizing it on time gives a very good overview of what was important or special during the festival.

Microblogs are really strong live applications. Afterwards they are less exciting to watch. You can use it as a collection of material where you can search items for articles elsewhere.

The Wordpress XMLRPC is wonderful. From the 400 posts we have published almost none of those was made on the website itself. The posts were created using other websites and automatically posted to Eclectro.nl/live. Making publishing really easy.

What didn’t work
Video is difficult. Or at least uploading video is difficult. if you record a video it is still difficult to upload. When we recorded a video in high quality using a mobile phone (N95) the files get easily close to 10 Megabytes. If you want to upload/e-mail these files using UMTS you’re not only giving your battery a hard time, you’re also making it impossible to upload anything else during this process. Wifi often wasn’t available and when it was it was too unstable to upload or e-mail video.

I think services like Qiktv or Seesmic Mobile are interesting because the web-server is recording instead of your camera. Unfortunately those services can’t directly post a recording to a blog, yet.

We used a photo camera for recording video as well. This worked very well, the quality is good and Flickr is a great service for distributing files shorter than 90 seconds. The files recorded with the 8 Megapixel Sony Camera are around a 100 Megabytes. Uploading a 100 Megabytes in size. This requires you (or your laptop) to spend at least a few hours on a restaurant Wifi. Missing out on the festival. In the end we uploaded most files at night or in the morning.

We recorded the interviews on DV camera. This worked perfect, since there is no urge in getting the longer interviews directly on the web.

Two blogs
My idea was to maintain two blogs. The Eclectro blog and the Eclectro Live blog. /Live would be about us, a personal story about how we experienced the festival. The main blog would present interviews and reviews. This was just too much. We simply couldn’t make all this in a weekend and have a good time.

Ideas for live blogging / micro blogging

zoom
You need a central spot with a computer and good internet connection. A central spot on the festival where you can empty a camera and upload a batch of files.

Think about what you want to do and if this is possible. Think about how you keep it clear to your audience what they are looking at. Most people don’t know what is happening and they have to understand what it is and why you are publishing. We explained it with a short introduction movie.

A few people asked me to add more structure to the website and make it easier to scan what happened over time. I think we need even more timeline based structure in a next version.

If you are telling a story make sure to tell everything. Tell what you expect and afterwards tell if your expectations were right or wrong. Make returning jokes / running gags. Keep it personal and keep your audience informed.

Jimmy Edgar performing on stage later that day

Hauschka is playing at the Urban Explorers festival 2008, Dordrecht, Netherlands from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.
Hauschka adds little things like bells, plastic and metal to the piano using tape. A piano mash-up :)

This weekend the Urban Explorers festival is organized in the city of Dordrecht, Netherlands. It’s a three day city-festival about art and electronic music. The main acts for this year are by Plaid and Murcof. It’s a small festival with a very good atmosphere and lovely people.

Eclectro is a festival partner and we (a few Eclectro bloggers) will be covering the event on the Eclectro blog by writing reviews, doing interviews, making photos and videos as the festival happens. And we have some other exiting plans.

This is great, but not something we haven’t done before. We report while we are there. This time we want to take it a step further and make the coverage more personal. Urban Explorers is a small, diverse and very distributed festival. This makes it difficult to ask or explain visitors to contribute to the live coverage by using a mobile phone. This year we will try to make visible how we experience the festival.

Making it personal
For me Twitter was the first service that made the web more interesting as a live medium. Blogs are good for a recap, but microblogs can really give you a better live experience and it’s a more social and more personal experience. There often isn’t much value in the individual messages it’s the collection that builds a story and a character.

So this is what we want to do for the festival as well. We will also be reporting about where we are, packing my bag, how we sleep, what we are doing, what we are eating and who we are talking to. Short talks, photos and video interviews. All the small pieces of information aggregated in one spot.

The problem with building aggregators is that it often ends up in something that is difficult to follow for outsiders or people unfamiliar with the technology. We (Inge, Renier and myself) try to make it personal. And this weekend I’ve been making a website that just does that. I used Wordpress Prologue, a theme that is based on Twitter and took out even more options like tags and feeds to make it look clean and simple.

