The coming weeks we will be further updating the EN.nl news website. The last weeks we have added interesting things on the database level and back-end of the system. Now it is time to bring some of those ideas to the front-end.

One of the things we have done is making tags more important. After using and testing with it we noticed the combined tagging methods we use give a very interesting and relevant database with tags. The tags have more value and semantic relations than I thought they would have. EN.nl has over 35.000 articles in its database with over a 100.000 tags, 10.000 of those tags are unique.

What we have added is a system that tracks the tags of the articles you read. With this information a metadata profile is created. New articles that enter the site will be matched to your ‘profile’ and if there is a match this will be a recommended article. There is also a tag relation mechanism to create a more semantic relation.

We will do the same for your friends, since news is part of a social experience. We are adding groups as well. If you have online friends using the website, you and your group of friends creates a semantic profile as well. New articles will be recommended that fit to your group of friends.

Your profile
What about this tag based profile based on what your read? The profile could be private or hidden. It could also be open or even exportable. For example EN.nl could connect to web services and get the highest rated and most recent blog posts about subjects you like and recommend these to you. Or you could connect the information to other profiles to create a more rich or enhanced experience on other platforms as well.

Would you like to take this profile? And can you think of a service that could serve you better when it has a collection of news themes and subjects you like?

The concept design for the EN.nl frontpage. The page automatically orders the information based on what is most relevant in general and for you.

I like location based services. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I’m sure it will invade/expose our privacy more than social websites already do and I think it will add something new and more to mobile devices that computers can’t.

The problem with LBS is that the technology is distributed. Every device and phone has its own interface, protocols, software and more. In the end the application that is used to transfer the location isn’t relevant. Relevant is what you can do with the coordinates.

Yahoo Fire Eagle
Yahoo Fire Eagle jumps into this hole. The service acts as a bridge between applications. Fire Eagle makes sure all applications can talk to Fire Eagle and they distribute the information trough an API. This makes it possible for me to develop a location based service without having to wonder about how to get the location information from the actual devices.

For example if I want to make a mobile website that displays news articles based on your location all I have to do is to connect a database with news (and coordinates) to the Fire Eagle API and render this on a page.

You - as a user - should take an extra step and install a client that is able to give your whereabouts to Fire Eagle. For instance I use Brightkite, Plazes, Dopplr and Navizon on my iPhone and desktop to tell Fire Eagle where I am. I don’t use it frequent, but they all work.

Go and build great things
This information about my location is open when I wish it to be open. Now we need developers that can create great applications that return some of the Location Based value back to me as a user.

I met Raquel Diniz through a hypernarrative project I did two years ago called slowshutter. The idea was to present a great picture every day and to present it nice.

The project did not continue fluidly (I probably should have been a more active photographer), but through the website I met some nice people and great photographers. One of the photographers on the website is Raquel Diniz. Recently she did a MA image and communication and is having a graduation exposition in London. Below parts from her graduation work.

The portrait of Barbie

‘Barbie is a character who has been photographed in scenarios of personal significance to the photographer. The locations to which she travels vary from interesting places in London to tourist scenarios abroad. Once she is in the place the photographer registers the doll representing different meanings.’

Things I would like to see forever

‘Things I would like to see forever’ is a project where I am registering the routine of three girls living in London. … The base for the project is the use of still photographs transformed into movie images.

GOLDSMITHS MA IMAGE & COMMUNICATIONS DEGREE SHOW
10-13 July 2008
11am-6pm daily
Private view 10th from 6 to 8:30pm

Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London SE1 9PH
Admission FREE
Nearest train/tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo
Information: www.icshow.co.uk

Note: this post ended up in my drafts and should have been posted during the European Championship, sorry :)

Statistics are wonderful and the web as a central mechanism to connect databases creates a great mechanism to share and interact with data.

One great example of statistics is the Castrol Performance Index. For this European Championship the Castrol Index distributes all the games data live on the web. You can immediately see which player played where and how they are doing.

You can compare players, ball possession, shots on goals and more. All this information is live during the game. The exciting part of these kind of websites is that they add something to television that only the web can add. It doesn’t make it more interactive, but it does give it more information depth.

Suddenly the game that looks so simple gets a new layer of data and statistics. I didn’t know that for example the Dutch goalkeeper van der Sar already ran over 1300 meters in the first 34 minutes. Did you know that most of the players run around 10 kilometers during a game.

I can see that players that should be attacking spend most of their time on the wrong part of the field. This information adds context to the video footage, and it is context only interactive media can add. I don’t have to see this data all the time, I can just open it when I’m interested in how the players are doing.

I don’t know if this is what interactive television should be, but I really like how this is adding an extra dimension to live footage.

See also this earlier example by the Dutch Broadcaster NOS

This week AP urged/forced bloggers to use ‘guidelines‘ set by AP when quoting articles. As you might expect this instantly burned all AP’s credits in the blogosphere.

Why?
Why? Why would AP be afraid about people copying parts of their articles and linking back? Haven’t we passed this station with newspapers before?

I think there might be a more structural problem for press agencies. Their customers are changing. Most of these agencies are created by newspapers. Combine journalism efforts and save money. But the web is famous for taking out the middle man. In this case the news websites.

Agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP are they source of news. The speed of publishing and access to information that we as consumers demand can do perfectly without a middle man. Press agency news is no longer an article that gives a journalist information to start writing his or her version. What a press agency publishes is the definite version.

Just take an AP headline and Google it.

What’s the problem?
What’s the real problem? Is AP afraid paying customers (news media) will start complaining because they (the agencies) are taking over the online conversation.

Press agencies are the source. And in a web where information is free to move and to be duplicated the source is the most important place.

What’s the future for press agencies? This question is equally important as the question about what the future of newspapers is. In todays news landscape press agencies are leading. Is their future (partly) in serving customers directly? Press agencies are facing changes, but what will be their new business model?

Image found on this forum by Jonny Crossbones

I like both :)

Two ideas
I’m not a traffic expert by any means, I’m just an end-user. Driving to work this week made me think about a few things. Just some ideas that may be already out there (I think so), and maybe they are not. I don’t know about them, since I’m not an expert in this field. Please let me know in the comments if this is.

First I passed a police car doing speed control using the latest laser equipment. I think speed control can be good and is necessary to maintain safety in some places.

In the Netherlands we are kind of overdoing it since it is a pretty solid cash flow. The police checks day and night on the most obscures highways. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only car driving there and the weather is perfect. The system is not flexible in any way. If you’re driving too fast you get ticketed.

Photo Creative Commons, TomTom by Argosnet Photoshopped by me.

This made me think about the TomTom navigator. These devices are very popular. It would be nice if I could tap the screen when I spot a speed control. If more drivers would do this the information would be more reliable. Or drivers could also tap the screen if speed control has moved. Because it knows where the car is it can directly distribute this information to other cars around.

This would not only be great service to the users of a navigator, it would also make them use the navigator more frequently, since people probably aren’t using it driving to work.

In the image above
1) A speed control point is visible
2) Tap the screen and direction the speed control is checking. This information is automatically distributed to other cars and can warn a driver if he or she drives too fast.

Then driving along I ended up in a traffic jam. Every time there is the same traffic jam at the same spot. Most of the time it gets worse because people are changing lanes at the wrong time.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use LED lights to lighten up the stripes on the road and turn these into a solid line when necessary. LED lights are relatively cheap (at least cheaper for an economy than daily traffic jams) and a strong visual barrier should stop people from changing lanes.

Photo Creative Commons, German Highway by Elmada Photoshopped by me.

Go! and connect to your users
These are just some thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking about these things. There are so many people using services every day and they have good ideas, but do not share these ideas.

Not all of these ideas are good, possible to implement or original. But the tools are around to easily connect to the people using your service and use the knowledge your users have.

The ideas are out there, the tools are out there. Just find your way to connect.

When you write a blog or create a podcast your entry has context in itself. It has a start and it ends. Most postings on micro blogs don’t have context in the messages. The context is in the stream or in time. For example Twitter messages often make sense in your personal timeline or in the conversation within your personal network.

Twitter and Qik are just the first services. Realtime platform independent micro services, that distribute contextless fragments of information are here to stay.

This sense of a ‘live medium’ is something that is changing the web as it is and how we use it. It will change search, or at least sorting search results and it will change reporting news.

