For those of you who read my website using RSS (Feedburner tells me there are 100 of you or so… hi!), you may have come across this faux pas at the bottom of my last post about the Hudson river air crash:
I can only apologise. No doubt the word’s ‘crash’ in this post will mean the same occurs on this post instead. Perhaps if I write VIAGRA it’ll even the balance. Or at least boost my Google rankings.
Seeing what RSS feeds other people subscribe to is a little bit like spying a new friend’s music collection for the first time. Seeing feeds you know and love brings out a bit of excitement in all of us.
Anyhow, was looking at the Google Reader blog just now and noticed this post about the feeds Google engineers are subscribed to.
Very nice! I thought. Even better is the ability they give you to add these feeds as a ‘bundle’. A pre-packaged set of feeds that you can add to your Google Reader list all in one click.
How bloody useful.
Academics out there: Imagine how handy it would be to produce RSS feed bundles for your course. A Web 2.0 reading list, if you will.
Journalists out there: Imagine how handy it would be to be able to create a feed bundle which you could then share with your co-workers.
Publishers out there: Imagine how handy it would be to offer your readers a pre-made easy-install bundle of your publications RSS feeds.
Please Mr Google, allow us to make our own RSS bundles.
The Guardian has become the first major newspaper to post their articles in full in their RSS feed. Glorious news.
It’s a move that’ll delight readers, but even more importantly, it’ll delight Google. From the Google Reader blog:
This is a huge first step in making more content available in more places, and we applaud the Guardian for taking it.
There is no more important a relationship that an online presence can establish than one with Google.
In the past week, Paul Bradshaw wrote what he called one of the most important posts he’s ever made. Here it is.
In it he describes how the era of the awkward, socially backward geek is nearly behind us. They’re not geeks, he says, they’re early adopters. And you’d better listen to them if you want to stay a step ahead of the game.
What Paul didn’t mention in his post, and what I feel is worth pointing out, is that as well as being early adopters, geeks are also early rejectors too.
In other words, listen to the geeks. If they use something for a long time, then it’ll slowly become mainstream. If they ditch it, then you should ditch it too.
This theory stacks up for almost any example I can think of. Except one: RSS.
Really Simple Syndication. Now, you and I know it’s brilliantly simple, but for some reason it has yet to hit the mainstream.
So why hasn’t it taken off? I’ll offer up some reasons for debate:
Why can’t feeds just be called ’stories’? Why don’t we ‘follow’ stories instead of subscribe to them?
Why are we relying on explanations like this to educate readers?
Newspapers need to make and market their own RSS readers.
Think about it. Make an RSS reader, and invite people to sign up. Once set up, offer a huge array of simple one-click subscribes, sorry, follows. You could even make this follow list user generated — if you find a lot of people are manually adding feeds, then these can be added to the simple one-click list.
And if you’re wondering how it makes money, then think of it this way: “Hello Mr Website Owner, for £loadsa-wonga we’ll add you to our list of feeds,” you say.
“Wow! Great! Now I have thousands of new readers clicking on my ads!” say they.
What’s more, just think of the hits. Now that your readers don’t need to go to each of their favourite sites to read new stuff, they’ll spend more time on your site. And with all those reading habits you’ll be able to target adverts like never before, right down to knowing if Bob from Newquay keeps making the type bigger. Maybe he wants some new reading glasses?
It solves all the problems I’ve described in this post. First, you’ll have a nice new budget to advertise your ‘Story Follow’ service, thus people will know what it is. Second, because you’ve made the technology you can strip out all the horrible terms like feed and subscribe and replace them with friendlier ones. Words that makes sense. And finally… users will feel at home using a website from a brand they trust.
Everybody wins.
View of Hataitai, Wellington. Picture: Peter from Wellington (Flickr)
Howdy!
This, I hope, will be a very exciting project. Not only for Whitireia students, but also as a journalism experiment for everyone out there.
Small crimes, bigger problem
Let me explain. A few years ago, back in the UK, the local police introduced a Neighbourhood Watch map. It showed the local town, divided up into tiny segments. Each segment consisted of a few streets, and was labeled with the details of who we could contact if an incident occurred in each little section. One person whose sole goal was to represent the people living in that small area. Hyperlocal policing.
Of course, hyperlocal is a word we journalists should be getting used to. It is a goal we should be aiming for within our news websites. After all, every news story is hyperlocal… you just need to live in the right place.
The effect of the Neighbourhood Watch hyperlocal scheme was huge. Suddenly, local residents who were a victim of petty crime felt they had somewhere to go. By emailing their local rep, they felt like they were reporting the problem without bothering the ‘real’ police — the investigators and coppers in the town centre.
What they didn’t realise, of course, is that their little problems translated to a major problem in the bigger picture. If you get your car window smashed, is it a big issue? No, probably not. But if, by reporting it to your local rep, you found that people all over town were having their car windows smashed in the same way, all of a sudden there’s a big crime problem.
Small stories, bigger issue
How does this involve journalism? Simple: we’ll apply the same strategy to news gathering. At Whitireia, we’ve assigned each journalism student — there are 27 of them in total — to a very precise area of Wellington (plus some bigger patches for the surrounding areas). We are going to promote our ‘news map’ to local people, under the branding of ‘Who is YOUR journalist?’. Just like the Neighbourhood Watch, we need to give off the impression we want to hear everything that’s going on; no matter how small or insignificant it may be. There are thousands of stories sat out there, but the residents don’t think they’re important enough to bother the busy journos at the Dominion Post.
So, instead, they’ll come to our students.
Anyway, this news map will feature highly in the new news website I am developing for Whitireia. For this, I have added all the data we have — so far — to a Google map, below.
By zooming in, you can see how each section of Wellington is divided up. Click on each slice, and you’ll find the name of the reporter in charge, and a telephone number to get in touch.
As I recently discovered, those bubbles allow me to put HTML code in, so that opens up a whole wealth of options for local news coverage.
Magical map of marvellous minisites
So the plan is thus: fill each segment with news relating its geographical position. Make each slice of map its own minisite. This won’t be a problem. An RSS feed will be generated by the main news site — powered by Wordpress — and fed directly into each bubble. And, er, that’s it. Simple coding, simple concept… but I think it’s a powerful one that all our local newspapers should adopt.
But that’s not all. In time I will be feeding reporter’s Twitter feeds into that bubble too, allowing visitors to see what they’re working on. One student here is doing a story about bicycle accidents in Hutt. If she was to Twitter the message “researching bike accidents in Hutt, any experiences?”, people could immediately get in touch.
And then…?
Well what next? Google Maps is a platform I’m only just learning about. In time, perhaps, all our news stories can be tagged to certain locations. So, for example, any stories about a school could appear as a bubble in that school’s location… perhaps. But then perhaps it should be kept as simple as possible — we don’t want to drive away the people who would be the source of stories.
Over to you, guys. I’m very interested to hear what you have to suggest. Is this a good idea? What else should we be trying? What can I add?
© 2013 Dave Lee / jBlog · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
