Tyler Chance

I had the privilege of meeting all three of these wonderful people at the conference, and I came across their final thoughts from ONA09.

Journalism entrepreneur and author of Journalism 2.0  (and the upcoming Journalism Next) Mark Briggs:

http://www.journalism20.com/blog/2009/10/06/four-things-i-learned-at-ona/

Poynter.org’s Online Managing Editor Steve Myers:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=171302

Knight Digital Media Center’s guest post from RJI Fellow Jacqui Banazynski

http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/from_ona_a_hot_list/

This serves mainly for my purposes as I try to focus my final thoughts…

From the early career-building sessions to even some of the remarks made by Evan Williams (entrepreneur) and Lisa Stone (entrepreneur and former journalist), an overriding theme to the entire conference was that even though many journalists are being laid off, there is hope.

This hope has come in the form of journalists starting their own independent projects. It’s been a hot topic these past few years, but journalistic entrepreneurship was the absolute BUZZ of ONA 09.

That led to the panel called “From Journalist to Entrepreneur,” a discussion on the role independent projects have played in the new media landscape.

Scott Lewis, CEO of VoiceofSanDiego.org, gave some wonderful words of wisdom. VOSD is a non-profit news organization run out of (you guessed it) San Diego that, thanks to its method of funding by donors and grants, gauges its success not on ad dollars but by connection to and influence in the surrounding community.

“I think you should not try to be ubiquitous,” Lewis said. He continued on to say that it should be every journalist’s mission to just try and stay pertinent. “If you keep trying to be everything to everybody, you are missing out on your chances to have value.”

He had a few more wonderful points to make.

• If you going to bootstrap your company, you know how to not work for not a lot of money.
• Don’t fall in love with your idea. A lot of these ventures get started out of passion. But your passion may not be shared by somebody else. They think they know the answer. Fail early and often. Iterate all over again. Get Feedback. Refine your idea according to what your users and customers are telling you.
• Don’t just sit there, just do it. (The Nike approach)
• Vision isn’t seeing exactly what will happen, it’s seeing what you need to have happen in order to prepare for it.
• Don’t invest in technology. You’re not a technologist. You aren’t a coder. Let those people deal with that problem.
• Being able to do difficult things like change direction and fire people.
• Often resort to your mission statement
• As a non-profit it’s important to implement your mission.
• It all comes back to knowing that you aren’t that smart.
• Journalists are very risk averse. Stop being so safe. It just has to be good enough to get that first version out there.

GigaOm founder and former Time, Inc. employee Om Mahlik had some incredible wisdom to share. He felt that it takes the wisdom from being on your own to become successful on an independent project.

“You don’t go to journalism school to be an entrepreneur. You go to journalism school to be the CEO of Enron or the CEO of Halliburton. You drop out of school to be Bill Gates and make something in a garage,” Mahlik said.

Malik’s closing question was incredibly simple, but left a huge resonance with those in the room, especially those rustling ideas for potential start-ups around in their heads.

“Why let somebody else decide your destiny?”

My favorite new tool that was unveiled by Josh Hatch from USA Today was an online tool called Swivel.  It is a tool that can be used for automatic interactive data visualization.

Past the nerd talk, what is amazing about this tool is that you can upload .csv files that are organized by either category or year and it will automatically create a flash interactive graph based on the data provided.

I used some data from the 2009 Statistic Abstract to make a quick, interactive graph of dollars spent in research in 2008.

You can follow these Twitter feeds:

#ONA09

#ONABIZ

I’m at least on these. A lot of really cool conversation going on during these sessions.

Okay, so at IUPUI we have a new Web-based presence, which is something we have never dealt with before. As a result one of the biggest concerns we could raise have to do with legal concerns, especially as it pertains to user-generated content, such as comments.

That’s where CDA 230 (which actually passed all the way back in 1996) comes in, and that’s where the panel focused a whole bunch of their discussion.

And this was by no means a light-weight panel. We had leading lawyers from Microsoft, Google and from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

What CDA 230 means is that when a user submits content, we a) reserve the right to edit for style, length or obscenity and b) we also have the right to take it down. This also serves as a way to protect us from libel or slander suits that are based on user-generated content, because even though the news organization published it on the web (and this statute only works for the web, by the way), the person that wrote it wasn’t owned by the news organization and therefore the news entity isn’t held liable. Great, huh?

Oh, and here’s a good note. On the topic of “fair use” and photographs, apparently the White House photographer is on Flickr, and therefore anything pulled from Flickr for use isn’t necessarily a breach of copyright. Just throwing that one out there.