A service like Twitter makes news travel fast. This makes it the #1 breaking news source for a lot of people. Why? Because it is reporting as it is happening. It isn’t always right, but it is reporting, open for conversation and correcting itself. It is live coverage and it is a storytelling experience.

News on the web is presented like news on paper. This is good since text on the web is - apart from certain screen specific style rules - the same as on paper. An article is written, checked and published.

Spreading the news
These services like Twitter are making reporting news a more public process. For example if something happens the first people who notice are there when it happens. Uploading messages, pictures and video, to a personal community or group of friends.

With Twitter people start repeating (or retweeting) messages distributing the news among followers and informing a very large audience within minutes. This is the signaling part. It’s not about being a citizen journalist. It is about telling your friends what you are doing, or what you are seeing.

The signal reaches the audience at the same time it reaches the journalist. A journalist has to check the story, is it true? Should I publish about this or wait until it is checked? The reader is expecting that his favorite news website knows more about it and visits the website after hearing about the news. Often resulting in a bad user experience, since there is nothing on the news website about the subject.

What is the role of journalists and media in this? Should they directly report serious rumors? Should they check for more sources. I don’t know. It has to be somewhere in the middle I think. A situation where journalists are producing with updated versions.

CNN
I think CNN is giving this a very prominent place on the CNN website. Maybe because they are from television and reporting breaking news is what they are good at. They are using storytelling mechanisms on the website. Reporting what is happening right now, and directly updating it when the story turns out to be something different.

These are the breaking news messages CNN showed last week. I heard the news about Hillary ending her campaign through Twitter and CNN was one of the few news websites with the news on it.

CNN message before

CNN message after

Your thoughts
What are your thoughts about this? When should news be published on a web site and should we adapt the design of news sites to make space for a more storytelling ‘as-it-is-happening’ approach? Or does this make news websites vulnerable for misinforming the audience?

This blog post was published on the Online Journalism Blog

A video is personal
It is more personal than text and even more personal than a picture. If you record video with your webcam or your mobile phone and you are in it you are broadcasting yourself.

Not only your thoughts (blog), not just your voice (podcast) or your esthetic moments (photo blog). You are broadcasting your mimics, how you move, how you talk, how you look.

By default we seem to be afraid to see ourself on video. It’s like watching a 3d mirror with a delay. You notice every little thing. Things you don’t always like about yourself. After a while you get used to this and it matters less.

The video blog, or the option to easily share ‘personal’ video is a new form of personal expression made public. More personal and more direct. We have to get used to this. Video feels very strong connected to privacy.

Video was always a very scarce medium. You needed access to movies or television and you needed to have message or idea. Television had to be interesting to be broadcasted. This does not longer exist.

Privacy
Social networks are changing how we think about privacy. Privacy is retreating actively from the web, in other words privacy is not signing in to your profiles or comment on your virtual hideouts.

If you act in public spaces off- and online you will end up somewhere on the web, probably without knowing. This could be party pictures, your MySpace profile or a videoblog you make.

Seesmic
Seesmic is a service by Loïc Le Meur that tries to convert the conversation into video. Make video comments instead of text. It’s an interesting idea, I don’t know if it will always work, but I think this is the time for it. We are making a cultural shift. We’re less afraid to publish video featuring ourselves talking directly into a webcam and use video to give our personal opinion.

This poses new problems of course. Video is difficult for scanning by humans and by computers. How do you find the things that matter most without watching hours of (sometimes irrelevant/funny) comments.

The videoblog still exists. Only it’s a format for structural video. Like programs on television. The production is often far less professional than television, but there is some structure.

The large amount of video that is coming to the web has no structure at all, it will be thoughts and comments that have no meaning without the right context. And I think this is great. It makes the web a more personal space and this is the next step to a more immersive online experience.

The festival was a great success. Exhausting, but really great. During the festival we made around 400 posts on the special microblog.

What worked
Mobile services worked very well. Sending a photo through Mobypicture and directly sending an audio file through Gabcast give a really strong storytelling experience. Twitter messages are like SMS. Great to keep context in the timeline without actually having ‘to produce’ something.

I think our idea to connect everything you post to an avatar (like Twitter), and make the coverage as personal as possible really helped keeping it clear for our viewers. At least for how much this is possible given the enormous amount of information produced. Organizing it on time gives a very good overview of what was important or special during the festival.

