ONA Conference Recap

A view from the Hotel where the ONA conference took place

In late September, I was one of three very lucky fellows to be sent to the Online News Association and having been in a small bureau for the past two years with

So here are some takeaways:

Computers Are Taking Over
Well, we're screwed. Computers are now starting to recognize our faces. And this is not just some technology that the CIA or the FBI use to crack down on con-artists and master thieves. It's now a highly commoditized feature: Facebook uses this technology to tag photos of your friends and an app called viewable employs it to sort your photo libraries.



This site uses it to gauge moods of people pictured on photographs on the Guardian (you can break down any other web site):

That's just one of the many technologies presented as a 'tech trend' by Amy Webb, CEO of the Webbmedia Group, in her lecture '10 Techier, Trendier Tech Trends' (you can watch her lecture here: http://bit.ly/o1B2Kz). There seem to be quite a few technologies that have now become an everyday commodity.

There are also electronic pens that transcribe and transfer your handwritten notes to paper and tools to visualize the 'future.' Social media network now allow you to find out who's currently in the
neighborhood, perhaps even in the same coffee shop as you are and it can help you meet folks as you detect their electronic trail.

The future, as it was painted in movies in the 1980s and 1990s, is here and it's available in your app store or on Amazon: you can now track your friends through their GPS devices and computers can tell whether you look angry or sad in photos. I guess the biggest takeaway from this lecture is that we'll have to learn ever-more ways to interact with technology. It's got huge potential for storytelling: you can personalize news outputs to the point that it's geo-specific. You can read emotions on the faces of a number of facebook users and gauge the mood of facebook fiends in who like your news site. You can map out the future with pre-cognition reporting. Above all though, you probably should also create a new code of ethics when using this technology.

Visualization Is For Everyone!
Recently, more and more tools seemed to have cropped up to help even the technologically challenged to create visualizations.

I went to an intro session to fusion tables, Google's new API-based chart builder. It's accessibly everyone, can link up to maps and is changeable in style. The site helps you host your data tables, visualizes data in multiple formats (maps, pie charts, bar charts) and it certainly helps those without the money or skills to use the Adobe family's Illustrator, Flash and other software to build graphics.

Here's how WNYC used the tool:




Just recently I saw the sneak preview for a similar widget by datacollective.com, that enables you to make similarly shareable charts.

It's neat to see this democratization of visualization tools.

Crowdsourcing and Viewer Engagement

I have to admit that until recently I wasn't the biggest fan of twitter. I saw it as a purely promotional vehicle and as an oddly public forum for personal conversations. I also felt like it made me into a hyperactive wreck unable to focus.

But I've come around to it as a tool. And it'd be silly to deny its usefulness to gauge online opinions, for instance, or to understand the dynamics of grassroots movements in the digital age. At the conference and during talks with a bunch of media folks (speak potential employers), the same question has cropped up over and over again: how do you maximize user involvement?

Well, Al Jazeera's The Stream uses live twitter feeds to interact with their audience and have them actively mold their conversation. They have a dedicated producer sieving through tweets during the live show.

The Guardian's answer to user engagement was threefold: live blogs, user-submitted content and what I'll call 'participatory' data evaluation for now. They perfected the art of live blogging while experimenting with football/soccer coverage and used it really effectively during the Arab Spring, actively conversing with their commentators and figuring out ways to work with their content. They visualized user-submitted stories about personal experiences during September 11. And they used their audience to annotate and evaluate the thousands of Sarah Palin emails that were released a while back.

Overall, user-submitted content and crowdsourcing is definitely a bit scary to fact-conscious journalists, but there are ways to tell stories in such interesting ways with the deluge of information that social media provide us. There's also a huge potential in using the manpower of thousands. Exciting times.

Anyhooser. If you're interested there are more notes here and all panels available on video here.

Hacks/Hackers Demo Day 3 Recap

At the third Hacks/Hackers NYC Demo Day, six speakers whizzed through their presentations covering several topics, from real-time data collection to content management systems.

Read the rest of my blog entry here.

Photography: Occupy Wall Street

I went down to Zuccotti Park to photograph some of the protesters who are part of the 'Occupy Wall Street' demonstrations. The whole place is more or less like a self-sufficient ecosystem: there sleeping areas covered with blankets and inflatable mattresses; there's a food station with boxes for packaged foods, fresh goods and even compost. One strip of the side-walk is reserved for protest posters which are strewn across the floor for passers-by to ogle over.

As for the protesters themselves, they are a diverse bunch. And there seems to be little to unite them except for the common need for a platform. Even organizers aren't entirely sure what the movement stands for.

But demonstrating for the right to be heard just for the sake of being heard is not necessarily a 'non-thing.' NPR reporters at Planet Money argue that it's an interesting concept to fight for: the right for a platform for your voice. In the podcast, the reporters explore the idea of a participatory economy and how the movement itself functions like hyper-democratic little village. Listen to the here:
http://n.pr/oqkblB

As for the rest of the photos snapped on that day, please go here: http://bit.ly/pEv8mF

Ira Glass on Why Radiolab is Amazing

Ira Glass put together a great analysis of why Radiolab has excited not just him but also hoard of youngens who've became to radio fiends thanks to the genius of Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Genius... get it?

Anyhow, here's a really interesting point Mr. Glass made in his piece.

"Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive."

It's definitely worth a read, even if you're specialized in video:
http://bit.ly/oeFznh