The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail - but they’re not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets by other people (ie excluding the Telegraph’s own accounts) have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

How many times each newspaper has had a URL tweeted by someone else

• Guardian: 328,288
• Telegraph: 120,731
• Daily Mail: 95,851
• The Sun: 33,580
• Independent: 24,423
• Times Online: 23,329
• Mirror: 13,881
• Express: 2,818
• FT.com: 691

About the data

The figures show that the Guardian has successfully translated its massive follower advantage into other people tweeting about its URLs. There are some caveats about the data (especially about the Times and FT figures), which you can read on the original version of this post (there are some other Twitter statistics about newspapers etc on my blog too).

articles | theblogpaper.co.uk via kwout

Last week The Printed Blog - a US experiment in printing a selection of blog entries as a newspaper - gave up the ghost after 16 issues. Around the same time I was contacted by theblogpaper, a blogging community website which by September aims to… you guessed it: publish a selection of blog entries as a free newspaper (in London). The people behind the project are Anton von Waldburg and Karl Jo Seilern.

In a series of emails I asked co-founder Anton von Waldburg why he thought theblogpaper would succeed where The Printed Blog didn’t. Here are his responses:

The obvious question first: how does theblogpaper differ from The Printed Blog?

I suppose we differ from The Printed Blog in several ways. Most importantly we are trying to build a platform (theblogpaper.co.uk) which aims to incorporate users not only into the creation of the content but most importantly into the editing process.

By rating and commenting the content, which ultimately promotes content to print (highest rated and most discussed content will be promoted) we hope to directly incorporate the community rather than “deciding” ourselves what we are going to publish. We hope that this will increase the level of interaction with the blogpaper as well as the brand recognition.

By leaving the decision to the community what should be promoted we can therefore focus our attention on the business part of publishing the paper.

Second of all we are focusing on London. London already has an established free sheet market. We are very aware of the current situation of the advertising market especially in the free sheet segment, but we are hoping that our “self regulatory content promotion system” (in other words letting users choose via rating and commenting what to promote to print) will attract advertisers, since the advertising content will be associated with the best content of the online community.

What is the business model? And how are you funded?

Its based on advertising. We are also currently in negotiation with several angel investors.

Furthermore I have to say that we are trying to keep the cost as minimal as possible until we actually publish the newspaper (which will hopefully be in 3 months). That secures us with an easy exit stradegy, because if we do not generate a critical mass of bloggers until our deadline to interact as well as post quality content the whole concept itself obviously does not work.

We believe that publishing “the best content” (as voted and discussed by the community) could create a distinctive character for theblogpaper. Readers get a quick weekly summary (in the form of a newspaper) of quality content, or at least content that has been declared “quality content” by a community rather that a few editors.

Why do you think people will contribute to the Blog Paper? Especially writers who already command a large following on their own blogs?

Our ultimate goal is create a platform for bloggers to reach out to new readers, increase thier profile and redirect traffic back to thier blogs. The main idea is that it should be as easy as possible to post content on theblogpaper.co.uk, making it convenient to get the chance to be published (of course only if the communtiy “likes” your content).

We thought about adding a feature to make it possible to [submit your blog's RSS feed] but at the moment we will focus on getting people involved manually. So we would aim at people to maybe upload your best articles onto theblogpaper, (it only takes couple of mins :)) and kind of engage with it the content which is rather important especially when it comes to voting for the best content. 

We also thought long and hard about a reward scheme, but for that to work we must first of all make profits, and this is not going to happen any time soon. The cost margins are so high especially when we are going into print that we primarily have to focus on generating enough advertising to even be able to publish the newspaper in the first place…

How do you ensure that content is still fresh by the time it is printed?

We acknowledge the fact that we can never be as “fresh” as for example a daily newspaper, but that is not what we are focusing on. Our research shows that especially daily newspapers stuggle due to the fact that breaking “fresh” news are being concumed online through online newspapers, twitter and other social networks (obviously spreading much faster than through print).

So we want to publish a weekly review of the best content (or at least what the community believed to be the best content). We won’t publish articles or photos which have been online for weeks of course.

What have you learned already so far?

It is rather hard to get noticed online. We are aware that we havent created the next killer app, we just aim to create a new opportunity for online publisher. It takes much longer to build up a substantial user base which makes live much harder for us obviously especially when negotiating with potential investors.

Anton says they welcome “all the feedback / criticism / help we can get on our concept”

Searching is the most popular activity online after email. It is the prism through which we experience a significant proportion of the world’s information - from news and information about our community, through to health information, commerce, and just about anything that has a presence online.