Microblogs are really strong live applications. Afterwards they are less exciting to watch. You can use it as a collection of material where you can search items for articles elsewhere.

The Wordpress XMLRPC is wonderful. From the 400 posts we have published almost none of those was made on the website itself. The posts were created using other websites and automatically posted to Eclectro.nl/live. Making publishing really easy.

What didn’t work
Video is difficult. Or at least uploading video is difficult. if you record a video it is still difficult to upload. When we recorded a video in high quality using a mobile phone (N95) the files get easily close to 10 Megabytes. If you want to upload/e-mail these files using UMTS you’re not only giving your battery a hard time, you’re also making it impossible to upload anything else during this process. Wifi often wasn’t available and when it was it was too unstable to upload or e-mail video.

I think services like Qiktv or Seesmic Mobile are interesting because the web-server is recording instead of your camera. Unfortunately those services can’t directly post a recording to a blog, yet.

We used a photo camera for recording video as well. This worked very well, the quality is good and Flickr is a great service for distributing files shorter than 90 seconds. The files recorded with the 8 Megapixel Sony Camera are around a 100 Megabytes. Uploading a 100 Megabytes in size. This requires you (or your laptop) to spend at least a few hours on a restaurant Wifi. Missing out on the festival. In the end we uploaded most files at night or in the morning.

We recorded the interviews on DV camera. This worked perfect, since there is no urge in getting the longer interviews directly on the web.

Two blogs
My idea was to maintain two blogs. The Eclectro blog and the Eclectro Live blog. /Live would be about us, a personal story about how we experienced the festival. The main blog would present interviews and reviews. This was just too much. We simply couldn’t make all this in a weekend and have a good time.

Ideas for live blogging / micro blogging

zoom
You need a central spot with a computer and good internet connection. A central spot on the festival where you can empty a camera and upload a batch of files.

Think about what you want to do and if this is possible. Think about how you keep it clear to your audience what they are looking at. Most people don’t know what is happening and they have to understand what it is and why you are publishing. We explained it with a short introduction movie.

A few people asked me to add more structure to the website and make it easier to scan what happened over time. I think we need even more timeline based structure in a next version.

If you are telling a story make sure to tell everything. Tell what you expect and afterwards tell if your expectations were right or wrong. Make returning jokes / running gags. Keep it personal and keep your audience informed.

Jimmy Edgar performing on stage later that day

Hauschka is playing at the Urban Explorers festival 2008, Dordrecht, Netherlands from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.
Hauschka adds little things like bells, plastic and metal to the piano using tape. A piano mash-up :)

We started with the Urban Explorers festival live coverage. We are using Wordpress as an aggregator for information we publish on several other websites like Flickr, Mobypicture, Seesmic, Vimeo, Ustream, YouTube, Twitter and more.

The next days we will be running around the city of Dordrecht. Everything we do can be followed on the special micro blog. This afternoon we will be picking up two artists at Amsterdam airport. Tonight we sleep in an old squatted villa in the centre of Dordrecht.

Hauschka talks about how he works

This weekend the Urban Explorers festival is organized in the city of Dordrecht, Netherlands. It’s a three day city-festival about art and electronic music. The main acts for this year are by Plaid and Murcof. It’s a small festival with a very good atmosphere and lovely people.

Eclectro is a festival partner and we (a few Eclectro bloggers) will be covering the event on the Eclectro blog by writing reviews, doing interviews, making photos and videos as the festival happens. And we have some other exiting plans.

This is great, but not something we haven’t done before. We report while we are there. This time we want to take it a step further and make the coverage more personal. Urban Explorers is a small, diverse and very distributed festival. This makes it difficult to ask or explain visitors to contribute to the live coverage by using a mobile phone. This year we will try to make visible how we experience the festival.

Making it personal
For me Twitter was the first service that made the web more interesting as a live medium. Blogs are good for a recap, but microblogs can really give you a better live experience and it’s a more social and more personal experience. There often isn’t much value in the individual messages it’s the collection that builds a story and a character.

