Have you ever wanted to make an interactive graphic but not had the time or experience to use flash to make it? Well, Pininthemap offer s quick way to map interactive maps.
Pininthemap uses Google Maps technology to deliver a versatile map to the user. With Pininthemap’s free service, the user can add a few free pins. For extra pins and the ability to export, users must pay a low cost of $1.
Along with using Google Maps, the service enables the user to add pins to certain locations and add information about the location. When a viewer clicks on the pin, the information is shown in a white call out box, just as is done with Google maps.
A sample map made on Pininthemap
The service also offers the ability to embed the map via HTML, allowing the interactive maps to be posted into Word Press stories. The export features also allows you to export the map as a XML file, for a more secure way posting into hard HTML pages.
This service can be very useful for college media outlets, especially for campus crime reports in showing where crimes took place over the week or month. There are tons of stories that this technology can be used for.
The one downfall that Pininthemap has is the inability to type an address in. The service does offer a field to type in a Google Maps link or zip code, but for precision and ease of use, it would be simpler to type the address into the field.
Still, the applications of this technology are nearly limitless. While the map may not be as versatile as a flash interactive graphic, or even an HTML 5 interactive graphic, the click-and-go functionality makes it easy for any reporter to throw together a quick info graphic.
Last week, I was able to talk via Skype with Dan Reimold of College Media Matters. We talked iPad, the ACU iPad app, and some news about CICM itself. hope you’ll listen. We’re thinking about continuing this, so let us know if you think we should keep talking or just shut up and blog.
Ning, the software that allows anyone to create their own social network, is moving away from the free/advertising business model to a subscription-based business model. This is similar to the move by Sprout that I wrote about previously. The Ning network I’m most familiar with – Wired Journalist – was already using Ning’s premium network services before this, so there should be no disruption for them. But for others, there will likely be some disruption in the social network space. TechCrunch reports that Grouply and Grou.ps are already targeting their service to Ning customers who won’t be excited about the move to pay-for-play. There is also Spruz, which is a service I wasn’t familiar with until the Ning announcement.
This Week on ABC is conducting an experiment. I think it’s a good experiment. Jake Tapper explains to Steven Colbert:
Pulitzer-winner Jim MacMillan spoke to students in our Society of Collegiate Journalists chapter last night via Skype. Check out his photos here.
Awesome tilt/shift effects from Ben Garvin at the Pioneer Press (via the ever-useful Newspaper Video Yahoo Group).
I am continually amazed at the storytelling coming out of the team at This American Life. Listen to the Planet Money, ProPublica and TAL teams explain complex Credit Default Swaps and Mortgage Backed Securities in this episode.
With growing dissatisfaction for current video advertising, Play Time intends to keep their customers out of the dark by providing information that current advertising companies are not providing.
The service will also work much like GoogleAdSense. Rather than companies paying a standard rate for commercials, Play Time has the customer pay by the view of the video.
The advertising technology will also target viewer preferences, much like Facebook ads, to maximize the ads impact on the viewer. TubeMogul claims to collect a wealth of data for analysis with users and videos. The technology seems to aggregate this data and deliver it to the advertisers.
The patent-pending technology (Mass Audience Segmentation Technology) is the first technology to target viewers on the “per-stream level.”
As of April 8, Play Time currently has 25 major advertisers signed onto the program.
A press release stated that, “for the first time, advertisers will have access to real-time reporting on which sites are delivering views and in what volume, how long viewers watch before clicking away, the number of social actions.”
How does this affect college media? In the short term, not very much. Play Time seems to be targeting specifically larger companies to advertise with, citing that most of their employees came from larger networks like Advertising.com and Comedy Central.
In the long run, perhaps Play Time will offer this service more extensively to local advertisers.
To date, Play Time does not offer a profit-sharing ability, but perhaps this is another feature they can add to maximize the service’s popularity among college media websites.
My colleague Brian Poulter shared this video with me, and I’m passing it along for any enterprising young video-savvy photojournalists who might find inspiration for some cool storytelling.
The video was apparently shot at 60 frames per second, which allows you to do slow-motion video. I don’t know what it took to set up the rig, or how much practice it takes to fly that kind of set-up.
