Crunchberry Project

Next TUESDAY the New Media Publishing Project class will give a presentation on what we did this quarter. We wanted to extend the invitation to all of our readers. Here are the details:

Tuesday, Dec. 9, the Medill New Media Publishing Project (Team Crunchberry) will present an exciting new Web site designed to get young adults engaged in the news through online discussion and their social relationships.

The site has been built during Medill’s fall quarter by a team of master’s students in our interactive sequence. Two of the students are experienced computer programmers attending Medill through a unique scholarship program designed to bring technologists into the journalism field.

The Web site the team has built is designed to address some of the most interesting challenges and opportunities confronting media and journalism in the 21st century:
· Getting young adults interested in local news
· Enabling genuine, productive online conversations regarding the news
· Building communities of news users
· Leveraging the value of online social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) to improve journalism

The site has been developed in collaboration with Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, owner of the Gazette newspaper and KCRG-TV. It will be one of the first sites in the world to take advantage of Facebook Connect, a new tool that allows Facebook users to log into other sites and connect there with their social networks.

Gazette Communications plans to launch the site in Cedar Rapids in early 2009. The software that powers the site will be made available on an open-source basis.

If you want to learn more about the project, check out Rich Gordon’s posts about it on the PBS Idealab blog: http://www.pbs.org/idealab/author/rich_gordon/

Details on the presentation:
When? 9:30-11 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9
Where? McCormick Tribune Center forum, 1890 Campus Drive, Evanston

(map here: http://tinyurl.com/65r7ph)

Refreshments will be served following the presentation.

Hope you can make it! Thanks!
–Team Crunchberry

The answer: yes we did. Well, we hope so, anyway.

As design and development for our final product wind down, we have begun to pool all of our thoughts and ideas from the past two months, and are preparing to assemble them for our final report and presentation.

ArtWorks | Building Voices | The Building Voices Crew! by www.richardcawood.com

Although we aren’t sure if/how our final product will incorporate the three commenting structures we have come up with (Q&A, short form, and letters to the editor), we chose them them as the most effective means of communication between people on the Internet. That clearly doesn’t mean they are the only medium for discussion.

Here are a couple of others we considered, but didn’t make the cut:

Live chat: In our consumer research and readings, we discovered that ease of use is one of the most important barriers to participation.  A chat room is one of the simplest means of communication on the Internet, and provides instant gratification to the user, who sees his or her comment appear immediately in the dialogue box above the entry form.

At any given time, thousands of people are congregating in chat rooms across the Web, oftentimes communicating with one another from around the world. Some people are genuinely interested in meeting others to have a conversation regarding a chat room topic. Others are interested in disrupting the conversation with foul language, spam, and marketing.

Nonetheless, by giving your readership this application, articles will garner more interest, and people will generally spend more time on your site. However, to be an effective medium, a staff member would likely need to moderate and guide discussion in the chat rooms. The creation of profanity filters and anti-spamming solutions would only curb the misuse of chat rooms – not cure it.

These inefficiencies, and a desire to pursue other commenting structures, led us to exclude chat rooms from development.

Polling: One of the simplest forms of aggregating community feedback, the poll has been a mainstay in evaluating the overall feeling about a topic in a finite, numerical form.

Because of the simplicity of polls, many media organizations feature them on their site. As was mentioned previously, one of the biggest barriers to online participation is ease of use. Polls transcend ease of use. With the quick click of a radio button, people instantly receive their community’s reaction to a relevant topic.

Although there are many positives to polling, there are just as many drawbacks to its use. Our first – and biggest – concern was that polls do not lend themselves to being creative. Poll questions are created by the editorial staff, and the answers are generally dictated by the same person who creates the poll.

Apart from the creative constraints of polling, we decided that the structure as a whole was not terribly innovative, and audiences could have a more effective means of conversation using the different applications we designed and developed.

Interested in reading more about our reasoning? Stay tuned for our final report!

  

 

 

Image source: flickr/Giant Ginkgo

I have been stymied by trying to think of a name for our creation.   

“The process of naming also has its idiosyncrasies.  Sometimes you’ll set out to name a new product and the perfect name will be hanging there,  right out in front of you, just waiting to be snatched out of thin air.  Other times, you’ll mull for days, agonizing over the details of your product, entering in hundreds or thousands of options to your registrar with nothing sounding ‘just’ right,” according to Scott Trimble from Halfagain.com. 

The second part better describes my experience so far.  Our class developed a list of words that we would like to be associated with our creation (e.g. friendly and easy).  My first step was to use OneLook Reverse Dictionary, which generates words related to a word or phrase.  I hoped something would jump out at me.  Sadly, it did not.

So now I have turned to other online tools like Worldlab.com that has a tool called Name Builder -” Use this handy tool to jump start your naming process. Over 340,000 possible combinations and counting. Try it for a company name, rock band, album title, product name, book of poetry - just about anything that needs naming.”  When I entered “better news conversation” it suggested “BoxMetal.”

The search continues.

Spam! by grumbler %_|

Spam.

Ingredients: Ham, pork, sugar, salt, water, potato starch, and sodium nitrate (to keep its color).

Delicious.

Yet what was once a hearty start to my boy scout troop’s mornings has become a major annoyance to web communities across the Internet. And no, we’re not talking about canned meat here.

We’re talking about electronic spam - evil comments left by programs intended to flood the Internet with nonsense, links to viruses and oftentimes, free marketing.

Email spam, forum spam, message boards spam, chat room spam, spam and eggs, spam bacon spam and eggs… you get the point.

So in poking around the administrative end of our Web site and searching for something to write about this morning, I deleted almost 50 spam comments left since last week. The platform we use for crunchberry.org is Wordpress - blogging software offered by Automattic. With over five million Wordpress blogs, there are ample opportunities to spam. To mitigate this, we use Askimet, a plugin offered by Automattic for our blog.

By using this spam filter, comments like “uteijh3bibw36g2q” from our friend Jeanne Dominguez @ dctru.com on one of our recent posts are avoided. As interesting and insightful as her opinions are, I don’t think many people would understand what she is talking about.

Anyway, clearing out our cache of spam led me to ask one of our developers, Brian Boyer, about the integration of a spam filter for our commenting structures. Mostly because time is of the essence, we will not be looking into a spam filter. Also, a programmer would have to spend some serious time learning about the intricacies of our commenting system to formulate a spamming program. And because it isn’t widely used, it would more or less be pointless.

So while we will look into safeguards such as captcha, a spam filter will likely be in the recommendations section of our final report so we can make the most of our time.

Carpe diem!

In part 2, I explained how we’re breaking down our work into tight, four-day-long iterations, but I didn’t get into what everyone is doing during the cycle.

It goes a little something like this: The design team sketches designs of the software that the development team will build during the following iteration, which will be tested by the consumer insights team during the iteration following that one.

The design team applies insights from testing to new and redesigned sketches, which will be implemented by the development team in a later iteration, which will be tested by the consumer insights team… you get the picture.

Design, develop, test, repeat!

In action it looks like this (slightly modified) schedule of our past three weeks:

IMG_3605.JPG by nautical2k

The benefits of a small vessel

By working in a tight cycle like this, we’ve been able to very quickly create testable, demoable work each week, while remaining flexible to changes in our feature list.

For example, this past week we’ve learned more about the requirements and terms-of-use for Facebook Connect applications.  If we were working with set-in-stone-up-front designs, we’d be scrambling to correct our course.  Instead, we’re just tacking as the winds change.

flickr/darth4life83

..without me telling you what I want to know.   One of the challenges in testing the comment structures we have been designing and developing is getting valuable and unbiased feedback from our test panel.  Since we are not in Cedar Rapids and cannot conduct the tests in person, we have been using CoPilot, a program that allows us to see the desktop of the person using our demo.   It is helpful to be able to see how the tester is interacting with our site and to see any glitches that arise for them.   It is not perfect, but it is better than being blind to what the tester is experiencing. 

We have been arranging times to chat with the people from our test panel and observe how they use the site.  Once they have poked around, we ask them questions about their experience.  We have improved our technique since the first week of testing, but it is still tricky to ask questions that are not leading.  We do have specific questions we want answered, but we would are also looking for ideas that we may not have considered during design or development – we want them to tell us whatever comes to their mind while using the site.  We have gotten some good feedbackand have been incorporating suggestions into the revised versions of our demos.

Another lesson we have learned is that it is best to somehow indicate to the test panel that we (the people on the phone with them) did not develop the site they are testing.  We don’t want them to hold back on telling us things they don’t like or  to be reluctant to give us their honest opinion.  As much as we appreciate positive feedback, it is really helpful to know what they don’t like or understand so we can try to make it better while we still have time.

A major component of the crunchberry project is researching Web sites and communities that have had some success connecting and engaging their users.  I am intrigued by TED.com, which has been referred to as the “Youtube for intellectuals.”

Ted.com is centered on video content, specifically talks and speeches by “world’s smartest thinkers, greatest visionaries and most-inspiring teachers.” With the aim of making speeches from the TED convention available to anyone who is interested.  I was specifically hoping to learn more about the built-in social network that allows people with similar interests to connect.  There seems to be a higher level of discourse on this site and I would like to know what the people behind TEd attribute this to — is it a reflection on the audience, the content, TED’s design, a combination of all these ideas and more?

The user profiles can be basic or detailed — users can talk about their work, save videos, and include information about their expertise and credentials.  Upon registration users are given the option to specify: Career Information, Organizations, Current Role, language, associations, universities, area of expertise, website links, gender, create a bio, and complete the statements “I am passionate about,” “Talk to me about,” “An idea worth spreading,” “People don’t know that I’m good at,”  and “My TED story.”  I especially like “Talk to me about” because it seems welcoming and provides an opening to engage other users with similar interests.

They are also given the option to complete the statement “I am”  with up to 10 attributes provided (e.g. Activist, Agnostic, Architect, Artist, Atheist, Athlete, Blogger, Brainstormer, Buddhist, Business adviser, Business leader, Concerned citizen, etc.)  Ted.com is giving users several ways to give personality to their profiles – selecting between a list of already specified attributes or by giving them a prompt and then asking them to write about themselves.  Users can flag their favorite content and other users as another method of defining thier interests.

The site provides several pathways for making connections between users — their associations with an organization, common interests or common friends (favorite users).  I am also intrigued by the credential part of the profiles that addresses one of the barriers we have encountered, readers do not perceive comments as believable.  It gives users a sense of who they are communicating with and a clue about whether the commenter is knowledgeable about the topic.  This is also addressed by including a history of comments by the user on individual profiles.

The users can interact with the contact is several ways as well.  They can rate videos or tag them as “beautiful” or “informative” by checking boxes or they can add their comments which appear in a standard scroll-down-to-view comment list.  

TED users can find the most discussed or most watched content so they know what is popular with other users.  The left side of the screen allows you to search videos by the most emailed, most discussed most favorited, most jaw-dropping, etc; users can also find talks by topic: technology, entertainment, design, etc.

TED is a great example of a social network that gives the users a lot of options to find content and to interact with both the content and other users.   I am hoping to be able to speak with someone behind the scenes at TED to learn more about their experiences designing and maintaining TED.com.

Follow this link to read David Pogue’s blog posts about TED in the technology section of NYTimes.com

As a follow-up to my previous post about the Monroe Evening News, I reached out to Dan Shaw, the former managing editor and director of new audiences for the Monroe Evening News, who now teaches journalism at Monroe County Community College and serves as a consultant for the media outlet.

