Robots! by STCroiss/Jacob Fredrickson on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

• Is Wikipedia controlled by bots? Apparently, yes, if you read this BBC article.
  

  “We had a joke that one day all the bots should go on strike just to make everyone appreciate how much work they do,” says Chris Grant, a 19-year-old student in Perth, Australia who is on the Wikipedia committee that supervises the bots.

• Does this very blog post make any change on people’s behavior? What happens is you read or watch news? NYT’s Aron Pilhofer – which I had the pleasure to meet during the 2010 scoopcamp in Hamburg – is in search for “the Right Metric for News“. Greg Linch has some background on this. [via @dvg on Twitter]
• Web radio becomes mainstream: 12 million people in Germany listen to internet radio streams several times per week according to a survey by the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, Bitkom.

• During the Arab Spring NPR’s Andy Carvin‘s Twitter accountbecame a “hub” for breaking news. A very interesting research paper by Alfred Hermida, Seth C. Lewis and Rodrigo Zamith titled “Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions” [PDF] looks into the sources which Carvin used. The key findings are:
  

  Andy Carvin offers a case study of how a media professional operates within such a complex and fluid media system. Newman describes such professionals as “multi-media writers and curators, who can synthesize events in real-time with the best of the backchannel from social media” [...]

  In light of our findings, Carvin emerges as a central node in a networked media environment—one trusted to authenticate, interpret, and contextualize information flows on social awareness streams, drawing on a distributed and networked newsroom where knowledge and expertise are fluid, dynamic and hybrid.

• Do we need a code of ethics for drone journalism? I think: yes! This is a first draft (author not mentioned in the text), touching points like privacy, safety and newsworthiness.
• This is neat: Conway’s game of life on Google. Back in my computer science class at school we had to code that in Turbo Pascal.
• “This is a title” – a Buzzfeed.com story without any content but interesting user comments. Is this the future of journalism?

- Angela Stringfellow has collected some ideas on “How To Write Attention Grabbing Blog Post Titles”

- Russia seeks for new ways to censor the internet, to block access to websites containing “banned pornography, drug ads and promoting suicide or extremist ideas.” Is this a new version of the Great Chinese Firewall? [via venturebeat]

Summary Risk Factors

Our business is subject to numerous risks described in the section entitled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this prospectus. You should carefully consider these risks before making an investment. Some of these risks include:

• If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed;

• We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising. The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business;

• Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results;

• Facebook user growth and engagement on mobile devices depend upon effective operation with mobile operating systems, networks, and standards that we do not control;

• We may not be successful in our efforts to grow and further monetize the Facebook Platform;

• Our business is highly competitive, and competition presents an ongoing threat to the success of our business;

• Improper access to or disclosure of our users’ information could harm our reputation and adversely affect our business;

• Our business is subject to complex and evolving U.S. and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters. Many of these laws and regulations are subject to change and uncertain interpretation, and could harm our business;

• Our CEO has control over key decision making as a result of his control of a majority of our voting stock;

• The loss of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl K. Sandberg, or other key personnel could harm our business;

• We anticipate that we will expend substantial funds in connection with tax withholding and remittance obligations related to the initial settlement of our restricted stock units (RSUs) approximately six months following our initial public offering;

• The market price of our Class A common stock may be volatile or may decline, and you may not be able to resell your shares at or above the initial public offering price

Ah, and they have Zuck’s signature as well:

PS: The credit for the headline goes to Lucy Chambers. It is so great, I had to copy it…

Cloud computing is great – but I rather prefer to have as much control over my content as possible. So I decided to use my WordPress CMS and not Storify. It is easy – you just need to have some Plugins to make your blog more storify-ish.

Here is a list what you need:

1. Twitter: Blackbird Pie
The plugin (you can find it here) lets you add Twitter Tweets to your post quiet easily with one click on the button in your WYSIWYG-Editor. You just have to know either the URL of the tweet, the ID of the tweet or the Twitter username and – voilà – the tweet is displayed within your post:

It’s not a graphic but a text – so, your visitors can copy or retweet it with just one click:

Yes, It's True: Ben & Jerry's Introduces 'Schweddy Balls' Ice Cream Flavor http://n.pr/qQn2C9

September 7, 2011 10:35 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@nprnews

NPR News

 2. Videos: Viper’s Video Quicktags

You want to add a video from Youtube, Vimeo, Google Video, Flickr and other platforms to your post? Just add the plugin (download it here) and click one of the buttons in your WordPress editor. Paste the URL to the video, change the dimensions and you’re done! Unfortunately there is not way of searching for videos within the plugin, you always have to use the Youtube search functionality.