Search Engine Society takes a critical look at search engines, how they work, the techniques used to manipulate them - from gaining better rankings to censorship, and the implications for privacy and democracy.

Chapter one looks at the development and workings of search engines, from the once-essential directories of Yahoo! and the citation-based algorithms of Google that now dominate the search landscape, through to lesser-known players such as social bookmarking service Delicious which relies on user-generated ‘folksonomies’ to organise material, and specialised regional and ‘vertical’ search engines like the French language Voila or the genetic materials search engine The Bioinformatic Harvester. This is situated within a wider discussion of information retrieval histories from the Library of Babylon onwards - and touches on recent moves into geospatial, mobile, social and semantic search.

Balancing that focus on technology, the following chapter focuses on users, looking at how people search. Search behaviours vary widely between users and between searches - Halavais discusses research that showed how many users simply add ‘.com’ to a word as the start of their search, while others use a ’shopping mall’ approach of going direct to the likes of Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (which also contain search facilities). Using a search engine, Halavais argues, is only one method of search, and search is “not only an iterative process, but one that is rarely linear and requires seeking out the concepts that surround a problem or question. In other words, the query and search strategy is likely to change as more information becomes available.”

Search as ‘re-finding’

Halavais also emphasises the importance of ‘re-finding’ - “not as a sub-set of finding, but the other way around” - indeed, this is the basis of social bookmarking services like Delicious and Digg that allow the user to store and label (’tag’) webpages for later retrieval, as well as searching for webpages that have been given similar tags by other users.

Power law distribution patterns famously recur throughout the web and in the third chapter Halavais looks at how this affects search results. With Google’s rankings relying so strongly on how many links point to a particular page, it is important to look at how those links are distributed. The fact that highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links - what Huberman calls “preferential attachment” - leads to the “chunky” nature of the web - in concrete terms the dominance of websites like those of the BBC and Guardian; a quality which, Halavais argues, Google’s PageRank technology ‘calcifies’.

But when Google tweaks its search engine algorithms to attempt to improve results, it can have enormous consequences for organisations dependent on their rankings in search results. Halavais uses the example of Skyfacet.com and Answers.com which saw sales and visits drop by 17% and 28% respectively when they dropped off the first page of related Google searches. It is as if someone moved your shop from the main high street to an industrial estate. In this context it is not surprising that search engine advertising accounts for the majority of online advertising spend.

Digital divides

Following up on those issues, the fourth chapter looks at implications for democracy on two sides: firstly, the division between winners and losers in the contest for public attention; and secondly, the division between skilled and unskilled users of search engines. Halavais is keen to highlight that division is nothing new:

“Current search engines, like communication technologies before them, contain both centralizing and diversifying potentials. These potentials affect the stories we tell ourselves as a society; and the way we produce knowledge and wisdom.”

In practice, these potentials are heavily weighted towards US sites:

“In the language of PageRank, US sites simply have more authority: more links leading to them … sites have existed longer in the United States, where much of the early growth of the internet occurred… Add to this the idea that early winners have a continuing advantage in attracting new links and traffic, and US dominance of search seems a foregone conclusion … the search engines do not merely reflect this authority, they help to reproduce it.”

Indeed, ranking systems that reinforce authority, says Halavais, are conservative in nature and comprise what Lewis Mumford, writing 40 years ago, called “authoritarian technics”.  But because of the unlimited size and reach of the internet compared to previous media technologies, it is not so simple:

“The current structure is a complex combination of a high degree of centralization at the macro-level, with a broad set of diverse divisions at the micro-level.”

Blogger as ’search intellectual’

Interestingly, at this point Halavais introduces the blogger as a “search intellectual”, upsetting existing structures of authority on the web and acting as “a counterweight to the hegemonic culture of the search engines” in bringing otherwise overlooked material into the “circle of reputation and links that search engines tend to enforece”. The recent rise of Twitter in performing a similar role would be worth adding to that list.

Chapter 5 takes a broad look at censorship - “just another word for filtering” - while Chapter 6 looks at privacy - search engines as “databases of intentions” where even anonymised logs of what individuals are searching for can lead to people being identified. Chapter 7 revisits the rise of “sociable search” tools and folksonomy - where classification is created by a mass of users’ ‘tags’ rather than any centralised scheme, and ‘finding’ is a social act closely related to ’sharing’.

