Two worlds colliding, or that is how it felt for me when I first started to understand the potential of web technology and journalism combined. Colliding perhaps isn’t the best word, but neither is it a bad word to describe the coming together of these two worlds, it suggests friction, reaction even explosions and that it will take some time for the dust to settle.

Beginnings

I am sad to say I’m no longer an OpenNews fellow - my time has expired and with heavy heart I shall remove the title from my bio. But let’s back up a bit and look at how this all started.

media is instrumental in shaping people’s opinions

My attention was first drawn to the OpenNews (then MoJo) project in the Summer of 2011. Being a curious sort of chap, I wondered what sort of shape this initiative would take. I was curious because it combined two of my interests - media and technology. I believe that media is instrumental in shaping people’s opinions and — perhaps somewhat naively — I believe that technology holds the keys to the democratisation of information and media, especially the inter-connectedness that web-based technology provides.

Optimism aside, ‘techno-journalism’ struck me as a very interesting intersection in which to work and so I enrolled in the Knight Mozilla News Challenge - a process designed to embed five people with technical backgrounds into newsrooms.

Six months later I was an OpenNews fellow working with Al Jazeera English. I had opted to work  on a remote basis with the understanding that I work on-site as often as was required.

Ten months after starting, my fellowship has drawn to a close and this is what I have learned.

Travelling is Important but so is Doing the Work

I’ve often wondered how those people who are in a continual state of transit ever get any work done. I guess there’s a knack to working on the hoof that I’ve yet to acquire, but while I’m travelling I’m often too excited or exhausted to be a very effective developer, at least on the shorter trips. That’s not to say travelling isn’t important. There is no substitute for meeting people in real life and I especially found the month I spent at Al Jazeera HQ in Doha very worthwhile. Other highlights included the Civic Media Conference in Boston where I was made to feel at home at MIT Media Lab and The Guardian offices in London where all the fellows got to work as a team.

I did get some work done at the various hack days I attended, but really travelling for me was all about meeting people and building up relationships, most crucially with other fellows. All my trips were worthwhile and indeed served to inspire and motivate me to actually do the work.

Developers in News Organisations are Constantly Shipping

I have blogged about this more than once - because of the fast-paced nature of news, if you are a developer in a newsroom you will find yourself imbibed with the “Fuck It, Ship It” mentality.

your work is transient - of the moment.

The good thing is, most stuff you work on doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough to get the message across. To all intents and purposes your work is transient - of the moment. That is not to say that the time that you are iterating hard against a deadline isn’t stressful, it is. It’s also very exciting.

Developers in News Organisations Make Cool Shit

Some of the best developers I know work for news organisations. Jeremy Ashkensas, creator of CoffeeScript and Backbone.js works for the New York Times and so does Mike Bostock who created D3.js. The Miso Project was taken on by Irene Ros and Alex Graul working at The Guardian - all important open source tools that all types of developers can take advantage of. In fact there are so many new tools that OpenNews launched Source to document it. 

Developing More Than just Applications

When I first arrived in Doha, I was told that it was easy to make a difference at Al Jazeera as there was always so much that needed doing. Actually Al Jazeera English (where I was placed) struck me as a very agile organisation - if you had a good idea, it seemed that you could often run with it. Due to my background and the discussions I had with people at various events, I’d amassed a few ideas for Al Jazeera to try out. I was curious about most aspects of the aljazeera.com website - and was eager to discuss issues such as content management, styling and even content. What I noticed and liked about the people there, was that they were not afraid to — and indeed were very good at — harnessing and taking advantage of technologies, services and concepts that were not necessarily home grown.

Pic: Internet Archive’s TV News Cloud

The use of Creative Commons licensing for much of their content was particularly inspiring and so was the grasping of the role of social media in news, never more apparent than during the Arab Spring.

I felt that there was an opportunity to bring AJE and other organisations together. Through various shared interests I was already in touch with Internet Archive. Being broadcasters as well as online producers AJ create a lot of video based content and are actively looking to get their content viewed on the US mainstream channels. Through closed captioned content they can not only meet the accessibility requirements for US TV they can produce content that can be archived at internetarchive.org. This will also allow developers to expose this video content in new and exciting ways, but that’s another story.

Another couple of potential matches I made some headway in making was to bring Al Jazeera together with Shoutabout.org who facilitate social action and Globaleaks.org who provide a secure whistle-blowing framework. 

When Nikki Usher a journalist and assistant professor at GWU contacted me asking if I could introduce her to anyone at Al Jazeera, I was happy to. From that came a visit and an enlightened article for Nieman Lab on my colleagues in the interactive team 

In the last days of my fellowship, I was very happy to introduce Al Jazeera to Nicola Hughes. Another OpenNews fellow working with The Guardian, Nicola flew to Doha to pass on her knowledge in the form of a Data Journalism course. I helped out when needed but my main effort was to bring the two parties together.

So I’m happy to say that thanks to Al Jazeera being very open to working with others, I was able to foster a few relationships.

Mucking In

Matchmaking aside, I did spend a fair amount of my time actually making things. I used the knowledge I had built up from working on jPlayer to create media based interactive pieces ranging from YouTube powered slide shows to Interactive Transcripts of the US presidential debates.

I’m fascinated by the emotion that can be conveyed by audio

My first foray was to create a contextual take on a documentary piece. The idea was that the viewer could choose to view (and share) extra information about the program. Ingredients included jPlayer, Tabletop.js and judicial use of an iFrame to not only sandbox the content but also allow it to be embedded in other publications.

I’m fascinated by the emotion that can be conveyed by audio and its role in storytelling. I’d been following what a UK startup ThisIsMyJam had done to allow people to select music from YouTube and share their favourite ‘Jams’. This is very shrewd as YouTube is an excellent music repository. Sure, the quality may be lower than usual, but the quantity of musical material it houses — and crucially can be accessed without an account — is second to none.

Inspired by a chat I had with Showkat Shafi a talented and — judging by his stories — very courageous photographer, I had the idea to create a service that allowed anybody to choose an audio track from YouTube and play a slide-show along to the music. I wanted to include that slow zoom and fade and partly succeeded. AJE ended up using it slightly differently to how I had envisaged by uploading their own audio commentary to YouTube. Again, jPlayer and Popcorn were used.