3. Creative-commons licensed photos: Photo Dropper

I really like this plugin (download it here)! You can easily search the Flickr photo database and embed a Creative Commons licensed photo (in small, medium or large) to your posting. The advantage of the plugin is that the CC code is automatically integrated in your posting as well – so you don’t have to take care of that.

4. Maps: MapPress

MapPress is a simple and slim plugin to add Google Maps to your blog (download it here). It will add a new form below your WordPress text editor, you just have to click “New Map”. You can search and then add several locations to your map, decide which detail should be displayed and then add it to your posting.

If you need more functions try XML Google Maps.

Do you know more plugins for curation journalism? Let me know!

Q: Your 300th episode is coming up. Congratulations on that! You started with your podcast when the housing bubble in the US collapsed and just last week the Dow Jones Index dropped some hundred points. So, obviously there seems to be no end in sight…

Adam Davidson (c) NPR

Adam Davidson: I think we will have to believe that things will return to normal someday, but that day seems far away. Certainly it will take years and not weeks or month. It is very shocking; if you told me on the first podcast that on the 300^th we would still be in the midst of this deep crisis I would not have believed it.

Please let us know: How bad is the situation really?

I like to think in terms of time spans. I do think we in the rich world, in Germany or the USA, we are very lucky to be born in countries that have seen sustained economic growth for decades and in some cases many centuries. Over the course of our lifetime we will have every reason to believe that that will happen again. But this now is not just a short blip, this is going to dramatically effect entire generations. Here in the US we still have to cope with the problems of foreclosure. There are still 30-40 percent of our houses for sale — that is a huge number of houses. Europe has in many ways even harder problems. The Europeans have to somehow figure out who and what they are and who is in the club and who is not in the club. I hate to make economic forecasts because it is just a guarantee to be wrong but we definitely have years and years to come with a fairly uncertain future.

Everything started in 2008 with the award-winning NPR radio special called “A Giant Pool of Money”. How did you get the idea to start the bi-weekly “Planet Money” podcast?

I was not someone who grew up fascinated by economics. My father is an actor and my mother is in dance and I was brought up to think that finance and business is a very boring thing. I learned to be really interested in it but I was always frustrated that business and finance coverage is for insiders. If you don’t understand the secret language then it is really sort of useless for you. So, for a long time I’ve wanted to find a way to do business and economics coverage for a broad audience, for non-experts. “Giant Pool of Money” was a fantastic “proof of concept”. It proved to me, to my bosses, to Alex Blumberg and “This American Life” that it is possible to do this, to make finance and even the most obscure parts of finance interesting and maybe even fun and enjoyable. ‘Giant Pool of Money’ was really a huge event in mine and Alex’s life. There were many people saying: Thank you for making things clear that I never understood. So, it became a very natural outgrowth at that point perusing this dream.

Broadcasting executives here in Europe would hardly agree to spend money on something you cannot broadcast in your normal program but which is “internet only”. How did your bosses react?

I think there is a general recognition that the days of what we call terrestrial radio are limited. We don’t know if it’s two years or five years or twenty years but we do know that we live in a world where you need to reach people digitally. For my bosses at NPR “Planet Money” it is a great experiment in what audio can sound like and what the experience can be like for on-demand audio. By definition, broadcast reaches a large audience, which means that it has to be attractive to a large number of people. Whereas in A podcast, since everyone of your listeners has chosen to listen to you – they’ve taken action –I think you can be a little more niche, a little more narrow, you can show you personality more maybe and you can be a little ‘geekier’. NPR is very generous in supporting it even though our primary output is not on our main radio programs.      

You said the “Planet Money” podcast is kind of a ‘niche’ program. Does it mean that you get more feedback or that you have fans have a stronger connection to your podcast?

To me it is amazing: When I am on the big shows like ‘Morning Edition’ – those shows get up to 25 million listeners a week. And I might get a few emails a year. For the podcast it is 150,000 to 200,000 listeners — for a podcast it’s a good number. But we get dozens and dozens of emails every day. Very smart emails, very interesting questions. It is a totally different relationship, much closer, for me much more exciting with our podcast listeners.

…even with professionals from the financial world? What do they think about “Planet Money”?

That has been a surprise to me! I thought our audience would be non-experts. But we discovered that there are a lot of professionals who really like us a lot. And I think that’s because finance is so specialized. If you are a bond trader you maybe only trade US bonds or emerging market bonds or corporate bonds. It’s the same for a stock trader. So, nobody knows everything about finance, so it is helpful if someone explains the overall vision of how it all comes together.  

Of course you talk a lot about the US and the world’s economy, the financial markets, the debt problems and so on. But you had other topics a well, for instance you described why pre-school is important to the economy, how Bitcoin works or about Shopping Center Economics. Where do your ideas come from?

One of the things we wanted to build into planet money from the beginning is that every story we do we do because somebody on the team is really interested. Like every reporter, for a long time I had to cover things that I didn’t care about because they had to be covered and that was my job. With “Planet Money” we wanted to make it so that we are always interested, we only cover things that are exciting to us. You cannot make a podcast that is exciting and engaging on a subject you yourself don’t think is interesting. That was the beginning. We then put together a team of I think the very best people in public radio and radio in America, just amazing curious people who really want to understand the world. And we let them follow their curiosity. For example Alex Blumberg has a new baby, so Alex became really fascinated by this preschool study and just decided to understand it better and better. And most of them have that feel. Even right now we are planning so Europe coverage, we want to send some of our reporters to Germany and probably to France. But even there we do not want just to cover the news, we say: ‘Find something going on that you find puzzling or upsetting or exciting or interesting in some way. Get yourself excited and then get us excited’ – that is the rule.

Please tell us about Toxie, the toxic asset.

This was the brilliant idea of David Kestenbaum and Chana Joffe-Walt. They just kept hearing this phrase ‘toxic asset’. It was on the news all the time. And they were just wondering what is a toxic asset, why would anyone own a toxic asset, what are they like and they came up with the idea: ‘Let’s just buy one!’ That would be the best way to figure out, what’s going on with them and why they are causing so much trouble. It turned out to be very complicated to buy a toxic asset, but they managed to buy one. And sure enough it was the perfect tool to understand the financial crisis, how people ended up with these horrible assets and what’s happening with them now. We asked our audience to name our toxic asset and Toxie was the name that won. Unfortunately our last of a long list of reports on Toxie was the day she died (for some reason we started calling her ‘she’). Now she is very missed.

There are a lot of business and financial journalists, but only a handful have the ability to really explain what’s going on in a way that everybody can understand it. Is the world of finance too complex – or is it a problem of journalism?

Finance is very complex, it is very confounding, it confuses you. I do not want to make it sound like it is simple but I do think that a lot of it can be explained much better than it is to a broader audience. There are a few reasons why it is not: First of all, for most of modern history there was no reason for the average person to know a lot about finance. It was like electricity – it just works. Finance was appropriately covered as a technical thing.
It is very uninteresting until the whole thing breaks. And then it becomes suddenly very very important and it becomes crucial. You have to understand it to understand anything that is happening in the world. There are a lot of journalists who know a lot about finance but do not have the training or in many cases the interest in translating it for normal people. And then we have journalists who are interested in translating it but do not have any of the technical training. It is an understandable mismatch, but it is a mismatch which needs to be addressed now. It is now clear that every major media outlet needs to invest in reporters who can deeply understand the complexity of modern finance

You yourself seem to have a real passion for finance. Is it still the same even after 300 episodes?

I wouldn’t say I have a passion for finance. I find it interesting and learning about it makes me feel like I am learning a secret language that helps me to understand how the world works much better. But I don’t think that I have an inherent fascination with bonds or stocks or interest rates. I spent time in Haiti and with very poor Americans and I now find those stories much more interesting, much more powerful because the stakes are really really high. Much higher, of course, than they are for the rich.

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Read this interview in German.

by George Rex

• London riots: Five ways journalists used online tools: See how online journalists used maps, videos, curation tools, blogs and timeslines to cover the events in London and around the country [journalism.co.uk]. Even the police used Flickr to let online users identify looters, e.g. the London Metropolitan Police.
• Curation: 5 plugins for WordPress: One of the hot topics online journalists are talking about right now is curation. That means that you do not go out and report the story but instead you monitor the current event via social networks and you pick out the most interesting post, tweets, videos and comments. A great tool you can use is Storify (see my tutorial here). But there is more – here is a list with 5 curation plugins for WordPress.
• A nice giant infocraphic about the use of social media in Asia. I cannot say if the facts are true or false but from what I know, e.g. Yahoo 360° is a huge thing in Vietnam.
• Do we have to tell stories differently on the net? “No” says Mike Jones in his essay “Transmedia Storytelling is Bullshit“. I think he’s right:
  

  “Not every story needs a twitter feed for God Sake! Not every story must have a Facebook page! Not every story warrants an augmented reality game…! Far too many Transmedia projects look like a collection of mindless busy work to keep idle hands amused but which add nothing to the experience.”