This one really is best described in my notes from this one:

Paul Barry – CTO of Huffington Post
It’s best to divide it up in the way we are thinking about it, which is WHO ARE THE STATS FOR?
Omniture, and then Management is looking at larger trends
1)    Management – super critical
Looking @ UVs Unique Views
What’s your last 31 days
Break it down and look @ how are we doing off-site. How are we doing on Facebook/Twitter/iPhone App
Vertical analysis.
Any new feature test. AB Test.
2)    Editors
Stats. How frequently do they get these stats and how much do they gate?
Right time frequency is 15 minutes and 1 hour.
Here’s what’s hot in your area.
What’s a good search phrase for this story?
Is this creating a new audience from us?
Viral component to a story.
The most popular –
See not just what’s popular around the site but really what’s popular with your friends.

Eric Brown:
“Preaching to the Cheerleaders”
The questions we should ask:
Do we have a rigorous success metric system? Did we meet them?
Can we use these insights for the future?
Yahoo starts with a mission: Connect people with the users and things that matter with them the most.
Content Optomization Enging
Ranks content by key metric and displays top scorer
Human editors control it:
Provides rigorous stats reporting
Under testing, segmentation models
Communicate what works
Stats reports: Send out to stakeholders, be honest!
Programming reviews: internal and external
Twiki great for sharing/collaboration

1)    Be “on message” with the mission
2)    Bring readers the most important local news
3)    Serve users with the Web’s best Fantasy sports advice
4)    Give office workers a fun, short video to watch during lunch

Develop robust metrics, and grade everything
Traffic, revenus, competitive factors
Schedule MORE content that performs well, and less content that doesn’t.
Don’t go Stats CRAZY!
Human editors control the algorithm
Turn qualitative factors into quantitative states

Steve Dorsey –
Advantages in qualitative research
IDEO: Human-centered design training in ’05 and ‘08
Observing how people interact with the way the consumer interacts with your product
Process
Understand + Observe
Synthesize
Visualize (Brainstorm)
Protoype, Evaluate, Refine
Deal with extreme user (those who sell your papers or use it for a specific purpose other than just browsing the news)
Learning more from non-users than from actual users
Quantitative
Trends
Repetition, habit
Data, Data, Data } Recordable
can be shallow
Qualitative
Extreme users give you unexpected uses
Messy process
Uncertain outcomes
Untested
Can be very quick
Low-investment
Potentially: DEEP
Disclaimer: DO NOT SEPARATE THE TWO, THEY CAN ENHANCE EACH OTHER
Users don’t know WHERE the content comes from! Worse – they don’t CARE!
Process of change
A cross-divisional rally spot
Freedom to ‘fail’
Innovate
Iterate
Break It
Learn from It.
(Repeat)
3 results
Michigan Six Page
Permission to have a point of view
A newly defined mission: BE Detroit
It’s only really useful to do these things if you are turning non-users into users.
Treating all of your destination pages as a home page. It better be a good experience then.
Watch the bounce rate.
Engagement
Non-hard metric indicators: comments
What are the comments? Only reason to have comments is to have your page be better.
Sentiment analysis.
A Headline that does really well for traffic, has mean people with the headline.
20,000 comments can have 10 horrible people.
A ton of time in their comment system.
Stick to mission → the role of prospecting, redefining your mission?
To not experiment is a horrible thing.
Wider array of information available.
Don’t require login for a start up….
People mistrust spam comments!
It’s about strategies to convert people from non-users to users

So, this Susan Mernit character that I’ve been mentioning since my first blog post wrote a tweet about me:

Susanmernit – enjoying the fresh perspectives of journalism undergrad and new #ONA09 attendee @tchance121–and his tweets w/mom @katyleen54

*blushes*

It’s nice to be noticed by perhaps one of the best well-connected people in Silicon Valley.

Another little hour of technology greatness from Amy Webb.

#1 Real-time web.
Google is the same way. Google isn’t publishing everyday. It doesn’t show twitter, facebook, youtube.
As a result we are starting to see this thing called the real-time web. Flock – kicks ass.
Simple Update Protocol : created by Friend feed.
Robo.to
RSS Cloud: Plug-in for Wordpress
PubSubHubbub
Real Time Messaging
Livestation -> Directly to iPhones
The Weather Channel
FB and TWITTER already have RT publishing established.
News organizations must compete with other “news” sources.
Search companies are beginning to offer social, other RT content.

#2 Lightblogging
Blog = easy to use platform
Content is defined by traditional media
Lightblogs refer to even lighter platforms, not just less content
Fewer barriers to entry actually means MORE content in the long run.
There’s going to be even more content.
On the other hand, there are fewer people integratina Tumbelog or Posterous acct with the average CMS.
Since you can post via email or by the phone, it’s even easier to vet cit-journalism content!
Every journalist could set up one for his or her beat.

#3 Personalization
Not about customization
Social networks, website other digital services
Consumers GET what they want, when they want it, how they want it.
Pandora.
Bing. Map search.
Microsoft
Re:Search project at Microsoft started as a MIT grad student project
Relies on information from your past searches to determine what information is most relevant to you.
PSearch is an IE plugin that searches your document, emails and other info stored on our hard drive to personalize Internet search results.
My6Sense for an iPhone
OpenID – portable identity and sign-on
OpenSocial – Google backed for social networks; create widgets with one set of code.
Gravatar – Single avatar for all networks.
Open Data Movement afoot.:
Structured data, interconnected and used by 3rd parties via API. The more data you provide the better-targeted content and web/mobile services.
CustomTimes.

#4
Interactive TV (iTV)
Fewer people watch TV. They manage video.
Multi-way multi-screen video content.
Action associated with the broadcast: Real-time social media streams, click to purchase, hover to get more information about something on screen…
TiVO, Sun Microsystems thinking about something like that.
Interactive TV Widgets
Sony in Japan – first to market w/ TV widgets in 2007.
Intel has had a chip ready for six years and says that 2015, 15 billion consumer devices that offer video will be interactive.
Yahoo has cornered the market

#5 Identity Recognition
Midomi
Batch recognition on Picasa.
Picasa auto completes names from Google Contacts
Face.com photo tagger or photo finder ack
Auto-record voice, database is queried to determine who the voice belongs to…
Authenticate “famous” voices as real or fake.
Multi-voice recording, crowded room
Civilian use
To be sure, it’s legal.
More and more important to monitor your own digital identity.
For reporters: Jackpot!
For HR people and online daters: Also jackpot!
Tag names if it’s in news sories!

#6 Augmented Reality (This one blows my mind)
Spherical coordinate systems to display info relative to the physical location of the viewer.
Two: Marker-based gravimetric.
Living Sasquatch.
“Yelp!”
Monocle
HUGE AR BROWSER FOR THE WORLD!
Wikitude – Android
AcrossAir
Layar – Augmented Reality 3d
Robotvision
Virtual Notes
Crime Scene Files
Health – personal checkups
Augmented reality RSS
ARML Augmented Reality Markup Language

#7 User Generated Sensor Data
Sense Network
Vitamin d
Searchable video
Any surface is interactive and searchable
Lookup video by mobile
VIDEO BEHAVIORAL METRICS!

#8 MobiLife
2 dimensional barcode (Yes, Maggie, that’s a QR Code!)
OMVC. Sprint / LG Lotus –
Even more emphasis on mobile

#9 Geolocation 3.0
Loopt
Offender iPhone App
Micello maps the indoors
Whrrl your MTBS score.

#10 Internet of Things
IPv4 vs IPv6
Everything has an address, interconnects
Real world things get internet addresses
Actions can be taken without your direct involvement
Centralen – tracks flowers
Pachube
Glympse – they can see how fast your are driving.
Watch the movement of your magazine
Infomaniacs
Computer assisted reporting on crack.

The report I posted yesterday was probably the best start you could have had at discussing Williams’ speech yesterday.

Well, not really a speech. It was more like a fireside chat that we were able to sit in on and ask questions.

So for the sake of not repeating what you have already read, I’ve decided to mainly just list my key take-aways from it.

What really broke the simple “How can Twitter make journalism better?” mold were the questions that had to deal with being and entrepreneur. I feel that this applies greatly to the online journalism world in that the main way to gain notoriety and the main way to actually still be new in this business is to have an entrepreneurial spirit and try to reach for the unknown. That being said, here were some of his best pieces of advice:

• One of the best things you can do as an entrepreneur is realize potential. This applies not only to assessing your successes, but to also realize when it’s a flop and jump ship (in a nice way).
• What really got him far in this world was his stubbornness and persistence (as Susan Mernit put it). It was the fact he was able to filter through those voices on the external that were and weren’t worth listening to (as HE put it).
• Finally, the main note I wanted to make about his speech was that if you want to start something, create something that YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD. It has to be something you are passionate about. And don’t try to do too much at once. He said that there were around 25 things that he wanted to do with Twitter and it would take 25 years to do all of them. So start small, because the mindset that “It has to do all of these things or it’s not worth it” doesn’t wind up a healthy one. (Guilty.)

… but my neck has been broken by the pace of this thing. I have a few things to update on. Including legal issues that are of great importance. So stay tuned! I won’t be out of this until 9 p.m. Indiana time!