Two weeks ago I posted that Australia’s ABC Online was down, showing an ‘outage’ message.
At the time I thought it was because of the Pope’s visit to Australia, but now it’s down again. It would be interesting to know why they’re down, or what’s causing the down time.
Again, the message on the screengrab is the same:
We’re sorry…
We’re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.
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I like the live Twitter event coverage (as a personal effort instead of just a pushed RSS feed).
The Twitter account web link was to news.com.au’s in-depth WYD08 coverage page, linking to their What’s on when? page, with an embedded Google map.
Follow that through to the same Google map, full sized, showing, amongst other things, pilgrimage routes, papal motorcade and boat-a-cade routes, and locations for mass.
The creator of that map, news.com.au journalist Alexandra Marceau, has also created 58 other news maps for individual stories. What’s great about creating a map for an individual story is that it’s a mapped record of that story, available through a permanent list of user-created maps.
Obviously, you say, but I’ve been in the habit of giving a quick search-generated map reference link to online for a news story, one that simply points to the intersection where said news event took place, for example. That’s not a permanent record, and doesn’t extend the news into the “user-generated content” section searchable within Google Maps. Creating individually annotated news maps is something I’ll consider doing from now on, time permitting.
It would also be much better if I could mash up a geotagged rss feed with Google Maps to automatically show news down to the street, or at least suburb, level. That’s something I would still like to work on, again, time permitting.
Mind you, somebody much smarter than me is probably already doing that.
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The ABC website was down for a while yesterday morning. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen their site offline, and the message would seem to suggest it wasn’t scheduled.
I was trying to find something about a contact who was on Australian Story earlier this year, when I was faced with this ABC Online: Outage page. I tried navigating to a few other pages, but the entire abc.net.au domain was off the radar.
The following screengrab was taken Monday, July 14, 1.50am, and says:
We’re sorry…
We’re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.
I did wonder if the blue was a nice homage to Microsoft’s universally recognised blue screen of death. The only reason I can think of for the site being down at that time is perhaps an influx of Catholics looking for news about the Pope’s arrival in Australia. Our 1-2am would usually be prime internet traffic time for both the west and east coast of the US (8-9am and 11am-12), as well as Europe (5-6pm).
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I would normally never highlight stuff I’ve done at work, but this guy is a great story.
Either check out the video directly directly at YouTube, or read a little bit about him and watch the video on the story page. If you think it’s worth sharing please send the links around, or digg it.
James Smith first tried singing 18 months ago. That was karaoke - now he’s had 10 singing lessons, and on Saturday night he sang Nessun Dorma and several others at the Bastille Day Grand Dinner Ball.
I shot and edited the video. I rarely get to play with the video cameras these days… This is the first interview James has ever done. A story to rival Paul Potts - the singing mobile phone salesman from Britain’s Got Talent (YouTube link).We had to go with the video before both commercial TV news stations got him, despite my rough shooting and editing skills (back lighting on his porch, and why the hell is there not a tripod in that kit?). Both commercial stations did a story on their Saturday 6pm bulletins, 18 hours after my video went online, but this was James Smith’s first ever interview.
Again, either check out the video directly at YouTube, or read a little bit about him and watch the video on the story page.
I had embedded the video here, but something to do with the code broke my webpage, so visit the links to see it.
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How’s this for awesome? I am of course buying into the hype that is everything Apple, particularly the iPhone, which is yet to be released in Australia.
Vodafone announced today they have signed a deal to sell the iPhone in ten of its global markets, including Australia, ‘later this year’.
Tuesday 6 May 2008
Vodafone to offer Apple’s iPhone in ten markets
Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.
You have plenty of other multi-purpose phones - smart phone, PDA phone, Pocket PC phone - all of which do lots of good things. Is the iPhone the best? How does it rate against the others?
The mobile world is advancing towards that mythical ‘all-in-one’ device that can not only effectively meet the demand for multimedia use of phone, video, audio, image and web, but also realistically meet the needs of those publishing content on the go.
It’s a mobile revolution. The Nokia N95 can’t be bad if it’s the mobile platform of choice for the Reuters Mojo team, so does the iPhone live up to the hype?
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Social Media Optimisation, or SMO, is gaining momentum as the new content distribution buzzword. Content is increasingly shared, and news content particularly is delivered through social networking sites. Will SMO replace SEO, search engine optimisation, as the way news organisations get their content seen by a wider audience?
A New York Times article last week tried to explain the future of news distribution by describing how ‘the young’ share news online via social networks.
SMO, or Social Media Optimisation, is one of the most important stories of the new media campaign - for several reasons.
MSM (main stream media) are beginning to understand that social content distribution is a serious threat to their current distribution methods
MSM in the main were disrespectfully late in adopting SEO, and
It’s only now, well into the Facebook boom, that people are starting to take notice of the value of SMO.
While SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, will remain very important to news gathering and searching methods, it could soon be superceded by a much more important player in news distribution channels and strategies - Social Media Optimisation, or SMO.
How do people share information online? How do they find it? How does social media facilitate this?
What the New York Times article shows is the acceptance, if only partial, of the concept of SMO - that news is no longer force-fed, it is now shared, social, viral, and word of mouth.
Young people expect to see video with campaign stories
New York Times
“And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message,“ says Huffington Post’s Danny Shea. Brian Stelter writes: “Younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading the Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.“ via Romenesko
Like it or not, for traditional news media the news is a commodity that must sell. For it to sell and make money, it must be traded, clicked, monetised, and advertised. When content went online, MSM (mainstream media) very slowly caught up to the idea of SEO - making content user and search engine friendly.
Arguments from MSM - and let me be brutally honest here - dinosaurs, have been that using SEO techniques in news media is simply bowing to a digital master. Many in MSM have for too long bucked at what they call ‘writing headlines for a machine’.
That argument represents a fundamental lack of knowledge about how the future of information distribution will be shaped, and does not bode well for the necessary rapid uptake of SMO - integration with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, and numerous other variety of social networking startups.
People use the internet to search for information. When doing so, people looking for a story about the conclusion of the divorce trial between Heather Mills and Paul McCartney would most likely use the search terms, heather mills divorce, or paul mccartney divorce, or heather mills paul mccartney divorce, or even add the word settlement to any of those searches. They will not search using a print headline like “Damnation of Her Ladyship“ or “Lady Liar“, from the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror respectively, both on March 19.
People use a search engine to find what they are looking for, so writing page or article titles that assists them to do that is by no means writing headlines for a machine - it is writing headlines that will help real people find information using a machine.
But as MSM has only recently grasped the importance of doing this, and just as they catch up and start optimising content for search, the rules of the game gradually begin to change again.
MSM need to not be left behind this time. News in the new world of digital media is shared. Social media is word of mouth advertising. Social media is recommending a product to a friend, and whether that be viral video or a news story, it is a link to content of mutual interest, shared among a community of friends, a seperate community of family, another community of professional contacts, and innumerable other communities that gather around hobbies.
That MySpace, or Facebook, may be the flavour of the social networking month and gone tomorrow as another new social networking site enters the friend-swapping fray, is no good reason to neglect to stay in the game. If you’re only just starting to embrace MySpace as the skyrocketing Facebook begins to face new competition from bebo, you’re two full lengths behind the leaders.
The only saving grace for MSM in the past is that they have generally formed a pack that lag behind the innovators. Be warned though, as soon as your competition gets a clue and embraces the reality of online content sharing and community building in their news distribution strategy - you’ll find out just how lazy you’ve been when you lose community respect and relevance.
When the editors and owners hit the panic button and ask, “What the hell have you been doing? We’ve been left behind!“ - What will you say?
Integration is not just newsrooms. Integration is leading innovation, or at the very least keeping up with it.
Traditional media no longer control the news distribution channels.
Seed your content. Link out. Allow your video to be embedded, linked to, displayed elsewhere.
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Qtrax, a new online music service, has made 25 million songs available for free and legal download.
Qtrax requires a software download, much like the iTunes store, to browse, play and download the songs. The service is said to be supported by limited advertising around the Qtrax player window.
The Mac version of the Qtrax music player software isn’t due for release until March 18.