So this is what we want to do for the festival as well. We will also be reporting about where we are, packing my bag, how we sleep, what we are doing, what we are eating and who we are talking to. Short talks, photos and video interviews. All the small pieces of information aggregated in one spot.

The problem with building aggregators is that it often ends up in something that is difficult to follow for outsiders or people unfamiliar with the technology. We (Inge, Renier and myself) try to make it personal. And this weekend I’ve been making a website that just does that. I used Wordpress Prologue, a theme that is based on Twitter and took out even more options like tags and feeds to make it look clean and simple.

The Eclectro Urban Explorers 2008 festival microblog: www.eclectro.nl/live

The secret is in the back-end
The power of Wordpress is that is has a xmlrpc back-end. This is a secure gate that makes it possible for other websites like YouTube or Flickr to talk directly to Wordpress, like you wrote the message on the blog. Ad some extra open source plug-ins to Wordpress and you have an incredible powerful system that is an aggregated channel centralizing information from distributed web-services.

Post from Flickr to a Wordpress blog

Or from YouTube to a Wordpress blog

Or record a Seesmic video in your Wordpress blog

Last weekend I first played with Seesmic and I really like what it does. The videoplayer could use some enhancement, but the Wordpress plug-in is a bless. You enter the Wordpress admin section, click on the Seesmic logo in a new post and can directly start recording a video using your webcam. When done, all you have to do is hit publish in Wordpress and you have just written a new blog post including a video.

Keep it simple
We can easily post to the website using mobile phones, laptops, webcams and websites like Flickr, YouTube, Mobypicture, Twitter, and Seesmic. Everything is automatically collected on the microblog and connected to our user accounts, connecting our names and avatars to the messages published.

Authors see an orange box on the front page, this makes it easy to directly write a message when visiting the website.

Will it work?
All these enhancements make it easy to read for visitors and easy to maintain for us while we are busy at the festival. We have a few more days to finish it, but I think we made a great tool. This weekend we will see if it works.

I’m very exited to play with this.

You can join the festival coverage as well. Use UE08 in your Twitter updates and they will show up in the stream, or post an image to Flickr with the tag UE08 and it will automatically show up in the header of the website.

Your ideas and thoughts are very welcome. How can we make it more personal or more clear? What would you like to see or what is difficult to understand? And do you know other great (web)services that could be integrated?

Once a month we organize a webcast at Eclectro. We use the website Ustream to broadcast a DJ-set or concert live from the DJ his living-room. All the DJ needs is a computer, webcam and internet connection.

Last friday the RGBoy-chiptune-heroes performed in front of the webcam. They performed a live gameboy concert including visuals. The entire performance was broadcasted live from Myslowice, Poland.

A chiptune, or chip music, is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. (Wikipedia)

The video above is a compilation from fridays performance. The tracks RGBoy plays are; my new PT82, super muter, secret level, 1980.

During these performances we invite viewers to use the Ustream chat-box. This increases the ‘live experience’ and enables contact between viewers and performers. The talks are often about technical problems, quality, track titles, personal matters or just to tell how great the artist is.

Utrecht meets Chicago
The next Eclectro Directo live performance will be friday the 30th of May. This time we will use the Mogulus website. Since this will be a live performance broadcasted simultaneous from two locations. Maurice Dohmen [moos] based in Utrecht, Netherlands takes care of the sound and visual artist Jorrit Poelen based in Chicago, USA takes care of the visuals.

Eclectro Directo Live: May 30th, 20:00 (Amsterdam time) / 1 PM Chicago Time

Eclectro Directo promo from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

Are you an electronic artist / producer / DJ and would like to perform live for the Eclectro webcam, let us know.

Romain Gavras made this amazing new clip for the track Stress by French band Justice. The clip is about youth in the French suburbs and how violence has become a way of life. The video is shot documentary style and shocking realistic (high quality Quicktime file). I hadn’t seen something like this for a while, interesting to see how Gavras and Justice use the video clip to spread a message.

Earlier Romain Gavras made the wonderful Signatune clip for DJ Medhi

We have always collected things. Somehow making collections is valuable to us. Most of the media we are collecting is moving or has moved to a virtual representation. Music is moving to the web, video and games will. And I’m sure books will move to the web as well. Encyclopedia and dictionaries already did.