But it did get me to thinking about the news potential for that type of photography. Imagine a breaking news event on your campus that you can’t get close enough to get quality video or stills (like a fire). I wonder if you could enlist the help of a local RC pilot to get closer with something like this? Or fly that thing over a big event like a football game or graduation or concert. Would make for some interesting yearbook photos, as well.
The potential seems pretty wide. Any thoughts or ideas?
A team of faculty and student researchers and developers from multiple departments at the university plan to have the Optimist ready for the iPad by the end of March. Optimist editors plan to employ the new platform to deliver a more converged form of media to the ACU community in addition to the print, online and iPhone app versions of the Optimist.
Sure enough, Dan Reimold reports at College Media Matters, the Optimist app is now available for download.
Here’s a video from ACU featuring faculty and student editors talking about the new app, and some footage of the app in action.
I downloaded the app over the weekend, as I was curious about what was included in this first student media effort on the Magical Unicorn Device.
Before I get into the details, let me give kudos to the students and faculty at ACU who worked so quickly to turn this app out. It works, and for what it does, it’s a perfectly serviceable app.
Version 1.0 of the ACU Optimist App features:
• Dynamic content selector to allow you to move between sections
• Access to over five years of story archives
• Photo montages
• Updated ACU Wildcat Sports scores
A screen capture from the Optimist iPad app page.
So far, my response to the app has been lukewarm. It looks and feels a lot like a basic port of the Optimist’s WordPress-powered web site. The stories are listed in descending chronological order. Clicking on a headline takes you to the story page, which looks a lot like a standard WordPress single post page.
The text on screen is readable. the full-color photos are gorgeous. Depending on your WiFi, the stories load quickly when you click on the headlines. If you swipe your finger from the right side of the screen toward the left (near the top of the screen), you can also move from one section screen to the next section screen.
At the right side of the screen is a “Contents” tab that slides out to reveal four sections: News, Sports, Arts & Culture, and Opinion. Notice anything missing from that list? A dedicated section for multimedia content. For instance, the store description promises “photo montages,” but, poking around the app, I wasn’t able to find any.
Compare that with the online Optimist web site, which does suffer from a little too much “nav bar creep” (The tendency to add more and more nav bar links to different parts of a site). But prominent in the lower nav bar are links to its multimedia content (podcasts and videos).
And despite the promise of “converged media,” much of the Optimist’s online text content still lacks hyperlinks. Over several days of testing the app, I was able to find one story on the iPad app home screen that had a hyperlink to another web site (to be fair, this isn’t the app’s fault – most of the current stories on the web site don’t have hyperlinks either).
I assume the archive access is primarily available through the search feature in the contents tab. It would be nice to have monthly archive listing available as an option. I typed “2007″ into the search engine and came up with nothing.
In terms of iPad capabilities, the one “bug” I found in the app was that it doesn’t rotate to landscape view when you turn the iPad on its side, unlike most of the media apps I’ve looked at recently. This is not an iPad specific feature, it’s also part of the iPhone/iPod Touch user interface.
As I said, having looked through the iPad Software Development Kit, I give high praise to the ACU students and faculty for producing an app for this new computing device.
But my overall impression is that the Optimist development team could have spent more time working on the presentation and iPad feature list and not so much on being first out of the gate.
As this is version 1.0, there is promise for much more innovation out of this effort, and I look forward to see what uses they can make of features like location-awareness.
I hope the development team will look at what other news outlets are doing with their apps – check out the Reuters News Pro app for an example of weaving multimedia content into the home page, for instance – and improve the Optimist app in future versions.
"This focused, three-day gathering of results-driven, action-oriented participants will discover, assess, shape and create forward-looking enterprises focused on key elements of community — diversity, shared values, tolerance, participation and developing youth." June 3-6
"Twitter has just launched a new site called Twitter Media, where it's offering media organizations and journalists some case studies and guidelines to better connect with their Twitter fans. Alongside the new portal, Twitter has also launched an official Twitter Media account."
The Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University in Georgia has some awesome conferences coming up. Unfortunately for a lot of college media types, they're smack in the middle of the end of the semester. Aggh!
"JLocal is a blog for journalism professors, newsroom leaders and others that will share news and resource information on course work, projects and partnerships designed to teach students to cover and engage local communities, develop content for and with local media and/or do research for local media." From the Kansas J-School.