The US elections provided a global opportunity to create new forms of visualisations and interactivity. I say global as it seemed that every news organisation in the world was trying to come up with something new. My part was to work on an interactive tool that allowed the reader to analyse, discover and share parts of the debate. It was an interesting challenge as there were four debates and we got to improve the format in response to feedback each time. I also took the opportunity to play about with simple data visualisation. So this time Popcorn, jPlayer and a bit of D3.

This is how my work is logged on aljazeera.com 

Unfinished Business

Right back at the start of my fellowship I began writing what was to be an op-ed on Firefox OS for aljazeera.com. I’m not the only developer to be encouraged to do write for AJE. Dick Olson - — a Drupal developer for AJE by day — recently got the opportunity to follow his passion for motor-sport and write up some interviews he had with some of his heroes. In my case as there was no real urgency to complete, this got put on the side and is still not quite finished. Thankfully the subject is still very much relevant and I look forward to finishing it off soon.

Playing about with D3 and generally getting closer to data journalism inspired me to start writing my own visualisation of the recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This remains work in progress but I’d love to create a generic comparison tool when I have time.

Reusability

As Dan Schultz — my colleague at The Boston Globe — touches on in his recent blog-post - one of the most important parts of an open developer’s remit is not only to release the code but to release it an a format that others can easily adapt. The issue is the next project is usually just around the corner and the luxury of time to work on genericising a piece of code all to often scarce. I admit despite my best intentions, I never fully got around to doing this.

OpenNews is Evolving

Help, support and encouragement are at hand. Anticipating the vital life-blood of development that is code, a source-code repository known simply as Source was launched and put in the capable hands of Erin Kissane which means you also get excellent news related articles into the bargain. Additional motivation is provided by Code Sprint grants, so if you’re a developer working in a newsroom and want to make that last bit of code generic you should definitely consider the grants and of course putting your code on Source.

What’s Next?

To be honest, I’m not exactly sure. It is very exciting to see the quality of interactive journalism coming out of news organisations like the New York Times and The Guardian right now. The Guardian have a whole section dedicated to Data Journalism and The New York Times are coming out with gems like 512 Paths to the White House and their recent excellent interactive piece - Snow Fall which received more than 3.5 million page views. It’s also exciting to see fellow developers who formerly worked in other areas get bitten by the journalism bug.

I’m looking forward to maintaining my relationship with The Knight Foundation, Mozilla, Al Jazeera and the rest of the OpenNews fellows and continuing to work in this very extraordinary space. I’d love to push hard on Hyperaud.io which has been a running theme for me throughout this fellowship. I’d also like to continue help improve our jPlayer JavaScript Media Library that happily is now being used by news organisations globally.

Here’s to all the Punks

It’s all been a fantastic opportunity and I’d like to thank the following people for making 2012 the epic year it really was for me. First and foremost Dan Sinker for support and encouragement and for being both Visionary Druid and Down-to-earth Punk. Thanks also to Erika Owens, fearless OpenNews community manager and organiser of epic journeys and accommodation Mohammed Haddad - my colleague and friend at Al Jazeera and all the other fine people working there, of which of course there are simply too many to mention. Thanks also to the Knight Foundation for funding and Mozilla Foundation for support.

Lastly but not leastly a big thanks to my family, (not my real family - I’ve thanked them privately), fellow fellows (my own Punk Rock band) Dan Schultz, Nicola Hughes, Laurian Gridinoc and Cole Gillespie. It’s been amazing working with you all. Thank you!

It’s incredible how much has changed in a year. It’s been about a year since I started to really think about news and technology seriously and about ten months since I took on the role of an Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow. While on this journey, I’ve felt a gradual and positive change in the world of journalism and its relationship with technology.

Application

Technology applied is a wonderful thing and much credit must go to OpenNews lead Dan Sinker for realising that the world of journalism was ripe for its application. I see Dan as modern-day Druid, this is thanks in no small part to his spectacular beard in which he keeps kitchen utensils and the smaller of his gardening tools, but it chiefly comes down to his leadership style; he’s more a co-conspirator than a boss, someone who provides inspiration and support - in many ways your archetypal bearded spiritual guide.

Getting Organised

I’m a little different to the other fellows, a little older, a little slower and I have a young family which means I opted not to be embedded in Al Jazeera, Doha and work remotely. So when I travel to Qatar to visit the newsroom in the desert, I like to make the most of it.

As fellows we are encouraged to see each other’s work environments and I managed to organise for Nicola Hughes — ex-fellow with The Guardian — to fly over at the same time and give a course on a subject close to her heart - Data Journalism. This was a big win for me. It showed that with a bit of persistence we can actually organise events thousands of miles away that will hopefully make a tangible and positive difference to a news organisation.

Data Journalism

Luckily my contacts in the newsroom did a great job in paving the way and it turns out Nicola is a natural teacher so it all went splendidly. We gave an overview in the AJE boardroom where people as diverse as Dick Cheney, Adriana Huffington, Kevin Rose and Senior Hamas officials have been known to congregate (not necessarily at the same time). It was encouraging to see a large cross-section of AJ English and Arabic in attendance. The main cut and thrust of the course was about how to find stories in data and to that end, how the journalist can scrape, refine, store, query and visualise data. It’s worth dwelling on this whole data journalism concept a little, it’s pretty amazing for several reasons:

1. There are big stories in big data, it’s just a matter of finding them.
2. Traditional investigative journalism is expensive. Data Journalism is investigative journalism done cheaply.
3. Increasingly more data is being made available by organisations and governments.
4. Data well presented can tell a story. Sometimes very few words or opinions are required.
5. Readers can do their own investigating if you give them the option. Readers like to share their perspective.

I’m interested in all aspects of data journalism but the bit that really inspires me is data visualisation - how we present that information to the reader in a meaningful and beautiful way. Yes beautiful - the aesthetic is important, so is the design of course, likewise the content - all fundamental parts of a good visualisation - that’s what makes it so much fun. Admittedly Edward Tufte has had his due influence on me, when I read his work something just clicks and when I meet another Tufte admirer, we click. It’s almost like there’s this secret underground pipe-smoking bohemian society that believes information can and indeed should be beautiful.

