Category: HCId

Social Data Portablity

Post author By nina
Post date October 11, 2010

Last week Facebook announced the ability to export your profile “and keep a closer eye on the sites and apps that they have allowed to access the profile.”

Before this, developers could get into user profiles through Facebook Connect. The Facebook and Twitter APIs are relatively open. But this is the first time users have easily been given a way to get a handle on their specific profile. Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Aditya Agarwal, shared with me on a phone interview that the potential for the use of Facebook data is much higher. Content can be personalized to give people a better experience.

A team of researchers at the National University of Ireland in Galway argue for something even more open. In their paper Social Network and Data Portability using Semantic Web Technologies the outlines a vocabulary to structure user generated content in a machine-readable way. This allows the social data to easily be used across services and applications.

I can relate to the problem this group is trying to solve with an example:
I have friends using Gowalla. I have friends using FourSquare. I have friends using Latitude and I have friends now using SCVNGR. I have a circle of friends on Facebook, on Twitter, on Email, on LinkedIn on Flickr and so on. But each of these services require me to reconnect with all the people I’m friends with. So, I use Facbeook Places. Why? Not because it’s more fun, or because the interface is better, but because that’s where my friends already are.

But if I could have all of my friends, everywhere, would there be more competition and therefor better quality of product across services?

What if Match.com could pull up everyone’s Facebook profiles to get an arguably more authentic profile of who you are. For better or for worse, I suppose.

I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see a mega network any time soon where people share all of their content to one service then feed all of it back out. That was the problem with Buzz. It basically became a Twitter Feed with a Like button and the occasional original post.

What I like about this Irish team’s proposal is the human side of problem solving. Their solution gives users more control, more flexibility and potentially more scalability to connect and share easier with their friends. It also has the power to increase and personalize the quality of our experience online as a whole.

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How the subtext changed

Post author By nina
Post date October 6, 2010

Journalists functioned as the authority of facts. Newspapers fit in the community; they were about “readers as citizens” David Nord says in his book Communities of Journalism. Civic journalism, at its core is about that community building exactly. Though people have classically argued that the job of journalism is to inform not engage in the community and politics.

“The essence of science, of public opinion, of democracy, of journalism was the authority of facts,” according to Delos Wilcox.

It’s inherently necessary for journalists-civic or otherwise- to be a part of the community. From this perspective they gain access, understanding and context for the stories they tell. Citizens depend on journalists to understand the communities on which the report. If they did not, we wouldn’t have war, court, city, tech, food, fashion and music reporters.

It’s also argued that civic journalism is “naively idealistic.” It does not take political and cultural difference and their powers seriously. So perhaps perfect civic journalism is an utopian dream, like Nord says. But, does social media get us a step closer to a goal?

The mental model of a community has changed drastically as the world has globalized. There are local communities, music communities, industry communities and millions of other communities. With the power of networks, groups can organize in a way they never could before. The power people in these networks have does help people get and stay engaged. Conversely, there is more power to consume information that validates our existing beliefs. It is certainly a double edged sword. That being said, the potential for civic, political and cultural engagement is significantly higher.

Nord also refers to the elements of modern journalism: objectivity, puzzling as it is, political and it existing with subtext.

This concept of subtext is important because it gets at the way. The way in which people consume the information relates to Marshall Mcluhan’s concept “medium is the message.” He emphasizes how much the character of the medium in which we consume influences how we consume it, processes it, understand it. This is all subtext.

This begins to explain why print news does not translate directly to digital (web, mobile, tablet, podcast). At SND Denver Richard Saul Wurman discussed how silly it is to have an animation of a page turning on an iPad. It’s not a book, it’s not supposed to be like a book and it doesn’t need page turning animation to feel like a book. We can think the same way about a newspaper online.

First news sites were direct replicas of newspaper pages. They were designed with 6 columns, huge headlines and flat graphics. It did not translate. The subtext of the web was ignored. But if we look at the Washington Post’s stunning investigative reporting project Top Secret America, we get the subtext and richness of what can be delivered on a browser, but not in print.

Nord also digs into what he calls the “orientation of text” and how the reader relates to the news service, the audience and the writer. When a reader writes a letter to the editor, they are speaking to the public, speaking to the editor and to the self.” This is no different than what we do on Facebook every day.

We are certainly expressing to our public and expressing ourselves. But I’ll argue that we also speak to the “editors” at Facebook. By using or ignoring features, we give them feedback about we use their product and how it fits into our lives, which is very close to what letters to editors did.

News is not much different now than it was before. The medium is different, the way it fits into our life is different but human needs for information and self expression are still relatively the same.

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Spinach and Chicken Nuggets

Post author By nina
Post date October 2, 2010

Do we give people what they want or what they need? Pablo Boczkowski, professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communications has been researching the space in between and gave a talk at IU.

People want to read what is interesting, he says. There is Public Affairs news (global, politics, economy, etc) and crime, celebrity, weather and entertainment news. What he found was that competing outlets are delivering similar news and the demand does not always meet the supply of requests (by clicks). Public Affairs news is the spinach, the news we need. All the other stuff? It’s McDonald’s–it’s chicken nuggets.

“It’s not a phenomenon that people are not interested in public affairs news,” he said. The difference in the new space is the unbundled internet. Boczkowski described the web as an unbundled place for niche markets.

The question for me, here, is how people will find and discover sources they can trust. How will niche news outlets float to the top, become available and even have the funding to do investigative, well edited, well reported, relevan news? And, even if all this quality news exists, will the Perez Hilton reading, Facebook Stalking readers find it? What will it take to move people out of their drive thrus and into the produce aisle?

Before, people came into news sites from the front page and clicked from there. But ask social media sharing increases, hits are populated throughout site significantly more frequently.

Will people eventually get sick from eating all the McDonalds and change their behavior? It’s hard to say. Is there a way to make Broccoli taste more like chicken nuggets?

What makes entertainment news so appealing? It’s certainly not more relevant to our lives than midterm elections but it’s tasty. It’s shocking, sensational, easy to understand and easy to throw away and worth talking about at the water cooler. I’m also interested to know if sharing has helped drive more visitors to sites. If so, does that eventually translate to more subscribed or frequent visitors.

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#SNDdenver

Post author By nina
Post date September 28, 2010

This weekend I went to the Society for News Design Conference and Workshop in Denver. My hope was to get insights for my capstone and independent research project–and I did. I haven’t spent this much concentrated time with journalists in nearly two years. I was reminded of the essence of these kinds of people. I was reminded of where their inspiration, motivations and also fears come from. These people are experience designers, they want to help people understand complex ideas.

Below are general accounts and conversations I had with journalists, designers and engineers. I will continue to compile this list:

Dave Wright Jr., Senior Interactive Designer at NPR

Dave and I discussed our favorite NPR radio shows. He started by asking me what my local station was. With a blank stare I told him it was essentially iTunes. I’m a podcast junkie, I told him. I nodded my head back and forth, who do I love more? Radiolab or Planet Money? Then we got to the essence of journalism. Both shows tell amazing, stunning stories. But we can certainly agree that Planet Money does the kind of reporting that journalists do. Radiolab lacks those “news values” we keep hearing about, like timeliness for example. Those stories exist in the ether, they’re not linked to today or 3 weeks ago.

So how come when Planet Money reporters don’t know the housing market is the way it is and why Toxie, their toxic asset dies, how come they can say they don’t know? Why does The New York Times need to be an authority but Planet Money doesn’t?

We somehow, then, came to talk about cloth diapers.

Sam Berlow, Font Bureau; Bill Couch, USA Today; Felipe Fortes, Treesaver

I dined with these three gentleman on Saturday night. To be honest, we discussed so much but mostly why the community is stuck in their funk. I asked why is there such a leap to get on the iPad bandwagon when Richard Saul Wurman himself mentioned how few actual non-developers own one themselves. One of these kind gentlemen pointed out that newspapers have fallen behind on so many curves that this is their chance to finally be on the ball.

I covered the e-tablet session which included discussions from Couch, Mario Garcia Jr, Jared Cockon and Dan Zedek. came to think that while an e-tablet conversation is important but also maybe short sighted, it did do something higher level. It opened up the platform conversation, the HTML5/CSS3 conversation.

Developing for iPads means that news companies need to think about their phones, tablets, sites, browsers and as Berlow mentioned: their brand.

Dennis Brack, Washington Post Design Director (soon to be at Foreign Policy)

Out visiting the pubs of Denver, Dennis and I came to talk about his move to Foreign Policy. We discussed what their news model would be like and what he sees for the future of the product and his team. I then asked him what he thought people are looking for.

“People are looking for clarity,” Brack said. There was a time when people were on the internet and broadly exploring but now they want to get to what they want to find. He is going from a major publication to a niche magazine, clarity is key.

