Archives for the month of: December, 2007

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter announced it has partnered with Nokia to launch the world’s first newspaper phone.

The device, known as DN-Mobilen, is a Nokia 6120 classic 3G running the Symbian OS. Subscribers pay $31 a month for a calling plan and unlimited access to the newspaper’s website.

Though Europe is ahead of the U.S. in cell phone use, it lags behind Asia, and therefore presents a huge opportunity for media companies that can develop an easy-to-use tool for readers. At least that’s the thinking.

An experiment in group fiction via Twitter launched today when 140 writers answered the call to join Cameron Reilly in writing a story called The Darkness Inside.

The idea is pretty simple: All writers follow @twittories. Reilly, as editor, lets each writer know when it’s their turn to add up to 140 characters of storyline and posts the entries to the website. (He also reserves the right not to post anything deemed illegal in his home country of Australia.)

The Twittories example could be a neat if inefficient and legal pitfall-filled way to draft a breaking news story for a topic of interest to a large community, such as the San Diego wildfires that broke out earlier this year.

In a time when the public is asking for transparency while clamoring for speed, this could be a daring approach to posting breaking news from the field online.

You’ve probably been blocking it, but elections are about three weeks away.

Pollingreport.com has been keeping an updated list of national polls, including the most recent Newsweek Iowa poll, which show Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama leading the GOP and Democratic hopefuls, respectively.

The primary dates have been shifting around quite a bit, making this election particularly confusing for the public. Though the Federal Election Commission has a chart, several news outlets have come up with better ways to display the information — and the implications of the votes.

The Washington Post created an interesting bar graph that shows the ripple effect of the earlier primary dates, as well as a national map of the primaries by state and by date.

The Los Angeles Times does their take on the national map with a more elegant timeline of votes and caucuses. The design reminds me a bit of the FEC’s presidential campaign finance map.

Pollster has a plot graph, that tracks the candidate’s poll ratings. There’s a lot of data on each graph, though, so it’s a bit messy.

Rather than tracking, the New York Times does some explaining, with a map highlighting the early states, and a date and map chart of the Democratic and Republican races.

PBS’ Online News Hour and NPR have produced an interactive map that displays data state by state using mouseovers. Click on each state and you get additional information and related stories.

There’ve been some rumblings that Facebook has jumped the shark. (Recall the mid-October Jossip survey about annoying Facebook habits.)

SiliconAlleyInsider yesterday noted that ABCNews.com’s political reporter Facebook pages are bombing. This could just be because they chose the wrong subject to launch with. Or because people are just really tired of the political campaign, which seems to have gone on too long already.

I predict within the next 12 months we’ll see users trickle out Facebook’s door and head to the next networking site.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.com took a look at the upgraded features in Multiply.com. While they look very attactive, I’m getting tired of signing up for yet another social network that will ultimately flame out.

So what does this mean for news organizations? A huge opportunity to further engage a loyal audience and bring in new readers/community members/eyeballs.

Social networks require four things:

  • a community of active users who can connect from any device — desktop, laptop, phone
  • a way to send private and public messages (including comments) to each other and to groups
  • a repository for files of unlimited (or at least very large) size and a way to tag, search and connect those files to other content
  • good, unique, content (which, for news organizations, should be a piece of cake)
  • a way to search, select and rank all types of files, comments, users and content, and share the data anywhere

Think you can do it?

Mashable wants to know: What’s your favorite large-scale social networking site? Voting is open until 11:59 p.m. PST on Dec. 16.

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