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Will the iTablet help the media? Possibly. Save the media? No.

Is the newly launched Apple tablet, the iPad, beautiful? Yes. Drool-worthy, in fact. Will Apple sell a lot of them? If the iPod and the iPhone are anything to go by, then yes — and at $499 for the basic version, they are priced to move. But does the iPad contain anything that could be seen as throwing a lifeline to the foundering ship of traditional media? Well, no.

Once you get past the hype (of which there has been a boatload), the iPad is really just a larger version of the iPod touch, with some interface and usability tweaks thrown in around things like email, games and e-books. Has the iPhone changed the traditional print media business? Not at all — unless you think selling an app for your publication (as Conde Nast has for GQ) is a game-changer.

Yes, the New York Times app looks impressive, with video that plays right inside the newspaper display (although you can do that on the NYT web site, too). But will a fancier app change the nature of the newspaper business or the magazine business? No.

Please read the rest of this post at GigaOm

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Yes, HR execs check your Facebook page

Have you ever applied for a job and wondered why you didn’t get it, even though you were qualified? According to a new survey, there’s a good chance that the person doing the hiring found something about you online that they didn’t like. The survey done by Microsoft found that 70 percent of HR professionals in the U.S. have rejected a job applicant based on what they found out about that individual by searching online (that number is lower in other countries).

As part of Data Privacy Day on Thursday, Microsoft says it conducted a survey of 2,500 people that included, consumers, HR managers and recruitment professionals in the US, the UK, Germany and France, with the goal of learning more about attitudes toward online reputation and how this information can have real life consequences. The survey found that the top online factors for rejecting a job applicant are unsuitable photos/videos, concerns about a candidate’s lifestyle and inappropriate comments written by the candidate.

Please read the rest of this post at GigaOm

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Talking with Steve Paikin about “slacktivism”

There’s been a lot of debate lately about the value of joining a Facebook group as a form of protest, and whether that just constitutes digital “slacktivism,” particularly in the context of the Facebook group opposing the proroguing of Parliament (if you don’t have any idea what that is or why you might care, there’s a brief overview here).

I recently talked to Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda on TVO, about whether Facebook activism matters or not in the larger scheme of things, and whether it would translate into real action (as it turned out, it did — last weekend, after the show was taped, more than 25,000 people across the country showed up to protest). The video is embedded in this post, and is also available on YouTube and at the TVO site.

On the subject of Facebook’s validity as a grassroots political tool, I tried to point out to Steve (as my friend David Eaves did in his piece for the Globe), that a Facebook group membership is something that deserves to be paid attention to, and that in fact joining such a group arguably means more than a petition, since membership in a group is a public act.

In addition to Facebook, Steve and I also talked about the success of the “text money to Haiti” campaign, and how the volume of people doing that — more than $25-million has been raised by the Red Cross in the U.S. alone through texting — says a lot about the positive side of digital activism. We also talked about the value of Twitter in the context of a disaster like Haiti, when it acted as a real-life newswire of on-the-ground sources.

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One door closes, another door opens

I have to confess that I’ve been sitting here for a long time, looking at a blank screen, trying to figure out what to say in this post. Getting to the point is easy: as some readers probably already know, I’ve decided to leave the Globe and Mail to become a senior writer with the GigaOm blog network, which is run by my good friend Om Malik (who has written a blog post about my joining the company here).

That’s the short version. The long version, of course, is somewhat more complicated. The part about joining GigaOm is easy to explain — I’ve been a fan of Om’s ever since I discovered his blog in 2005 while he was still working for Business 2.0 magazine, and came to like him even more when we had him at our very first mesh conference in Toronto in 2006. He doesn’t hesitate to shoot down popular perceptions, and when he speaks his mind it is always worth paying attention to, even if (and in fact especially when) you disagree with him about something.

Over the past few years, Om and his team have put together what I think is one of the world’s premier technology blog networks, one that has a well-justified reputation for thoughtful and intelligent reporting and analysis, something that has become even more of a necessity as the Web has filled up with fast-food style news hits. I’m honoured to have been asked to join GigaOm, and to work with its terrific writers. It feels like the first day of school and I get to sit with the cool kids 🙂

That said, I would be lying if I said that leaving the Globe and Mail after 15 years isn’t difficult (I’ve actually been working for the Globe for almost two decades, if you count my time at the Financial Times of Canada, which was owned by the Globe when I started working there in 1991). Despite my excitement at joining GigaOm, leaving somewhere after that length of time is never easy. And working at the Globe was a dream of mine ever since I graduated from journalism school.

