Google Maps mashup, Open Calais tagger and Adobe Air toolbar take Telegraph Developer Weekend prizes

Posted by Martin Stabe on 28 April 2008 at 08:47
Tags: New Media, Telegraph.co.uk, telegraph

Philip Skinner of onlinegalleries.com won the first prize at the web developers’ competition held by the Telegraph this weekend.

Skinner’s winning entry, which netted him £600 in vouchers for Apple products, was a mashup that combines YouTube videos and Telegraph.co.uk news stories on a Google Map.

Mark Ng (a consultant to PressGazette.co.uk and the creator of the previous version of this site) won second place for a tool that categorises Telegraph content — along with feeds from BBC News and Google News — using Reuters’ semantic tagging software Open Calais and creates custom RSS feeds for each tag.

A team that developed a Telegraph toolbar written in Adobe AIR
won third place.

The second and third-place winners took home £400 of Apple vouchers.

Other entries included:

• An application that took keywords from the Telegraph’s motoring RSS feed and searched Google Images to find pictures related to the article.
• A downloadable Telegraph RSS reader, video player and offline reader, which Telegraph CIO Paul Cheesbrough described as a “very professional looking application that we’ll certainly take forwards”.
• A desktop widget for viewing Telegraph RSS feeds.
• A tool to attach a blog to Telegraph stories.
• A program to tag videos and finds relevant related search results from Google while the video is playing

Representatives of some of the Telegraph’s technology partners demonstrated some applications of the technologies they had demonstrated on the first day of the competition

Google presented a tool that uses its translation software to automatically translate Telegraph stories into several languages. Adobe, meanwhile, showed off a Telegraph RSS reader.

Telegraph developers weekend: Morning highlights

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 April 2008 at 13:44
Tags: Telegraph.co.uk

This morning’s presentations from Digg, Google, Adobe and Apple have provided some inspiration for potential Telegraph applications.

So far, we’ve heard about Digg’s API, iGoogle, Google Earth, Open Social, Adobe AIR or development tools for iPhone or iPod Touch.

I’ve already mentioned the Google presentation (and have been Twittering some other things). Here are some highlights from the other presentations:

• Apple’s Paul Burford says Safari now has 71 per cent market share in the US mobile browser market. He shows off the iPhone OS and the iPhone developer tools. A new “App Store” will be the only way for end users to load applications onto the phone. The reason, he says, is that this is to protect users from applications that are badly written or do malicious things.
• Adobe’s Xavier Agnetti shows off an Adobe AIR project, currently under development, which will let customers of fashion etailer Anthropologie search its product range by picking a colour from a palette or picking a colour from a local image.
• Digg’s Matt Van Horn shows off how Digg drives traffic to news sites, such as when an eight-year-old Guardian story about Astronaut sex suddenly went viral or how the New York Times’ traffic from Digg grew after its added Digg buttons. More

The visiting developers are now being taken for a tour of the Telegraph newsroom or for lunch.

This afteroon, they will disperse to training sessions with Google, Adobe and APple before the tomorrow’s developer competition is launched this afternoon.

Telegraph developer weekend: Showing off the possibilites of Google Earth

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 April 2008 at 12:15
Tags: Google, Google Maps, Online, Telegraph.co.uk, telegraph

Google’s Chewy Trewhella been presenting the sort of things are possible with the search giant’s various APIs, particularly the geographic mashups in Google Earth.

he acknowledges that despite the vast data available on Google Earth, the company has been having difficulty keeping people interested in using the tool beyond a few initial experiments.

He shows off some projects that use Google Earth to display the sort of information that might be interesting to a news site:

• Property website Nestoria used the Google mapping API to build its site and plot different layers of information in various neighbourhoods.
• A tool that explains the tomb of Tutankhamun in three dimensions.
• A layer that shows global oil consumption as a bar graph where each country’s height reflects its consumption.
• A layer that shows the effects of rising sea levels. He demonstrates that if the sea level ere to rise by 20m, the Google and Telegraph offices in Victoria would be one tiny island of dry land in London.
• Fboweb.com plots aircraft flight data in real time, plotting airplanes’ locations and flightpaths with planes at the correct altitude.

Newspapers use online audio and video to report on ‘anti-teen’ gadget’s noise

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 February 2008 at 11:23
Tags: Online, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, audio, video

National and regional newspaper websites have been using audio and video capabilities to good effect today in their coverage of the controversy over the “Mosquito” device, which uses a high-pitched sound audible only to young people in order to keep teenagers from congregating.

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Top UK news stories on Digg in 2007

Posted by James Ball on 10 January 2008 at 08:15
Tags: BBC, Digg, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mail Online, Telegraph.co.uk, The Sun Online

The social bookmarking and news recommendation site Digg, which determines its front-page content by allowing its users to vote for (or “Digg”) links posted by other users, has gained a reputation for generating huge spikes in traffic to web sites that stike the Diggers’ fancy.

So what stories have the often-geeky Diggers chosen in 2007? Surprisingly, perhaps, every one of the top ten most-Dugg stories from the UK comes from a traditional news website. It’s a heady mix of sex, violence and astrophysics. Take a look for yourself:

(more…)

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Hillary campaign excluded UK journalists, says Telegraph correspondent

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 January 2008 at 15:07
Tags: Guardian Unlimited, Mail Online, Telegraph.co.uk

Telegraph correspondent Toby Harnden, blogging from the Iowa caucuses earlier this week, notedhow unhelpful the Hillary Clinton campaign had been to foreign journalists — in stark contrast to the victorious Barak Obama campaign:

The Hillary Clinton staff excluded all foreign press from their “victory” celebration. A smug, humourless functionary called Lane told me and my colleague Alex Spillius that 700 US national press were allowed but no nasty foreigners – not even the BBC.

He said that there was foreign pool coverage for video and tv – but no print pool – explaining, condescendingly, that “If you think about it, there couldn’t be foreign print pool because it would have to be in lots of different languages.” Well, how about print pool in English, buddy? He gave me the email of an AP correspondent who was the “national” pool. I emailed her asking for the pool copy. Did I get it? Of course not.

Contrast that with the Obama staff. Senior aides chatting away to big shot and small fry reporters alike. Credentials and access to as many reporters and members of the public who wanted it. Throughout the Iowa campaign, Obama volunteers would thank us for coming, accompany us to the correct entrance if we asked the way. Clinton staffers treated us as an inconvenience at best and at worst like a bad smell.

As this exchange was taking place, an American reporter I know came over to us and said: “Get used to it – this is what the next eight years could be like.” Except that after tonight’s result it looks like we won’t have to get used to it after all.

The old division between foreign and domestic press just doesn’t make sense in the Internet age. As the blog Britain and America notes, the Clinton campaign’s attitude might not be such a good idea given the large readership of British news web sites among the American electorate.

They are right: after all, last summer the sixth and seventh most-read newspaper web sites in the United States were called Mail Online and Guardian Unlimited.

@Society of Editors - ‘Google is hugely dangerous’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2007 at 12:09
Tags: Google, Google Maps, Google News, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph, video

An organisation that produces no news at all is the third most trusted brand for delivering news, Phil Harding, notes from the floor, and asks the panel to respond. The answers suggest that the debates about the role of the seach engine have moved on about the relatively simple concerns about driving traffic versus the question of whether copyright law demands aggregators should seek permission before indexing sites.

“We’ve only recently woken up to the problem with Google,” says Peter Wright of the Mail on Sunday says. “Things move quickly, and what seems like a big threat To get traffic on a web site you have to publish free and encourage as many people as possible to read it. We encourage people like Drudge to aggregate our content because it means more people are going to come to the site.”

He says: “Things move quickly, and what seems like a big threat To get traffic on a web site you have to publish free and encourage as many people as possible to read it. We encourage people like Drudge to aggregate our content because it means more people are going to come to the site.”

Mark Dodson of GMG regional and Telegraph editor-in-chief and Will Lewis agreed that it is important to driving traffic.

But Anne Spackman gave the most forceful answer: “I think Google is hugely dangerous“, noting the search giant’s moves into collecting ever more personal information. “It’s the number one topic of conversation in News Corp.”

Speaking to Press Gazette afterward, Spackman said Google was now having a significant effect on the way Times Online does business. It’s dominance of the search market means the slightest changes to its search algorithm has major impact on traffic, she said, pointing to last moth’s change that had a major impact on the Washington Post.com’s PageRank. Google’s ownership of Doubleclick means it now controls an enormous part of advertising inventory. Google Maps, Spackman predicted, will transform local newspapers as Google enters the geographically-defined advertising market.

Online Video

Responding to another question, about online video, Spackman sas one of the most successful pieces of video on the web site was created when they handed Baghdad correspondent Stephen Farrell a camera and said “point it at interesting stuff”. This resulted in some amazing detail about everyday life in Baghdad, such as private military company vehicles with signs warning anyone approaching within 20 feet will be shot.

Will Lewis, meanwhile, says the advantage newspaper video has over television is that it is non-linear, allowing people to jump around in the running order. Telegraph TV recorded 2 million downloads this month, he says.

@Society of Editors - Football economics coming to online journalism salaries?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2007 at 11:14
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Mail on Sunday, Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, Society of Editors, Society of Editors, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph

The final session of the conference is “The Future is ours: 2020 Vision”, which is billed as “lifting the covers on editors’ crystal balls”.

Appropriately, the panel will be chaired by Martin Stanford, presenter of Sky.com News, the rolling news channel’s interactive programme which covers the most popular stories and debates on the web. He reveals the the Madeleine McCann story has constantly lead Sky news traffic, regardless of what else is going on. Meanwhile, the revelation that the home secretary smoked cannabis, which was a massive story everywhere else, “scored an absolute zero”.

Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of Times Online, says the paper has been digitising its archive, which will add 20 million items to its website, which already has 750,000 “bits of content” at any one time. It is noticable how litttle the publication has changed over the first 200 years, she says, but the pace of change has increased dramatically.

Her most startling prediction for the future is the rise of football economics in journalism. Spackman describes a “Drogba effect” where pay in journalism will be greatly skewed towards stars who are able to bring in a lot of traffic online.

Spackman repeats her comments from last week about the type of journalists she is seeking to recruit for Times Online: “The people who are by far the most valuable are those who combine journalism skills with real technical skill.”

Her prediction for 2020 reflects her view that many people with these attributes are currently men: “I think this will be an industry rather more full of men than it is now.”

Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, which includes the host Manchester Evening News, says things have changed dramatically in this sector. Cover prices were static for years, and companies relentlessly measured themselves against the semi-annual ABC figures. That has all changed recently, with the introduction of part-free distribution and new online products.

“Video will be a key aspect of every web site we produce,” Dodson says.

Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph Group, outlines the trends he expects in the next few years:

1. Localisation - Good news for the regional press, because there will be greater focus on customising news by location.
2. Personalisation - Mobile and other personal gateways will become the preferred medium tailored to the individuals
3. Enablers - Rather than handing down pearls of wisdom, and will provide practical help and user-generated
4. Double media - Video and text will not be enough. They want to read as the watch.
5. Customer obsessiveness - It is no longer a secret what our readers actually want. We will sell more papers where people now shop. “Our customers will be as much outside the UK as within it,” he concludes.

Telegraph and ITN extend online video deal

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 August 2007 at 14:33
Tags: Brightcove, ITN, ITN On, Telegraph.co.uk, video

ITN has extended its agreement with the Telegraph Media Group to supply video for Telegraph.co.uk.

As part of the new agreement, ITN’s multimedia division, ITN On, will launch a Telegraph rolling news programme in early September.

Another new show, On This Day, will use archive video footage to recount an event from history that took place each day of the year. Additional programmes — in the arts, fashion and travel — will be launched on Telegraph.co.uk by end of the year, according to an ITN news release.

ITN will also continue to make video programmes for the Telegraph site, including the weekly Fantasy Football Friday and the daily Business Show.

The Telegraph-ITN video service uses technology from Brightcove, which has been expanding its presence in the UK, including the recent launch of a UK office.

ITN On also supplies video for Mirror.co.uk.

Oh, hai Telegraph editor. Can I has Nazi catz search traffik?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 28 June 2007 at 16:43
Tags: Journalism, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online

The new editor of Telegraph.co.uk, Marcus Warren, has been blogging for a week now.

Another feed to add to the newsreader, even if it has already had a post about cats that look like Hitler.

Despite its title, that post is actually very interesting. It seems a mole at Times Online has been supplying Victoria Place with top search terms, a rather handy piece of intelligence for Telegraph.co.uk’s search engine optimisation efforts.

The Wapping spy reported that the terms “cats that look like Hitler”, yields a post Daniel Finkelstein’s Times comment blog on the first page of Google. Well, it did anyway, until Warren acted on his newfound intel.

“I’m just a bit browned off that the ‘cats that look like Hitler’ traffic was going to Times Online, not us,” wrote Warren.

The title of his post on the subject of course, ensured that that was taken care of the next time Google’s spider came around. Now Warren’s post is near the top of the Google search restults for that phrase.

Good to see the Telegraph so doggedly pursuing the fascist feline fan search demographic. I’d guess lolcats yield a better CPM, though.

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