“About two years ago, we knew that social networking movement across the country was important,” said Shaw. ”And we needed to get into it.” Using Newspaper Next guidelines, Shaw and his staff created the MonroeTalks forums, which have blossomed into one of the more vibrant online communities on the Web. Check out his video on Youtube for some more info:

Although they clearly had some hurdles along the way with traffic, Shaw said the biggest obstacle to overcome is a lack of time and resources for projects like this at newspapers. Nonetheless, he said this should not be a major deterrant. “This is something that every news organization nationwide should be doing and they aren’t,” said Shaw.

But why should they be doing this? What’s the point? Money, of course, right? Think again. According to Shaw, despite averaging about 2.3 million page views per month, MonroeTalks does not make much money. “We make a little bit of money on it, but not much,” said Shaw. ”We don’t spend too many resources on it because it’s more of a community social networking experiment than a moneymaking enterprise.”

But why is that? According to Shaw, local businesses have been reluctant to advertise on MonroeTalks.com because of some of the controversial discussion in the forums. Which brings me to this article, courtesy of the Gazette’s Steve Buttry. In a small community (apprx. 60,000 households), it would seem that local business would benefit immensely from the 6-7000 unique visitors the site receives a day.

And despite the success of MonroeTalks.com, Shaw believes the niche Web products the Evening News is coming out with will be more popular with his audience, and MonroeTalks will fade into the background as the conversation niche for the Monroe County community.

As journalists, it is our responsibility to inform our public and foster discussion. That’s why we have undertaken this project. But the business side of the industry dictates that we need to make money doing it as well. The synergy of these two ideas is what ultimately makes online communities successful.

By giving our audience the opportunity to interact with the Web site and stay informed, more page views will be generated - giving advertisers more opportunities to reach our readers.

I guess that’s the point?

As noted in an earlier post, we developed personas to guide our development and to serve as users in our product mock-ups.  When the design team creates a template for what the commenting structure might look like and how it might function, they use the Bristol, Willow and Track personas to post example comments. 

The basic characteristics of our personas were hashed out a few weeks ago and we have been adjusting and building upon them ever since.  They now have histories, families, hobbies, friends, media interests and, of course, facebook profiles.  This enhanced familiarity with Bristol, facilitates the design team’s creation of comments she might make on a particular article (e.g. what she would say, how she would like to say it, and who she would want to say it to), which ultimately helps us create something geared to those needs. 

These Web sites have good examples of what a bio/persona should look like:
Chopsticker   Agile Modeling

p.s.  We think Bristol-berrywould dress up as Sarah Palin for Halloween.

(Click here to read the rest of this entry)

Image source: adactio/flickr

Starting out down this road, our guiding question was, “what can we create that will facilitate connections between people in Cedar Rapids, preferably through local news.” To encourage participation and connections between users, we have to think about what will compel people to contribute, not just consume. We are looking to the lessons learned by successful social networking sites to guide us through our research and development.

For the sake of our sanity, and in the interest of completing something by the end of our quarter, we narrowed our focus and chose a specific subset of people in Cedar Rapids to keep in mind while developing our product.

We thought it would be a good idea to aim for Gazette readers who are relatively tech savvy and use the Internet regularly — one less hurdle to overcome in getting people to use what we create. It looks like this hurdle is getting smaller.

According to research by Forrester Research Inc.,

“Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives — people untouched by social technologies — have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators — those who read, watch, or consumer social content — have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.”

We chose to focus on connecting 20-34 years olds because research indicates they are more comfortable communicating online and more likely to read news online than pick up a newspaper.

It is encouraging to see research that suggests what we develop will be useful to more and more people if we incorporate social networking tools to break down the barriers that are keeping readers from contributing.

It is not only that more young people are using social networking tools, but that ,“Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content.”

Go to groundswell.com for more information and to learn more about the classifications used in the graphs and to see and illustration of the Social Technographics Ladder that breaks down different groups and methods of online participation.