The book closes with a roundup of the possibilities of future search and the factors that will influence that, from increasing digitisation of material to improved mapping and the possibilities of RFID tags (which makes objects a part of the web too). Semantic search - technology that understands the meaning of what you are searching for, or of relationships between objects - is the promise that lies forever ‘just over the horizon’, while sociable search offers a more likely immediate move.

As is natural, there are areas which have developed since this book was written and so are not tackled in depth - most notably real-time search. The rise of Twitter and the ability to search through what people are talking about ‘right now’ represents such serious competition to Google that it introduced the first major new features to its homepage in years. Wolfram Alpha - the “computational knowledge engine” that made newspaper front pages this year - is not even mentioned.

But those are incidental issues in what is an important book. Halavais manages to acknowledge the dominance of Google without being distracted by it, and gives due attention to non-Western tools and services not commonly seen as search tools. He avoids the pitfalls of technological determinism and manages to distinguish between top-down domination and bottom-up diversity. What emerges is a sophisticated picture of power in flux. “Search engines are interesting to the person who wants to understand the exercise of power in the information society,” Halavais writes in the his conclusion. “In an era in which knowledge is the only bankable commodity, search engines own the exchange floor.” The more readers understand this exchange floor, the better we can exchange and interrogate what information we possess.

A shorter version of this review will appear in Journalism

I asked David Price, co-founder of Debategraph, some questions about the partnership and experiences with the tool:

How did you get involved with The Independent?

We were lucky enough to pilot a very alpha version of Debategraph with Prime Minister’s Office when Jimmy Leach was at Downing Street, and we kept in touch when Jimmy moved to The Independent.

What’s your background and what does your job involve?

I co-founded Debategraph with Peter Baldwin, who was a cabinet minister in the Keating administration in the Australia; possibly the first — but hopefully not the last — cabinet minister to retire to a code web application.

After doctoral research at Cambridge on organizational learning and environmental policy I worked in the TV industry; first in documentary production and then as a public policy advisor/consultant with a focus on public service broadcasting. We were drawn together by our shared interest in using the web to help people think collaboratively about complex problems facing society.

As you know, there’s no job description for a two person web start up beyond “everything that needs to be done”; although the main focus of our work is on the continuous development of the ideas and implementation underpinning Debategraph and on supporting and championing the emerging community of collaborative visual thinkers.

How have the debates on the Indie gone so far? What has worked well and not so well?

We have been delighted with the way that the debates are working. The first map in series “What should Obama do next?” started before the inauguration with a few seed questions and policy positions and is still growing as a cluster of interrelated maps with well over 1,000 elements covering a broad range of policy issues.

The map on the crisis in Gaza, which was being developed at the start of year while the crisis was unfolding, demonstrated that collaborative visual mapping can handle subjects in which the flow of dialogue is characterised by strong emotions and fundamentally different world views.

And the map on climate change is showing how the ability to embed live versions of the maps on different websites can enable different communities (e.g. climate change activists and climate sceptics) to engage constructively in the same debate.

The map in the series that I would like to have seen maturing faster than it has done so far, is the one on the Middle East Peace process — and we are starting to explore the possibility now of using this map as means of facilitating dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian students later this year.

What have you learned and how have you responded to how people have used the technology?

One of the joys of working with the collaborative maps is that you are constantly learning new insights about a wide range of subjects in compressed and context relevant way.

With respect to the technology, the best web applications are living processes, co-evolving with their communities, and this has been the pattern with Debategraph from the outset — with, typically, multiple updates being released each week in response to feedback from the community.

With visual mapping tools there are essentially two interwoven learning curves: the art of visual mapping and artefact and artifice involved in the tool. The ultimate goal is to hone the latter to the point at which it frees the mind to focus fully on the former.

We have come a long way with this since our first iteration, have some significant changes in the pipeline for this month, are still bursting with ideas for further improvements. The other learning point for us has been that the community always seems to find and build on latent pliability in the tool in creative and unexpected ways.

How has the relationship with the Indie been organised? How involved are they?

We have been working with digital rather than the print team at The Independent — although we’re excited by the potential for the display of the maps on the printed page as well — and Jimmy is the perfect champion: happy to create the space for experimentation, happy to the let the process build naturally, and happy for other sites to share the maps as well.

We talk about the ideas for the next maps in the series and discuss the progress with the existing maps, but the content of the maps as they develop has always been left to the discretion of the community. So, from our perspective, the relationship has always been light-touch and enabling.

What is the business model?

