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One for Fun: Want a Mapfaced or Evernote Beta Invite?*

March 29, 2008 //
12

It’s the end of the week, which means time for Ricochet’s One for Fun.

Today, I’m giving away private beta invites.

Update: All the invites are gone. If I get more in the future, I’ll post a new note.

Mapfaced allows users to create, search for and rate food and drink crawls in New York City. It’s positioned to be part map mashup, part Yelp.

Evernote is a multiplatform notetaking and clip organizing tool. It’s been around since at least 2005, but the new incarnation allows you to pass clips to Evernote from PCs (Windows XP/Vista) and Macs (Leopard), phones running Windows Media, and Web browsers (Firefox 2, Safari 3, IE7).

There’s even an alpha test of IMAP support, so iPhone users can browse, clip and send to an Evernote account too.

Want to check either of these out? Post a comment telling me which site you’d like to try (one site only) and your email. And if you have a favorite bar or restaurant you’d like to recommend, post that too.

I’ve only got a few invites for each site. First come, first served.

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Categories Maps, One For Fun, Tips & Tools

Maximizing Story Traffic With Half-Life Analysis

March 11, 2008 //
1

I love The Economist.

You may scoff at their Web site, but there are few sources that analyze business and world affairs as well or as soberly.

On March 6, they published a story called, “Hold the Front Page,” which described an HP Social Computing Lab study that tried to answer the question: How do you maximize attention for stories on a Web page?

To conduct the experiment, researchers Fang Wu (no relation) and Bernardo Huberman simulated the behavior of stories on Digg, pitting popularity against newness.

They discovered that while a fresh story may drive a lot of traffic at first, there will come a time when story popularity matters more. As I understand the conclusion, exactly when that happens varies from site to site, depending on each site’s reader patterns.

The full text of the Fang-Huberman study (written for scientists), makes for some really interesting reading if your head doesn’t explode over the math, and makes a case for news organizations to study traffic patterns closely.

As The Economist states:

“…You would be wise to learn more about exactly how interest in your stories cools off, if you want to display those stories in a way that will entice the largest number of people to read them.”

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Categories General Journalism, Tips & Tools

How to Make the Most of Your Next Conference

March 6, 2008 //
0

Social media consultant Chris Brogan has posted 10 tips for conference goers.

Since the season is about to get into full swing, here are some of the best ideas from the list:

  • Scour the web (technorati and Google Blogsearch) to see who’s coming, and reach out to people you want to see.
  • Have a really simple, brief sentence to answer: “What do you do?” “What are you working on these days?” “What brings you to the conference?”
  • Never assume people are better than you, or that you’re somehow not good enough or important. You are. And if people don’t know you yet, go in like they know you reasonably well anyway.

People naturally flock together in safe, familiar groups, especially when they find themselves amid a sea of strangers. But to learn anything new, it’s more useful to break away now and then. For the shy, there’s an entire wiki on how to start a conversation.

What do you do to get the most out of seminars / panels / expos / conferences?

(Cross-posted on Wired Journalists)

Categories General Journalism, Tips & Tools

Computation + Journalism Videos Posted

March 6, 2008 //
0

Didn’t make it to the Journalism 3G symposium in Atlanta? Catch up on what you missed.

Georgia Tech has posted videos of the talks and panels, and links posted by conference attendees.

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Categories General Journalism, Social Media, Tips & Tools

Watch Journalists and Other Web Geeks in Action

February 22, 2008 //
0

As mentioned earlier this week, the live webcast from “Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in the Field” (a symposium on computation + journalism) begins at 1 p.m. ET.

Speakers and panelists include:

  • Krishna Bharat – Principal Scientist at Google and creator of Google News
  • Ian Bogost – videogame designer, critic, and researcher, Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games
  • David Cohn – Beatblogging.org and NewAssignment.net
    Ezra Cooperstein – Director of Development and Production for the Viewer-Created Content group at Current TV
  • Leah Culver – Founder of Pownce, a San Francisco-based micro-blogging service
  • John Geraci – Co-Creator of outside.in
  • Mark Hansen – Co-PI of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA, creator of sensorbase.org (and one of the guys who created the cool art installation in the NYTimes Tower)
  • Alexander Hauptman – Senior Systems Scientist working on the Informedia: News-on-Demand project at Carnegie Mellon University
  • Elizabeth Spiers – media columnist for Fast Company magazine, founding editor of Gawker.com

Check out the full list of speakers, then be sure to watch the webcast. QuickTime 7 or later required.

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Categories General Journalism, Tips & Tools
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