I took a business trip recently, and it was a big deal. Even if it was nothing major for anyone else, it was a big deal for me. The trip was full of promise and opportunity. I made sure to capture all its key moments with my phone. When I got back, I didn't want to stick all those photos into a bland, blue Facebook album.
I used Jux, because it lets me design the whole experience out to every edge of every screen. Jux just launched crop control for photos, so the Jux album of my trip looks just right on every device. A Jux isn't a blog. It's more like a portfolio. Each piece stands on its own.
News agency Reuters launched Social Pulse, which it describes as a "social media hub" that will display "the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web."
The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne."
The President of the United States held a Google+ Hangout today. He fielded questions selected from over 130,000 submissions as well as from five lucky Americans selected to hang out with him live. For the rest of us, it was a streaming video experience. It began with a swooping, dramatic intro, and then Google MC Steve Grove took control of the proceedings.
This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy. But despite the great camera angles and the believable-but-composed real-world folks, it stretched the definition of "social media" pretty thin. User-submitted content is good, and the hand-picked live participants get to be involved, but for most of us, it's no different from television.
This morning, Parse.ly launched Dash, a content management system smart enough to make a blogger weep with joy. It analyzes the Web to show publishers what's hot. It tracks trends within the site, revealing what works for the audience. It points out when old posts are getting popular again. It follows individual authors over time and shows how their coverage performs. It shows where traffic is coming from to improve targeting. In short, it helps publishers plan.
It does all of this by analyzing the billions of page views it tracks anonymously across its whole user base. Parse.ly started as a feed reader for pros in 2009, and Dash expands its capabilities with predictive analytics for one's own site. The software gets a sense of what topics and stories are most important and whether they're trending up or down. That's a great thing for publishers. Is it good for readers? I can't wait to find out.
Paul Berry, the Huffington Post's CTO since 2007, is one of the best regarded tech leaders in New York. After helping build one of the biggest news sites in the world, Berry announced this week that he's leaving AOL soon to focus on two new ventures: A social startup called Rebel Mouse and an incubator called SoHo Tech Lab to goof around with a bunch of different ideas and see what works.
I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he's planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
When it comes to news-reading apps, iPad app Zite is a favorite amongst many of the staffers at ReadWriteWeb. It provides a personalized news feed based on your interests, social graph and the community. Zite will bring you news catered to your interests but also provide serendipitous discovery of new sources and topics that may be of interest. This is all useful and interesting functionality ... but how the heck does it work?
Zite (now owned by CNN), at its core, is a data-parsing engine tied to the social graph. Its roots are buried to a social discovery search engine called Worio that the team eventually folded to create Zite. Article URLs are parsed out of the social graph, mapped and weighted. How does the company pull this all off? Today, Zite gives users a peek under the hood.
The Daily, News Corp's subscription iPad news publication, is about to turn one year old. To celebrate, it announced yesterday that it will be pre-installed on select Verizon Android tablets, starting with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The Galaxy Tab 7.7 will be among the next Android tablets to get the app. Existing Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners will get The Daily bundled in a software update this month.
Verizon users get a free trial for one week. A monthly subscription costs $3.99, and an annual subscription costs $39.99. Publisher Greg Clayman told paidContent that The Daily currently has 100,000 paid subscribers on the iPad. It needs 500,000 to break even.
The biggest upsets in last week's Iowa Caucus may have been in the media rather than the field of Republican presidential candidates. Google outshone the Associated Press in its ability to report the election returns, surprising veterans in old media. But reading the social media landscape before the caucuses failed to predict the outcome, showing that new media still don't have the full picture.
To help out as the New Hampshire primary rolls around, Storify has put together 10 lessons from the Iowa Caucus for using social media to report on elections. Storify is the front page of social media news, and its curation tools are employed by all kinds of major media companies. Storify's list of election coverage strategies also includes some news. Storify has just released a search tool in beta, allowing users to search across previously "Storified" elements to embed them in your stories.
For most print publishers, the transition from ink to pixels has been at least somewhat painful. Over the last few years, the industry has seen widespread layoffs, furloughs, bankruptcies and newspaper closures. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are no exception. The company that previously owned the two daily papers filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and ended up selling them the following year. The new owner, a company called Philadelphia Media Network, has since been trying to reposition its publications for the twenty-first century.
Today, PMN fulfilled a promise it made last year by doing something few would expect a newspaper company to do. Project Liberty, the company's tech startup incubator, is now open for business.
Storify users have voted Josh Stearns' story tracking journalist arrests at Occupy protests as their story of the year. The social Web storytelling tool has grown up this year, finding itself in the right place at the right time to transform the way news gets made.
Stearns, journalism and public campaign director at FreePress.net, used Storify to keep track of the arrests of credentialed journalists at Occupy Wall Street and other affiliated protests. He collected stories of journalists being cuffed, tackled and trapped, even as they shouted that they were members of the press. We highlighted his efforts in our article, "How Storifying Occupy Wall Street Saved The News," and we're thrilled that the Storify community is celebrating his great work.