In the end it will probably be a mix of economics and access that make things move to the cloud of information. Why buy a more expensive cd in the store if you can listen to the song right now?

For now we create virtual representations of our physical collections. For example the books you own on LibraryThing or Amazon or your music on Last.fm.

My ‘real-life’ public profile
We use the collections to express who we are. My books and my collected music tell me something about myself. Your collection of books is like a public profile that your real-life friends see when they visit your house.

I don’t know why we collect. For some people it is an obsession, see the movie in the end of this post.

When collections move virtual we get a new type of collectors. The librarians already unite at wikipedia to collect all the information that is valuable. We see creative artists playing with public sets of information through API’s and feeds. Making interactive installations or retrieve emotions and relations from large sets of data.

For journalists the information age is like a golden age. There is so much data public available that if you know how to make valuable collections you can generate news. A good collection of information can act like a news machine. Database journalism enables people to see patterns that answer or create questions.

Video
I’m researching some things about collections for the EN.nl website. Here are some videos I found that are really interesting.

The interactive installation “I Want You To Want Me”, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56″ high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Email became an integral part of my life in 1998. Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one.

Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line.

My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

More info: christopherbaker.net/projects/mymap/

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

‘POSSESSED’ enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions. The film questions whether hoarding is a symptom of mental illness or a revolt against the material recklessness of consumerism. When does collecting become hoarding and why do possessions exert such an influence on our lives?

Todays popular websites use smart algorithms to determine what we want or might like. Google is famous for its mix and so is the Amazon recommendation system. Your actions tell these systems about your behavior. And your actions make these services better in recommending you information. For example Google tracks what results people click. If most users click the second search result they make this the first result.

I love news selection
I really like how news websites, blogs and other person driven websites make a selection. Most often this works best if there is a sharp focus. A popular blog can’t be about everything. It has to be about a person or a subject to keep the blog interesting.

In the future this fragmentation might be happening to news websites as well. The traditional newspaper told you everything. It was your primary source of information. With websites we see a different pattern. People don’t just read one news website, they read many. They might have a favorite, but it is no such thing as exclusive readership. Will we see focus in newspaper websites as well? Although media operates independent it is almost always marked as ‘left’ or ‘right’ by the type of stories they focus on.

The news algorithm
Why wouldn’t news sorting be captured in algorithms? There is nothing that makes this impossible. Stories are written as closed interchangeable containers. News websites might make a selection on the frontpage, they also provide lists and rss-feeds where they sort the same information on time or popularity.

Journalists have multiple tasks, they create stories and they sort them on relevance. Maybe with this sorting we can experiment and create a more personal version as well?

Sorting news by machines
Sorting news is not just making a selection on popularity. Sorting news by systems is difficult. The presentation of what you like consists out a complex set of variables.

• What do you like (personal interest)
• What you might like (if you like a subject you might like to read about)
• What do you need to know (because it is important to you, and it will dominate the media landscape for a while)
• What everyone needs to know (breaking news)
• What do you officially don’t like, but occasionally read (the stories everyone says they don’t read but always seem to get the highest click-through rates)
• What do your friends (colleagues) read (news creates conversation and small-talk)
• What do your friends recommend (you trust your network)
• What you don’t want to know (things that really bore you and are irrelevant in any way)
• Where do you like to know more about (if you are an expert in something you don’t want another article that explains it all again. You would prefer analysis and background articles)
• What is your (current) location (for large groups of people location based information has extra value)
• Surprises (they change your interests and habbits)

* If I forgot something please ad your thoughts in the comments

These are the variables that construct personal relevance of a news website. It’s a complex set, but if you can manage a good balance you are able to create a website that sorts news by personal relevance on another level than we are used to.

I don’t know if an algorithm can create a better news experience and what it should look like. I do think there is value in tracking and learning form your users behavior and return new or additional value to the reader.

Update: Concept Design

| View | Upload your own

What this could look like and how you can keep this simple for the reader. The text is in Dutch. The screens ask for your location, favorite topics, company you work or would like to work and friends.

Why?
This is inherent to how these new web applications work. The webservices that are doing something new are often ‘connected‘ applications. Websites and widgets connect information and people resulting in a new collections and new relevancy. This relevancy will only show itself when using the service for a while. Which is - of course - difficult to explain to a user when he or she signs up.