Javier Zarracina, Graphics Director at the Boston Globe

Javier and I quickly chatted to catch up on where we are and what we have been doing. He said what we need to do is apply the knowledge we already have. We need to make our graphics interactive. Readers want something that is useful and compelling, he said. They want new experiences, new ways to interact and new storytelling forms.

Jeremy Gilbert, Assistant Professor at Medill, Northwestern

My post from the SND.org blog:

Trends are not sustainable solutions and they certainly don’t solve problems at their roots. This morning, I sat down to chat about interaction design and news trends with Jeremy and Jessica Gilbert at the Medill School of Journalism in at Northwestern University and Jennifer George-Palilonis, SND’s Society for News Design Education Director.

It would have been great if news companies invented Groupon, Craigslist, Yelp and Twitter. But they didn’t. And really, advertising and money from other services are simply revenue models. They are not directly related to news content. We questioned if people would pay for content and debated if the “everything for free” concept is a phase.

People are willing to pay for service, trust and quality. We pay for Flickr, Dropbox and Netflix. Readers are looking for solutions to cut through the noise online. Twitter is so valuable because we can depend our network to filter trustworthy, useful content.

Jeremy and I spent time talking about the power of automated story crafting. What would the news look like if we let reporters gather and write but let computers process and parse the information? Can machines help bring context and individualized stories to our readers? We can move away from Wiki style live coverage to something that will be much more valuable for our staffs and readers.

As we look beyond trends and into the next few decades a few themes are visible. We will see changes in how we depend on our networks, our editors, computer automated resources and bringing more context to news.

Capstone HCId Journalism

Different articles for different readers

Post author By nina
Post date September 20, 2010

This weekend, a friend of mine said reading the news was difficult because they felt like they were not caught up on the news. So jumping into the middle of a news saga was quite difficult.

What if each news resource could restructure an article based on what else you have already read? So, if I have been following a story closely, it will float the most important parts to the top, or only make those parts visible.

But, if this the first time I’m reading about an oil spill, it will give me much more background and detail.

I need to sketch this out, but right now I only have a few minutes to get the idea down in text.

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What does sharing look like? An ixd review

Post author By nina
Post date September 19, 2010

Throughout the semester I will rapid sketch wireframes of current sharing interfaces. The goal and intent is to get a more intimate understand of how the interactions work. I’m still in debate and discussion if this is an interpretation or a review.

I looked at the current Facebook Share interface and the Twitter interfaces. A friend of mine is in an AB test for a new share interface and Twitter should be rolling something out to me any second now. But, there is no wait in research, so I sketched them out anyway.

Twitter and Facebook both ask a question of their social journalist (their user). Doing this prompts action. Both of their action buttons are also simple, short words with a clickable button. By “clickable” I mean they are geographically placed at the bottom right of the text field which follows Western reading habits (left to right) and visual vertical hierarchy (top to bottom).let me

What’s on your mind?

and

What’s happening?

Facebook Share

Facebook initially hides buttons that may complicate the layout and distract the user. It seems their ultimate goal is to simply get their social journalist to click in the box.

Facebook @mentions

When the social journalist types the @ symbol, links (events, pages, names) from their network filter down to ultimately build the richness of the Facebook experience. However, I wonder if there is a way Facebook can suggest links so the user does not have to type the “@” symbol.

Facebook post

Once shared, the post then appears at the top of the news feed may it be top news or top posts. The buttons that were initially hidden remain visible but the text field shrinks back to one line.

Facebook Attachments

Many of the interactions across photos, videos, links and events are similar. I think it’s possible to create one attachment button. It’s possible Facebook explored this avenue already and separate choices were more explicit and therefor better for their users overall.

Facebook Attachments

I think Facebook link attachments could be removed all together and should be something that automatically happens when any link is inserted.

Twitter Sharing

Twitter takes more liberty with space and asks their prompt question above the text field. There is less activity on a Twitter stream so it is less necessary to tie up all text and images into small spaces. The counter turns to red when 9 characters are left before surpassing the limit.

Twitter @ Mentions

Twitter may have popularly introduced the @mention behavior but Facebook’s dropdown filter is an overall easier to user experience. It’s often quite difficult to remember someone’s username on Twitter versus a friend’s actual name on Facebook. However, in not using a filter down technique, Twitter gives their users more creative freedom to link outside their network and create their own hash tags.