All A Twitter

June 1st, 2011

Next Monday will be a big day for Steve Jobs and his Apple empire. It is the start of the Word Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.

Yes, there is speculation about what new surprises Apple will bring to the table, but one thing for sure is that we will see a new Apple operating system (OS).

Already Apple has leaked in its press release that the new OS5, or Lion as it is being called, will be the life of the WWDC party.

That might be a little dry for us non-developer types, but what is being thrown about is a partnership  with Apple and Twitter. Several online tech sites are reporting Twitter will be included in the new Lion release. TechCrunch broke the news first.

We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device.

Why is this such a big deal? Think back a few years when Microsoft rolled out Internet Explorer with every operating system. Microsoft captured the browser market and to this day, still holds a commanding lead.

In today’s “everything social” climate, a partnership with a major worldwide manufacturer can only mean one thing, growth!

Twitter is quietly maneuvering this week too, confirming that is will launch a new Twitter picture service. Users will be able to upload from Twitter.com and you will get a  thumbnail in your Twitter post and link to original photo. This is in direct competition with the established Twitpic service, made famous by the USAir crash photo into the Hudson River.

Twitter is obviously gearing up to be a bigger player. Last month they paid $40 million for Tweetdeck from London.

Apple may be on to something, if the new OS5 speculation pans out. A report released today by Pew Research shows significant growth in Twitter use in the last 6 months.

13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter—a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.

As in our previous research on Twitter use, African Americans and Latinos continue to have high rates of adoption of the service. Fully 25% of online African Americans use Twitter at least occasionally, with 11% doing so on a typical day.

Additionally, Twitter use by internet users ages 25-34 has doubled since late 2010 (from 9% to 19%) and usage by those ages 35-44 has also grown significantly (from 8% to 14%).

The study cites non-whites as the largest segment of the population using Twitter. “One in ten African-American internet users now visit Twitter on a typical day—that is double the rate for Latinos and nearly four times the rate for whites.”

All of the Twitter stars are aligning and the 140 character tweet service that has played second fiddle to Facebook could be setting up to make a run at a bigger share of the social pie.  Stay tuned…

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Tools of the Trade – MountMe

June 1st, 2011

We pad users all love the capabilities of our portable devices. Whether it is reading a good book in bed or tracking the navigational markers with a marine boating app, tablets now have a place in our daily lives.

But due to the size of the iPad, there is just not a good method of mounting the iPad in the car for GPS, or on a desktop for presentations.

Here’s a cool idea released just this month from MountMe, a company building mounting accessories for the Apple iPads and Samsung Galaxys.

MountMe is releasing the Freedom II for iPad 2. The protective carrying case doubles as a mounting accessory. Included with the mount is a variety of hardware options including a mobile mounting strap, four suction cups, screws and a built-in kickstand.

For the digital journalist – mount the iPad in the field for teleprompter viewing, a steady desktop kickstand for writing copy, attach to your windshield or back glass and live stream video of traffic, weather conditions or events.

Here are some mounting suggestions from the manufacturer:

If you are a first version iPad owner, there’s a mount for that too. Same specs and limited only to your imagination. MountMe will cost you $49.99, but at the moment has a discount running for pre-orders.

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Tools of the Trade – Xacti

May 25th, 2011

Just in time for hurricane season, Panasonic is releasing a new Xacti waterproof HD camcorder in June.

Xacti was previously a product of Sanyo but purchased by Panasonic in 2009. The HX-WA10 is waterproof, up to three meters and comes with a 16 megapixel camera.

There is a built in stereo microphone and interfaces for HDMI/USB/SDXC interfaces. There is a 2.6 inch LCD screen. There is limited internal memory at 80 MB, but external SD chips can solve that issue.

The $550 price is pretty hefty for a compact HD video camera. It is interesting that Panasonic is making a play into the pocket camera market, just as market leader Flip ceases to exist and pulls the plug.

For my money a good smartphone with a 8MP camera is still the best bang for the buck.

Panasonic will ship the Xacti on June 25.

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Are Smartphones Making Us Smarter Consumers?

May 25th, 2011

The amount of new technology rolling out for smartphones lately is mind boggling. The mobile device manufacturers have successfully integrated the smartphone into our everyday lives giving us instant access to our friends, the web and of course telephones.