The Web is the Medium

And then there’s our old friend the World Wide Web - a medium that is fast maturing into a vibrant and interactive canvas for presenting data. We have libraries born from news organisations and the strong desire to visualise data in new ways. We have interactivity. We have transitions. We have transparency. We have community. We have a low cost method of getting shit out there. The web has always been the ideal platform to present data and now it’s becoming the ideal place to visualise data. This is an exciting place. I might want to hang around a bit.

Making a Difference

I was happy to not just bring Al Jazeera and Nicola together in this way, but also be part of the data journalism course itself, I talked a little about visualisations and gave a session on a library called D3.js. The good news is that Al Jazeera are now looking to run the course again and they have committed to investing in data journalism next year.

Mark Boas

The Mozilla Festival

Only now getting some time to reflect on my third Mozilla Festival and all the fantastic events and interactions that took place at Ravensbourne College in London this year.

Once again I demoed Hyperaudio at the festival’s Science Fair and it was great to see the encouragement and enthusiasm surrounding that, but the main event for me was Saturday morning’s Second Screen Prototyping session. This post is intended to document that session.

What is the Second Screen?

The ‘second screen’ or the companion app refers to the additional screen you use whilst ‘watching’ the main screen. The main screen is usually the TV, but can also refer to the cinema screen or even the radio. The second screen can be a phone, tablet, game controller, a laptop or PC.

Who’s using it and who’s making it?

Research suggests that as many as 75% people use a second screen already but generally use everyday applications and services such as email, social networking and sites like wikipedia.

Realising the value and opportunity that the second screen presents - many companies are creating a new generation of applications that are tailored and intended exclusively to compliment main screen content.

What can we do with the Second Screen?

Many, many things. To mention a few :

• main screen control
• augment programme* information 
• provide social communication around a specific programme*
• facilitate user generated content
• vote, poll and quiz (participate)

*Note my spellchecker doesn’t approve of the word programme but in this instance I mean “A presentation that is broadcast on radio or television.” http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/programme

What did we hope to achieve with the Session?

Since second-screen technology is relatively new, the whole concept is a rich vein to mine. I hoped to attract a group with diverse backgrounds that could come together as small teams and paper-prototype a few ideas specific to media genres such as film, sport and entertainment.

How did we get things Started?

More people turned up than I had expected. Thankfully I was helped out with the facilitating by the very able Ben Moskowitz. We started by polling the group on their knowledge of the subject and then talking a little bit about what we thought the second screen was. I then gave a very brief presentation on second-screen stats and some example usage.

It was great to have Mike Pennisi from Bocoup and Travis Daub from PBS’s Newshour join and present their second-screen companion app for the election. We were also privileged to be joined by Simon Klose who’s making an interactive documentary The Pirate Bay AFK using a second-screen app called Linkontrol and has been researching and implementing second-screen technology for some time now.

Getting Going

After the brief presentations we asked people about the sort of media to which the second screen could be applied, encouraged them to form small groups around those different themes and get some ideas down ready for the next stage of paper-prototyping.

The technology behind second-screen apps can actually get pretty complicated but I told everyone not to worry about that and just to assume everything was possible. I wanted to capture ideas.

The various groups were self-organised around the following categories:

• Movies x 2
• Sports
• News

At about the half-way point we asked folk to share their ideas with the other groups in the session get feedback and re-huddle for paper-prototyping.

So what came out?

Ben and I both moved from group to group and worked on some of the ideas and it was great to see people having fun and not applying a ‘no limits’ attitude to their brain-storming. We were pretty insistent about asking people to get their ideas down on an etherpad so that nothing would be lost and actually I’m pleased to say that some very cool ideas came out of it all.

(Italicised text below represents that pasted directly from the etherpad)

Movies - Part 1

(Ingrid Kopp, David Illsley, Ian Jempson, Nic Wisteich, María Yáñez)

” 1. App for bookmarking clips / time-frames while watching any content 

• Options for both unobtrusive bookmarking experience or deep dive into content and social experience while film is playing
• Clips can be shared out to social media
• Metadata surrounding clips is included eg. locations, music playing, actors
• Possible option for SoundCloud-like commenting system on the film’s timeline?

2. Airplane mode for movies… director can indicate moments when interruptions are particularly unwelcome - can delay delivery of sms/redirect to voicemail… or redirect to a voicemail saying you’re watching something and give the option to ‘break in’

Fan fiction on the second screen to extend the life of a feature film

• the file doesn’t change, but the context does

Two UX options:

• a waterfall / list of metadata linked to timecode scrolling (like a Twitter stream)
• a fixed width visualisation (like a Soundcloud player)

Some nice ideas here, certainly I hadn’t considered an Airplane mode but that could be a very convenient piece of functionality given that we could access the necessary telephony APIs.

There was another suggestion that I think could apply to many different forms of media.

3. Second screen for activism - get people when they’re fired up - donate/call your congressman via skype..? “

This is interesting because services like Shoutabout and Avaaz which facilitate news related activism already exist and the second-screen could be the perfect medium to call for action while people are watching related material.

Movies part 2 (Physical Effects)

(Sarah Wolozin, Robert Basden, Wesley Lindamood)

” Physical Effects is a second screen application that serves as a hub to control connected devices in your home.  By creating effects in your physical environment, it facilitates a more immersive film experience.

Using sensors on the tablet (camera, microphone) and physical sensors, heartbeat monitor , perspiration monitor (through apps like fitbit) “Physical Effects” will subtly and intelligently adjust light, sound, temperature, and other connected devices while the film is playing.

By sharing your experience with others using this application, ambient sound from their physical space can be incorporated into your home recreating a shared audience experience.

Lastly, to make the experience more tactile. 3-D printers, will be used to print out objects from the film that may be out of view on the first screen but provide more information and meaning to the film. “

This is great - a classic case of thinking without borders. It sounds a lot like something we’ve been working on with Ian Forrester’s team at BBC R&D under the umbrella term ‘Perceptive Media’. Which coincidentally was demoed later on in the festival.

Sports

(William Bailey, Mark Fullbrook, Martin Skelly)

“Digital Stadium 

A second screen app that celebrates the emotional rollercoaster of being in the crowd at a football stadium.It pulls in the digital stories created with social media around premier league football matches. 

* Principles *

• Celebrating the adversity of team sports fans 
• Wider digital conversations of football matches in real time 
• Design for passive and passionate fans 
• Optional log in 

* Criteria * 

• Tablet based (mobile options) 
• Simple log in and match choice system 

* Features * 

- Visualisation -

• tweets per minute line graphs 
• see tweets in real time 
• word clouds 
• sentiment and feeling scroller 

- Tweet Categorisation -

• correlation to match events on timeline 
• encourage game tweets - with themes tweets suggestions 
• method of segretating tweets based on hashtag 

- Automated -

• knows what games are scheduled 
• automated creation of virtual stadiums based on schedule api 

- Other -

• match build up - anticipated matches on schedule “

Lots of opportunities with sports programmes, especially live ones. Currently people tend to use their social networking service of choice as a general second-screen app but there’s plenty of scope to tie these services more closely to main screen content. 

News 

“Goals:

• Improve on the weaknesses of the first screen
• Give viewers more control
• Enable viewers to participate (or choose not to)
• Add a deeper layer of information and expertise. 
• Engage social users
• Increase the flexiblity of the media. 

Idea:

Build a second screen app that interfaces with the user’s DVR. The content provider provides a main televsion stream, but also alternate video or content streams that can be viewed and then return to the main program. Streams can be viewed on the second screen or on the first, depending on user discretion.  

The main program can extend or contact depending on the user’s interest. Portions they like may feature longer uncut interviews that seamlessly appear inside the program at the users’s discretion.  

User can create commentary using the camera on the second screen and add it to the timeline. Other users see popups that “User X” has created a video comment, watch it now…”  Programs grow and nurture communiites of experts to contribute to those programs. “

Again plenty of scope with news apps and this group came up with an interesting idea where it seems that an almost hypertext-like mechanism is applied to video. Allowing viewers to discover and explore there own route through the news.

Brain Food

This was an experiment in process as much as anything else. What happens if you put variety of mostly unrelated people in the same room and ask them to brain-storm ideas? How much do we need to guide the process in order to achieve something worthwhile? Well the answer is that as facilitators we kept our initial presentations to a minimum and moved as quickly as possible to inspire the larger group and provide ‘brain food’ (a phrase coined by Ben). 

We encouraged people to break into small groups and had a lot of fun jumping from group to group to see how things were coming along adding input if we felt it was needed but really just encouraging people to come up with their own ideas.

I think the idea to imagine that there was no restrictions was a good one - it allowed people to let their creativity flow and actually, I think all the ideas we got are pretty much feasible.

It took a while to write up but I definitely think it was a worthwhile session and I’d like to thank all involved. Hopefully these ideas will become food for thought for other people and lead to further brainstorming and innovation.

Further Reading

In preparation for this session I undertook a fair amount of research and the end of this post it seems like as good a place as any to share those resources.

1. Great Pinterested stuff on Second Screen and Social TV 
2. Bravo’s “Play Live” Adds Polls, Games to All Its Shows 
3. KIT digital takes fresh approach to second screen 
4. 24% of people use second screens while watching TV 
5. Synchronized second screen 
6. The Guardian’s Second Screen: your indispensable London 2012 companion 
7. Anatomy of an interactive: a look at the code behind our Second Screen 
8. THE RACE FOR THE SECOND SCREEN: 5 APPS THAT ARE SHAPING SOCIAL TV 
9. Multiscreen PatternsPatterns to help understand and define strategies for the multiscreen world.
10. Grab Magic: My hack for The Boat That Hacked #mipboathack 
11. RWW Recommends: The Best Channel-Surfing Companion App for TV Trivia 
12. SmartGlass, Xbox 360 and the battle for the connected living room 
13. Google Multiscreen World 
14. Making great TV even better: The BBC’s approach to companion 
15. Shazam Is TV, Not Music 
16. Use your phone as the controller for in-browser games. 
17. Is This the Second-Screen TV App That Finally Goes Mainstream? 
18. Network Service Discovery API support in Opera 
19. The Second Screen Hype Cycle 
20. “Second Screen” Ideas for Radio 
21. IBC 2012: Clash of Four Second-Screen Titans
22. Netflix sneaks in some Simple second screen functionality 
23. Companion screen services - one year on 

I’m nearing the end of my Knight-Mozilla Open News fellowship and I’m eager to go out with a bang. Initially I intended to travel over to Doha for the elections to capture the excitement of a news organisation operating at full tilt, but that trip has been postponed until the end of November. It works out though - one of my personal remits was to show that it was possible to work effectively while remote and with much help from my on-site colleague Mohammed Haddad we seem to be doing that.

We decided to do something with hyperaudio (a project I’ve been developing on the side) and the election debates. So for the last three weeks or so I’ve been working pretty hard on that. Work expanding to fit time - there’s nothing like an immovable deadline to make you work at maximum capacity and you’ll find plenty of absolute deadlines in the news business.

Real Deadlines

The great thing about the US election debates are that there are four of the blighters. We had already compressed about a months work into two-weeks for the first debate but now we get to bring out versions 2 - 4 over the next weeks. This is the fun bit - I’ve always envied developers who’d shipped version 1 and were onto the next stage of streamlining and improving for the next release. Usually though this process takes months or even years. I was going to get to do this in weeks.

So a bit about the process - to call it agile would be to do it a disservice, to be honest to call it a process would be doing it a disservice. There is no process - not a fixed one anyway. We’d been discussing what we’d like to see on and off over the last few months but we had no best laid plans. I’d been travelling recently and so I didn’t really have time to start thinking about this seriously until about a month ago - but I’m a great believer in leaving ideas and thoughts on that great perculator at the back of your mind. I had a tonne of ideas but Mohammed and his colleague did a great job of cutting these down to the minimum and viable and with that and a few rough sketches we were off to the races.

Nipples

Anybody at this point expecting to hear tales of exquistely crafted code, tightly packaged JS libraries, unit-tests and all the things you are supposed to do, better turn away now. In my other life I mostly make prototypes and demos and get other people to do the crafting (only half-joking). I appreciate that I am spoiled but I feel this quick-fire approach suits the transient world of journalism quite well, where it is all about shipping - there is no room for people of an obsessive-compulsive disposition here. Of course it has to be ‘good enough’ ™ but I guess the stats will be the judge of that.

My approach was not to start from scratch but as I like to have working code from the very beginning - especially when there’s a tight deadline - I took the hyperaudio pad, which contains a lot of the functionality I wanted and started hacking on that. I just did the minimum to remove pieces I didn’t need (display:none is your friend) but it meant I could get something demoable in a day or two, which then allowed Mohammed to feedback and allow us to continually adjust course. This was extreme repurposing and from a code-base perspective a little inefficient. In fact when we shipped we still had blocks of code, structure and styling that were never used, but then again by leaving everything in I would often discover functions that I could repurpose and was very glad about it. In a vague attempt to justify this approach to someone I used the analogy of the male nipple which has no conceivable purpose but in the end is ‘easier’ to ‘leave in’.

The Wolf

You know that bit in Pulp Fiction where things get just a little bit too messy and they have to call in The Wolf? Well luckily for me I have my very own Wolf. My colleague Mark Panaghiston is the author of jPlayer, and as such has the wonderful ability to identify things that can be improved when it comes to web-based audio or video. At about 24 hours to go we realised that although things were working, laptop fans were spinning and things were perhaps a little slow to load. Bringing Mark in also helped me psychologically - suddenly things got git-hubbed and there were two people under pressure coding and bouncing crazy ideas off each other. Hilarity usually ensues - it was fun and we went twice as fast and pretty much implemented every feature I’d hoped to and made for an enjoyable three-legged sprint!

Doing it Live

Of course there has to be a price to pay for all this slackness and due to the plan of releasing immediately after receiving the transcript we had a few problems getting things working initially and sure enough we didn’t test thoroughly enough and similarly to how you only notice your spelling mistakes after you send that important email, we hadn’t noticed a subtle but vital bug until after the interactive had actually been published. The good news was we fixed the bugs and thanks to the fact that we were using client-side only iFramed sandboxed code that lived on a server that Mohammed could easily deploy too, we managed to deploy any changes relatively quickly

Postmortem and Moving On

I mentioned that a large measure of success in the journalism sphere is how many people read/use your work and I was pretty disappointed by the reaction to the interactive. Many people praised it but not that many people used it. To date we’ve had 389 Facebook likes and 203 tweets.

At one point @ajenglish with its 1.3 million followers tweeted it and we only got 14 retweets off the back of that. One theory was that there was lack of interest possibly due to timing caused by the fact that we had to wait almost 18 hours to get the transcript and it was an hour or so before we got everything working as we should. Another theory was that performance was lacking.

You can judge for yourself http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2012/10/20121049528478583.html

But the good news was that the low level analytics I’d built into the app worked and we were able to analyse how people were using the interactive (all this without creating any back-end code). That information was fed-back into the piece as :

The top searched keywords: Economy, Big bird, Obama, Jobs, Iran, Tax, Health, War, Obamacare, Taxes

So we’ve been around the loop another time this week, but less frantically and as I wait for the transcript to come in and write this blog post (when I really should be testing things), my expectations are lower, especially as general interest in this debate seems more subdued, but whatever happens we’ve got two more shots at it after this one! Iterate or die! :)

This is a short follow up post to my previous article : New Ways to Consume Video in which I touch on the importance of the shared experience.

Olympics Schmolympics

I was fascinated not so much by the Olympics itself, but by how much fun people were having sharing the experience. During the live broadcast of the opening ceremony my tweet-stream took on a life of its own - providing more entertainment to me than the event itself and judging by the reactions of others, I wasn’t alone. The problem was that for many not watching the event - this frenzied Twitter activity was — I presume — a little bit annoying.

Lunatics and Asylum

Yesterday I got caught up with the events outside the Ecuadorean embassy where Julian Assange was currently holed-up and awaiting the decision from Quito on his asylum status. I have to admit to being somewhat distracted for an hour or two as I watched events unfurl live on the occupynewsnetwork channel.

A great addition to the experience was the comments coming in live, reactions and additional perspectives of people watching the same thing at the same time! I say great but there was a lot of crazy noise among the signal, but it still added to the experience more than it took away. It was also interesting to clock the ever-fluctuating number of users watching the stream.

The Second Screen is Already Here

So excitingly the potential seems to be there to create very compelling and engaging experience, sure it needs a little refinement and I’m confident changes are being considered to allow you to mute tweets with certain hashtags in Twitter and mute noisy people on UStream’s open chat. Actually UStream includes Twitter comments hashtagged appropriately. Although it remains to be seen how long that will continue to be possible.

For all intents and purposes we are already there. Twitter provides us with a nice decoupled way of using the second-screen but perhaps something like app.net is more suited. Crucially it appears to allow you to take full advantage of its API with few restrictions and subtly but perhaps importantly allows you slightly more characters. Note: app.net is a paid-for service.

We’re Only Human

There’s something about being human that means we love to share certain experiences. Cinemas and live music events are still very popular and I think that if we provide an opportunity for people to watch something together, they will, especially if you allow them to interact with each other. Good odds then that what Apple will do if they get the rights to stream cable TV content through their Apple TV is try and implement some live commenting system.

I’m wondering how we can activate peoples mics upon hearing laughter or applause and add that to sound, but that path is a little fraught.

Mark Boas

So I’m trying to work it out in my head : How many months have I been a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow and how many months have I got left? It’s a ten month gig and I started in February … and damn I’m over half-way already! Oh well, I guess it’s one of those glass-half-empty situations which I need to view as nearly half-full but it’s so hard when the contents are so deliciously intoxicating.

I’m talking about that cocktail of news and technology. It’s a mix alright and although I enjoyed both separately, it wasn’t until I started mixing that I realised how amazing it was.

I have various people to thank for getting me started on what I feel already will be a life long addiction. I’m not going to name them all but let’s just say that both the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation are two amazing organisations to work for and I feel privileged.

So what’s so special about the intersection of news and technology, specifically in my case on-line news and web-technology? What’s the big attraction?

The People

I’ve been lucky enough to be assigned to Al Jazeera English – but I assume this is broadly true of any of the news organisations taking part in the OpenNews initiative – and in my experience journalists are very interesting people. Their mission is to tell stories and they have some very interesting stories, not all of which have been published. Get to know them though and they will weave you a good yarn. One of my Al Jazeera colleagues told me how he met his future wife on Twitter in Palestine trying to figure out where close-by shells he heard were landing. It’s fascinating to talk to people that know so much about what is actually going on the world. It’s an education. Really.

But it doesn’t stop there. I love this idea of a fellowship, you’re not alone on this journey, there are other fellows doing the same sort of thing as you. Fellows seem more than just colleagues – they are co-conspirators and already we’ve become very close. Recently my fellow fellows visited me in Florence – well actually they came to attend a couple of hack-days on the Tor project. They ended up AirBnBing a cool flat right next to Piazza del Duomo and this became the centre of operations for a few days. We hacked on code, we talked (a lot), we ate together. Later on in the week I invited them to my home town and they met my family and told stories to my kids. It was all very relaxed and very very cool. In the end I feel I will end up learning as much from them as the news organisations. 

The Opportunities

There is great opportunity to innovate and see your experiments incarnate on websites that get very many eye-balls and of course get all that lovely feedback. And when I say lovely I don’t mean complimentary I just mean that all feedback is lovely even when it is negative and the more you get – the better. In fact, I think one of the most important things you can do when publishing to a site like AlJazeera.com is measure the usage in as much detail as possible. Certainly for me it’s not often that I will be able to collect so many stats on things that I have had a hand in making.

The unpredictable and somewhat transient nature of current affairs also presents tremendous opportunities. One of the projects I’m working on is an interactive slide-show that displays a series of slowly zoomed images to a YouTube soundtrack. I had just got a rough proof of concept together when my colleague mentioned they had some fresh photos and an audio soundtrack from Syria and that they wanted to create an audio-slide show from it to go live the next day. Frantic hacking of code and content ensued but we got it out in time. I wrote in my last post that situations like these are an opportunity to hone your shipping skills and a good exercise in delivering the minimum viable product.

I hadn’t anticipated that we would be encouraged to travel so much and take part in so many different events. On every single trip I met amazing people, people that were not only technologists, journalists — or some hybrid of the two — but also filmmakers, writers and artists. Believe me when I tell you that attending a technology conference after one of these events feels distinctly one dimensional. Technology to me is something that works best when applied and the more I mix with people outside my technological comfort-zone the more applications I discover.

A Unique Position

Being an OpenNews fellow means you are free to experiment and disrupt and generally cause a little controversy without fear of too much reprisal. It’s a temporary job and you’re being sponsored - what’s the worst that could happen? Actually I think newsrooms need and welcome a bit of disruptive thinking.

I feel I have the freedom to suggest or criticise anything – which is a beautiful freedom to have. More recently I’ve also found myself becoming something of an honest broker as I try and foster collaboration between Al Jazeera and third-parties, be it the Internet Archive or Universal Subtitles (now Amara). I didn’t expect to play matchmaker but it’s a role I thoroughly enjoy.

The biggest coup that I think all the fellows are working towards is to get all the OpenNews news partners working together in some mutually beneficial way. Honestly, I think we have a very good shot at it. We’re trusted by our newsrooms to be given a company email address, they evidently trust us to do what is in their best interests.

The Big Question

So, open, what is open in this context? The big question : What does ‘Open News’ mean – or at least what do I think it means?

I don’t remember ever being told and although we’ve touched upon it in conversation we’ve never really discussed it in great detail, although we may have done one of the times Laurian brought a bottle of whisky to a meet-up. It’s almost as if this is something we were meant to discover along the way and I suspect we all have slightly different interpretations of it. To me it’s many things – yes it’s bringing open source and the open source mentality into the newsroom, it’s also using and sharing open data, it’s opening up discussion, it’s also open license-free content, it’s working in the open, it’s even about being open about what you are doing but more, for me, it’s about opening up journalistic channels to everyone.

Living in Italy I am all too aware of the power that the media can hold and how that power can be abused when wielded by too few people, conversely I followed Al Jazeera and how they opened up and integrated the new channels of social communication during the Arab Spring. I’ve seen the results of both approaches and I’m not saying things are black and white here, but I’m definitely leaning towards the latter.

So here I am, trying to concentrate on the fullness of the glass, but reflecting on the bit that is already in me. What I love about all this, what I really love, is that as part of this whole process you are expected to take the initiative, find your own way, that’s some responsibility, yet as part of OpenNews and the fellowship and the people - above all the people – you know you will always find friendship and support along the way.

The good news — for other people — is that these are rotating positions, which means that if you’re a developer, technologist, engineer or programmer you can apply to be an OpenNews fellow too.

I’m now only moderately jet-lagged from a week spent in the US in which I crammed in two hackathons and a conference. Here’s the scoop.

I was excited to visit Boston and super excited to be invited to the Knight Civic Media Conference hosted at MIT Media Lab. Boston is a fine city with lots of tech-related activity and since my colleague and Boston Globe Open News fellow Dan Schultz had recently graduated from the MIT Media Lab I had an in! Jet-lagged but happy I got my first glimpse of the famous lab when I and another fellow Open News fellow Laurian Gridinoc were invited in to watch Inception with a Rifftrax soundtrack playing over the top it. It sounded like a kinda chilled out media hack and after food, beers and caffeine tablets I found myself in what seemed to be a very cool building with more inventions and gadgets (let’s just call them toys) that you could shake a memory stick at. As I saw more, it soon dawned on me that this was the place dreams were made of and I started to wonder if there were any adults about. As I watched Inception unfold with added Rifftrax sarcasm I started to wonder why I didn’t know more about what was – for me at least — a type of media and technology Mecca.

