Crunchberry Project

We’ve been writing this blog since the project started.  For the first few weeks we wrote about the theory of the project, since that was what we were struggling with - the major decisions of which task to tackle, which features to include, and which to cut.  

Those were the heady days of philosophical discussions about Journalism and Conversations and Democracy and there was much to blog.  

Then came the era of the research, wherein the consumer insights team wrote about their findings, and the industry researchers dug through the host of products already in existence, and the team gleaned many new answers that provided course corrections for the project.  Since then we’ve blogged about some of our industry research discoveries.

The act of blogging served as a catharsis.  It was the cleansing act of articulating the problems we were combating.  It helped us organize, provided objectivity and some of the input we’ve received from comments has been invaluable.

Happy programmers write happy code. by Stuart Tiffen

But after much hand-wringing and painful decisions suddenly, overnight we were in full-on development mode.  Since now our day-to-day grind consists of tackling innumerable design and development obstacles, with some research and now final report and presentation preparation thrown in, such pursuits do not always make for interesting blog posts.

And so, I ask you, our loyal reader(s), what is it that you would like to know about the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that we call the Crunchberry project?

So for the past seven weeks or so we’ve been talking about fostering community conversation, civic engagement, and enabling people to discuss the news that affects them. And we have come up with some pretty cool ways that undoubtedly encourage interactivity and will potentially help form an online community of engaged individuals who are motivated to have their voices heard.

But that’s what we need to get at - the people who comprise these communities. As much as the structure of what we create matters (ease of use, clarity, etc.), the fundamental piece to this puzzle isn’t the applications we are creating; It’s the people using it. Passionate people with genuine fervor for the content they are reading are the consumers targeted on the Web.

An understatement to say the least, the members of ESPN.com fit this profile perfectly. I sat down for a phone interview with Patrick Stiegman, vice president and executive editor and producer for ESPN.com to find out more about their Web properties, and the people who traffic them.

“The passion that sports fans have is the fuel that drives our community,” said Stiegman, who oversees production of an estimated 20 ESPN Web properties. “Sports is somewhat tribal - people tend to aggregate around a team, school, or state. With the fan profiles on our site, it’s like a virtual discussion at a bar,” said Stiegman.

The “fan profile” Stiegman refers to is the nexus of ESPN’s social community. With the fan profile, users can post a picture and information about themselves, message one another, see who has recently viewed their profile, add widgets, create a friend list, blog, post photos, join groups, and get updates about their ESPN fantasy sports teams. This virtual water cooler is essentially Facebook for sports fanatics – complete with a comment wall.

In addition to the fan profiles, users are able to personalize the news they receive from ESPN.com via their “MyESPN” page. Modeled after iGoogle, users can keep tabs on news from their favorite teams, check scoreboards, mark their calendars for TV listings, and check progress on their fantasy teams all on this one page. This personalization acts as a gateway to the communities the fans interact with, but according to Stiegman, it is a feature that is not used heavily.

“There is a lot of value around personalization in the news business, but people are hesitant to do it because they are worried that access could be shut down to it,” said Stiegman. “Ten to 15 percent of people personalize. The vast majority of people don’t want to put the time into personalization because they don’t want to miss something else going on in the sports world.”

While personalization (ideally) facilitates interactivity, it appears that many people are not willing to spend the time to customize the content they receive.

So to you, using your RSS reader, iGoogle page, and desktop widgets for news, (and of course, those of you who don’t), how vital is personalization to your Web experience?

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

photo by ashe-villain/flickr

Lately we’ve had all sorts of posts about various bits of industry research that we’ve been doing on sites like MonroeTalks, Salon.com’s letters to the editor model, Plurk and personas, but we haven’t taken the time to actually give an update about where we are in the process of this project.  

Well, here it is folks:  We are in the midst of our fifth development iteration.  We have so far successfully designed, developed and are testing the first of our comment structures - Q&A.  Ryan and Brian, our overworked dev team, made an solid product in minimum time.  

We have also designed our second comment structure - Short Format - and that is being developed during the current iteration and we’ll be testing next week.  

The design team, which consists of Kayla and I, augmented by Josh and Angela is working hard on the Letters to the Editor comment structure, as well as ratings structures to be reverse engineered into Q&A and Short Format, all of which are to be developed next week.  

Through each of the last three iterations we’ve been plumbing the depths of Facebook integration, asking how much is too much, how little is not enough and how should it all look?

Charged with the task of helping a newspaper organization reinvent itself, our group has been given some tremendous tools to work with. Already in possession of a newspaper that reaches more than 40% of the metro-Cedar Rapids area, Gazette Communications also owns KCRG-TV, the local ABC affiliate.

Combined with gazetteonline.com and some of its other online and print properties, Gazette Communications has already laid the groundwork for a multimedia powerhouse, and is ready to make the “epic surge” into creating an equally strong online community. The inherent challenge however is creating synergy between the Gazette and KCRG-TV, while still having each organization keep its brand identity.

I just finished reading the book Linked by Albert-László Barabási this past weekend. With his Ph. D. in theoretical physics, Barabasi delves deep into network theory, and offers a major piece of advice that completely applies to the Gazette:

“As research, innovation, product development, and marketing become more and more specialized and divorced from each other, we are converging to a network economy in which strategic alliances and partnerships are the means for survival in all industries.”

Indeed, with the properties it has, the Gazette is more than capable of putting together a product that can engage its readers beyond article comments. But how can we make them work together to create a “successful” online community?

According to Robin Miller of the Knight Digital Media Center, there are five rules for building a successful online community. Check out the link for explanations, but here they are:

1. Your discussions must be threaded or nested, not just “flat.”
2. You have readers who know more than you do about any given topic — and plenty of readers who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do.
3. Let your readers judge each other so you don’t have to judge them yourself.
4. All good things must come to an end.
5. Why buy a cow when the software is free?

Taking these things into account, what are some of the things online that interest and engage you?