Search giant Google has been busy looking into just how people are using the new generation portable devices. The Google sponsored report from Chief Marketer is giving us new insight into just how people are using their smartphones.

Nearly four out of five smartphone users browse the web on their devices and 75% use mobile search. What are they looking for? News and shopping.

Here’s a break down of the top five searched categories on Mobile.

• News 57%
• Restaurant 51%
• Navigation 51%
• Entertainment 49%
• Shopping 47%

The drill down from the study shows consumers have adopted mobile as a means to making buying decisions.

The study found that 42% of users click on mobile ads they see and like over their smartphones. Of those, 49% go on to buy something or convert somehow, 35% later visit the advertiser’s Web site, and 27% actually call the business in the ad. 71% of respondents said they have done mobile searches because of exposure to an ad. Of those:

• 88% said they were responding to a traditional offline ad in print or on TV
• 27% searched because they saw a mobile ad
• 18% who did so after seeing an online ad

79% of respondents said they have used their smartphone for shopping activities, including finding store locations and checking local inventory (78%), acquiring product information (69%), contacting retailer (52%) and finding and using offers and discounts (48%). The median spending on smartphone purchases in the previous year was $300 per shopper, with most of the buying happening in entertainment, electronics, and clothing or apparel.

Terry has been reminding us for a while that advertising also qualifies as relevant content for users. In this study it is obvious, news and shopping information as two key drivers for mobile interactivity.

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Tools of the Trade – Chartbeat

May 18th, 2011

In the new world of continuous news the main objective is to practice a web first strategy. Pushing the content out can test even the most efficient content center and just how much credit are you getting for all of that hard work.

There is an interesting service out that allows you to track, in real-time, just how your website is performing.

Chartbeat tracks the users, the stories – what’s hot and what’s not, and a lot more critical information for your online staff. Chartbeat explains the features on its website.

An unexpected story starts to go viral, the Huffington Post decides to link to your post, your product is featured on Oprah. When unusual events happen, responding 24 hours later is the same as not responding at all.

Our dashboard gives you the pulse of your site, showing you what traffic you have, who is sending it to you, and where it is going. chartbeat enables you to react to events as they happen: promote or improve a rising story to maximize time on site, participate in discussions about your site on the web, raise prices in response to demand.

Michelle Donaldson, News Director at KPHO in Phoenix, knows first hand the attributes of Chartbeat. She even displays the live data in her newsroom for the staff to see.

“Managing news is like having a professional case of ADD, what with the broadcast demands, internet, email and text alerts and everything else competing for your attention. Chartbeat helps me focus my attention on user behavior. I don’t have to wait for hours to find out what’s hot and what’s not. Plus, since I get that information in real-time, I can be more responsive and shore-up hot content to make it even hotter.”

She adds, “Putting it on display in the newsroom keeps everyone’s attention focused on the goal of serving the internet user.”

Chartbeat is a monthly subscription $9.95, with a free 30 day trial.

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Live Streaming on Facebook

May 18th, 2011

You have the audience. You have successfully built a fan base of thousands of Facebook fans. So know what do you do with them?

There are at least two apps for Facebook that are helping companies interact with their fan base through live streaming. The plugins allow the sharing of live cameras or video feeds directly to your Facebook site. Also included is the ability for your fans to interact in chat sessions during the stream.

In the past there was a fee involved, but now this streaming service is offered free from LiveStream and UStream.

The Livestream for Facebook app requires an account and  download of the  Livestream Podcaster software, then its just a single click to begin LiveStreaming.

UStream, just launched its free app last week. UStream offers a similar service including broadcasting to mobile phones and archiving of broadcasts. Through UStream your fans can be alerted by wall posting or messaging of an upcoming Facebook live event.

Aside from generating interesting content for your Facebook Fans, the service helps build your fan base, requiring users to “like” your page before being able to access live events.

Amy Wood at WSPA in Spartanburg uses embedded live streams on her Facebook page each night at 10PM. More than 13,000 of her fans can tune in to watch not only what is on-air, but what happens behind the scenes during commercial breaks.

