Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer. Not just because of the way it makes it possible for me to share, store and retrieve information very easily – but because of the network of other users doing just the same whose overlapping fields of information I can share.
So where should he, and all the other dedicated Delicious bookmarkers, store their warehouses of tagged URLs?
Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog is collating responses from users and has even prepared a handy spreadsheet to compare services (So far, Pinboard.in, Publish2 and Diigo are leading the field). But this ignores the key flaw in the whole project of moving our data online.
Have a look at a 2006 list of social bookmarking sites. How many of them are actually still going four years later?
The list includes 54 different social bookmarking type sites (of varying kinds – only a few of which are really like Delicious). Going through them now at the end of 2010, just 27 are still functional in more or less the way they set out to be (with one having stopped and started again and which now boasts all of 1,000 users).
As I know how much my readers love their pie charts, here’s a visual guide. To save you the calculation, that’s a 50% attrition rate of web services. In four years.
Yes – many of those flaky start-ups were doomed to failure (and several were aimed at foreign markets, so you wouldn’t have used them anyway). But Delicious (or del.icio.us) was a flaky start-up once. One of the attractions of Delicious, apart from some of its features, was that it came to be owned by Yahoo – a giant web player that you thought you could rely on.
But the truth is there is no such thing as reliability online. These services last as long as the company thinks they’re worth supporting – or until the company fails or is taken over by a company that isn’t interested.
The fact that they’re mostly free probably doesn’t help – there’s no real financial incentive to support a service once it goes out of fashion. But even if they did charge money, there’s no guarantee the customer base will be able to support it in the long term. In fact, given the draw of free services, paid services start with a big handicap – even if the free rivals don’t stay the course.
Most of the recent criticism of cloud computing (getting your digital services and software online and keeping your data there) has been to do with security. A former National Security Agency director has said he doesn’t trust the cloud, and an awful lot of everyday users seem to agree with him. Other reasons include reliability – cloud services, even those run by the mighty Google, are down more than you’d like. Nancy Nally on GigaOM has a useful round-up of reasons not to trust the Cloud here.
But, really, the key problem with cloud computing is you need to be able to rely on the company providing it to stick around. And which online/computing companies have done that for more than a decade? More to the point, which ones have done it and maintained a specific web service continually?
You only have to look at personal blogs and web sites. If you started off with your own personal web site back in the mid 1990s, you might have been on the GeoCities network. If so, you would have lost your site in 2009, when then-owner Yahoo shut it down (can you see a trend here?).
Aside from the risk that your blogging site might be shut down by the Feds, there is a good chance that a web provider will pull the plug on your content.
It doesn’t matter who it is – Vox.com bloggers might have been unsurprised at the news that the company would shut its doors, but Google video fans must have been a bit put out that it would stop allowing new uploads to their video channel. As for Bebo users – well, it’s still going, but the writing is probably on the wall. (Though not, I guess, on the Wall.)
And of course the biggest problem faced by Delicious fans is that the site offers some great tools to tag and share bookmarks. Just downloading a backup of the links you’ve saved, or exporting to another social bookmarking site, is only part of the battle. What you want is another service that offers the same functionality. Which doesn’t exist.
Hooked on cloud computing? Save yourself the heartache. Keep your digital bookmarks where they’re supposed to be – in a browser. (Just make sure you back them up. Online and off.)
In the current climate, some hard-pressed journalists may be thinking they’d like to get out of underpaid, overworked hackery and into the cozy, cushy world of corporate writing.
But freelancers who fancy dipping their toe into the water need to be aware of some cultural differences between corporate communications and journalism that can derail them.
Here, then, are eight key rules for anyone who wants to make the jump from journalistic bear pit to corporate feather bed.
Get used to red tape Freelance journalists are used to getting a call or email asking them for a feature and giving them a more-or-less coherent brief. A couple of thousand words later, you send in an invoice and wait for a cheque or BACS payment. (And wait. And wait). Dealing with big corporates is different. My brief stint doing corporate work for a big energy equipment supplier involved getting set up as a supplier, signing a mutual non-disclosure agreement, providing quotes for work to generate purchase orders and filling out a range of financial-type forms. There was also a four-page “supplier integrity guide” to digest. Many freelancers by their nature seek to avoid this kind of thing and will give up at the first hurdle. Don’t. Just bear in mind that, once you’re in the system, those freelance payments are a bit more reliable than “the cheque’s in the post”.
Embrace ‘reply to all’ emails It’s called corporate communications for a reason. Everyone communicates with everyone else all the time. Expect to receive constant email updates, memos and reminders as the project you’re working on progresses. Likewise, make sure everything you send to one person is copied in to anyone else remotely relevant. Don’t worry about wasting people’s time: employees in large companies love this – it proves that they are important and valuable and always in the loop.
Don’t think for yourself Journos take pride in being able to interpret a scanty editorial brief and take a feature somewhere interesting off their own bat. Don’t be tempted to do this in the corporate world. If any question or uncertainty at all occurs to you, ping out an email to everyone involved (see rule 2) and don’t carry on too far with a project without getting a response. Corporates tend to be very clear about what they want from their comms and they want you to deliver it. Exactly.
Keep it plain and simple Very plain. Drain all the colour out of your writing. Keep it as straight and factual as possible and avoid colourful turns of phrase and expression. Remember that much corporate output needs to be understood in offices and markets around the world, so its readers are often not native English speakers. In fairness, this does not make your writing bad – in fact it needs a lot more discipline. And sticking to the facts, writing plain and clear English and assuming your readership is global is actually increasingly relevant advice for online writers generally. But it is a bit boring.
Avoid anything controversial Even if you’ve been used to writing very soft features, where no news is bad news and problems are always challenges, it’s still difficult to get used to the corporate horror of real language. This applies to everything, especially quotes that sound like a real person has said them. Think you can’t write something controversial about a management improvement programme? One interviewee’s inflammatory comment that “people see things that annoy them every day and want to fix them” had to be quickly altered to read: “Now when people see things that could be improved, they have the tools to do something about it. It’s satisfaction for them and a win for the business.” If not a win for engaging writing.
House style matters. A lot Newspaper and magazine house style used to matter a lot more than it does now, given the changes in production processes the media is going through. Even in the old days, many journalists would be a bit careless about house style as they relied on sub-editors to get it right. But the corporate style guide is law, and anyone writing for company publications must obey it. In journalism you sneer at companies that try to insist you use ® and ™ symbols on their products. In corporate writing you must follow this guidance slavishly. Be warned.
Learn to love Word’s ‘Track Changes’ function As a journalist you will probably never have used this – or even be aware of its existence. But Word’s ability to keep visual track of all the changes made to a document by different authors and editors is a godsend in the corporate world. Because, yes, in the end this is editing and approval by committee, and all the committee members must be acknowledged in the process. And when you manage to miss out one of the changes because you can’t decipher the chaotic Word document, that makes it your fault.
Most of your time is not spent writing Even if you’re on an hourly rate, you’ll probably have to quote for jobs – and there are many factors affecting how long a corporate job will take. Meetings; email communication; getting up to speed with corporate systems and intranets and learning how to use track changes will all eat time and must be allowed for in your quote. As a rule of thumb, you should double the time you estimate it will take to allow for all the palaver.
If after all this you’re still undaunted, think of the upside. While the past two years has been grim for journalism, as newspapers and magazines close and aggregation web sites pay £6 an hour for churnalism thrown together by raw graduates, in the corporate world journalistic skills are valued – even prized – and its offices are, in comparison with the newsroom, paved almost literally with gold (well, at £25-£35 an hour basic, it’s nearly the same).
It’s something at which many journalists might have turned up their nose in better times. But things being what they are, the corporate world can look a great deal more attractive than the publishing house. Get it right and build a good reputation, and the rewards become even higher. Even if you have to wade through in-house jargon to do it…
In a very interesting analysis from tech site GigaOM, Joe Weinman looks at how more tightly metered broadband services will affect web content.
As broadband services become more finely tiered – ie you pay for what you use and real “unlimited” broadband becomes a thing of the past – many of the services and content we are taking for granted will come up against a brick wall.
Take video. Web users and the media are taking on board the idea that web video is the future and will become more and more ubiquitous. Yet, as telecoms companies make their pricing more specific to usage, heavy video consumption will carry more of a cost for users (and possibly producers, if ISPs are allowed to create a two-speed internet).
Among other possible effects, Weinman suggests there will be:
Less random streaming video – consumers will seek out content specifically, thus demanding better quality
Pressure on peer-to-peer (p2p) sharing – ISPs may achieve through pricing what governments and copyright owners have failed to achieve through legal action
Data efficient apps and content – file sizes will start to matter again
Very interesting stuff – well worth a read. We often forget that the creative technology is not the only factor driving innovation in the media – often it’s our technical infrastructure that lies behind creative change.
Cathy Relf’s excellent Rantings of a Sub-Editor blog offers a tough challenge to journalists and sub-editors – to turn a piece of drivelling nonsense submitted by a car reviewer into elegant and accurate copy.
