Inside View

Behind Storyful

I HAVE WATCHED members on the Storyful team do their work before they started working together and that's the big reason why I trust what they do with news.

Before Mark Little started Storyful, he reported the news with authority and integrity. When he decided to jump from mainstream broadcasting into the waters of new media, he knew how to pull together journalists who could source and cross-check the fast-moving flow of social content. It's a skill most people online do not have. The major reason Storyful succeeds is by being able to dip in and out of content streams coming from social media, breaking news sites, special aggregators and traditional sources. It is uncanny how Storyful can find and report on incidents that major news desks do not see. I think part of the reason is "the Storyful team" which happens to be the exact phrase several people a week use when coming to my blog. I've used that phrase just once and yet it's being cross-checked by people who want to know more about the fascinating people from across the globe who help produce the true story, not necessarily salacious news items. The result is news you can trust and that's why Storyful sits as a well-used bookmark on all of my mobile phones.

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Previously: "Storyful in the Sunday Times",  August 28, 2011.

Markham Nolan -- "Making journalism more social than ever", October 6, 2011.

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Der iGod ist Tot

WHEN STEVE JOBS PASSED away I turned off the three Apple iOS devices we have in the house, knowing that I would be snipping communications with family eight time zones away. It was like lighting a votive candle.

Woz on Jobs

Crash Planned

I had a terabyte box half-filled with data crash onto my tile floor a few weeks ago and now find myself implementing CrashPlan's cloud backup as a form of insurance. But the problem is bigger.

I have to finally set aside time to master my own data flow. It's obvious after a few days with Crashplan that I have several self-induced choke points and each of them need my attention.

I stepped into CrashPlan because of Jochen Lillich's recommendation. He uses and recommends CrashPlan as part of an essential business process. I don't mind paying a little more than I've previously paid for online backup because I'm getting a piece of software for myself. Until I started using it, I did not realise that I could use the service to back up to CrashPlan's servers and to my own (or my friends') computers.

Our Pinch and Zoom Back Seater

OUR FOUR YEAR OLD can touch, tap, swipe and pinch. But she isn't unique.

Her cousins and several friends in her creche form part of a newly-emerging Touch Generation that has developed a clear expectation of how computing technology should work--by touchscreen.

Mia saw us working with our phones and just took things from the point where we handed her our iPod Touches. It was easier for her to locate video files by swiping and tapping a single icon instead of trying to move keys on an old Nokia phone where Peppa Pig also resides. Like other two-year-olds, she liked getting a vibrant, colourful reactions to her touch.

October Sunday Newsround

I LEARN A LOT from the Sunday newspapers in Ireland and this week my phone told me who was in the cover photo of the short seven minute video clip below the break I made while reading the newspapers.

I had set my cameraphone to ask Google Goggles to cross-check images and one of the results pointed to the model's name in the Swiss field with an alpaca. If Mark Little's face also accompanied some of the press Storyful got today, I imagine Goggles would have identified him as well. I might be among a dying breed who doesn't mind buying and reading two or three different Sunday newspapers. It's the only way to get a sense of balanced coverage in the Irish media market. It's only fair to support the Sunday Business Post (SBP) since that's the paper in which many Irish start-ups hope to earn their column inches. If it's not selling, there won't be inches for promotion. I also like the first Sunday of every month for the Computers in Business magazine inside the Sunday Business Post. In today's CIB, Dick O'Brien gives the cover story to "10 Technologies that could change your business". I'm putting all ten technologies into a long bet on my Educasting blog, betting that by 2016 at least half of the technologies cited in the article are part of the working world in Ireland.

Irish News with Aurora

I've summarised some of the high points of my seven-minute newsround below the break. It's also on YouTube and Audioboo.

Skitch Blogging Now

ONE OF MY NEWEST apps is Skitch and it allows me to snap an image with my phone, annotate it like the image at left and share it in dozens of ways.

Because my Android gallery shows images uploaded into G+ and Picasa, I can pull down those images and mark them up too. For someone like me who has moblogged more than 1000 posts, Skitch is a natural workflow extended. And now that Skitch is wrapped around Evernote, I consider it an essential app. The Evernote podcast crew says there will be a free Skitch app for iOS soon. I hope that means Windows development is also underway because there are so many ways Skitch would help in setting up wireframes, marking up project plans, annotating versions of web designs and highlight issues with infographics.

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Sent mail2blog using O2 Typepad service from my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc.

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