ACP Magazines announced today it was closing down Australia’s longest running magazine, The Bulletin, effective immediately.
Circulation has fallen from a high of 100,000+ in the mid 90s to just 57,000 in the last audit in September 2007.
The press release said the trend was “symptomatic of the impact of the internet on this particular genre”.
Surprisingly, The Bulletin will not remain in online form.
Director of Communications for PBL Media Arabella Gibson said there will be no online presence remaining, and the website would likely be taken down over the coming weekend.
At the end of the release, some information about ACP Magazines boasts that of its stable of 70 international magazines, “integral to its success are vibrant, information-packed reader websites”.
The Bulletin website is certainly information-packed, perhaps it’s just not ‘vibrant’ enough.
In a continuing push to break new ground in digital media, ABC (Australia) has released ABC Now, a desktop media player for select ABC digital content.
The potential of this application is huge. When I read the description of what it would do, I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately the interface isn’t entirely user-friendly at the moment, but it’s in beta, so expect something great to come.
For what is obviously planned for this media player the ABC is again demonstrating why Australians go to them for original online audio and video content - because they try to make it easily accessible.
Often they succeed in the attempt, and that’s why their podcasts and vodcasts have enjoyed such popularity. ABC digital content has succeeded because it is available. If there’s not much to choose from, people move on. The ABC’s integration online of text, audio and video content is impressive, to say the least.
If you haven’t seen it, check out an example of their in-page video player on this story.
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Earlier this year it was announced that News Corporation was developing a YouTube killer. It was to be their own video serving site that was going to deliver full-length TV shows in a partnership with NBC, rather than the perceived notion (misguided I think) of the worthless fare served up on YouTube.
The News Ltd paper I work for (full disclosure) went so far as to declare in March 2007 that “YouTube’s dominance of online video content is about to end”.
Hulu.com is the outworking of that effort and is now in beta, and it’s looking pretty good.
Something very few news sites are doing today is incorporating social networking opportunities into their structure. Even less are incorporating social networking into their video content - which remains for the most part clunky and unappealing.
Hopefully Hulu will change that for News Ltd/Corp. This aspect of the current beta player is promising.
The “embed” function allows you to set in and out points, so you can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on your blog.
I really hope this technology gets rolled out to all News Ltd/Corp sites, because it will exponentially enhance video content accessibility.
A while ago I mentioned the impending launch of CitizeNews. It is now live.
About CitizeNews
Our mission is to aggregate the work of talented video journalists of great diversity and distinction whose work is characterized by a powerful individual vision. We are constructing a digital platform where video journalists chronicle the world as they work to interpret its peoples, issues, events and personalities.
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David Lazarus in the San Francisco Chronicle argues that, for newspapers to “survive in an age of free online content” they need to start charging for the use of their products online.
The argument is counter-intuitive.It is an age of free online content.That is the fact.
If newspapers start charging for their online products, they won’t survive in this age of free online content.People will simply go elsewhere.
Should newspapers sue Google or Yahoo for their content appearing on news aggregators?No, but perhaps in their concern they could collaborate with Google to count online readership.Surely another way of counting online readership for individual mastheads could be when they are read externally, in the same way RSS readership can be counted even when your site is not visited.
Also stake claim to some of the advertising click, or visit length, revenue being collected, and it becomes desirable to a media outlet that their content is seen freely by as wide an audience as possible.
Whatever else, newspapers must demonstrate that their online content has value.
“The students I teach really do believe that everything on the Internet is theirs for the taking,” Kirtley said. “Young people have been conditioned to believe that they’re entitled to this content.”
It’s time for newspapers to condition them otherwise.
No, it is time for all media outlets with online interests to demonstrate their content has value, and then to stop harping and work a bit harder at figuring out how they’re going to get advertising to pay for it - in the same way the advertising pays for their print stable.
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The Pew Research Center has released a report about online video usage in the US that shows more than half of all adults have downloaded online video at some point, and 20% regularly watch online video every day.
How’s this for awesome? I am of course buying into the hype that is everything 
Social Media Optimisation, or 
ACP Magazines announced today it was closing down Australia’s longest running magazine, The Bulletin, effective immediately.