The Eclectro Urban Explorers 2008 festival microblog: www.eclectro.nl/live

The secret is in the back-end
The power of Wordpress is that is has a xmlrpc back-end. This is a secure gate that makes it possible for other websites like YouTube or Flickr to talk directly to Wordpress, like you wrote the message on the blog. Ad some extra open source plug-ins to Wordpress and you have an incredible powerful system that is an aggregated channel centralizing information from distributed web-services.

Post from Flickr to a Wordpress blog

Or from YouTube to a Wordpress blog

Or record a Seesmic video in your Wordpress blog

Last weekend I first played with Seesmic and I really like what it does. The videoplayer could use some enhancement, but the Wordpress plug-in is a bless. You enter the Wordpress admin section, click on the Seesmic logo in a new post and can directly start recording a video using your webcam. When done, all you have to do is hit publish in Wordpress and you have just written a new blog post including a video.

Keep it simple
We can easily post to the website using mobile phones, laptops, webcams and websites like Flickr, YouTube, Mobypicture, Twitter, and Seesmic. Everything is automatically collected on the microblog and connected to our user accounts, connecting our names and avatars to the messages published.

Authors see an orange box on the front page, this makes it easy to directly write a message when visiting the website.

Will it work?
All these enhancements make it easy to read for visitors and easy to maintain for us while we are busy at the festival. We have a few more days to finish it, but I think we made a great tool. This weekend we will see if it works.

I’m very exited to play with this.

You can join the festival coverage as well. Use UE08 in your Twitter updates and they will show up in the stream, or post an image to Flickr with the tag UE08 and it will automatically show up in the header of the website.

Your ideas and thoughts are very welcome. How can we make it more personal or more clear? What would you like to see or what is difficult to understand? And do you know other great (web)services that could be integrated?

Eclectro Directo: RGBoy live concert from Jan Dybala JD Video on Vimeo.

Once a month we organize a webcast at Eclectro. We use the website Ustream to broadcast a DJ-set or concert live from the DJ his living-room. All the DJ needs is a computer, webcam and internet connection.

Last friday the RGBoy-chiptune-heroes performed in front of the webcam. They performed a live gameboy concert including visuals. The entire performance was broadcasted live from Myslowice, Poland.

A chiptune, or chip music, is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. (Wikipedia)

The video above is a compilation from fridays performance. The tracks RGBoy plays are; my new PT82, super muter, secret level, 1980.

During these performances we invite viewers to use the Ustream chat-box. This increases the ‘live experience’ and enables contact between viewers and performers. The talks are often about technical problems, quality, track titles, personal matters or just to tell how great the artist is.

Utrecht meets Chicago
The next Eclectro Directo live performance will be friday the 30th of May. This time we will use the Mogulus website. Since this will be a live performance broadcasted simultaneous from two locations. Maurice Dohmen [moos] based in Utrecht, Netherlands takes care of the sound and visual artist Jorrit Poelen based in Chicago, USA takes care of the visuals.

Eclectro Directo Live: May 30th, 20:00 (Amsterdam time) / 1 PM Chicago Time

Eclectro Directo promo from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

Are you an electronic artist / producer / DJ and would like to perform live for the Eclectro webcam, let us know.

Last week I was reading a Wired article (March edition) about how the video rental service Netflix is awarding $1.000.000 to the person or group who can improve its recommendation algorithm by 10%.

Todays popular websites use smart algorithms to determine what we want or might like. Google is famous for its mix and so is the Amazon recommendation system. Your actions tell these systems about your behavior. And your actions make these services better in recommending you information. For example Google tracks what results people click. If most users click the second search result they make this the first result.

I love news selection
I really like how news websites, blogs and other person driven websites make a selection. Most often this works best if there is a sharp focus. A popular blog can’t be about everything. It has to be about a person or a subject to keep the blog interesting.

In the future this fragmentation might be happening to news websites as well. The traditional newspaper told you everything. It was your primary source of information. With websites we see a different pattern. People don’t just read one news website, they read many. They might have a favorite, but it is no such thing as exclusive readership. Will we see focus in newspaper websites as well? Although media operates independent it is almost always marked as ‘left’ or ‘right’ by the type of stories they focus on.

The news algorithm
Why wouldn’t news sorting be captured in algorithms? There is nothing that makes this impossible. Stories are written as closed interchangeable containers. News websites might make a selection on the frontpage, they also provide lists and rss-feeds where they sort the same information on time or popularity.

Journalists have multiple tasks, they create stories and they sort them on relevance. Maybe with this sorting we can experiment and create a more personal version as well?

Sorting news by machines
Sorting news is not just making a selection on popularity. Sorting news by systems is difficult. The presentation of what you like consists out a complex set of variables.

• What do you like (personal interest)
• What you might like (if you like a subject you might like to read about)
• What do you need to know (because it is important to you, and it will dominate the media landscape for a while)
• What everyone needs to know (breaking news)
• What do you officially don’t like, but occasionally read (the stories everyone says they don’t read but always seem to get the highest click-through rates)
• What do your friends (colleagues) read (news creates conversation and small-talk)
• What do your friends recommend (you trust your network)
• What you don’t want to know (things that really bore you and are irrelevant in any way)
• Where do you like to know more about (if you are an expert in something you don’t want another article that explains it all again. You would prefer analysis and background articles)
• What is your (current) location (for large groups of people location based information has extra value)
• Surprises (they change your interests and habbits)

* If I forgot something please ad your thoughts in the comments

These are the variables that construct personal relevance of a news website. It’s a complex set, but if you can manage a good balance you are able to create a website that sorts news by personal relevance on another level than we are used to.

I don’t know if an algorithm can create a better news experience and what it should look like. I do think there is value in tracking and learning form your users behavior and return new or additional value to the reader.

Update: Concept Design

| View | Upload your own

What this could look like and how you can keep this simple for the reader. The text is in Dutch. The screens ask for your location, favorite topics, company you work or would like to work and friends.

At the Next Web conference there was an overall urge for relevancy. You noticed it in presentations and startups. Unfortunately there weren’t many speakers that had exiting answers. In his presentation Robert Scoble made clear that for most new web applications ‘The first experience sucks‘.

Why?
This is inherent to how these new web applications work. The webservices that are doing something new are often ‘connected‘ applications. Websites and widgets connect information and people resulting in a new collections and new relevancy. This relevancy will only show itself when using the service for a while. Which is – of course – difficult to explain to a user when he or she signs up.

This is a user experience problem, but not one we will not find a solution for. The friendfinder button in most new web services enables you to import your Gmail contacts or another social network. Most applications are doing something similar to a service that already exists, with the open web (API’s and feeds) technology should be able to suggest a personal social profile before you start.

When information gets fragmented
What’s more interesting about this is what this search for relevancy really means. The web was always used similar to previous media. We made pages and domains on the web. Information was reserved for one place and relevancy was made by the website editor. This can be a news website or a blog.

Now the web is evolving in something that goes beyond what we are used to. Everything gets fragmented, distributed and aggregated. Information (text, photos and video) transfer from one online place to another. Information gets distributed and duplicated. The collection made by the creator is getting less relevant.

The distributed future of this blog post
For example this blog post is distributed through RSS and it will be picked up by a dozen of spam blog that will all duplicate the entire text and distribute it again. All these blogs are indexed over and over by aggregators like Google or any other. This blog post is written in the context of my blog, but most people will probably read it in another context. Specialized companies trace discussions about brands on the web and redistribute relevant articles. Social networks are crawling the web to show articles that are personal relevant to your profile (LinkedIn).

Data is made to be duplicated
The incredible amount of fragmented information is what makes the web interesting. New social recommendation tools, networks, online friends, aggregators, feeds and widgets are breaking the web apart. This is what makes the web really exiting and work like a network.

This is difficult to understand and use by publishers, copyright lawyers and designers but more relevant for the user. The reader doesn’t care what blog or website presents a good article or where they read it, as long as they can read it. The most important value is the relevancy of the presenter, this can be a system or your friend.

EN.nl (and.nl) is a new project where we are experimenting with new media, users, technology and journalism. This project is an open project where the public process plays an extremely valuable part in designing and shaping the news website.

The online news industry really changed over the last years. I think we’re at a point where every self respecting news organization takes the web as a serious medium that requires a different approach then previous media (newspaper, television, radio).

Some see these new possibilities as a threat and try to protect what they have. Which is I think the worst possible strategy (looking backwards into the future). Others see chances, new competitors, new technology, new journalism, new markets and new ideas.

I love a quote I heard in an interview with someone at the Washington Post. He said his ambition is to be the new CNN. With new media and technology this ambition is realistic. A company like the Washington Post (newspaper) can see CNN (television) as its competitor.

Google / AP
Google can be a news service. Why wouldn’t they? They have the database of intentions, Google knows what people are searching for and they can – like any other company – subscribe to press services. The value of press agency news is devaluating in a way that it often ends up in duplicate copies with a different lay-out. Try to search for an AP article headline. I’m sure you will find a dozen versions of it, all exactly the same.

Online news is moving to something where added value counts. What can you add to the news (omnipresent). Is it a personal or political view? Is it the selection you make? Is it a community? Are it your reporters or journalists? What is your added value?

In technology communities, collaboration tools and social networks are redefining most services and institutions. Why shouldn’t services and technology like this redefine how we consume news?

This is what EN.nl is about. We want to experiment with everything around news from a practical point of view, let’s make things.

Wisdom of Crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds believes a group is smarter than the individual. The Wisdom of a crowd can be very valuable for news. In the public opinion the idea of a wiki collides with news. I think a wiki-based system can work for news if you make sure the process is transparent and everyone can join the discussion.

Sure you will have to deal with vandalism, this a technical problem to solve. A reader doesn’t have to be an expert on everything, the valuable wisdom of an individual can be something he has read or seen somewhere else. The Wisdom of a crowd is about all the knowledge, not just the expert knowledge. The biggest challenge is get the knowledge and use it as a contribution.

Traditional media floats on the wisdom of a few wise people who create value by the choices they make. Social media uses the wisdom of your network en wiki media taps into the wisdom of a crowd. All have advantages and disadvantages.

The design
For the design of this new website we also experiment. The most important object is the database, we designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with the data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization.

The newsriver navigation

The newsriver is a principle that regards news as a continues flow of information, where you can hook in whenever you want (An RSS feed). For the first version of EN we are experimenting with this idea in the navigation. I don’t know if this is it, it’s different from the navigation we are used to.

What we can do?
Almost everything. We can make mash-ups, feeds, aggregated pages (screenshot draft design below). Hook in to social networks, extend the wiki functionality, and more. Technically everything is possible.

What does the news site of the future look like? Join the debate and discussion here or in Dutch at http://ontwikkelen.ning.com.

Last week I did an experiment with a linear story and loading photos from Flickr. This week I made a second experiment using the same code and adding a map. I will try to tell a second story.

About the story
This story is about how fast urban areas are growing. These growing areas aren’t in the west. Of the 100 fastest growing urban areas only two are located in what we call the western world.

In an era where our lives get globally connected through similar culture, mass production and consumption these emerging areas will play a very important role in the near feature.

I’ll try to tell this in a short linear story with the latest photos loaded from Flickr and a map that shows the lights of the world. I love that map.

Try it yourself http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrcities/

“UN figures for urbanisation, published this week in the State of the World 2007 report, show that more than 60 million people – roughly the population of the UK – are added to the planet’s cities and suburbs each year, mostly in low-income urban settlements in developing countries. Unplanned urbanisation is taking a huge toll on human health and the quality of the environment, contributing to social, ecological, and economic instability in many countries.”

Guardian January 17th 2007

Difficult
The most difficult part in making this animation is to actually tell a complex story in slides. I want to make something that will make you think about things for a while. The previous Flickr project was easy because you didn’t have to pay much attention. It was a collection of things. This one is more a story making it more difficult to make an impression.

Storytelling tips
The most important thing in interactive storytelling is probably to kill your darlings and only use effects, technology and interactivity if you think it will benefit to the story you want to tell.

Make sure to write out what you want to say. It doesn’t have to be final, but it gives you an idea of what you want to do.

Focus on what you want to say. Focus on the impression your story will have.

All data used in the animation is from this list. Hypernarrative won’t be updated until the first week of March.

Share your best tips and tricks to tell an interactive story? How can I make this better?

Today I experimented with the Flicrk API. An API is an external programmable interface that connects to a database, it allows external developers to access the content in the database. In this case I can access the photos on Flickr by using a free license (API-key).

2.269.526.982 photos
Everyday millions of photos are uploaded to Flickr. While writing this post 4.871 pictures are uploaded every minute and the total of photos uploaded to Flickr is 2.269.526.982. Most of these photos are tagged with meta information, like a title, description, user generated tags and device generated (shutter speed, type of camera, coordinates). That’s a lot of information.

Slideshow experiment
For this first experiment I use thirteen slides to tell something general about myself. Every slide loads the most recent images from the Flickr database based on a tag that corresponds to the slide.

The slideshow plays by itself and has no interaction, it’s linear, but not static. Every time you play the slideshow the content can be different, the story won’t.

www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrapi/

How would you combine live data feeds with storytelling?

What are you doing? Is the simple question twitter asks you

In July 2007 Edward Mischaud (at that time student Politics and Communication) asked me – and other random selected users – a few questions about how we use Twitter. His goal was to find out if Twitter users actually answer to one thing Twitter asks ‘What are you doing?‘.

65% of his focus group didn’t answer this question. What they did write about is in the graphic below.

These findings correlate with the theoretical foundation presented which is based on the understanding that technologies are not neutral objects that operate apart from society’s influence. Technologies are flexible devices. People often extract different meanings and uses out of a technology – applications that are not always factored into its design. In some instances, however, inventors, or shapers, of technology can themselves determine how a technology is to be used and therefore limit and restrict its ‘interpretative flexibility’.

Download the MSc dissertation by Edward Mischaud *.pdf

What are you doing?
I think the question itself is very important for Twitter. It’s the step that makes it easy to join the conversation. You don’t know what to do, just answer what you’re doing.

With this you start the storytelling. Eventually you start connecting with friends or try to start a discussion. You see people talk about other people and start following them or they start following you. This is how your network grows.

Twitter probably wouldn’t be equally successful without this question. With a simple and personal question that everyone in the world can answer Twitter really lowered the barrier to join the application.

Twitter is more a network than an application. If you ask around you will notice that most people are using different interfaces on different platforms and clients. Because of the API connecting to the network adapts to your preferred way of working.

Twitter

• Is easy accessible
• Is live
• Forces you to focus
• Is broken conversation
• Is open conversation
• Is spam free, like RSS (subscription based)
• Is a network
• Is synchronous / asynchronous
• Is a black hole
• Is a time capsule
• Is a centralized network
• Changes public / privacy
• Is a knowledge base
• Is very unstable
• Is making it very difficult for search engines
• Is platform independent

The best part of twitter to me is the live/buzz effect. What is happening right now. You just turn it on like you turn on television. There’s always something going on, and if it isn’t you can always start it by saying what you’re doing. The two graphs below show how twitter is being used during live events. The same thing happens in the Netherlands during live sport events, news or television shows.

Twitter during the Superbowl

Twitter during Super Tuesday

Examples

Some conferences have used Twitter for a so called backchannel. A live (sometimes moderated) screen behind the speaker that allows the audience to discuss and ask live questions via Twitter and SMS.

Every morning @gvenk presents the Gvenk Daily. Gerard is a programmer and knows what’s going on in the tech scene. Every morning around 7.30 he scans his RSS feeds and drops the highlights in the Gvenk Daily, a series of tweets about tech news.

Last year I wrote a post about @BreakingNewsOn, it’s a newsservice that posts rumors to Twitter and confirms them live. Building the story as it happens.

The Twitgeist is a hourly updated cloud of the most popular words used within a group of twitterazi. It tells you what’s going on.

These examples are just a few spin-offs. Like the conclusion from the dissertation. Twitter has just one rule, a maximum of 140 characters. The people using it are experimenting what they can do with this network.