There are plenty of things I’m not going to miss about working at the Globe, particularly in its ancient Front Street headquarters — including the often underwhelming cafeteria (not the fault of Bozenna, the world’s nicest cashier), as well as the world’s slowest elevator, the moldy carpeting, a distinct lack of windows and a lighting system that wouldn’t look out of place in a run-down 1960’s suburban rec room.

What I will miss is working with some of the finest journalists anywhere, a group of relentlessly smart and talented (and in many cases charmingly eccentric) reporters and editors, who manage to turn out a great newspaper every day under incredible pressure. On the Web side, I will miss the tremendously resourceful group of writers and editors who do the same under even more time pressure, with a deadline every minute, and manage to juggle several jobs, and some balky technology.

I want to make it clear (in part because a bunch of people have asked) that I’m not leaving the Globe because I think newspapers are dead, or because I think the Globe is going under, or anything of the sort. I think it’s pretty obvious by now that the newspaper industry is going through a tremendous upheaval, a clash of evolutionary forces that will cause some to expire and others to thrive. I think — and hope — that the Globe is well positioned to be one of the entities that can adapt to those forces, and in fact it has already gone some distance towards doing that.

Evolution is a messy business, however. And changing the tools that people use is not the hard part — changing the way people think and the culture they work in is the hard part (in some cases, it may even be impossible). And doing that while you are still operating a traditional legacy business, one that still provides the bulk of your revenue, makes it even harder (the old saying about “building an airplane while flying it” comes to mind). The Globe has made some progress in that department, and is making more every day, but there is still much left to do.

Part of me is sorry that I won’t be around to help the Globe continue to make that transition. I can’t say that it hasn’t been frustrating at times, because it has, especially the seemingly endless meetings and debates over policies and procedures — not to mention the fear and uncertainty that often underlie them — that can get in the way of journalists engaging with readers in a real and human way. I happen to believe that doing this isn’t just a “nice to have” feature, but is a crucial part of what journalism is now (a point I tried to make in my TEDxTO talk back in September).

Those battles are someone else’s to fight now, although I will be happy (and may even feel compelled) to provide advice from afar. Instead, I have the good fortune to be moving to an organization that doesn’t have to worry about legacy print products and declining revenues — an entity that is Web only, is growing rapidly, and has social media woven in and out of the very fabric of the company. A nice change 🙂 Onward!

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Neil Fraser: Google = Multivac

In 1958 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled "All the Troubles of the World" (included in the collection "Nine Tomorrows"). It described a world transformed by Multivac, a giant all-knowing computer. Asimov died in 1992, a mere four years before Larry and Sergey started their project "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." Below are selected quotes from Asimov’s story (no spoilers), next to relevant imagery from Google.

via Neil Fraser: News: Google Multivac.

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The Ingrams Christmas Letter for 2009

We started the year with a great fondue dinner and some pool in Buckhorn at the home of our friends Marc and Kris, and some skating and shinny on the pond. We went to Ottawa for our annual Winterlude visit and did some skating on the canal and had poutine and Beaver Tails, as usual. Then we went south to visit Becky’s mom and dad in Florida and did some playing in the waves and lying around soaking up the sun on the white beach at Siesta Key and some shuffleboard back at the Bay Indies park where Becky’s parents have a place. And we headed off with Becky’s family to Busch Gardens for some rollercoaster riding and other forms of assorted merriment.

Meaghan went on a school trip and saw the statue of the lady holding the fire, and had a birthday (something she almost always does once a year). Becky and I went out west because I was invited to be part of a panel at an arts conference at the Banff Springs Hotel. We stayed in a hotel in town that had a spa in the basement, and went for a run down by the river, and had a delicious dinner in a restaurant just down the hill from the Banff Springs that I think used to be the clubhouse for the golf course. There were the usual summer hijinks at the Farm weekend, as we call them, which included the next generation this time — Zoe made a new friend named Fox and we took the kids for a swim in the old quarry.