We are part of the wave of social entrepreneurs whose primary motivation is to build something that’s useful and meaningful in helping humanity address the challenges emerging in the 21st century (and we think that creating a new kind of public space in which people can distil, explore, evaluate and mediate all of the salient perspectives on these challenges is both meaningful and necessary).

As it develops, Debategraph is also becoming increasingly useful for facilitating and tracking private sensemaking within groups, organizations and networks, and at some point we will switch to a paid model for new private mapping (the ability to build public maps will always be free).

In the meantime, we are starting to be paid to produce maps for people and to advise and train teams about the how to use collaborative maps within and between organizations.

And any plans for an easier way to embed? iframe excludes a lot of potential users.

Yes: different ways to embed the maps are on the development list (although we haven’t set the dates for the release of these yet). And, as you may have seen, Seven Sigma has just released a free webpart that lets you embed Debategraphs on the Microsoft SharePoint platform.

“The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.”

Whilst Gladwell’s response would seem to be too obvious to be necessary, unfortunately even such a measured, rational reaction is enough to rile certain elements. The problem Gladwell makes is he is trying to have a rational debate on what is basically a very successful marketing ploy: simplify a complicated topic and market yourself as its guru. The column-inches Anderson has gained show his success. There will, however, be a large number of readers who (like me) get exasperated by his over simplification and promotion of himself as the guru.

I started filling the margins of my copy of ‘Free’ with a variety of swear words on pg. 4:

“…Surely economics must have something to say about this, I thought. But I couldn’t find anything. No theories of gratis, or pricing models that went to zero. (In fairness, some do exist, as later research would re-veal. But they  were mostly obscure academic discussions of “two- sided markets” and, as we’ll see in the economics chapter, nearly forgotten theories from the nineteenth century.)”

Obviously it wouldn’t be fair to knock someone for their inability to understand the Dewey decimal system, but Anderson then goes on to quote liberally from Predictably Irrational. ‘Predictably irrational’ is about as far from obscure academic discussion as you can get. It happens to be written by an academic, but very much a book in the popular science genre. Even more annoyingly he goes on to criticise the work as: “…directionally interesting rather than rigorously quantitative…” He makes sweeping statements left, right and centre, and then has the nerve to criticise the rigorousness of a perfectly acceptable academic pieces of work!

However, here I find myself falling into the same trap as Gladwell, arguing with the content rather than viewing it as a promotional device for Anderson. Whilst I’m sure Anderson expects to make a lot of money from the book, he also has his eye firmly on the increase in his fee for public speaking, and as such the book does a great job of marketing Anderson as the guru of ‘Free’.

Does this book turn “traditional economics upside down” ? Not really.

Nicholas Rapp’s post on recommended infographics feeds is what got me started on this. Wasn’t there an easier way than copying every single URL into my RSS reader?

There was: OPMLBuilder.

OPMLBuilder takes a webpage, finds all the RSS feeds listed, and allows you to create an OPML file with it.

(An OPML file is basically a list of RSS feeds in a format that makes it easy for RSS readers to import and export. If you wanted to change RSS reader, for example, without losing your RSS feeds you could do so by exporting your feeds as an OPML file and then importing them into your new RSS reader. You can import numerous OPML files without losing older imports)

This is how OPMLBuilder works:

1. Enter the URL of the webpage with the RSS feeds (make sure it is the individual post rather than a blog homepage)
2. Click Get Links - the box below will be filled with a list of RSS feeds
3. You’ll probably have to edit that box to remove unwanted RSS feeds - e.g. those from the site hosting the post. The best way is to find the first RSS feed you wanted and delete everything before it; then find the last RSS feed you wanted, and delete everything after it.
4. Click Create OPML
5. A new page will be created which doesn’t look like much - it will be blank apart from a line like ” Created by FeedShow OPML Builder: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:01:12 +0200″ (if you have a browser which doesn’t like XML it may not display at all). However, this is the OPML file - you can see the real content by right-clicking and selecting ‘View Page Source’ (or similar)
6. Save the page to your computer as you would any other webpage.

If you were writing the list of RSS feeds for a post yourself you could skip steps 1 and 2 and just type the links directly into the second box (although it may be easier to publish, then get the links in the normal way). You can then include a link to the OPML file on your post.

In case you want to know how to create an OPML file of your blogroll, there’s some info here.

In case you need to know, this is how you then import an OPML file into an RSS reader:

1. Go into Settings (top right in Google Reader)
2. Click on the Import/Export tab
3. Click on Choose File
4. Find the OPML file you’ve just saved and click Open
5. Click up Upload
6. You should now be subscribed to all the infographics feeds in that file

Perhaps a revealing example is the creation of Facebook applications by a Seattle-based aggregator, NewsCloud, which received a grant from the Knight Foundation to study how young people receive their news through social networks.

With developer Jeff Reifman leading the way, NewsCloud has developed three applications (Hot Dish, Minnesota Daily and Seattle In:Site) that engage users in news content through linking to stories by providing a headline, photo and blurb. The applications also allow them to blog, post links themselves and much more – all while getting points for completing “challenges” that can be redeemed for prizes, which works as an incentive to stay engaged. Prizes include everything from t-shirts to tickets to a baseball game to a MacBook. Some of these challenges are online ones (sharing a story, commenting on content, blogging, etc.) and others are offline challenges (attend a marketing event, write a letter to the editor).

HotDish

Hot Dish was the first application that NewsCloud worked to create with Grist.org, a website that provides environmental news, commentary and advice. The stories posted are centered around climate change.

Minnesota Daily is an application that was created to feature news surrounding the University of Minnesota community, featuring news from the college newspaper’s website (MnDaily.com). (Disclosure: I worked as the editor in chief of the paper when the application was launched.) The interesting thing about this application is that not only does it look and feel like the newspaper’s actual site, it pulls several features directly from it, such as a feed of university-related Tweets and even some banner ads. The application is mostly used to connect students to MnDaily.com stories, but has the potential for much more.

Seattle In:Site functions for a similar purpose, but the content produced is by journalism students at University of Washington and the application features certain multimedia that can directly be watched on the Facebook app.

Replacing news sites?

It might not be these Facebook applications that replace news websites, but perhaps something similar. The point is: it’s all meshing together in one pot of media and it might not be far off before social media sites like Facebook become the primary publishing platform. Of course, this may take some time and some needed additions in content management for these platforms to be viable, but let’s use these Facebook applications as a starting point. The checklist:

• Content: We need original content, not just aggregation. Well, these Facebook applications already include ability for users to blog (again, with some needs for improvement, like offering rich text).
• Multimedia: Users can watch videos directly on the Seattle In:Site application. The Daily application features a Twitter feed, and the possibilities for more are endless.
• Subscription: Users can sign up for the application and follow it on their Facebook profile pages. It also includes the ability to ad the application as one of your tabs on the profile page. And of course there are always twitter feeds.
• Advertising: The site currently pulls ads from the other websites, but could also include original ads. Why not make some of the challenges sponsored? For example, a business would pay for you to post a challenge that involves going to their business (prizes could be sponsored too).
• Virality: Things spread like fire through social networking sites. You don’t have to worry about users coming to you. With the way Facebook is structured, things spread quite quickly through sharing. For example, if I am signed up for the application and do sort of interaction with it, it will show up on my profile page for my friends to see. They will see if I posted something, etc. The applications also allow the administrator to send notifications to its visitors and users. Also, users have the option to place an application badge onto their profile page for their friends to see. When I was editor at the Minnesota Daily, we received 15,000 visits from Facebook out of 257,000 in one month. That is a good start. And I can image many more people didn’t click through but only read the content actually provided on the application.

What’s next?

NewsCloud application source code is now open to college media that is interested in using the application and customizing it themselves, or media organizations can hire NewsCloud to manage the application for them.

The applications were used to gather data on how users were interacting with the content. Jeff Reifman said preliminary data is now available and the research being done by Christine Greenhow from the University of Minnesota will mostly be complete by the end of August. It will be interesting to see what the findings are. Using the information, the applications can be retooled to better attract users and learn how they interact with news most.

“Now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app.

“Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you through and records your progress. Men’s Health also sells additional workouts, called “Expansion Packs”: for example, “Huge Arms in a Hurry” for 99 cents; “The Ultimate Golf Workout Series” for $1.99; “The Ultimate Abs Pack” for $1.99; and “Build a Beach Ready Body” for 99 cents.”

Outing then explores what news organizations could charge for within an iPhone app (much more detail on his post):

1. One-off premium purchases
2. Enable premium services for an added fee
3. Delay the news by an hour
4. 99 cents gets you a basic news app with advertising. Pay an extra $4.99 inside the app to upgrade it to the no-advertising version.
5. A paid upgrade that delivers alerts of various happenings (news event, house sold, apartment burglarized, road construction detour installed, etc.) within a user-selectable mile radius of your house.

Steve is inviting more ideas on his post.

Keen to practise what he preaches, Anderson has put the entire book online for anyone to read - and embed. It’s embedded below.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson