"In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken."

"The point of the matter is this: user-centered design isn’t simply a luck of the draw; its an iterative process that involves a complex interplay between designers and the users for which they design."

"Horling – a developer with Google's personalized search team – said that up to one in five searches are tailored to the user's particular location, web history, or online contacts. "As it stands today," Horling explained, "between these three techniques, just about every user who's engaging with Google search today is affected.""

"On the other hand, the politics of the paper's owner seem to matter much less. For example, once one controls for geographic factors, there is no statistically significant correlation between the newspaper's own slant (horizontal axis below) and average slant of papers in other communities owned by the same owner (vertical axis)."

“How slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way they’ve chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. "

"It turns out that those stories that indicated they contained videos were shared more than the average story on Facebook, while they were actually shared less than the average story on Twitter. This is likely because the Facebook platform makes it easy to embed multimedia content into updates while Twitter does not."

""Advertising alone is not going to sustain scale of newsrooms," he says. But growing a subscription base allows advertisers to know exactly who it is that they are selling to, which increases its value. "If you have an audience that is paying for your journalism they are engaged and that is an important message for advertisers.""

""We are not planning to close any further titles," said Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror. "The major activity [in terms of cost cutting] was at the begining of the year [2009 when the ad slump hit hardest] and while I won't say we won't close anything in the future ever, we have no plans. There is [also] no redundancy programme planned"."

""We certainly don't believe throwing up a paywall is the right strategy," she said. "It won't be possible to charge for general content, I can't see why people would pay for high quality content when it is free elsewhere … the BBC is an obvious one here.""

"If social sites, including Twitter, are a new center — Nick Negroponte’s “Daily Me” morphed — that’s a new challenge, and maybe opportunity, for the news industry. The challenge: getting the news to where the readers are hanging out, and figuring out to monetize there. The opportunity: If properly seeded in the social sites, the readers themselves do the (free) marketing and distribution of the content…"

"Right now we don’t have any sort of immediate plans [to charge for web content], but we’re definitely thinking about what new products we can create, including on the web,” Sheikholeslami told me. “If it makes sense to charge for it, we would.”"

"The BBC? Paying for advertising on Google?"

"Reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber have created a guide that reverse-engineers how they reported a year-and-a-half-long investigation on how states handle disciplinary action against nurses. The results of their work were alarming, and its consequences were swift…"

"As you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend a significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. "

"The investment research firm sees value in her investigative work, particularly Leder’s ability to find useful, “actionable” information. “I think there’s been a discussion about whether information has been commoditized or not,” Morningstar’s Kunal Kapoor told me. “Some news may have been, but that’s just half the story.” "

"Bookmark the pictures you like around the web. Enjoy people's favorite images."

“The daft thing is, we all knew that it was going to end. We knew that the internet would eventually take away our ad revenue; that classified would go first, followed by property and sits vac. And yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t plan for the future or invest in innovative content and means of delivery. We just carried on snuffling up the profits like pigs around a trough.”

The number one rule when responding to all criticism, even the negative type, is to stay positive. Adding more negativity to the conversation by letting yourself be drawn into a fight with a customer or user will only reflect poorly on your business.

"The crowdfunded journalism site Spot.us unveiled changes to the site today based on feedback from its users and writers. Users can now easily follow updates on a reporter’s pitch and donate their time or expertise to a story, instead of just their money."

"Young people are particularly sceptical: almost two-thirds of 18-29-year-olds believe that networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are an ‘overrated and often pointless’ way of carrying out political debate. Only nine per cent see such websites as ‘useful’ for campaigning."

"Join us for a sneak preview of Drupal Gardens Beta. We give a complete walk through of the new features planned for version 1.0. One of the primary goals of Drupal Gardens is to empower users to quickly and easily assemble socially smart and powerful Drupal 7 websites without programming. "

"Think of it this way: social media is about the people who use it. If you dismiss Yahoo or MySpace as yesterday’s news you’re essentially dismissing those people, suggesting that their interactions, creativity and choices are of zero interest because of the platform they’ve chosen. It’s hard to think of anything less in the ‘social’ spirit."

The Chart API provides Image Charts which are rendered by a Google chart server in response to a simple URL request. Image Charts are fast to render and can be easily emailed and printed. In addition to the extensive gallery of charts, this server now also provides dynamic icons, QR codes, and math formulas.

"Too many news startup ideas fail because they take an upside down approach. Journalists think of a product and then decide who to make it for. Instead you need to define your audience first – and then ask “what do they need?”."

"You sign up for usability testing, we notify users, you watch and listen to them use your site, you read their summary."

"Users are often in a rush to complete their task and reach their goal. By removing obstacles and making the web-form easier to complete, we increase the likelihood of visitors reaching your conversion page. So how can we increase the likelihood that visitors will reach your goal page and find your web-forms easier?"

"# What draws your attention?
# What do you like on this page?
# Where do you click for information about X?
Wouldn't it be great to be able to ask your website visitors questions like these or any other question?"

If there is one undercurrent of design these days it is this: design is becoming more strategic and thus more important to business success. With this power comes great responsibility. As designers we must be accountable for what we produce, and that means we must start aligning our work with concrete business metrics.

The amazing thing about our business is we get think about (and sometimes work with) emerging technologies and trends. Here are some other important trends for the next few years: gestural and multi-touch interfaces, social networks, game design. Apple's tablet, everything to do with geolocation, multi-channel customer experience.

UX London is a unique three-day event combining inspirational talks with in-depth workshops presented by some of the industry’s biggest names.

However, if every reporter or editor has the same interests and thinks alike, the newsroom will unknowingly and collectively produce the same stories and target the same audience, leaving other sections of the readership or viewership underserved and underrepresented.

"Relationships. That’s what the business of media must become. In our New Business Models for News, we began — just began — to project the value of the relationship a new media service can have in its community: creating events; educating; gathering and selling data; selling goods directly (as the Telegraph does, quite successfully); running networks to help others succeed; saving money by collaborating. This is why the notion of charging your best customers — cutting off your richest relationships with a toll booth — seems so dangerous to me. "

"Hyundai's US arm has nearly 3,000 "followers", but Joel Ewanick, its group vp of marketing, was unsure about the benefits it provided for the automaker… By contrast, Facebook, where Hyundai has 14,000 "fans", has proved to be more useful from a marketing perspective, having adopted many of Twitter's best features…"

"I have been a member of hunch from the very beginning, it is such a shining example of social community building I decided to note some of it’s most useful features to act as a resource for other social site designers. "

This is a simple, potentially effective technique. But of course you need to know who your visitor is. That’s simple enough if you require your users to register on your site, or you know who they are because they log into your site via Facebook Connect or some other third-party connection.

What my old boss is up to…

“All the News That’s Fit without Print”

"Next a walkie-talkie preamble from the auteur, pacing steadily towards the lens, punctuating every other sentence with a hand gesture…" – superb!

"Its website, launched in December 2009, says that owners GPG UK plan to launch the Manchester Weekly, Liverpool Weekly and Birmingham Weekly by 2012."

"However HTFP understands from other media sources in the West Midlands that yesterday's reports were accurate and that Mr Reeves has already begun selling advertising for the new site. "

"Maybe not giving me a right to respond is totally legal. Maybe not even telling me there was going to be an article is totally legal. Publishing my photograph without my knowledge or consent probably is totally legal. But I don’t know how it could be. I’ve never ever felt this low."

"Grimshaw, who has outlined micropayment plans in the past, said that a day pass model for access to online and mobile content would be the first step for 2010."

Since 2008 Sandhu has been chief information officer and general manager/senior vice president, digital, for Star TV in both India and Hong Kong. He established the digital division for Star, which like News International is owned by News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) in India in 2007.

"People want to see a little humanity behind the corporate mask and respond better to newsletters written by one particular person at a company who they can get to know over time through little personal comments in the emails."

"In terms of getting new messages, the MySpace Shot is the single most effective photo type for women. " (But if you're a man it's better to show off your pet than your abs!)

"I started this list when I spoke to students at a high school journalism conference on how it is possible to do everything you need as a journalist by using free products. Since then, this list continues to grow! It can be helpful for anyone trying to do good journalism on a tight budget."

Associated Northcliffe Digital, the digital media arm of DMGT, has acquired the stake in Globrix for an undisclosed sum. AND intends to move Globrix into its Digital Property Group which includes Findaproperty, Primelocation and Findahome.

"Outsell, a research group, reported this week that only 6 per cent of US online readers say they would pay online news sites if they charged. If we are to take the figure at face value (which I don't think we should), then The Guardian could get 2.1m people to subscribe to it online, making it highly profitable at a stroke. Even 1 per cent would give it a subscription base of 350,000."

In the future, both Twitter and Google hope to improve the relevance of search returns in all contexts by adding geo-location data, which can be added to postings sent from smart phones. In general, real-time search "is evolving," says Dylan Casey, the Google product manager for real-time search. "I talk with the guys at Twitter on a regular basis to learn where the feature is going. We get feedback from them, we give them feedback, and our engineers collaborate. It is truly symbiotic."

"The report said 25 per cent of companies reported a fall in total spending, while 18 per cent reported an increase. The balance of -7 is a marked improvement from the -15 the previous quarter and was "the highest since the first quarter of 2008, and well above the record lows seen in late 2008 and early 2009"."

"Guardian.co.uk says it’s sold 68,979 copies of its premium iPhone app since launching in December. At £2.39 a pop in the UK (and $3.99 in U.S.), that’s £164.859 in income over the month, or, at that rate, £1.97 million (about $3.2 million) a year."

"Caroline Little, chief executive of Guardian America, told Press Gazette the company did not have any specific plans but was exploring possibilities for New York-based PaidContent. She said: "We have thought about the possibility of charging for some of our content on PaidContent.org, but the first thing we wanted to do was hear from our readers.""

"Rusbridger said: "It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things." He conceded that, whilst pay walls are unlikely to be erected around Guardian.co.uk, it was good that journalism was "trying different things.""

"Our strategy is to build the metered model while we remain focused on making NYTimes.com more compelling, interactive and entertaining, providing many more reasons for online audiences to visit our site and stay longer. In the weeks ahead, we will be adding resources to achieve these critically important goals. "

"Its not summer yet, but that's a lot of swallows. With respect to the End of FreeConomics, we hate to say we told you so, but…well, we told you so Till the next rush of dumb money hits the Tech market, of course…. "

AOP and PPA have announced today that AOP – previously a subsidiary of PPA – has formally become an independent membership organisation, as of 1st January 2010.

The document states that the trade negotiations are a "unique opportunity [for Canada] to upgrade its IPR regime despite local anti-IPR lobbying." It includes an assessment of recent copyright reform efforts, noting that two bills have died due to "political instability." The document adds that the copyright reform process was revived in 2009 with the national copyright consultation, but notes dismissively it may have been a "tactic to confuse."

"We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in building a collaborative relationship with you."

"1. Convince your boss this stuff is for real, and that if you haven't jumped on it, you're late.
2. Profile your customer base, and see what they're ready for, before planning a project to reach out to them. (After all, People is the first step in the POST process.)
3. Segment your audience; build different strategies for different segments. (Social is so prevalent now that a single approach for your company is probably too broad.)"

"Facebook, Twitter etc clearly rapidly will need to accelerate a mobile application strategy will that drive Location based usage.
But the sweet spot will be Location Based gaming, one wonders what Google, Facebook et al will launch in this space. "

"The iTrust creates a locked dummy screen to prevent access to text messages, emails or social networking accounts, and stores a record of every button pressed on the display."

"The pace of change for hyper-local news sites and related businesses is dizzying.
It's hard to keep up, especially if you try to pay attention to business moves made by large players, as well as innovations that bubble up from local, independent news sites."

"For me 'the curation gap' is that, at present, most mainstream media organisations seem lacking in the tools, or the will, or both, to bring the best of the voices in those niches and make them relevant to the mass audience."

Turn Twitter lists to RSS

Amusing breakdown of a Sunday Express article on Twitter.

There are questions about how the internet has already changed the Times, and how the dawning world of niche-reader taxation will change journalists’ ideas about what they do and who they write for. And there are questions about how we ourselves see the “public” we are a part of.

"If an institution is all geared up for a future that is like the past and the future changes radically, then the institution becomes an anachronism, like a Motorola or GM."

"Risk aversion is the number one reason that people and organizations fail to tap the full power of social media. People often tell me that they can't afford to make a mistake online, because any error will be just one Google search away for anyone to see, forever."

"…many organizations don't spend the time and effort to turn their data into dollars. They don't look at their network of relationships as a way to gather new and interesting information about the market and their customers. Those few who do, enjoy higher margins, more agility, and less volatility — because they can react faster and better."

"With each Daily Wave, RedEye connects with their readers and builds a sense of community. The RedEye is also demonstrating that is sees itself as more than a newspaper and more than a blog by embracing innovative technology that encourages a continuous and dynamic discussion about the news."

To survive, newspapers need to rethink radically not only their business models, but also how they manage their businesses; they need to overhaul outdated organisational structures; they need to consider how they relate to all their employees, to third-party providers of content and services, and to individuals with whom they may have no contractual arrangement whatsoever.

Most crucially, they need to rethink how they relate to their communities of readers, subscribers, and users, when they know next to nothing about members of their digital audience. They need to identify their most loyal users and then work harder to meet their individual needs.

Some fantastic pictures, drawn and uploaded live by the @drawnalism team at Journalism.co.uk's News Rewired event.

A common mistake made when first venturing into user generated content is to focus on the technology, rather than the reasons for using it. “We need to have our own social network!” someone shouts. But why? And, indeed, how do you do so successfully?

"View satellite photos from GeoEye that show Port-au-Prince before and after the Jan. 12 earthquake."

"National Geographic rebuilt the site internally using an open-source framework called “Django.” This approach lets the developers plug new modules easily into the site, like upcoming community and social media features. It also allows other developers to work with the company to advance new features. "

"Michael’s title is unimportant, what matters is the food. Undoubtedly, it is possible to learn to be a better cook, just as you can learn to be a better journalist. But I don’t mind whether the writer of a story or the guy with the camera defines themselves as a journalist, a photographer, an eye-witness or what."

"We will always tell stories. We will always need story-tellers. Bye bye to the traditional ways of doing it – you were great, you really were. Hello wonderfully connected new world."

"Unfortunately, too many print and broadcast veterans don't want to change their production model. So they instead devote their time and energy toward getting someone to fund another doomed quest to look for their revenue model Holy Grail.
There is no new revenue model for journalism. That's why we have to find new production models that work. "

"The site, which primarily serves readers in the Black Country and the broader West Midlands, has partnered with Trinity Mirror to use its Local Mole business directory and added a new motoring channel after forging an agreement with Motors.co.uk."

"The Wall Street Journal was also one of the first organizations to use the Loomia Facebook App to show users which WSJ stories were read by their friends. (They eventually took it down because of performance issues.) Murray disclosed that the paper is in the process of closing a new partnership with Facebook, though he won't reveal details."

"Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community's activities to expose content you may have otherwise missed. "