“ I am early in on Livestream but like the way it has video and chat all on my Facebook wall. I have UStream set up too…I’ve used UStream for 3 plus years.. on the website itself…over 2,000 videos… most behind scenes during my shows.. also a weekly web show I do, featuring local events usually on Friday mornings, from a local coffee shop,” she says.

“Livestream costs if you get huge crowds gathering, but it’s my experience that for behind the scenes I get a a core group of under 100 that float in and out on various days/weeks, with crowds of 25 to 30 at a time, but again by end of a session may have seen 40 to 50 in and out.  15 to 20 commenting.  Almost always more watching than commenting. The nice part of the Facebook related chat is that you can see who is in the room.  It’s more accountability and you can’t be part of the stream without logging into the chat.

I think the benefits of live stream on Facebook are obvious. Not only are you exposing your regular fans to different content they may see on-air, but also brings the power of social networking into the equation. Friends sharing content with friends builds sampling of your product and a potential loyal audience.

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Pew Digs Into How We Navigate the Web for News

May 11th, 2011

Without a doubt, the internet has changed the way we consume news. Pew Research has new information from a just released study that digs into how certain people end up on certain web sites, why they go there and what exactly entices them to go there.

Pew examined the top 25 national websites, as identified by Nielsen, from January through September 2010. What they found was an audience that mainly uses search to get where they are going, have a growing desire to follow links from their Facebooks friends, and are just not into Twitter, yet.

Here are some of the key findings  from the study:

• Even the top brand news sites depend greatly on “casual users,” people who visit just a few times per month and spend only a few minutes at a site over that time span.  USAToday.com was typical of most of these popular news sites: 85% of its users visited USAToday.com between one and three times per month. Three quarters came only once or twice. Time spent was even more daunting: When all the visits were added together, fully a third of users, 34%, spent between one and five minutes on the paper’s Website each month.[1] Even if, as some suggest, online data tend to count some users multiple times, inflating the number of casual users and undercounting repeat visits, casual users till would be the largest single group.

• There is, however, a smaller core of loyal and frequent visitors to news sites, who might be called “power users.” These people return more than 10 times per month to a given site and spend more than an hour there over that time. Among the top 25 sites, power users visiting at least 10 times make up an average of just 7% of total users, but that number ranged markedly, from as high as 18% (at CNN.com) to as low as 1% (at BingNews.com).

• Even among the top nationally recognized news site brands, Google remains the primary entry point. The search engine accounts on average for 30% of the traffic to these sites.

• Social media, however, and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic. Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links.

• When it comes to the age, news consumers to the top news websites are on par with Internet users overall. This stands apart from news consumption on traditional platforms, which tends to skew older, and may bode well for the industry.

As we all know the demographics of a television news audience is a sorted bunch. Producing newscasts that invite young and older demographics is often challenging. For the web, Pew has discovered what Terry Heaton and I have been suggesting for years – niches sites for niches audiences.

“Niche sites, absent the brand of the station, are an opportunity to reach beyond the competitive walls that plague efforts to be a better TV station online. Our branded sites attract our offline loyalists and not much more, so any efforts to reach beyond that are smart Web strategy,” says Heaton.

Pew sites the most obvious niche vertical, ESPN as a reason for stations to look beyond the obvious newscast website.

…the ESPN digital network, whether driven by the topic matter, technical design, content quality or a combination, has found a formula for attracting and retaining an audience that most general news sites have not.  General news by its nature may not elicit the same kind of passion as a single topic might, particularly sports, which are built around drama and have finality each day with game results. But there may well still be insights to glean from ESPN.com’s success. For one, it suggests that specialized sections or “verticals” on specific topics could build loyalty if well enough executed. For another, it suggests that certain topics may be so deeply covered by specialists that general news sites would be best to devote their resources elsewhere.

This study is worth the 30 minutes it will take to read.  You might also consider a  discussion with your staff on how people are using the web today and ideas on how best to recruit users.

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Tools of the Trade – iLoqk

May 11th, 2011

I have have shared stories of stations using the iPad 2 as a news gathering tool. The front and rear facing cameras make it an effective means of capturing images and shipping them back for online and on-air.

The only downside to an iPad though is its size. The 10″ screen is a little bulky to carry around, and steady for quality video. It was just a matter of time before someone developed a method to make the iPad2 more “field friendly” for journalist.