Here’s the original:
The car is fairly pedestrian-friendly as there aren’t any hard surfaces directly beneath the bonnet
Her straight-down-the-line edit is admirable, but a bit dry: “There are no hard surfaces directly below the bonnet, minimising danger to pedestrians in the event of a crash.”
She says: “If anyone can sum it up with both beauty and sense (possibly in haiku format, for extra kudos), I’d be interested to hear it.”
You have your mission. A guide to English language haiku form is here. Well, what else would you do on a Friday?
As online journalism student assessment looms once again, here’s a handy guide for J-students on how not to mess up their web site assignment.
This is aimed at students who create in WordPress, but can equally apply to other platforms. Or, probably, almost any similar student assignment.
In brief:
Start early
Do it for real
Design is more than just appearance
Your problem is already solved – somewhere
Start early
Don’t leave site building and content production to the last week before hand-in
You need time to practise using a CMS because it can take a while for any limitations and problems to show up (especially in navigation and usability). This allows you time to solve them without the usual last-minute panic.
It’s only by producing content over a period of time and reviewing it that you figure out refinements and new ideas of what to produce and how to present it.
You will only understand what you want your site to do once it is up and running with content. Your plan for the site will change once you start working with it. The main problem with last-minute sites is they are very undeveloped.
Even for a student site, if it requires audience participation, you need time to market it and develop your user base. There’s no point in having forums and social networking type links if there’s no participation.
It takes time to set up affiliate marketing and advertising relationships. Google AdSense can take up to a week to process your application. Even when acceptance is immediate, it takes some time to figure out how systems work (eg Amazon) and all the logins and ID codes you need.
Finally – don’t leave “Uncategorized” as your default category. You will end up with last-minute content defined as this and it looks sloppy. Also, watch out for default WordPress posts and pages (eg, the “About” page). Please, please, remember to remove them – nothing loses marks faster…
Do it for real
It’s as easy technically to set up a real site as a dummy one – so plan for all features to be live and genuine (forums, advertising etc etc)
Design is more than just appearance
Too many students (and clients) focus on how a site looks, rather than how it works
Design is about the user experience – not just the logo and the background colours
Spend time navigating the site and think about how the user sees it. Each page is a different experience. Think about the design for each page
Your site will have repeated structure, but much variation is possible within that. Use sidebar areas – the most neglected part of site design.
If you leave all your content until the last minute, you will not have time to think about refinements to presentation.
Your problem is already solved – somewhere
95% of all WordPress questions can be answered by Googling “Wordpress [my problem] plugin”
Always keep two tabs open – one with the WordPress dashboard, one with your site’s front page. Any changes to code, plugins or templates, refresh the front page in the other tab. If anything goes wrong, undo what you did in the first tab.
Not that this will have any effect on the production schedule of most student web sites…
The price of a murder in South Africa is 5,000 rand (“about £460”), according to early reports, including the BBC.
Oh no, it’s 15,000 rand (“about £1,400”). Again, according to the BBC, which quickly updated its story.
It’ll be interesting to see if the 5,000 rand figure spreads through the internet, as aggregation does its work, or if it’s been nipped in the bud.
And where did that come from in the first place? The coverage seems to have all come from a court report yesterday from the South African Press Agency. But from early on each of the two figures has been quoted as the hitman’s fee.
The 15,000 rand figure seems to be the winning number. Let’s hope that’s because it’s correct. This is the kind of story that journalism – and the police – need to get absolutely right.
Alongside the reported difficulty of black and minority ethnic students to gain admission to Oxford and Cambridge, the Guardian reported: “The FOI data also shows that of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff at Cambridge, none are black.”
Really? The admirable team at FleetStreetBlues set to work to carry out a thorough investigation. One Google search session later and the dogged hacks unearthed details of a high-profile black academic.
But, like any information, the duty of the journalist is to question what is served up to them, not simply to report it blindly. Regurgitating FOI results as news without examining the material is as remiss as printing a company press release or government statement without putting them under some kind of scrutiny.
And given that “scrutiny” these days can be as simple as a Google search, it’s a bit weak for a national newspaper not to do anything.
Here’s a fascinating example of animated infographics. It’s a powerful visual representation in a few minutes of a complex and controversial story – the idea that, contrary to much of the media’s narrative about life in the modern world, things have gone quite well, all in all.
Uncovering, understanding and representing data such as this (whether or not it tells the same story) will be a key task for journalism in future.
(HT: Coyote, Cafe Hayek)
Spotted everywhere, and now on the BBC, people going “err” when they want to indicate a certain uncertainty.
This is odd – there’s a perfectly legitimate word for this, but it only has one “r”. Adding more because you think it makes it sound more hesitant has a certain logic, but is just plain wrong.