This is a user experience problem, but not one we will not find a solution for. The friendfinder button in most new web services enables you to import your Gmail contacts or another social network. Most applications are doing something similar to a service that already exists, with the open web (API’s and feeds) technology should be able to suggest a personal social profile before you start.

When information gets fragmented
What’s more interesting about this is what this search for relevancy really means. The web was always used similar to previous media. We made pages and domains on the web. Information was reserved for one place and relevancy was made by the website editor. This can be a news website or a blog.

Now the web is evolving in something that goes beyond what we are used to. Everything gets fragmented, distributed and aggregated. Information (text, photos and video) transfer from one online place to another. Information gets distributed and duplicated. The collection made by the creator is getting less relevant.

The distributed future of this blog post
For example this blog post is distributed through RSS and it will be picked up by a dozen of spam blog that will all duplicate the entire text and distribute it again. All these blogs are indexed over and over by aggregators like Google or any other. This blog post is written in the context of my blog, but most people will probably read it in another context. Specialized companies trace discussions about brands on the web and redistribute relevant articles. Social networks are crawling the web to show articles that are personal relevant to your profile (LinkedIn).

Data is made to be duplicated
The incredible amount of fragmented information is what makes the web interesting. New social recommendation tools, networks, online friends, aggregators, feeds and widgets are breaking the web apart. This is what makes the web really exiting and work like a network.

This is difficult to understand and use by publishers, copyright lawyers and designers but more relevant for the user. The reader doesn’t care what blog or website presents a good article or where they read it, as long as they can read it. The most important value is the relevancy of the presenter, this can be a system or your friend.

Today I visited the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. This conference is a two day event about the near future of the web.

Unfortunately I won’t be there tomorrow, but with these conferences this isn’t really a problem. There is a very good live coverage of the event. The organization took care of a live video stream, a backchannel, a great event blog and a bloggers corner (cable internet and wifi, power supplies) resulting in serious online coverage.

My highlights today (quotes aren’t the exact words used, this is how I interpreted them and wrote them down)
In the introduction there was a really interesting sentence by I think Erick Schonfeld that triggered me.

How to make money if the web explodes?

When I make something I don’t think much about business models, I like to think about a concept and how something can be valuable for a user. I don’t really see the web as a business. Although it is serious business.

For most people making a serious business defines the success of a concept. A web that is breaking apart (widgets, feeds) creates a serious problem for people who think this way.

The guy Bryan Thatcher from Empressr said about the future of the web:

“The cloud: information (content) becomes more important websites don’t”

Store your information online and access and transfer your information online. The computer or website becomes a terminal that allows you to access and alter your information. Open systems will eventually allow you to take (or distribute) your information to other services.

Kevin Rose talked about the future of Digg.com and how to make it more relevant.

Expose the right content to the right people

This quote is not just about Digg.com, it can be used for the web in general. We will see better and more personal filters. All these social applications and social profiles enable a better and more personal selection. We are getting used to this and expecting more relevant results on other websites as well.

Nova Spivack talked about his love for the semantic web

The web is the database

This is a concept that regards the semantic web as a database. Store all your information in ‘the cloud’ in the form of metadata. Every set of information will have a complete set of metadata in it, theoretically you wouldn’t need a database because everything is in the front-end.

A smart and great concept, but somehow I’m worried about who will make the meta information? User don’t like to enter a lot of meta information, they just want to upload and share photos.

Tomorrow another day, don’t miss it in Amsterdam or online.

In this post I’m just thinking out loud and writing down some thoughts. Please share your ideas or fallacies you see in my thoughts.

In News presentation we see the article as an article. It’s a finished story. On a news website, newspaper or television broadcasts we present a collection articles and items. These articles are also objects. Finished stories presenting a near live experience, but not live.

For the presentation and sorting of these objects news media are using a few options.
1. We show it by editorial selection (the far most popular by newspapers, television and news websites).
2. We show it sorted on time (often combined with the first)
3. We show the article list sorted on popularity (often somewhere on an extra page or column)

This works very well. We are used to see a pre-selection made from all the information and from this selection we choose the things we like. News reading is scanning through a pre-selection made by editors.

But the object (article) itself has a very interesting set of meta-information. This is what we potentially know about, and can extract from an article on EN.nl.

Tags, time published, pageviews, updates, incoming links, comments, votes (1-4), urgency levels (1-3), edits, editors, editors popularity, dateline (geocoordinates), related articles, favorites, pictures, videos, hyperlinks

This is information we know about each article. It is metadata connected to the object. What can we do with this information? Obviously presenting the news is critical for a news website, but the added value is in the selection made by editors. Why do these selections work so well? A selection by editors is based on the values of the presenter (newspaper) and often focus extra on certain aspects of the news. Left, right, popular, politics, celebrity, sports, art…

Most news media present the same facts. Is it the hierarchy and presentation that really counts? Is it what you show or don’t show that adds value? Is it what you’re friends read and what you can talk about with them? Do you go to certain websites for coverage about certain items? Are it the extra stories that add value? Are it writing skills? Is it the fast coverage?

Adding relevancy and new value
How can we make the selection and the sorting of objects (articles) more relevant to your needs? Should we ask you what you like? Should we track what you read? Should we ask you social profile? Should we ask your social network? Should we do things with your location? Should we read the tagging you did on your blog, del.ico.us, flickr and youtube and use this to determine what you like? Should we make your music taste count, the weather or how you feel today?

I think news is social by itself. We want to be able to talk about it with friends. Serious news, but also weird or funny news, sports and celebrities. Every real-life social network connects to certain news media. Your friends are often reading the same newspaper or same websites.

Would you be interested in what news your social network reads? Or your favorite bloggers? If you look at articles as if they are objects with metadata you can think up a lot of new ideas and possibilities. But what does really add extra and new value to presenting the news?

Last night I made my first iPhone website. The iPhone has a full Safari browser, but you can also use some iPhone specific styling to make a website better accessible on an iPhone. Today we connected the stylesheet to the EN database making the EN newssite available on the iPhone platform.

en.nl/iphone

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I have said it before, but I really think that the future of information is in databases, meta information and API’s (public or not). Making this website was done really fast (20 minutes CSS & 20 minutes coding by a programmer) because all the information was easily accessible.

If you want to make an iPhone website make sure to check the User Interface Library for Safari development on the iPhone. For mobile phones we also made en.nl/mobiel

The online news industry really changed over the last years. I think we’re at a point where every self respecting news organization takes the web as a serious medium that requires a different approach then previous media (newspaper, television, radio).

Some see these new possibilities as a threat and try to protect what they have. Which is I think the worst possible strategy (looking backwards into the future). Others see chances, new competitors, new technology, new journalism, new markets and new ideas.

I love a quote I heard in an interview with someone at the Washington Post. He said his ambition is to be the new CNN. With new media and technology this ambition is realistic. A company like the Washington Post (newspaper) can see CNN (television) as its competitor.

Google / AP
Google can be a news service. Why wouldn’t they? They have the database of intentions, Google knows what people are searching for and they can - like any other company - subscribe to press services. The value of press agency news is devaluating in a way that it often ends up in duplicate copies with a different lay-out. Try to search for an AP article headline. I’m sure you will find a dozen versions of it, all exactly the same.

Online news is moving to something where added value counts. What can you add to the news (omnipresent). Is it a personal or political view? Is it the selection you make? Is it a community? Are it your reporters or journalists? What is your added value?

In technology communities, collaboration tools and social networks are redefining most services and institutions. Why shouldn’t services and technology like this redefine how we consume news?

This is what EN.nl is about. We want to experiment with everything around news from a practical point of view, let’s make things.

Wisdom of Crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds believes a group is smarter than the individual. The Wisdom of a crowd can be very valuable for news. In the public opinion the idea of a wiki collides with news. I think a wiki-based system can work for news if you make sure the process is transparent and everyone can join the discussion.

Sure you will have to deal with vandalism, this a technical problem to solve. A reader doesn’t have to be an expert on everything, the valuable wisdom of an individual can be something he has read or seen somewhere else. The Wisdom of a crowd is about all the knowledge, not just the expert knowledge. The biggest challenge is get the knowledge and use it as a contribution.

Traditional media floats on the wisdom of a few wise people who create value by the choices they make. Social media uses the wisdom o