who what where when why web

From Slashdot:

Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. …this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of flash content.

This is good news

Flash is a terribly popular platform for interactive news, and it’s opacity to search engines was a serious problem. Content in Flash applications was not findable in the same way that regular web content is, effectively hiding large areas of the web from searches.

But it ain’t great news

The navigation at Ace of Cakes is so mysterious, it has its own guided tutorial.  Let’s consider this: You need to study a tutorial. To read about a television program. About cakes.

Eight years ago, usability guru Jakob Nielsen called Flash “99% bad.” Everything he said then is still true now. But there are waaay more Flash apps now.

The problem is that it’s frequently used to present text in a prettier fashion. Add music and some magical menus, and paragraphs get better, right? Wrong. Adobe says that the text will now be searchable, but that fixes only one of Flash’s many problems.

Among many other reasons, Flash sucks because:

1. You can’t link to content within a Flash app.
2. Flash apps usually don’t work like the web, so a reader has to learn how to use it.
3. It usually stinks for people with disabilities.

The above aren’t always true, but the exceptions are few and far between.

When it works

When Flash is at its hottest, it presents information to the user in a way that text never could. The New York Times has been putting out excellent apps that do this, like their Obama-Clinton support visualizer, and their map of the impact of the cyclone that hit Myanmar.

The Spiderman analogy applies: With great power comes great responsibility. Flash lets you jam practically anything into a web site, but the temptation to do so must be resisted.

Amy Gahran did a great write up on the upcoming NYT API over at E-Media Tidbits:

I think it would be great if more news organizations and journalists could learn a different approach to presenting news — one that provides structure to information that supports both conventional storytelling and remixing, analysis, or alternate representations.

JD Lasica’s take on why it’s important is spot on:

The salvation of the news industry — if there is to be one — will come not from corporate board rooms but in unleashing the pent-up power of the citizenry as part of a multipronged social media/participatory media strategy.

Let’s just hope the folks over at the Times write a good one. APIs are not guaranteed to be useful. If they quit at movie listings, they’ll have given us little. But if they coat their stories in layers of delicious metadata, the web will eat them up. (Personally, I’d prefer a Microformat for news metadata, but I’ll take what I can get.)

What do you want to know about a news story?

There are obvious useful bits: date, headline, author, location, etc., but what else would be neat? How about translated headlines? Or full translations? Related news? Related videos? Related links on other sites?

Sources!

Tags!

Target demographics!

Krishna Bharat told me after his talk at Journalism 3G that the Google News bots would love to know if a particular story was from a wire service.

What uber-mash-upable goodies would you want from the NYT?

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome — A List Apart

We have lots of “brand identity guidelines,” but not so many “style guides” (for content, at least). We have “strategists,” but no “commissioning editors,” and we more often “go live” than “publish.” Hence, we tend to first think “copywriter” when trying to get our content sorted, whereas very often an editor is the person we should be engaging.

Cisco Leak: ‘Great Firewall’ of China Was a Chance to Sell More Routers — Threat Level

The document is the first evidence that the networking giant has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression. It reinforces the double-edged role that Americans’ technological ingenuity plays in the rest of the world.

Recent EveryBlock-themed conference keynote — The EveryBlock Blog

My talk… focused on EveryBlock and some lessons we’ve learned while developing it.

And there’s a great conversation going on at Meranda Watling’s blog on Wired Journalists:
How is your news org using twitter?

Woot! YouTube’s got a new channel for citizen journalism.

From ReadWriteWeb:

This channel will highlight the best of the citizen journalism that’s taking place on YouTube, but its ultimate goal is to become a go-to news destination on the web.

Though as Dan Gillmor points out YouTube isn’t giving much back to the community:

I hope they’re going to find a way to reward the people who are doing the work. As I’ve said again and again, I’m not a fan of business models that say “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”

I also hope YouTube will give people a way to post using Creative Commons licenses, which are all about sharing information, as opposed to the currently restrictive terms of service. This is the main reason I don’t automatically recommend the service — though I do believe it offers great value in a general sense– and why I do recommend Blip.TV, which makes Creative Commons one of the defaults.

Chinese Flowering Crabapple / 海棠(カイドウ), by TANAKA Juuyoh

In part 1, I wrote about free speech and free software for journalists. This time we’ll try something a bit easier for the less tech-savvy journo to try out: Creative Commons-licensed content.

Last month I had two stories that were dying for art — one on wetlands, one on flowers. They weren’t half-bad, but without pictures, they weren’t going to get the attention they deserved. What’s a poor journalist to do with no sunflowers to photograph?

Creative Commons to the rescue!

In a few minutes I found two killer images, both free to use, under the simple condition that I attribute the work to the photographers. Neat, eh? The stories were saved, and are on their way to winning Pulitzers.

How to find photos that are free to use

Go to Flickr Advanced Search.

Enter your search terms. (Try to think about how someone would tag their images. They’re usually tagged pretty simply. Don’t search for “big sunflower photo” — search for “sunflower”. Also, folks don’t always use the correct terms. “crabapple” and “crab apple” bring up different result sets, both lovely.)

Wait!

Before you press enter, scroll down a bit. At the bottom you’ll see an option to search only within Creative Commons-licensed content. Click the first box. If you will use the image commercially (like in a newspaper, or a web site with ads) then you must click the second box. If you are planning to do something tricky with the image like altering it by adding text or fiddling with contrast or putting it into a video, them you must click the third box.

Now you can hit search.

And there you have it. Free images. Lovely. But you’re not done just yet.

Once you’ve found an image you like, you need to do your part. The author deserves credit, and if you don’t give it, you’re breaking the license just as badly as if you ripped off a snapshot from National Geographic.

Scroll down on the image page. On the right, under the additional information heading, you’ll see in tiny blue letters the phrase “Some rights reserved.” Click that.

The page the link directs you to is the license for the image. Read this carefully. You’re probably going to have no problems with the terms of the agreement because of those boxes you checked on the search page, but check, just in case. (For instance, if you were to put the image into a video, thus creating a remix, you may be restricted to distribute the derivative work, your video, under a similar license.)

Once you’ve read the terms (which are standard, so once you’ve read a few, you’ll know the agreement at a glance), you’ll need to, at the very least, sort out to whom you’ll attribute the image. At the upper-right corner of the image page is a link to the photographer, click it.

Then click the link to the photographer’s profile.

here you’ll find the name of the photographer or the handle the photographer uses on Flickr. Either will do for the attribution. I like to use their real name if they choose to list it on their profile.

Now you’ve got all the information you need to attribute the work. So, when you use it, here’s what the Creative Commons FAQ says you’ve got to do:

(1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work; (2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify; (3) the title of the Work; and (4) the Uniform Resource Identifier for the work if specified by the author and/or licensor.

See the pretty picture at the top of this post for an example.

Beyond images

Other types of content can be free to use as well. There are many places you can find Creative Commons-licensed audio, video, text, presentations, and all sorts of other good stuff. Creative Commons Search is a great place to start. I haven’t used it much, but The Freesound Project also looks promising.

I publish this blog under a Creative Commons license. So, for instance, if a teacher found this guide useful and wanted to translate it into her students’ native tongue, she would be able to do so, worry free, as long as the derivative work is not commercially used, and is free to share and remix as well.

Distributed Boing Boing is doing something quite powerful. They make Boing Boing, a hugely popular, and Creative Commons-licensed blog, available to users who cannot access it, because they are blocked from doing so by their government, workplace, etc., by distributing it to lots of other web sites.

Even more

The Library of Congress has a pilot project on Flickr. They’ve posted some great *color* images from the 1930s and 40s, among other stuff. They’re even freer. The Library of Congress images are posted without any restrictions at all, they’re in the public domain.

There is an amazing amount of content out there that’s free to use. And if you use it, I hope you’ll be inspired to give back. I post to Flickr under a Creative Commons license, and as a result, my work has been used by many folks, in ways I never expected.