The next day - a Saturday - we started hacking. The hackathon itself (sponsored by Mozilla) started in the afternoon, but as a warm up exercise and just because it was there, I attended the Hacks/Hackers meet-up immediately before it, in the same building. As you might have guessed from the title, this was an event for journalists and developers. We were lucky enough to have Miranda Mulligan facilitating the event which touched on interesting and useful subjects such as responsive design for online news sites. I guess when you intersect two disciplines you get straight to the point of what is actually useful.

So on to the hackathon on another floor, the now familiar introductions around a circle and rules of engagement, more coffee and away! I didn’t suggest any projects this time as I wanted to work on somebody else’s for a change. The theme was The Story and the Algorithm and there were plenty of cool projects to chose from. I gravitated towards the folk planning to do something with web based video and after a bit of brainstorming we pretty much had a plan and started hacking. We had something working by the end of the day and the next day we finished it off and added the a distinctive front page and lo surfbored.tv was born - it provides a way of surfing YouTube channels passively. Warning - if you tune in to the Andy Carvin channel you may encounter graphic content. It was fantastic to work with a crack unit of developers, designers and journalists which made up our team James Burn, Jesse Shapins, Kara Oehler, Corey Ford and Brian Boyer.

The hackathon ran from 3pm until 4pm the next day (thankfully sleep and socialising were encouraged in-between) after which we were given a whistle-stop tour of the Media Lab by Dan Schultz who you got the impression was very sad to leave the place. But leave he must for now, as he made the error of graduating. Actually I think he has a year’s leeway so watch out for him at future Rifftrax events. After the tour in which I probably lost a boat-load of Twitter followers by compulsively photographing and tweeting EVERY SINGLE LAB we were ushered up to the totally different atmosphere of the conference centre on the top floor and the start of the conference proper. More canape’ than cyberpunk we were provided with refreshments, food, networking opportunities and a great view of the city. All very plush.

The conference took place over the next two days and it was inspiring to once again witness the fusion of journalism and technology. Best of all was the opportunity to liaise with the other four Open News fellows and Dan Sinker our inimitable leader (it’s not often we’re all in the same place). There were many good talks and discussions, I especially appreciated seeing people I knew or had followed from afar get up on stage and do their thing. A couple of the highlights that stood out for me was Erin Kissane’s short but beautifully told story on her relationship with books and how digital books and related services are replacing them. Being a great lover of the papery thing, I very much identified. Long and short - it’s hard to let go but there are just too many advantages to using electronic versions. I also loved Ben Moskowitz  talk on Drones and Journalism - a fascinating subject, somehow I have retained the love of remote control vehicles from my youth.

And so on to Washington DC and the second leg of the tour. Another city, another hackathon - this one was a Mozilla-ITVS-LivingDocs initiative dubbed Silverhacks by organisers Brett Gaylor and John Archer. I travelled down with Zeit Online fellow Cole Gillespie. It was all part of the Silver Docs Indie Documentary Festival  where Cole and I got to work with two local filmmakers - Brandon and Lance Kramer who had spent two years filming material for a documentary exploring “the lives of people employed by the modern-day DC Green Corps, an urban forestry job training program […]” They had some great material and our job as developers over the next couple of days was to help make an interactive piece with a selection of it. The result was a Popcorn.js / Google Map API combo and I think we were all fairly happy with the process and the result (the audio part after the initial video is where all the fun starts).

Overall the trip was extremely worthwhile - amazing people were met and caught up with and some valuable lessons were learned. Hackathons or just hack-days, to me, are a great way to work with other people and concentrate on getting the minimum viable product out in a very short space of time - invaluable practice in fact for working in a newsroom and I feel that although I’m now behind with all my other work I am much better off for the experience. The best part is that both of the things that we ended up making could be used in a news organisation and I hope to incorporate these ‘hacks’ in the near future.

Hack on!

Sometimes I have trouble shipping, I think this is a common problem in the software world. Nothing is ever finished is it?

A great advantage of working in a newsroom is that people are constantly shipping. The product changes from hour to hour, so you need to get on with it and get things out. There’s no choice. I’ve sat with people as they rushed to put together a breaking story, the excitement is quite palpable – very similar to that feeling you get as a developer when you’re about to deploy a new version of your app. That shipping feeling.

There is usually of course a great disparity in time between shipping a story and shipping a software product.

However it is the atmosphere of shipping that interests me and it’s something that I’m really appreciating while working with Al Jazeera English. It has been both motivational and inspirational to work with the people there and to take on-board the culture of ‘getting-things-out-there’.

As a software developer a news website is a perfect place to get your projects seen, viewers will generally appreciate that news is a transient medium and naturally give you a bit of leeway. After all, you’re not creating an app that they have to use every day, maybe just some interactive video thing that they watch one programme on, or an audio slide-show they let play for 5 minutes, a quick visualisation perhaps.

Recently I have been working on an “interactive video thing”. Admittedly it took a few iterations to get right and we took a very reactive approach as we worked through those iterations, varying both content and function. Many features were tried, adjusted or simply removed. It took a while to get right – but as part of that process we demoed and sought feedback from the wider developer community, we even soft-launched a version as suitable content came along. Finally we got somewhere near to where we wanted to be and we launched.

The “Internet Indians: In Contextual Video Player” aims to add a bit of interactivity to the standard video experience. The idea being that while the video is playing additional info is displayed to the viewer. The viewer can then interact with this info using social and playback controls. Social control in this context means that they can easily tweet an excerpt of that additional info and link that to the part of the video it relates to. The player was also built with the consideration that media can be consumed in different forms and on different devices. To this end and with the idea that the viewer should determine the level of interactivity, we baked in a more passive full-screen mode. We also made sure that the app could be ‘detached’ from the page and be used on various mobile devices.

Technology-wise we opted for Popcorn.js which gives us good control over time generated events and as our player framework we used jPlayer which was skinned and extended to work with Popcorn. I can’t help feeling that having an application in a constant state of flux is a good thing. We were used to changing things about completely and managed to incorporate two new building blocks as they came out. The first of these was an IE8shim for Popcorn that together with jPlayer allowed us to target the vast majority of browsers. The second was the excellent Tabletop.js which helps you grab data from a Google Docs Spreadsheet and incorporate it into your application, live. This gave us a rough, ready and entirely usable content management system allowing the editors to quickly and easily add and view content.

We learned a lot developing and a few things deploying, especially about iFrames and cross domain restrictions. There were a few glitches initially, but we soon got them ironed out. Our code was client-side and sand-boxed in an iFrame and so it was very easy to deploy without having to go through the official security procedures that exist for server-side apps.

Agility aside, the biggest lesson learned was not to fear shipping. Whatever you will do will never be perfect and it’s transient anyway.

Now that we have these versions out, we have measured, taken on-board feedback and taken stock, we are very ready to move on, take things to the next level and I’m raring to go – I want that shipping feeling back.

Mark Boas

As you can probably gather from the title, part of my remit as Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow is to investigate and help implement open solutions. Solutions that will not only benefit Al Jazeera English but also other enlightened news organisations. Luckily AJE is already somewhere down the path to openness having released much of their content under a Creative Commons license. This license allows others to use this content without having to worry about royalties - this is of particular interest to me, planning as I am to build tools that will allow anybody to create new content by mashing up existing stuff.

A related approach currently being taken by AJE is to use the open source Drupal Content Management System to power the blogs section of their website. They’ve also had the vision to employ one of the key contributors to the Drupal codebase and community Dick Olsson. Significant customisation of the new CMS will be required in order to meet the requirements of a newsroom and so bringing in someone already active within the Drupal community makes good sense. I spoke to Olsson and his colleague Alaa Batayneh about how they saw this all panning out. We discussed architecture, testing and crucially the release cycle. It seems they already have an agile methodology in place and seeming like two very capable developers I imagine they will be able to push custom code pretty quickly. This is of course essential - as needs of the newsrooms evolve, so must the supporting framework. There will be no quicker evolution than at the very start but no system of this kind is ever finished. This will be real reactive user driven development.

The real beauty of using a popular open source library like Drupal (now on its 7th major iteration) is not only the fact that you start from a solid base but importantly that any modifications you make can be released back out into the ‘wild’ for others to test, enhance and benefit from. The modular approach is key - it means you don’t need to modify the base of the framework and so in theory your modules can be applied to new versions of the base as it is released. Further, by plugging together modules to make solutions that work in a certain environments — in this case news — you can create distributions that address those specific areas of industry. So although the modules are not necessarily news-centric, the distribution they make up is and it is this that AJE and Olsson are keen to release.

Assuming then that Drupal is properly modular and can be easily and comprehensively customised, I would expect an open strategy to yield very real benefits. This is an opportunity to take advantage of an eager and vibrant community of Drupal volunteers working on the continual improvement of the core of the product while initial customisation takes place in-house. Actually I am thinking of creating a couple of modules myself just for the fun of it. When something is both cool and open it draws curious developers to it like bees to honey.

Sometimes for large and established organisations to adopt new ways forward it just needs someone to lead the way, so here’s hoping Al Jazeera will do with systems what they did with content - that way we all win.

Mark Boas

I remember with surprising clarity the day after Jaws first aired on British TV. Those were the days of few channels - BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. I’m pretty sure it was pre Channel 4. While I can recall parts of the film, what I really remember is discussing the film in the playground the next day. Almost everybody had seen it, after all we had been building up to it for about a week. It really was a huge thing for us kids at the time!

Television has changed a fair bit since then, with the exception of a few popular shows and live events we all consume video in different ways and usually at different times. It no longer feels like a shared experience. I miss it and I’d go as far as to say that the large part of the continuing attraction of visiting the cinema is to get that feeling of a shared experience with others.

A few months ago the BBC launched its Global iPlayer App. Italy was one of the first lucky countries to be given access and after trialling it for a month I bought an annual subscription and a rather expensive lead to connect my iPad to my TV. No hesitation. No doubt. It was always worth it. The content is, on the whole, very good and the app is slick and easy enough for a 3 year old to use.

If you read my previous article you’ll know that I’m currently in what I consider the fantastic position of being paid to create new and challenging applications for Al Jazeera English and one that I’m really looking forward to creating is a web based application for viewing the great documentaries Al Jazeera put out.

As most of the content is Creative Commons licensed I don’t have to worry about monetisation, DRM or anything like that. It really is very liberating. I will no doubt be influenced by the silky smooth experience of the BBC iPlayer (Native) App, but I feel we also have an opportunity to take things further.

I am already working on adding to the somewhat passive consumption of video, being very careful not to overwhelm people and detract from what is often a very pleasant passive experience thank-you-very-much. I want to present additional information and material - multiple language subtitles, transcripts, notes and the like. But I also want to add social - or sharing if you like.

The fact that I am making a web app means that I can integrate easily with other web-services such as social networks, so there is that aspect to explore. However I think we also have an opportunity to create some unique mechanisms allowing deeper interaction with people sharing a similar experience - this is the part I’m really looking forward to. Again with a careful eye on not overwhelming or unnecessarily distracting the watcher I’d like to build in some experiments which would allow viewers to interact with each other in real-time where appropriate.

Technology is available now to allow people to chat and comment over the web. Certainly this is an experience we could build in. Imagine if you could see all the people currently watching the same programme as you and interact with them. Of course people are likely to be at different points in the programme but we could present people with viewers at the closest point to them and who knows maybe people will start to decide to watch things at the same time because after all it’s more fun!

We can also allow commenting on media in non real-time. People could leave comments and notes on documentaries while they watch while others could discover these annotations while viewing or peruse them separately. With the advent of second-screen technology (where the second screen is probably a web connected tablet or phone) different interactions will be possible.

It would also probably be worthwhile collecting ratings and suggestions from viewers. We can also measure popularity and gather other metrics which could provide useful feedback to the programme makers.

Certainly a lot to think about and a lot to do and I’m not sure how far I will get but I am very excited about getting started and helping consumers share and become — in their own way — producers. This is what the web is all about.

Mark Boas