"Cheap j-school labor has a toxic effect on the already anemic journalism job market, and Columbia isn’t the only journalism school that encourages their students to work for nothing. Journalism schools around the country provide free labor to news organizations and direct their students to poorly paying jobs. This helps news executives cut pay and fire reporters."
"The service may persuade readers to buy more magazines at a time when industrywide print circulation is falling. Time Inc. now charges $4.99 for each digital issue of the weekly Time magazine on iPad, 4 cents more than the print version. Newsweek, published by Washington Post Co., costs $1.99 on the new Apple device."
Don't understand how you charge more for a product that costs less to produce.
"The Columbia program, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the Fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of news gathering, reporting and delivery. The problem: Users really don’t know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users."
Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, a German publishing powerhouse, was interviewed about the Magical Unicorn Device (aka iPad) on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week.
Since “The Charlie Rose Show” apparently hasn’t figured out the concept of embedding videos on other sites, you’ll have to go to this link to watch the interview.
There’s been quite a bit of discussion among journobloggers and other publishing types about whether or not the iPad (and similar tablet devices) will “save” the media industry, but none quite so over-the-top as this:
I spent a couple of days with a family in Miami and on Saturday morning I went to the Apple store on Lincoln Road and played a little bit with the iPad and then bought one with my son. And I think this is really starting a new era.
And I think every publisher in the world should sit down once a day and pray to thank Steve Jobs that he is saving the publishing industry with that.
I think the iPad is really delivering what we were all waiting for. It’s a device that enables you to visualize content in a very emotional way. It is an easy-to-use device. The price is a mass market price.
(Emphasis added)
I’ll have some more iPad related thoughts later today. But for now, watch the video. (thanks to colleague James Tidwell for the heads-up)
Also, here are some other people who’ve been fixating on the Magical Unicorn Device:
Colin Mulvaney writes an excellent post on his blog: Video at newspapers needs to improve – that I want to highlight because it’s as good a summary as any of the ways that newspaper-produced video needs to go to reach the storytelling heights that still photojournalism has reached in the past.
He identifies the following problems with much of newspaper video:
Storytelling
Bland Videos
Structure
Editing
Journalism
Narration
Collaboration
Some of these problems stem from the obvious fact that newspapers are still trying to figure out what works for online video, and still photographers are still learning the basics of video storytelling. And when some of the best newspaper videographers get shown the door, or land in academia (Hernandez and Gitner), or must shift careers for personal and geographical reasons, and others (like Mulvaney himself) get pulled off video duty, figuring out what works and indwelling those skills within newspaper staffers just gets that much harder.
A lot of this mediocrity is doubtless self-inflicted. Stories that work in print don’t work so well in video. Stories that benefit from video don’t always get the time they deserve to get it right.
But the greater point is that people (especially student journalists) who want to be videographers for newspapers need to spend a lot more time honing their craft. That includes paying attention to broadcast videographers. While I firmly believe that web-based video necessarily is different from broadcast video, the fact is that broadcast videographers have a lot to teach in terms of video storytelling.
Some of that honing of skills should come through classwork. But a newspaper journalist might only get a few weeks of video training in an intro class. The rest must come from practice and DIY learning (including some of the workshops Mulvaney mentions in his post above). To that end, below are several sites I’d recommend for more advanced DIY training:
Edit Foundry: Shawn Montano’s site hosted by NPPA focuses very sharply on the depths of video editing. What I like about the site is that Montano breaks down a concept – say, Video editing transitions – complete with detailed commentary across the entire video, along with screen grabs.
News Videographer: Angela Grant continues to explore videography from a newspaper veteran’s viewpoint, despite her career developments. An excellent resource.
Mastering Multimedia: Mulvaney’s blog is another excellent resource, which takes a more theoretical approach to multimedia storytelling. Even though he spends less time shooting video, his thoughts are worth the time to absorb.
I’m sure there are other excellent sites around the web that focus on video gathering and editing. These are some I’m familiar with and enjoy reading. There are also some excellent sites (Mindy McAdams, among others) who devote some time to video, but also examine a much broader vista of multimedia and online journalism.
Got a favorite site for learning video techniques? Please let us know in the comments.
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Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, a German publishing powerhouse, was interviewed about the Magical Unicorn Device (aka iPad) on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week.
Colin Mulvaney writes an excellent post on his blog: