MINE. What an exciting experiment that was.
Here's a good video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq084TqQjtk&feature=related
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Worth a thousand words
For many people personalizing their world news means thumbing through pictures with helpful cutlines. It's fast, it's exciting, it's comprehensive, it's insightful, it's beautiful.
My experience with the Reuters app on the I-pad reinforces that approach. Swishing through a day's pictures with the flick of my forefinger couldn't be more satisfying.
And now word that the Big Picture, the Boston Globe's world news in pictures and its most popular blog, has been readied for the I-pad with a $2.99 a month app. That's exciting.
Visit http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Departments/Online/boston-coms-the-big-picture-blog-now-an-iphoneipad-app-62532-.aspx
The full story:
Boston.com's The Big Picture Blog Now an iPhone/iPad App
By: E&P Staff
Published: September 07, 2010
NEW YORK
The Big Picture, Boston.com's popular blog, is now available as an iPad and iPhone app. The photo blog presents news stories solely through large-format, high-quality photographs gathered from news services worldwide.
The Big Picture's wide range of coverage recently has included Iceland's volcano eruption, the war in Afghanistan, and the World Cup. It also presents photography of more timeless subjects, such as astronomy.
New photo essays are posted each Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week.
The blog won two Webby Awards last year for Best Use of Photography, both juried and people's voice. It has also been nominated for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Web Awards and Editor & Publisher's Eppy Awards.
"Far and away, The Big Picture is our most popular blog, with a worldwide following," Robert Kempf, vice president of digital for Boston.com, said in a statement. "It's able to tell a story that is moving and meaningful, through a medium that needs no translation."
"The Big Picture from Boston.com" app is $2.99 and includes versions optimized for the iPad and iPhone. The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-big-picture-from-boston/id370709214?mt=8
The Boston.com portal is owned by The New York Times Co.
My experience with the Reuters app on the I-pad reinforces that approach. Swishing through a day's pictures with the flick of my forefinger couldn't be more satisfying.
And now word that the Big Picture, the Boston Globe's world news in pictures and its most popular blog, has been readied for the I-pad with a $2.99 a month app. That's exciting.
Visit http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Departments/Online/boston-coms-the-big-picture-blog-now-an-iphoneipad-app-62532-.aspx
The full story:
Boston.com's The Big Picture Blog Now an iPhone/iPad App
By: E&P Staff
Published: September 07, 2010
NEW YORK
The Big Picture, Boston.com's popular blog, is now available as an iPad and iPhone app. The photo blog presents news stories solely through large-format, high-quality photographs gathered from news services worldwide.
The Big Picture's wide range of coverage recently has included Iceland's volcano eruption, the war in Afghanistan, and the World Cup. It also presents photography of more timeless subjects, such as astronomy.
New photo essays are posted each Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week.
The blog won two Webby Awards last year for Best Use of Photography, both juried and people's voice. It has also been nominated for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Web Awards and Editor & Publisher's Eppy Awards.
"Far and away, The Big Picture is our most popular blog, with a worldwide following," Robert Kempf, vice president of digital for Boston.com, said in a statement. "It's able to tell a story that is moving and meaningful, through a medium that needs no translation."
"The Big Picture from Boston.com" app is $2.99 and includes versions optimized for the iPad and iPhone. The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-big-picture-from-boston/id370709214?mt=8
The Boston.com portal is owned by The New York Times Co.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Turnaround
I love this video for several reasons. First, as with most things on the web, it is time-stamped 2007. This type of explanatory video was all the rage in 2007. Second, it explains RSS very, very well. At the heart of this video is an illustration with someone sitting at a computer and two boxes to the right, one marked "blogs" and the other marked "news" and the moderator explains by arrows from the person at the computer to the boxes that the OLD way of finding out what is new in the "blogs" and the "news" sources was to reach out to them and search them.
Then he says brilliantly, but the NEW way can be explained by turning those arrows around so they point from the "blogs" box and the "news" box to the person at the computer. In other words, RSS automatically sends you the new "blogs" and "news."
In my book, turning those arrows around explains everything from RSS to the web in general to KNOWLEDGE. As strange as it seems knowledge, which used to come from outside of us from the larger world, now comes from inside of us (where the larger world really is and always has been). That doesn't sound workable in today's world, but it's true. Knowledge is more and more what we say it is not what ANY external authority says it is.
Watch it yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU.