The folks at Xshot have been making add-ons for mobile devices for a few years, including collapsing extender tripods for portable cameras and mountable cases for iPhones. Now they are introducing  iLoqk. A lightweight polycarbonate skin for your iPad 2 that allows you to mount your device on a tripod.

“We have come up with an innovative way to get a grip on the iPad 2 to make better use of the dual cameras. The product is a safe and secure removable latch system that allows you to quickly attach a universal tripod mount in portrait or landscape mode. The best part is it does not add bulk to the device. The lightweight polycarbonate skin snap fits to the iPad 2 with two small slots that accept the latch in portrait or landscape mode. So when the tripod mount is not needed, the skin does not add bulk as it is only 1mm thick”, states the XShot team develops blog.

The uses are obvious. Mount your iPad 2 for steady Skype interviews, snap shots, video conferencing or journalist on camera stand ups. A simple but potentially valuable tool in a digital journalists tool kit.

The product is only available for pre-order on kickstarter.com for $40. Here’s a video from the companies web site on the iLoqk.

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Tools of the Trade – Google Talk Video

May 4th, 2011

Newsrooms are learning the value of video chat. It is common place today to see broadcasts using Skype for on-air interviews in place of satellite or microwave shots. In these days of continued resource tightening it is a great way to get the job done.

Just recently WCBD in Charleston delivered live Skype reports from their news vehicle while their meteorologist traveled through the tornado ravaged South. Here is a link to that live report from WCBD.

Scott Flannigan, Director of Digital Journalism sees the value in adopting th new technology. “Skype provided immediate live talk back between my anchors and the reporter in the field. When no other station in the market was able to provide that and it was a lot cheaper. When the economy is tight and the budgets are tight,  Skype allows you to get the job done without breaking the bank. We pushed ourselves to make it easier to Skype.”

Less commonplace but even more powerful is to do the same thing over mobile devices. Imagine journalists in the field with smartphones capable of sending back live video pictures without laptops or webcams.

It is time to ramp up your next mobile news gathering initiative. Skype Mobile Video on iPhones is already an option for some 3g users, and Verizon is planning to roll out faster service over its 4G LTE network. At the moment mobile connection speed is the only drawback, but that too is changing rapidly.

Google is announcing it too will offer mobile video calling with Google Talk Video for Android.  Google is telling its users, “Google Talk with video and voice chat will gradually roll out to Nexus S devices in the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update and will launch on other Android 2.3+ devices in the future.”

So here is how the setup works in your newsroom. You establish a Google Mail account for your newsroom on a desktop computer that is capable of “going to air”. In most cases its the same computer stations already have setup for Skype calls. Android users video call into that Google account from their mobile phone and now you have instant live pictures, using your mobile phone front and rear cameras.

With Gmail and Google Talk you can already make calls over 3G, 4G and of course Wi-Fi.

The time to start experimenting is now. WCBD in Charleston began experimenting with mobile Skype months ago and the Alabama tornadoes offered a great avenue to show off the technology and it paid off.

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Storify – The Social Media Writing Tool

April 27th, 2011

I wrote about Storify earlier this year when the social media tool first went into private beta testing. Well now it is out there for all the world to use and it is worth taking for a spin.

Storify is simply this. A tool to help you gather content from social media sites to include in stories you are working on online and even on-air. I created a Storify example to give you an idea of what it can do.

Adding video from other social sites is a cinch too, it is just a matter of searching , dragging and dropping. The video can be something you posted on YouTube or someone else. Storify doesn’t care, it searches public domain content and brings it to you for including in your story.

Storify also allows me to share the story via Twitter, Facebook and email, as well as allow others to embed the story wherever they choose.

Traditional media companies are seeing the power of Storify. The company’s blog, touts examples from large US websites to international online startups, like “The Stream”.

Our private beta users have created more than 21,000 stories. Storify stories have been embedded on more than 5,000 sites — including some of the most-read destinations on the Web like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, PBS, CBC and many other blogs and sites.

Storify is powering an entire show on Al Jazeera that revolves around social media. We’re also working with major brands and PR and creative agencies.

Storify is worth checking out. If you are a journalist writing a regular blog or a web producer looking for content during breaking news, Storify can be a helpful tool and a time saver.

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