Continue reading “The Ingrams Christmas Letter for 2009”
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The Dallas Morning News pulls down the wall

Editor & Publisher reported this week that the Dallas Morning News (which is owned by Belo Corp.) has done a major restructuring of the newspaper, and one of the most contentious aspects of that re-organization will see the editors of several sections reporting to newly-appointed general managers who also have responsibility for advertising. The restructuring creates 11 “business and content segments,” including sports, health/education, entertainment, travel, automotive, real estate, communications and retail. The GMs in charge of these segments report to the head of sales. A statement from DMN editor Bob Mong called the arrangement:

“the next step toward becoming the most comprehensive and trusted partner for local businesses in attracting and retaining customers and continuing to generate important, relevant content.”

Continue reading “The Dallas Morning News pulls down the wall”

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Daily Mirror editor says to forget about SEO

Matt Kelly of the Mirror decries what he believes to be a cruel delusion on the part of newspapers, who have used SEO techniques to accumulate a broader audience — but have succeeded only in attracting “locusts” who have little long-term value, while at the same time cheapening their content and advertising.

Below, he brags about how low the traffic from search engines is to two new sites that the Mirror launched, deliberately ignoring SEO:

Crucially, traffic from search engines is ridiculously low for a newspaper website. Around 15 percent for MirrorFootball and less than 10 for 3am. That means the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source. We get a lot of traffic to both sites from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Not recommendations from a search engine, but from a friend. That’s how to grow a meaningful audience.

via guardian.co.uk

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Video of my TEDx Toronto talk

Back in September, I was honoured to be asked to be one of the featured presenters at the first TEDx Toronto, a kind of mini-version of the famous TED conference (whose videos are highly recommended). The video of that presentation,which was entitled “Five Ways New Media Can Save Old Media,” is now available on YouTube, and I have embedded a version of it in this post, or you can watch it in all its high-def glory here. Frankly, I wish that I had gotten to the point a little faster — and I’m sure the organizers wish I had as well, since I went over my time by quite a bit (no one seemed to mind though, which was quite nice of them). Thanks to Ryan Merkley and Becca Pace, and to the other speakers like Peter MacLeod and Gavin Sheppard, it was a pleasure to share the stage with you. Videos of all the speakers can be found on the Tedx YouTube page.

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The Globe and Facebook

I did a workshop/presentation for Globe and Mail reporters about Facebook this week, and I’ve embedded a version of the PowerPoint here (it’s on Slideshare too if you want to view it there). It’s not very long, nor does it go into a lot of depth about the various issues that can arise when you use — or misuse — Facebook. It was really just an introduction to the topic, and an attempt to explain how we can use this massive social network for two broad purposes: 1) to allow us to find information, and also to reach out to people who might be involved in stories we are writing about and 2) to allow fans of our content to share, and thus to help promote, our news stories and content (the embedded presentation is actually even shorter than the one I gave at the workshop, because I removed a few slides that had proprietary numbers related to Globe traffic, Facebook metrics, etc.)

The basic impression I wanted to give reporters on the first point was that Facebook is a huge network filled with actual human beings, some of whom may want to help us with our reporting on a story, and/or talk to us about their experiences — which can improve our journalism, and help us fulfill our goal of making contact with real people, not just ones who work for advocacy groups or happen to live next door to a reporter. I tried to emphasize that it’s important to be polite when approaching people about a news event — in other words, to be human — rather than barging in with a microphone in hand, hassling people for a quote, and I also tried to make the point that simply becoming a member of a group doesn’t mean a person is deeply committed to a particular cause, since joining just takes a click.

On the second point, I talked about how we are using our newly-created fan page (which is here if you aren’t already a fan), and how the act of clicking “share” or “comment” or “like” effectively distributes that item — or a reference to it — into the user’s feed, where it can be seen by all of their friends, who might be exposed to a story that they wouldn’t otherwise read. And I also talked about how we are looking at integrating Facebook Connect so that users can connect their activity on the Globe and Mail website to their profile in Facebook, and so that theoretically we might be able to offer some of the same features that Huffington Post does, where readers can see what their Facebook friends have been reading.

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Online collaboration tools like Mendeley are growing

The idea that the Internet might be used for scientific collaboration shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since the Web’s predecessor was originally created as a way to connect researchers at different institutions so they could solve problems together. That said, however, collaboration has accelerated over the past several years, thanks in part to the increasing popularity of “social media” or Web 2.0 tools, which have collectively lowered the barriers to online interaction.

A number of social networks and services devoted specifically to scientific research have sprung up and are growing quickly, including one called Mendeley. An online collaboration tool, it allows scientists and researchers to upload research papers, which the software combs through looking for bibliographic data (author, title, etc.) which are then matched with any other research that already exists in the database.

“You can just drag and drop your collection of PDFs into the software and it’ll automatically extract all the bibliographic data – all of the stuff that you’d usually have to type in manually,” co-founder Victor Henning told the BBC. “What Mendeley is designed to do is give you recommendations which compliment your existing library.”

The software has become popular with some scientists at highly-ranked research institutions such as Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge, and Henning says the service has about 70,000 users, and is growing at a rate of 40 per cent every month.

Many scientists from different disciplines have also adopted the “open source” model favoured by the Linux free software movement and supporters of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia. Project Polymath, for example, uses blogs and wikis to allow people to collaborate on solving complex mathematical problems.

In less than two months, Polymath participants “had worked out an elementary proof, and a manuscript describing the proof is currently being written,” Walter Jessen, a bioinformatician and cancer biologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told LinuxInsider. “The project demonstrated that many people could work together to solve difficult mathematical problems.”

Another open-source science project is Bizarro’s Bioinformatics Organization, which started in 1998 and uses wiki software to let researchers post models, questions, experiments and discoveries related to biology and informatics. Scientists were “looking for a central location for their open source projects,” founder Jeff Bizarro told LinuxInsider. Today, the organization has 27,000 members from all around the world.

If Bizarro is like Facebook or Wikipedia, a collaborative network called ResearchGate has aspects that are similar to LinkedIn, the corporate social network. While the service allows scientists to search for and connect research done by others to their own work in order to see patterns or relationships that are worth following, it also allows scientists to create profiles and search for or find relationships with other researchers in similar or related disciplines.

ResearchGate, which has 180,000 members, says it wants to create something called “Science 2.0” using social media tools. In this environment, “communication between scientists will accelerate the distribution of new knowledge. Without anonymous review processes, the concept of open-access journals will assure research quality. Science is collaboration, so scientific social networks will facilitate and improve the way scientists collaborate.”

Some scientists are using even newer tools to collaborate — including Google Wave, the new tool launched by the search giant that some describe as a combination between email, instant messaging and a wiki.

“Google Wave offers two specific things,” Cameron Neylon, senior scientist at Britain’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, told the BBC. “What it looks like is this cross of e-mail and instant-messaging, which is great fun. Where it really wins for science is that actually these documents or ‘Waves’ can be made automated so we can connect up documents and ideas with each other.” The power lies in allowing scientists to share a range of objects, he says, from pictures and text to raw data.

Will these new social tools help produce any penicillin or DNA-type breakthroughs? Scientists and researchers who use them say it’s just a matter of time.

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McSweeney’s: Has Bell Invented the “Telegraph Killer?”

What if a tech blogger was writing about the launch of the telephone? McSweeney’s imagines for you:

“We had difficulty reaching other users on the Bell apparatus, which Alexander Graham admits will have limited utility until they build a second Telephone. In comparison, the Telegraph network already has fifteen machines connecting backwaters like Los Angeles to metropolises like Cincinnati, a support gap that should only widen in the coming months. Leaked reports from Morse reveal plans to suspend a line between New York and London using kites by January, a scheme insiders predict to be a terrific success.”

“While the technology behind the Telephone is new, the design is reassuringly old-fashioned, reminiscent of a phrenologist’s horn or ear-candle in form. We found the experience far more comfortable than the one we had with the Telegraph, though fatigue from magnetic waves is inevitable in the use of each. This is a minor complaint, however, as we could scarcely imagine using such a device for more than a few minutes a day.”

via mcsweeneys.net

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