Associated Press opens news bureau in North Korea | World news | guardian.co.uk.

…As if the news business wasn’t already Kafkaesque. Well, AP is an appropriate choice for this. 

Having done some critical coverage of several boneheaded AP strategies in digital media over the last few years, I think they see eye to eye with NK regarding the dangers of criticism, and how to respond to it.

I’m not kidding: See the response from Paul Colford, AP’s director of media relations, to a 2010 KDMC story I wrote about the controversial AP News Registry program

Here’s a great example of adaptability: How the much reviled flavor-of-the-month web startup Chatroulette has found a way to make money off its inevitable tide of exhibitionists:

Fast Company: Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy Raises New Funding: “50,000 Naked Men”

“Chatroulette can’t fully wean itself off nudity yet. “You’ll still see some naked men, about one every hour,” Ternovskiy says. Of the roughly 500,000 visitors Chatroulette receives daily, about 10% are males itching to show their business. So Ternovskiy parlays that business into profit.

“Everyday, about 50,000 new men are trying to get naked,” he says. “What we’re doing is selling the naked men to a couple of websites–it’s an investment for us.”

When users flag someone enough times for indecent behavior (by clicking a button), the offender is automatically transferred to a partner site. Thanks to deals with adult dating services like FriendFinder.com, Chatroulette is earning cash hand over fist from the referral traffic.

“Basically, once we detect a person is naked, he’ll be kicked from our service to another website,” Ternovskiy says. ”So, we’re actually getting revenue from naked men right now.”

Brisbane asked NYT readers: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

This led to consternation from many Times readers, who believed this kind of revelation is part of the basic job of any news organization. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram offered a good roundup of the flap, and at The Guardian Clay Shirky wrote an eloquent deeper exploration of the mindset disconnect between the Times and its readers.

Many people are debating the ethical implications of this issue. However, I’m wondering about the practicalities and possible opportunities.

If the NYT (or any news organization) does decide to point out when sources offer inaccurate “facts,” HOW might they accomplish that? Might there be good options, especially online, that could serve this purpose in addition to inserting relevant text into stories?…

I’m wondering about tools that might visually or otherwise flag to a web reader when a factual assertion has caveats — such as it’s probably not true, or could be stretching the point, or is a conflation, or lack corroboration or sourcing, etc.

It just seems to me that especially in digital media we might be able to do with some of the nuances of gradations of truth in ways that go beyond mere words on a page.

Your thoughts? Please comment below or e-mail me. Offer examples of potential strategies or tools, if you know of any. I plan to use this information in a post to the Knight Digital Media Center site, so expect to be quoted.

Thanks!

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Santorum Google screenshot

When you Google for "Santorum," this is the top search result. (Click to enlarge - but only if you're not too squeamish.) You can help keep this brilliant effort working.

It’s time to use my power for good.

Yesterday NPR reported on how the batshit crazy social conservative former US senator Rick Santorum is pulling ahead in Republican polls for the presidential race.

Santorum has always annoyed and amused me. But with this, he’s officially scaring me.

Today, Marketplace Tech Report reminded me about Rick Santorum’s Google problem — so I decided to take action.

So here I am linking to SpreadingSantorum.com, a Google bombing page that writer Dan Savage set up in 2003.

Furthermore I encourage everyone else to do likewise.  Especially if you’ve had your own web site or blog under its own domain name for several years. But even if your only online presence is via a third-party service like Facebook, WordPress.com, or Tumblr (where you don’t have your own domain), I still encourage you to post a link to SpreadingSantorum.com.

Talk about a long-term investment in search visibility that is REALLY paying off! Here’s how it works…

When a website or page has been on the web and attracting links for several years, Google promotes it in search results so it ends up near or at the top of the first results page for relevant Google searches. This ultimately raises the destination site’s Google PageRank — especially when it’s linked to by sites with PageRank that exceed its own.

So far, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5 — but it’s already showing up at the top of Google searches for the term Santorum. (See screenshot at the top of this post.)

My site, Contentious.com, has been online and publishing fairly continuously since 1997. I currently have a PageRank of 6 (out of a possible 10 points). Not to be self-congratulatory, but that’s pretty good for a blog run by one person. That’s the power of a site being online under the same domain for nearly 15 years.