Then he says brilliantly, but the NEW way can be explained by turning those arrows around so they point from the "blogs" box and the "news" box to the person at the computer. In other words, RSS automatically sends you the new "blogs" and "news."
In my book, turning those arrows around explains everything from RSS to the web in general to KNOWLEDGE. As strange as it seems knowledge, which used to come from outside of us from the larger world, now comes from inside of us (where the larger world really is and always has been). That doesn't sound workable in today's world, but it's true. Knowledge is more and more what we say it is not what ANY external authority says it is.
Watch it yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU.
We're mad as hell
Funny, on the internet, how this happens. How did I find this post, which was a speech delivered in France more than a week ago? Because I have a friend who I sincerely respect, who on occasion I check in with, although I'm in Colorado and he's in West Virginia, and I'm in media and he's in academia and somewhere on his page, not high up, but somewhere he had this link that I followed and shazam here it is. You can feel that you are part of a group of people worldwide communicating in a new language. Beautiful.
You are going to have to do a little bit of work here. You need to go to Jay Rosen's blog -- http://jayrosen.posterous.com/ -- and search Sept. 6, 2010. That's where you will find "The Journalists formerly known as the Media: My advice to the next generation." You will also find embedded in that blog the famous scene from the movie NETWORK where Howard Beale tells the world on TV and inspires the world to be liberated from TV with "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
This is Jay Rosen's speech to a group of incoming French journalism students.
You are going to have to do a little bit of work here. You need to go to Jay Rosen's blog -- http://jayrosen.posterous.com/ -- and search Sept. 6, 2010. That's where you will find "The Journalists formerly known as the Media: My advice to the next generation." You will also find embedded in that blog the famous scene from the movie NETWORK where Howard Beale tells the world on TV and inspires the world to be liberated from TV with "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
This is Jay Rosen's speech to a group of incoming French journalism students.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Your own hero
Want to be your own hero, and get points toward future purchases from today's purchases. Anywhere you carry your I-Phone. Well here's the web version, as usual on steroids compared to the past. You go into a store, launch an app off you I-phone and then hit the barcodes of the items on the shelf to discover how many points you'll get if you buy. And by just reading the barcode you are racking up points to attain new status such as "King" of the sugar doughnuts.
Check out the URL: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/16/barcode-hero/
And the full techcrunch story by MG Siegler, Aug. 16, 2010:
You’re likely aware of Foursquare, the location-based service that turns checking-in to venues into a game of sorts. You may also be aware of StickyBits, an app that turns barcodes into message boards. What do you get when you combine them? Barcode Hero, a new product by Kima Labs, a startup founded by two Amazon veterans.
The main idea behind the service is an app that attempts to make shopping more social. A user takes their phone into a store, launches the app, and starts scanning the barcodes of items they’re interested in. Doing so unlocks points and rewards such as dukedoms and kingships — yes, the Foursquare idea, but here it’s for product categories. More importantly, this scanning allows Barcode Hero to build up a database of information and will help them to personalize your shopping experience.
“We want to attack in-store shopping,” co-founder Blake Scholl tells us. Personalization has revolutionized shopping online, Scholl says. But there’s very little of that in actual stores, he notes. Obviously, this is the Amazon influence at play — both Scholl and co-founder Jason Crawford worked at the online retailing giant for several years. Both then moved on to Pelago, makers of the location-based app Whrrl, where they clearly got the app itch.
What’s nice about the app is that it’s simple. From the moment you launch it, it’s very clear what you’re supposed to do: find a barcode and scan it. It’s also a bit addicting to see yourself gaining points and moving past other users in certain product categories as you battle for the aforementioned dukedoms and kingships. And doing other actions such as recommending a product or writing a short review will get you even more points.
Obviously, all of this is to entice users to help Barcode Hero build out this recommendation service. But the app is also helpful because it provides price comparisons via a deal with PriceGrabber. This is in line with what a few other apps in the barcode scanning space do, such as Red Laser and ShopSavvy. But Crawford notes that they’re different because they’re mainly focused on the social aspect.
In that regard they may be more like Blippy or Swipely — but those products are only on the web. While Barcode Hero has a website, the main focus are these apps. At first, this is only an iPhone app, but the plan is to expand to other platforms quickly.
And then, of course, there’s Shopkick, one of the newer hot startups in the social shopping space. Today, that service formally launched their broad partnership with Best Buy retails stores. But Shopkick seems more focused on the geo-based coupon aspect of in-store shopping. Barcode Hero wants to be the recommendation arm of that experience. Of course, getting users to use multiple apps to enrich the shopping experience will be difficult.
