Today’s bookmarks

Things I’ve bookmarked in Ma.gnolia in the past 24 hours

Mechanical Turk: The Demographics

Apparently more than half of Mechanical Turkers have degrees, and the vast majority are still in first world countries. Fortunately for people who need to live off their work – and value their spare time – after 2.5 years it still seems to have only niche appeal on the labour supply side.

More on Open Calais

The folk at Reuters don’t miss a trick! Obviously I rarely write on this blog so comments are very few, but I quickly got responses to my posts on both Open Calais and, a while back, on Reuters and Global Voices.

Anyway I’m very glad to see Tom’s links below of some interesting apps. This one connects to Wikipedia and then Amazon (loaded slowly for me but worth the wait), and I also enjoyed this impressive demonstration of how it pulls semantic data out of raw text. I ran a few stories through it to see how it worked.

This story about Bush’s speech on Iraq from NYTimes shows some of the cool things it catches:

Of course shorthand references and humour don’t work so well, as this post from FT Alphaville shows:

Today’s bookmarks

Things I’ve bookmarked in Ma.gnolia in the past 24 hours

Yahoo Buzz is a Game Changer for Social Media; And Spells Trouble for Digg! – ReadWriteWeb

So far stories are limited to coming from an invited group of publishers.

Election Night at NYTimes.com – Open – Code – New York Times Blog

Great description of how they get their data etc.

How separate are technology and content?

News media companies might feel their specialty is content, not technology – but it’s hard to divorce the two. Some of the big news media companies are embracing the idea of their own technology shops. Reuters’ Open Calais seems to be the best example right now. It’s an ambitious semantic-web project based on a company they bought last year called Clear Forest. Read/Write Web has a good description and early review, it’s a little out of date now though it seems not many apps have been built for it yet.

Meanwhile NYTimes has ‘Code’ (and its developers’ blog). The projects aren’t quite as ambitious or interesting as Calais.

Of course there are more… I just can’t think of them right now.

But it’s interesting to ask whether content and technology should be seen quite so separately as they often still are.

We’ve all seen examples where the two are intertwined – the question is how to combine them effectively, in a practical sense. After all good coding knowledge and editing/reporting experience are pretty separate.

Rob Curley’s description of how his ’skunkworks’ team works shows one way. They sound a little separate from the core editorial operations for my liking, but that’s the whole Washington Post two-different-buildings-15-minutes-drive-apart problem for you.

Even being in the same building, or the same room, it’s difficult to see how to keep experienced reporting/editing and the extensive coding knowledge needed to work together. But I’m sure it’s possible.

Today’s bookmarks

Things I’ve bookmarked in Ma.gnolia in the past 24 hours

Calais – Overview

An interesting Reuters project.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype – ReadWriteWeb

Rather critical review of Twine ‘the most hyped semantic app of the season’ – but apparently it has greatly improved since this review was written.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Paul Kedrosky: Live Sovereign Wealth Fund Performance

Quite simple updating table of current share price of companies invested in by big SWFs (Blackstone, Bear Stearn etc) compared to the price paid by the SWF; showing loss or gain.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Unsocial bookmarking for journalists – the dynamic blogroll

I am one of these curmudgeons who only uses delicious as a bookmark repository, not as a social tool. But it can also be a great publishing/speed-blogging tool. There’s a useful guide here to getting del.icio.us to automatically post your links to your blog each day.

Some of Martin Belam’s thoughts about how/why to use it are interesting:

The New York Times site probably won’t care if you send them a trickle of referrers from your bookmarked link, but lots of bloggers and smaller webmasters spend time gazing at their analytics software tracking down every incoming link that is sending them traffic. Bookmarking someone else’s site is a great potential way to get new eyeballs onto your blog pages.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you put together an evil bot army spamming people’s referrer logs of course – mind you, that works too – but if you remember to ‘test’ the published links on your site you’ll make sure that your URL is appearing in the referrer logs of the sites you’ve linked to.

Urgh, more potential for nice web technologies to be abused for spam.

But back on the automated posting of your delicious links to your blog – I looked into this about a month ago and got distracted for some reason, but I’m keen to get Gideon using it as he’s pretty good with delicious (my use of it is far more sporadic and frankly too personal, even with the ‘non-sharing’ option).

Anyway this is the page on delicious that lets you setup this tricky tool. Despite my private

There’s another way to get your delicious links on your blog, however – a ‘dynamic blogroll‘ that sits outside your main blog posts. Delicious makes it calls it  a ‘linkroll’ and Typepad has a way to getting it up there.

The Westminster guys are doing this, but using the Google Reader. Brad Delong has long been doing the same thing with delicious (but you have to look hard to find it these days – it’s right down the far right).

Of course the downside is that it’s not integrated with your actual main blog feed – so doesn’t turn up in your own feed at all. But perhaps non-newsy bloggers this is somewhat suitable, as Delicious tends to be used for less contemporaneous links.

So, it’s a start. Surprisingly some of our other new bloggers are quite keen. I’m starting to recommend Google Reader to colleagues, rather than Bloglines. Bloglines does have a ‘clip/blog this’ tool but as everyone already has a Google account it’s easier to just use that.

Reddit is great. But where are the private sub-reddits?

I always liked it in theory but never used it much. Perhaps because the designs and fonts are so unappealing (though I don’t like to think of myself as so easily swayed by such things). Now I’m looking at it every day. It’s superior to Newsvine, Newsnow, and in some ways better than delicious. But when are they going to release these fabled new features?

What is the point of the NYtimes ‘Polling Places’ project?

Am I missing something, or is this amazing citizen journalism project actually rather dull? Pictures of the Third Reformed Church in Kalamazoo don’t really float my boat, and as a source of information on balloting systems, voting behaviours etc, it seems pretty limited in that you can’t really see the data in any obvious way.

‘By documenting local voting experiences, participants can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America(,)’ it says.

But what can it tell us?
On the one-to-many front, this is not bad way to display the masses of survey info that we often have to render.

Reuters and Global Voices

When is Global Voices’ deal with Reuters going to be realised? I can’t see a peep about it on Reuters’ website, apart from the media release, and that was ages ago. And I’m very curious… Global Voices seems to be one of the few successful attempts at ‘citizen journalism’ (or whatever the cool kids are calling it now).

Full-text RSS feeds

The very nice and smart Tim Harford thinks full-text RSS links are the way to go. He sent me some links:

I think full RSS feeds are much the best idea. See:
http://scobleizer.com/2006/02/22/blog-herald-doesnt-understand-why-full-text-feeds-work/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070813/014338.shtml
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2007/10/18/tim-harford-blogging-at-ftcom
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2007/10/01/blogonomics-rss-feeds

This is what I emailed back to him:

Thanks for the links, btw. I had read the Techdirt and Scoble ones but not the rest. It’s provoked a rant.. I would like to know what you think:Full-text RSS (for the likes of us, as a business that relies on advertising) is an argument that still feels a little fuzzy to me. I get the point about being nice to your readers, but basically they are arguing one should give things away so that people who know how to get them for free will recommend them to people who don’t know or can’t be bothered to get them for free. You could apply this argument just as easily to other industries or even other media… but no-one has done it anywhere else, presumably because it’s uneconomic!

Underlying it all is that we don’t have a viable business model for many types of content on the net. We don’t have a solution, so we shouldn’t pretend there is one. If there’s no business model for publishers of some scale, seems to me that only rich kids or those who have other incomes can become journalists…