This also means that when I link to other sites with a lower PageRank, my inbound link helps their search visibility in Google. Right now, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5. So in fact, my inbound link helps this site maintain its search visibility.

Why link to SpreadingSantorum.com now? 

Now that Santorum is pulling ahead (however moderately) in Republican polls, it’s likely that Republicans and social conservatives — who have a pretty good track record for unified action — will try to undermine SpreadingSantorum.com‘s search visibility by linking like crazy to the official Santorum campaign site. (Yes, I am deliberately NOT linking to that site here.)

Also, mainstream news sites, political bloggers, and others are especially likely to link more often to the official Santorum campaign site, now that his viability as a candidate is increasing. (I’m gonna go wash my hands, now that I’ve typed that sentence, ick…)

All of this means that this brilliant social/political/search hack is currently under threat and needs your support. So link now, and keep linking! The more links on more days from more sites, the better!

What kind of power do your links wield?

Here’s how to check PageRank for your site or any site:

• Google Chrome users: I use this Chrome Pagerank addon. It displays the PageRank of any page displayed in my browser.
• Google toolbar users: If you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, here’s how to view PageRank in the toolbar. (Install Google toolbar)
• Safari users: There’s a Safari PageRank addon.
• Everyone else: You can check PageRank by pasting the URL for any site or page at CheckPageRank.net.

GO FORTH AND LINK TO SPREADINGSANTORUM.COM! And do your part to undermine an increasingly powerful politician who denies evolution (and thinks scientists are amoral), wants to eliminate birth control and opposes abortion rights (thus indicating he thinks women’s most important role is as an ambulatory incubator for male sperm), and who has compared homosexual sex to bestiality and child rape.

Yeah. Really. No kidding. Batshit crazy has no business in government — especially in the White House.

I realize this perspective flies in the face of reality, but I have a dream… of sanity…

This is an early animation by Terry Gilliam, from Christmas 1968. Laughing Squid posted it to Tumblr this morning.

Every since my brother introduced me to Monty Python when I was about eight, I’ve been enamored with highly visual absurdist humor. And I especially adore Terry Gilliam’s ability to upend our assumptions of space, time, place, scale, and intention.

This was also why I loved the original Pink Panther cartoons, Ren & Stimpy, and Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse. And, of course, my all-time favorite film, Brazil (by Terry Gilliam, of course).

We live in an unpredictable world, where meaning shifts drastically as context changes. We’re forever falling into a new picture frame, and parts of other pictures intrude rudely upon ours. Laughter is the best way to stay afloat amidst chaos. And there is always, always chaos.

And with that, happy holidays, all!

Case in point: Here’s a screenshot of a link that one of my Facebook friends shared, which I tried to click on:

shared link

Click to enlarge.

When I tried to click that link, here’s what I got:

yahoo FB app request

Click to enlarge

No, I don’t want to install that stupid app. But this request gave me no option to just follow the link — neither in this window, or when I hit “cancel.”

#sharing #fail

I just went under account settings -> privacy and worked my way through the list. Under “apps and websites,” I saw several dozen sites and apps listed that could connect to my Facebook account. Most of them I never use or didn’t even recognize. So I went through deleting Facebook access to all but about 6 services I currently use in conjunction with Facebook.

One of these services was Scribd.com — which I sometimes use to post documents that I want to be shareable and embeddable.

I figured that these Facebook connections with sites and apps mainly enabled easy sharing from those sites to Facebook. But apparently I figured wrong.

After I finished this exercise on Facebook, I had an e-mail from Scribd.com saying that my account there had been deleted.

Huh?

Granted, they gave me an easy option to “restore” my Scribd.com account — which basically meant creating a new username and password. I did that, it seems to work.

But…

I checked, and this process broke existing embeds of my Scribd.com documents.

That’s right: I now have to go back and redo in a few different blogs all the embeds of my Scribd.com documents that I’d previously created.

And that’s just wrong.

I’m assuming that I probably made the mistake of using my Facebook login to create my Scribd.com account in the first place. Which goes to show how problematic it is to rely on Facebook to create an account, or log in to an account, anywhere else. I don’t actually recall whether I first created my Scribd.com account with my Facebook login, I’ve had my Scribd account for years. But it’s possible I did that. Lesson learned.

Scribd.com, I hope you fix this issue. I didn’t see this coming, and I’m annoyed.