Barcode Hero’s goal is to be the one app you go to when you enter a store. “That’s a very monetizable place to be,” Crawford says. They expect both brands and merchants to be very interested in this, and note plenty of interest already. Scholl also is quick to say that while coupons remain very much on the table, they don’t want to get into that space too early. They want to build up the social graph and perfect the user experience first.
Today, they’re also announcing they have the cash to do just that. Kima Labs has raised a $770,000 seed round from an impressive roster of angels including SV Angel (Ron Conway), Naval Ravikant, Owen Van Natta and several former senior executives from Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, and Wal-Mart. The Washington Post Company also made a strategic investment as part of the round, we’re told.
You can find Barcode Hero in the App Store here. Apple just recently began featuring it as one of their “New & Noteworthy” apps, so that social graph should be growing quickly already.
Check out the URL: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/16/barcode-hero/
And the full techcrunch story by MG Siegler, Aug. 16, 2010:
You’re likely aware of Foursquare, the location-based service that turns checking-in to venues into a game of sorts. You may also be aware of StickyBits, an app that turns barcodes into message boards. What do you get when you combine them? Barcode Hero, a new product by Kima Labs, a startup founded by two Amazon veterans.
The main idea behind the service is an app that attempts to make shopping more social. A user takes their phone into a store, launches the app, and starts scanning the barcodes of items they’re interested in. Doing so unlocks points and rewards such as dukedoms and kingships — yes, the Foursquare idea, but here it’s for product categories. More importantly, this scanning allows Barcode Hero to build up a database of information and will help them to personalize your shopping experience.
“We want to attack in-store shopping,” co-founder Blake Scholl tells us. Personalization has revolutionized shopping online, Scholl says. But there’s very little of that in actual stores, he notes. Obviously, this is the Amazon influence at play — both Scholl and co-founder Jason Crawford worked at the online retailing giant for several years. Both then moved on to Pelago, makers of the location-based app Whrrl, where they clearly got the app itch.
What’s nice about the app is that it’s simple. From the moment you launch it, it’s very clear what you’re supposed to do: find a barcode and scan it. It’s also a bit addicting to see yourself gaining points and moving past other users in certain product categories as you battle for the aforementioned dukedoms and kingships. And doing other actions such as recommending a product or writing a short review will get you even more points.
Obviously, all of this is to entice users to help Barcode Hero build out this recommendation service. But the app is also helpful because it provides price comparisons via a deal with PriceGrabber. This is in line with what a few other apps in the barcode scanning space do, such as Red Laser and ShopSavvy. But Crawford notes that they’re different because they’re mainly focused on the social aspect.
In that regard they may be more like Blippy or Swipely — but those products are only on the web. While Barcode Hero has a website, the main focus are these apps. At first, this is only an iPhone app, but the plan is to expand to other platforms quickly.
And then, of course, there’s Shopkick, one of the newer hot startups in the social shopping space. Today, that service formally launched their broad partnership with Best Buy retails stores. But Shopkick seems more focused on the geo-based coupon aspect of in-store shopping. Barcode Hero wants to be the recommendation arm of that experience. Of course, getting users to use multiple apps to enrich the shopping experience will be difficult.
Barcode Hero’s goal is to be the one app you go to when you enter a store. “That’s a very monetizable place to be,” Crawford says. They expect both brands and merchants to be very interested in this, and note plenty of interest already. Scholl also is quick to say that while coupons remain very much on the table, they don’t want to get into that space too early. They want to build up the social graph and perfect the user experience first.
Today, they’re also announcing they have the cash to do just that. Kima Labs has raised a $770,000 seed round from an impressive roster of angels including SV Angel (Ron Conway), Naval Ravikant, Owen Van Natta and several former senior executives from Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, and Wal-Mart. The Washington Post Company also made a strategic investment as part of the round, we’re told.
You can find Barcode Hero in the App Store here. Apple just recently began featuring it as one of their “New & Noteworthy” apps, so that social graph should be growing quickly already.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Fashion for me
Personalized shopping on the internet. That's what covet.com, which just got bought by GOOGLE, promises. The site uses visual search as it is called. In other words you look at styles that you like or don't like, vote on them, and then the site goes and searche clothes (on sale) for you.
(the URL: http://www.covet.com/hon?alt=true)
(the URL: http://www.covet.com/hon?alt=true)
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
New media wild west
Anyone toiling in the fields of new media, must come to grips with their own sense of fair play (or to use the legal term: fair use) in order to keep toiling.
That's why in all my blogs I always site the actual URL and copy and paste the full story I'm referencing. In my world, I'm just commenting on work someone else has done. I'm not co-opting. And I want to give them full credit and full disclosure, so the point they obviously were trying to make is clear (and separate from mine) so my interpretation or spin becomes icing on the cake.
If YOU want some guidance in fashioning your own sense of fair play, here it is, an annotated study of digital law.
(The url is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2010/whos-afraid-news-aggregators)
The full story:
Who's Afraid of the News Aggregators?
Posted August 30th, 2010 by Kimberley Isbell
in Aggregation CMLP Fair Use Hot News Misappropriation Journalism
As anyone who has been following the debate regarding the "future of journalism" knows, there have been a lot of ink (and bytes) spilled arguing over the role news aggregators are playing in the "decline" of traditional journalistic models. Rupert Murdoch has labeled the practice of news aggregation by entities like Google News "theft," and a professor from the Wharton Business School recently called on lawmakers to amend the copyright laws to prevent aggregators from posting any portion of news stories for a full 24 hours after their initial publication. Even the FTC has gotten in on the act, listing "Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators" as the first policy proposal in the Staff Discussion Draft recently released in connection with its workshop series on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" (To which Google had a thoughtful reply.)
But for all of the heated rhetoric blaming news aggregators for the decline of journalism, the fall of civilization and male pattern baldness, many are still left asking the question: are news aggregators violating current law?
Today, CMLP releases a white paper entitled "The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices" that attempts to answer that question by examining the hot news misappropriation and copyright infringement claims that are often asserted against aggregators, and to provide news aggregators with some "best practices" for making use of third-party content.
A hearty thanks goes out to the people that helped make this paper possible: Justin Silverman, for invaluable research assistance; David Ardia and Sam Bayard, for reading and critiquing numerous drafts; and the speakers from the "Saving Journalism from Itself? Hot News, Copyright Fair Use and News Aggregation" panel at our spring conference, for helping to frame and crystalize many of the issues.
You can download the report here.
(The URL for that report link is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/news%20aggregation%20white%20paper.pdf)
That's why in all my blogs I always site the actual URL and copy and paste the full story I'm referencing. In my world, I'm just commenting on work someone else has done. I'm not co-opting. And I want to give them full credit and full disclosure, so the point they obviously were trying to make is clear (and separate from mine) so my interpretation or spin becomes icing on the cake.
If YOU want some guidance in fashioning your own sense of fair play, here it is, an annotated study of digital law.
(The url is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2010/whos-afraid-news-aggregators)
The full story:
Who's Afraid of the News Aggregators?
Posted August 30th, 2010 by Kimberley Isbell
in Aggregation CMLP Fair Use Hot News Misappropriation Journalism
As anyone who has been following the debate regarding the "future of journalism" knows, there have been a lot of ink (and bytes) spilled arguing over the role news aggregators are playing in the "decline" of traditional journalistic models. Rupert Murdoch has labeled the practice of news aggregation by entities like Google News "theft," and a professor from the Wharton Business School recently called on lawmakers to amend the copyright laws to prevent aggregators from posting any portion of news stories for a full 24 hours after their initial publication. Even the FTC has gotten in on the act, listing "Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators" as the first policy proposal in the Staff Discussion Draft recently released in connection with its workshop series on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" (To which Google had a thoughtful reply.)
But for all of the heated rhetoric blaming news aggregators for the decline of journalism, the fall of civilization and male pattern baldness, many are still left asking the question: are news aggregators violating current law?
Today, CMLP releases a white paper entitled "The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices" that attempts to answer that question by examining the hot news misappropriation and copyright infringement claims that are often asserted against aggregators, and to provide news aggregators with some "best practices" for making use of third-party content.
A hearty thanks goes out to the people that helped make this paper possible: Justin Silverman, for invaluable research assistance; David Ardia and Sam Bayard, for reading and critiquing numerous drafts; and the speakers from the "Saving Journalism from Itself? Hot News, Copyright Fair Use and News Aggregation" panel at our spring conference, for helping to frame and crystalize many of the issues.
You can download the report here.
(The URL for that report link is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/news%20aggregation%20white%20paper.pdf)
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