Inside View from Ireland

Crowdsourcing the news

ONE OF KILKENNY'S weekly papers goes to print on the weekends and that's a big change for local news reporters. A bigger change would be if those well-read newspapers took a page from Gannett and start sourcing more news from active citizens, instead of depending on the news originating in the news room. Let the public report on matters affecting the public. In many places, the public contributes photos, editorial opinion and press releases anyway.

Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other daily newspapers across the States, will begin crowdsourcing many of its news-gathering functions because breaking news on the Web and updating for the newspaper draws more people to both those media. Bloggers would confirm that by explaining people want their news to be more than factual reporting of events. They want details for calendars, recommendations for cinema, lifestyle topics and stories gathered around the parish pump. Plus, all 21st century news sites embrace community interactivity.

Jeff Howe explains that "Gannett newsrooms were rechristened 'information centers' and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like 'data,' 'digital' and 'community conversation.'

Bebo Spam

GARETH STACK writes about a worrying problem with Bebo--mountains of Bebo spam that accounts get across the globe.  This is a big problem, especially for the uninitiated.  Bebo’s staff merely generate form letters when contacted about the abuse, which "leaves users at the mercy of spammers and the willfully abusive." The only tactic left for a Bebo user is to block IP addresses in large swaths, which means you cut off comments from well-intentioned friends in the process. It gets worse.

Should GAA Sue YouTube

PERHAPS THE GAA should queue up to sue YouTube. The Association owns the rights for the representation of the teams, their logos and their media distribution. If so inclined, the GAA could join Bayern Munich, the team that wants YouTube to remove footage taken by fans. Bayern believes the presence of these user-generated video clips, many filmed by fans sitting in the stadiums, harm the 30,000 paying subscribers to the team’s own video site, FC Bayern TV.

Online Media Captioning

GOOD IDEAS about online media captioning keep bubbling into my newsreaders. We like the dotSUB video and the cross-flow percolating at Obie's weblog. I'm trying to figure out whether people who bookmark the BBC’s Annotatable Audio project on del.icio.us have also pointed to wikis that locate audio segments online. Captioning is an important concept because it transports podcasts into spaces whre easy transcrition and translation sit.

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Obadiah Tarzan Greenberg -- "More about the online captioning idea"
Tom Coates -- "More on the BBC Annotatable Audio Project"
Casting Words transcription services.
OpenSource OpenCourseware Prototype System needs volunteers to help transcribe many available Open Educational Resources (OER) video lectures into English.

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Podcasting.ie on the shortlist

JESSIE AND STEVE recorded an hour-long Culture Sluts conversation [31.3 MB MP3 file] with Stacey and Tanja in Thomas Read's pub in the middle of Dublin today. It was momentous because at the end of the session, podcasting.ie ended up on the shortlist of the Irish Internet Assocciation Net Visionary Awards. Steve McCormack lobbied hard to launch that award category and now second and third level students podcasting from Tipperary benefit from a groundswell of social media support. Thanks for voting us onto the shortlist.

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Bonus Link: Ireland's most prolific podcast: An Liora. That's Stacey Lyons, Steve McCormack and Jessie Ward talking about SL, Bebo and clubbing surrounded by the lively atmosphere of Thomas Reads.
Irish Internet Association shortlist for 2006 Net Visionary Awards.

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YouTube Mobile Version

CRUNCHGEAR read an AdAge story with YouTube founder Chad Hurley telling attendees at the OgivlyOne Digital Media Summit in New York that YouTube hopes to be able to deliver user generated short video clips to mobile devices by the end of 2007. According to TechCrunch, Hurley said figuring out a monetization model on mobiles was a big part of the challenge, he said he hadn’t seen mobile advertising work yet.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick -- "YouTube Going Mobile in 14 Months?"

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What BarCamp Ireland Taught Me

ABOUT A MONTH has passed since we attended BarCamp Ireland and the most resonant piece of information still lingering in my notes come from Conor O'Neill's microformat talk, based largely on Ryan King's XTech presentation. He described microformats as small and gentle syntactic touch-ups for web pages. We need to use them because they will graciously make the information on web pages we create easily readable by humans and macines. Consider microformats as the technical diplomats of the web and the facilitators that permit the same piece of data to be shared among many applications and people.

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Ryan King -- "The Intelligent Design of Microformats"
Bonus Link: Elly Parker gets granny podcasting.

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Boost e-mail clickthrough

NEW RESEARCH indicates including the company name and/or brand in the subject line of email campaigns could boost click-through rates by as much as 50%. Other simple changes to creative elements could boost click-through and conversion rates even more.

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Kristina Knight -- "Creative e-mail that works"

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Centurian YouTuber

MY USER demographic includes my self-registered age of my dear deceased dad. So I'm pushing the average age of YouTube users closer to the 30 year old mark. Here's a summary of YouTube usage from Mashable Labs:

Walking Skeletons

IT'S OUR FIRST HALLOWEEN in the house with all sorts of new creaking sounds coming from John Walkenbach.

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If you had time to linger here, I think you should go watch "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad".

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