Yesterday I listened to an excellent Radio Open Source podcast episode. Christopher Lydon interviewed Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University, about what he’s been learning about the Occupy movement by talking to protestors in Boston — and putting it into a global economic, social, and historic context that I found sobering.

So give it a listen:

Mark Blyth (6): Going to school on “Occupy Wall St.”

One point Blyth made that particularly struck me — and that I especially wish every journalist would take to heart — is this: The labor movement didn’t come out of nowhere. It didn’t spring into being fully formed with collective bargaining and arbitration procedures. It coalesced gradually, in fits and starts, from a society struggling with the “volatility constraint” that comes with rampant inequality.

Birth is messy. Infants aren’t born talking in complete sentences. So don’t look at the Occupy movement expecting this:

botticelli-birth-venus

Boticelli's "Birth of Venus"

After listening to all the context Blyth offered, I suspect we’re watching the earliest phases of a different kind of labor movement: the labor pangs that precedes the birth of something that might eventually walk and talk. Something that probably won’t go by the name “Occupy.”

I only hope the world can collectively raise this baby right.

EXERCISES:

Special demonstration of the unique impact of mobile media, courtesy of Will Sullivan (@journerdism)

Then…   How mobile-friendly is your site?

• Check out your site on a mobile phone’s web browser (home page, and specific story). How much zooming, scrolling, etc. is required just to see what’s going on?
• Have your neighbor bring up your site on their phone.
• If you don’t have a web-enabled phone, check out your site on a mobile device or on the Opera Mini simulator. (Note: On a computer, sometimes the simulator doesn’t serve up the mobile site, so checking from a mobile device is more reliable.)
• For comparison, check out CNN.com, the Spokesman Review, MLB.com, West Seattle Blog, MyVeronaNJ.com, MyEverettNews.com on a mobile device. How are these mobile sites different from yours?

Hyperlocal and mobile: the big picture

Brand new report from Pew: Nearly half of American adults get some local news/info via mobile devices. So far they’re mostly getting weather, breaking news, restaurant/business info, traffic updates on their phones. So far they’re not visiting news sites or apps of any kind very much.

Why? My opinion: Most mobile news offerings are shovelware and not action-oriented. Also, they aren’t easy to use or navigate on a mobile browser. In a mobile context that makes them inherently second-rate.

The good news for hyperlocal: Independent community news/info sites may be especially well suited to do mobile news much better than major legacy news brands or centrally operated networks such as Patch or the Huffington Post. More nimble, little/no bureaucracy, not burdened by unwieldy systems they don’t control. Also, they’re closer to the community, where it’s easier to see the local nuances in the mobile market.

PROBLEM: Most people in the news business (any part of it, including hyperlocal) aren’t yet very comfortable/familiar with using the range of mobile media and channels. That limits their ability to see and exploit emerging opportunities. We tend to create the kind of media we’re used to using — going mobile requires expanding your personal media usage skills and tastes.

ACTION STEP 1: Start doing as much as you can with your phone. For everything, not just for news. Use every mobile channel you can. See what you like and don’t. Ask people in your community what they do with their mobile devices — all kinds of phones and other devices, including cheap non-smartphones.

Grab your friend’s phones and play with them. (OK, ask them first…) Walk into mobile stores and demo the hell out of the features on new phones — not just the expensive ones. If you own a smartphone, also buy a cheap feature phone (prepaid or month-to-month) to see how the other half lives.

Your goal: Get a sense of how mobile tech, media, and communication are augmenting people’s lives. Ultimately you want your news/info to be woven into the fabric of their lives, accessible wherever they are. Mobile helps your venue become more like the air your community breathes, not a special place they visit.

Look for revenue options! Sign up for text alerts, esp. fr local businesses. Look for other mobile ad/revenue strategies. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t suit your personal taste. How do these strategies function, and how do they pay off? Most news sites, are doing a terrible job of mobile ads — and most hyperlocal sites don’t seem to be doing anything w/ mobile ads/revenue streams.

What is mobile good for?

The main problem with most mobile news offerings is that they are shovelware. With the exception of e-reader apps, music players and YouTube, cell phones are not great publishing or media consumption platforms.

Use mobile for what it’s best at: People like to use their phones to DO stuff.

(CAVEAT: Tablets aren’t really “mobile,” since they’re mostly a lean-back experience. In contrast, cell phones are all about activity and entertainment on the go. They’re what you grab when you need something right away, or have a few spare moments.)

The best mobile offerings are services, not content. Don’t expect people to read long articles on their cell phones. So figure out what kinds of services your content can offer or support.

Consider what they could use on the go, what they’d enjoy, what would give them an edge, what they might want to note to check out later, what they might want to share. Then focus on delivering just that much via mobile. And make sure your mobile users know exactly where to turn to find the fuller version of anything that caught their attention.

Mobile is a way to foster ambient awareness and value in your community. Mobile makes it easy for people to encounter your content, benefit from it, and share it — although their cell phone probably won’t be where they settle in for a deep dive on a topic you’ve covered.

Let people use their phones to talk back to you or contribute. Texting, e-mail, sharing photos, and social media are consistently most popular non-voice cell phone activities on any kind of phone. Those are all two-way (at least) communication channels. Consider how your mobile offerings can support or encourage two-way interaction, in ways that are friendly and fun for mobile users.

Current U.S. mobile landscape:

1. The web is quickly becoming mostly mobile by default. According to IDC, by 2015, most U.S. internet access will happen from mobile devices. (Gartner predictedthat globally this tipping point will happen in 2013)
2. About 77% of all Americans (all ages, from infants to centenarians) own cell phones. (comScore, US population clock)
3. About 35% of these phones are smartphones (comScore, July 2011 figures).
4. About 65% are “feature phones” — all of which can do text messaging (which requires no data plan), and many of which have e-mail and web access (albeit generally slow and clunky). The only thing feature phones cannot do is run sophisticated apps (but they can run simple apps). So the feature/smartphone line is blurry, and it’s getting blurrier.
5. By late 2012 most U.S. handsets in use will be smartphones (based on comScore data). But the cheaper/simpler end of the mobile market will probably always be the largest part of the market in most communities. So be ready to serve the phones that most people in your community have at any given time.

How Americans use their cell phones:

• Around 92% of smartphone owners (60% of feature phone owners) send/receive text messages (Pew. Nielsen and comScoreoffered different estimates.)
• Mobile users spend far more time doing e-mail than Facebook on their phones (Pew, Nielsen)
• Feature phone web browsers are improving. Opera Mini — which looks pretty nice — now comes preinstalled on (or can be downloaded to) almost any U.S, feature phone. It is currently the #2 mobile browser, behind the iPhone’s mobile Safari, and ahead of the Android stock browser. (NetMarketShare) In a year most feature phones will probably come with web browsers that look more like Opera Mini, so that’s a good target to design for.
• Right now, most web sites suck on most mobile devices. In fact, usability experts at Nielsen Norman Group recommend that sites don’t bother supporting feature phone access. That may may sense for e-commerce — but probably not for hyperlocal news/community sites.

Most hyperlocal and community sites are NOT friendly to mobile users. Seriously, I checked them out from the conference participant list. They’re not even mobile friendly for smartphone users — too much pinching, zooming, scrolling required for easy navigation. Basic reason: their web sites lack:

• A mobile-optimized theme
• Server-side mobile auto-detection, which figures out if a visitor is on a mobile device and routes them accordingly to an appropriate theme.

This can be relatively easy to fix — especially if your site runs on WordPress. (Examples of free, nice looking WordPress mobile themes)

Action step: Implement a mobile-friendly theme for your site (home page and story/other pages).

Yeah, I know I say your mobile presence is not all about your web site. But your mobile web site will be the core of your mobile strategy, because it’s something people can link to and access via search engines. Ultimately it may not be how mobile users encounter you most often, but it absolutely needs to be there to provide value to back up your engagement.

If your site is based on a popular content management system for which many people have created themes (like WordPress), then there are probably already many simple mobile themes to choose from. You can customize these.

Otherwise, it’s worth getting a web designer to develop a simple mobile theme for your site. Here’s some free basic mobile web design advice, and for $300 you can get all the gory details.

Or you can use reformatting services like Mobify.me, as long as they appear under your domain, and you can track the traffic, and you have options to deliver your own ads (or get a really good cut of what they serve up).

Once your site is mobile-friendly, you’ll be better positioned to leverage the power of recommendations to build your brand.

