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 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.

@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.

Nominees announced for newspaper innovation gong

Posted by Martin Stabe on 21 March 2007 at 13:20
Tags: BBC, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Guardian Unlimited, MEN Lite, Manchester Evening News, Newbury Weekly News, Newbury today, Pinkun.com, Reading Chronicle, Sunday Telegraph, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph, thelondonpaper

Reading Chronicle editor Simon Jones has good reason to be boastful: his paper’s Polish edition has been nominated for The Fujifilm Grand Prix Award for the “most significant contribution to future newspaper success” at the 2007 Newspaper Awards.

The Kronika Reading is certainly in good company. Other nominees for the award are the Telegraph’s new newsroom, the Financial Times’ mobile news reader, the Guardian’s afternoon PDF edition G24, and free papers MEN Lite and thelondonpaper.

Meanwhile,
BBC News Oniline, Guardian Unlimited, the Manchester Evening News, Newbury Today, Pinkun.com, Telegraph.co.uk, and Times Online are nominated for the “Electronic News Site of the Year”, an award described as “The Press Computer Systems Award for all electronic news sites”.