7 Months of OpenNews

In two months, my Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellowship at BBC News Specials will end and everybody wonders what I’ll do next.

In a previous century, while studying medicine (long story) I got a part-time webmaster job at one of the most important regional newspapers in Romania (Monitorul de Iași). After working there on the newspaper site and other related online publications for over a year, I left with two colleagues — a designer and a strategist (both also med students and working part-time at the same newspaper) and founded what became one of the leading branding and interactive agency in Romania: Grapefruit*

That unlikely path led me to this fellowship, which has been its own adventure. Let me summarise the past seven months:

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Visualising My News Diet

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On Sunday, at the Visualize Your Media Diet learning lab at the Mozila Festival ran by Nate Matias, Matt Stempeck and Dan Schultz from the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media, the participants had to draw how would they like to visualise their media diet, then discuss it.

Here is the sketch I made there on how I would like to visualise my news diet in order to understand not only the time spent with and the frequency of use of several channels/​formats, but also the actual navigation relationships, the way I discover and I engage with the news.

The idea is that you can see on a timeline the frequency and duration of what sources and types of news items you consume, and how they interrelate; for example, a tweet leads to an article, then to a Hacker News article, then I come back to the article. Another Hacker News article leads to content creation (comment, or share via tweet, etc.), other tweet might get just retweeted, etc.

If I would have other dimensions like sources, authors, topics, etc. I might be able in time to have an algorithm that monitor the usual sources will predict what I might consume as news item, and only if I won’t actually find it via the usual way, then notify me “you might have missed this article, you usually read this type of article because…”.

Timeboxing the News

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This Saturday at the Touch the News design challenge at the Mozilla Festival, I was in team 6 with Heather Lesson, Peter O’Shaughnessy, Carlo Frinolli, Nick Smith, Gavin McFarland and Chris Warring.

We focused on how people consume news on the iPad with regard to location, time of day and time available to spend on news.

We discussed on the needed changes in font sizes and layout needed for various reading positions, discussed Craig Mod’s Bibliotype article (A List Apart: A Simpler page) and prototype.

Then we discussed how the news site could use time of day and location as information to learn from various user settings (font sizes, layout) to what categories of news the user is reading at home, work, in the morning, etc. to adjust accordingly the suggestions of related articles.

The major issue we tackled with was: given a known time to spend with the iPad (while commuting, etc.) how do you choose what to read? How do you know what can be read in that time?

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PLESPER

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Rarely our exper­i­ence with a news story is a dir­ect one, therefore our point of view on a story is driven by habit and con­ven­tions and not created through a first hand exper­i­ence. To under­stand a such story you have not to only under­stand the elements that com­poses it, but the rela­tion­ship between them. Under­stand­ing means decon­struc­tion and reconstruction.

Design

PLESPER works at two levels: the usual macro level is concerned with an article (or any web addressable item) as unit (regarded as a coherent point of view), the micro level dissects an article into smaller segments (ideally at the level of facts).

The macro level navigation is what we’re currently used with as passive readers. The micro level is needed for active reading, for ques­tion­ing assump­tions, con­sid­er­ing altern­at­ives, ques­tion­ing the trust­wor­thi­ness of the authors and their sources. An active reader will recon­struct his crit­ical point of view for deeper understanding.

PLESPER is organised around the idea of shareable space, akin to Etherpad, as data and not as live interactions, each person even when collaborates on the same space may have different views, but the same items.

At macro level PLESPER allows the people sharing a space to add items (by URL or a web search), view a thumbnail representation of them, filter and sort them by various dimensions (location, names, social tags).

A zoomable user interface (ZUI) allows switching from macro to micro level while keeping the navigation coherent.

At micro level each paragraph or possible meaningful sentence can be individually addressed, selected and related with ones from other articles by various means:

Additionally a selected segment can be promoted (quoted) to the macro level in order to be used in constructing relations.

A quote (for example a tweeted quote with a link) can be related not only to its original context if provided but for brevity sake to the minimum context needed to decrease its ambiguity.

Once the initial items were sorted, filtered and dissected; they can be connected in a graph to convey sequence, relations, etc.

Spaces can be shared fully or read-​only simultaneously (different capability URIs), they can be imported (cloned or synced); allowing the construction of various interaction processes.

You can test the prototype as shown in the video at PLESPER​.com (server temporarily offline)

Technical notes

Brief

PLESPER is a platform for collaborative storyboarding that does not impose a specific process. People can create, re-​use (fork), mix elements from various storyboards (spaces), share and comment on them by using their exiting (and future) social networks. Several envisaged uses are:

  • collaborative drafting of stories with full or partial public collaboration
  • published along an article to support it and gather feedback (comments, storyboard re-​use, etc.)
  • evolve articles based on the public interaction with the storyboard (at the discretion of the editor)
  • create meaningful articles’ connections with other ones (as they may connect at a more abstract/​storyboard level)
  • back data visualisations with more in-​depth discussions and datasets (allowing the community to create alternative visualisations and import additional datasets)

One of the most important feature is that there are no specific requirements for the exist­ing sites other than be accessible over the web, PLESPER will work over old pages on the web, it will work with legacy and future CMS sys­tems, it will work over Twit­ter, Face­book, G+ and whatever will be inven­ted; because it is based on what the web is made of: links.

Relevant blog posts:

  1. The Perplex & Other Stories (the initial idea)
  2. News Stories & Interaction (where I initially explore some existing news spaces navigation metaphors then I introduce PLESPER)
  3. Collaboration in PLESPER (a simple playlist analogy)