One of the most popular things that people do online is share links — by social media, e-mail, instant messaging, and SMS. New Gallup research shows that most people’s brand preferences are strongly influenced by personal recommendations, and digital media (including mobile) amplifies this effect.

When you get a link from someone you know, that’s a personal recommendation — but if that link doesn’t work on the device you have handy, that won’t help anyone.

Nearly 40% of social media users access social media content from their mobile phone (Nielsen). Many/most of those phones are feature phones — and you want to make sure that if people get a link to your site, they’ll be able to display that page on any mobile device.

EXTRA RESOURCES

These came up in my session, so here they are for your perusal

Mobile Marketing Association mobile advertising guidelines

Our online audience suggested some resources for mobile & Drupal

• Digett: Drupal Mobile: How to create a Drupal mobile site without using Mobile Tools
• Jquery mobile framework
  
• Drupal mobile tools

The Filter Bubble, by Eli Pariser

Further steps in your mobile strategy

OK, there’s no way can I cover all of this stuff in one session. But I’m ready to discuss any of these that interest Block by Block attendees (either in the session, or buy me a drink later):

Do some basic local mobile market research. Don’t guess about what phones people are using: ask.

Experiment with SMS alerts/services/polls. Twilio is a versatile and affordable tool to start experimenting with on a small scale (services up to a thousand or so subscribers). If you want to grow beyond that, you may need access to a shortcode — which can be cheap (with risks), or rock solid (but costly)

Back-end technology. Some content management systems (especially Drupal) make experimenting with mobile more difficult, unless you’re a skilled developer. When you make CMS choices, favor tools that support mobile experimentation well.

WordPress is a good bet for less-technical site operators. Also consider third-party services — it doesn’t all have to be about your web site, you can have more than one digital presence. But you will need to learn more about several kinds of technology to go mobile, including telephony. Small-scale experiments are great learning tools.

Good skills/tools to learn for mobile: HTML5, CSS (including media queries), Javascript, Twilio,

Tablets and iPod Touch-like devices. Small markets for now, and probably not the best place to focus on, even though they look really cool. Wait a year or two before your seriously focus on them.

But there are some interesting developments to watch with these devices, especially if the new Kindle Fire has a decent web browser and really takes off with consumers.

There’s finally an Android answer to the iPod Touch: The Samsung Galaxy Player, coming out in October. Reasonably priced. Wifi only. Basically an Android phone without the phone. We’ll see more of these devices, especially if U.S. wireless carriers keep insisting on two-year contracts and steep early termination fees for decent smartphones.

Having a good mobile site will position you well for the tablet market — although this device would merit its own theme because it has unique size and interface considerations.

E-readers and e-books. Excellent secondary market for your content, with a proven revenue model. Robert Niles has written a lot about e-books in OJR. Also, check out the Bookbrewer platform for repackaging web or blog content as e-books and getting them into the major markets.

Start geotagging all your content with latitude/longitude info, and make sure this gets included as an element in your RSS feed. This will open opportunities to mashup/integrate your content with locative services, which will be getting more popular on mobile devices in coming years. At that point, if you have an archive of geotagged content, you’ll be ahead of the game.

Mobile web apps are an option to offer interactivity directly through the browser. Or look for mobile web apps to package as features within your site. Apps.USA.gov offers several examples that run on all phones.

Let people phone it in! Capture phoned-in audio for comments, etc. Evoca offers some affordable solutions.

Use print to complement/push mobile. This could involve publishing your own print supplement, distributing stickers/fliers/postcards with QR codes, etc.

Mobile-friendly e-mail newsletter/alerts. Opt-in only, no graphics, short versions of links.

Smartphone apps. Probably not worth the expense/effort for most hyperlocal sites at this point. A good mobile web site will get you farther.

The main problem with smartphone apps is that you have to do a separate software development project for each platform you want to serve, and maintain that platform, and make sure your content gets into the app correctly.

And on the user’s side, in order to get value from a smartphone app they must:

• Already know and like your brand enough to want to get your app
• Have the right kind of phone
• Download and install it your app
• Use it regularly. (The vast majority of apps get opened just a handful of times LINK)

That’s a lot of hurdles, compared to just opening a page on your site in their mobile web browser — especially when someone they know sends them a link to your site.