A session at Media 2010 that I had been particularly looking forward to was the talk by Adrian Holovaty. Adrian is a geek – geeky haircut, geeky clothes, bad jokes etc. – but with the Everyblock site he pioneered the use of otherwise random government data for social media purposes, in the first instance case the mapping of crime statistics onto the city of Chicago. Adrian proposed that there were three big new ideas with media:
1. Reorganizing Information: his aim is to automate all data gathering and use. Data is gathered primarily from three sources – automatic parsing of unstructured information like random news articles, third party Web sites like Flickr, Yelp, Craiglist etc., and government data. The latter is by far the biggest source. Government departments are good at gathering data but poor at using it, media companies are very good at using data from other sources, and therefore need to get better at accessing it without doing the work of gathering it.
2. “Living” Information: this is about developing a “long view” of news. One reason why potential users resist news sites is the sense that they lack a back story to current events. Wikipedia provides valuable lessons for news companies on how to provide the encyclopedia style back story on an event, which must be more than simply an indexing of articles about that topic.
3. Taming Streams: In an era of proliferating information sources – think of Twitter, for instance, or news comment threads – value is attached to knowing how to extract valuable nuggets of information from these endless streams of random comment.
Simon Gallagher, the Director of International Business Development at Hulu.com, introduced the business to those unfamiliar with it, as initially a partnership between the FOX and NBC TV networks for providing TV shows online. He pointed out that in Q4 2009 there were 44 million unique users of Hulu in the U.S., and there are 924 million videos streamed per month. Interestingly, Hulu allows users to choose how they gt advertising (e.g. at the start of a program or at intervals during it), as well as the type of product they wish to see (e.g. which brand of Nissan commercial). He argued that Hulu gets more streams than all other network sites combined, that it reaches untapped audiences for programs, that is has a younger and more male audience skew, and program views on pirate sites drop if the program is also available from Hulu.
Moeed Ahmad, the Head of New Media at Al Jazeera, made the point that Al Jazeera has since its inception sought to make all of its content freely available from multiple platforms, seeing content sharing as value adding and brand building, and noting that much of its content is available via sites such as You Tube anyway. He struck a cautionary note about the “Twitter Revolution” in Iran in 2009, noting that a lot of Twitter posts allegedly “from Teheran” were being generated from New York, Chicago etc. The number of truly reliable Twitter eyewitnesses in Teheran after the elections was as few as 6-60. Moeed therefore emphasised that:
Responsible Journalism = Information – Noise + Context.
NB: you can also read up on the event at Brad Howarth’s blog.