Rabu, 27 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Apple: Tune in to podcast “stations” on an iPhone “radio dial”

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 03:44 PM PDT

Screen shot of Apple's Podcasts app for iOS

Radio stations worry about relevance in a digital age. The cachet of a spot on the FM dial can disappear in the seemingly infinite number of audio streams on the Internet.

Today transmission-tower owners can take some comfort that the most valuable company in the world considers the radio dial worth sustaining, at least metaphorically.

Apple spun off its long-neglected iTunes category today into a full-blown app for iPhone and iPad, appropriately named Podcasts. (You can download it now.) And it’s chock full of radio metaphors. The most popular podcasts are labeled “Top Stations.” Users can browse those stations by swiping across the “dial.” And, as you can see above, the playback display looks like a reel-to-reel. (The design is receiving mixed reviews.)

Apple has chuffed a lot of designers for nicking bits of real-world design for its iOS apps. Newsstand gets a walnut bookshelf; Notes gets that hideous marker font; Calendar looks like a tear-off desktop calendar.)

Defensible or not, those visual ties to the real world are meant to make the digital transition easier for less-savvy users. Podcasting has long had difficulty breaking beyond a core audience. Apple’s app reduces podcasting to one-tap simplicity: Users can now subscribe to podcasts right from the device, edging us closer to the “post-PC” world. The app also downloads new episodes to the device automatically, a missing feature that has caused much grumbling. Episodes can either be streamed or downloaded for offline consumption.

What does the app look like for news podcasts? Buried in the middle of the Top Stations “radio dial,” somewhere around 103.7 FM, is the News & Politics category, which currently features two NPR programs, Bill Maher, the BBC, and 60 Minutes.

Podcasts.app would seem to represent Apple’s renewed commitment to a medium sometimes accused of irrelevance. The desktop version of iTunes simplified podcasting somewhat back in 2005, abstracting away RSS feeds and MP3 downloads by providing a directory listing. The iOS app takes it a step further, untethering the user from a computer.

Now that Apple is shunting podcasts onto a private island outside of the iTunes iOS app, however, it may be more difficult for new users to discover the content. The Podcasts app won’t come preloaded on iDevices, unlike the separate Music and Video apps. (The same is true for iBooks, but users are prompted to download that app after turning on the device for the first time. It’s unclear if Podcasts will get the same treatment.) The podcasts section is apparently removed from iTunes altogether in the beta version of iOS 6 being shown to Apple developers.

“It’s tough to overstate how lazy and nervous people are about trying new forms of media, so I’m scared that separating podcasts from iTunes might mean a huge drop in people trying them out,” said Jesse Thorn, who makes a living from podcasts.

“My hope, though, is that the downside will be outweighed by a great, easy-to-use piece of stand-alone software,” he said.

New Pew data: There’s a good (and growing) chance you’re reading this on your phone

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 02:34 PM PDT

A majority of American adults who have cell phones are now using them to go online, according to a study out today from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And, within that group, 31 percent of those adults use their phones for the majority of their Internet access.

But the numbers get even more striking when you look at younger demographics. Among adults 18-29 who use the Internet on their phones, a remarkable 45 percent do most of their web surfing there. And for all age groups, preferences are shifting away from desktops and laptops and toward mobile devices.

(Need any more evidence you need to make sure that mobile version of your website looks good and works well?)

Pew’s most recent data comes from a three-week phone survey of 2,254 adults that concluded in April, but the center first began tracking the percentage of people who use cell phones to go online in April 2009.

“In the space of three years, we’ve seen the proportion of cell owners who do this almost double,” Pew senior research specialist Aaron Smith told. “Depending on where you start the clock on the consumer smartphone revolution — most people do that with the introduction of the iPhone in June 2007 — within the space of five years we’ve gone from basically zero to half the country, with a sizable percentage using cell phones as their main source [to go online].”

Smith characterizes the reliance on mobile phones for Internet access as “not only very fast but widespread,” meaning that more people across age and socioeconomic demographics are increasingly using phones to go online.

The age breakdown: For adults 50 or older, 11 percent of cell Internet users use their phones for most of their access. For adults 30 to 49, it’s 29 percent. And, as mentioned above, it’s 45 percent for 18- to 29-year-olds. (Pew didn’t look at teens in this study, but you don’t need a researcher to tell you they like their phones.)

Two-thirds of those surveyed cited convenience — the chance to be online anywhere, and at any time — as the top reason for accessing the Internet by phone. A handful of responders credited cell phones with being easier to use, while others said phones were their only way to access the Internet from home. (Consistent with previous years’ findings, those with lower incomes and less education were more likely to report using cell phones for the majority of their Internet use.)

So what kinds of numbers can we expect three years from now? Cell phone ubiquity and more mobile Internet reliance seem clear. Smith says the data from April’s survey came as no surprise but he won’t speculate on what’s to come.

“One of the things that we have learned is there could be something that someone is developing in their garage tomorrow that could completely blow any projection we — or anyone else could make — completely out of the water,” he said.

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano used under a Creative Commons license.

Scoople: Gaming the news to get your data

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 09:07 AM PDT

Polling station

Scoople is a polling company that acts like a media aggregator but operates as a game. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you’ve been spending time with the newish app, which gives users points for answering questions about news stories, and predicting other users’ answers.

Here’s how it works: Scoople uses a “content engine” to aggregate from a variety of sources and produce a single story. The machine tracks some 200 RSS feeds, but a story is often a partial mash-up of just two articles, which Scoople cites with links to the originals. Scoople publishes content by category in channels like Celebrity, Film, Politics, Tech, World, Gaming, and so on. Part-time editorial staffers come up with questions that go with each story.

So, let’s say it’s a piece about the Philadelphia Eagles.

The question might be: Will Philly ever win a Super Bowl? [No. —Ed.] If I’m a Scoople user, I answer the question (2013 all the way!) then guess whether most other readers answered the same way. Questions remain open for a period of hours, and collective answers are revealed after the time expires. (Here’s an example from the Scoople blog.)

As players accrue points, they work their way up the Scoople leaderboard. The company also has launched a virtual store where players can spend “Scoople bucks” they earn by playing. For now, they can use bucks to decorate their profile pages. That could lead to a system where bucks could be redeemed and used for subscriptions to online news sites, according to Alain Mayer, co-founder and CEO of Dygest, the company that made Scoople.

Scoople screen shot

I asked Mayer if he feels compelled to give back to news organizations that produce the content Scoople aggregates. Does he feel like he owes them something? Not really. Mayer calls the dynamic “a give and take,” saying that Scoople is careful to lift only small sections from each story, and that the game actually drives up traffic to the news sites by linking to the original content. Scoople isn’t a media company but rather a “social network around news,” he says.

“Foursquare is a social network around location, a social experience around location,” Mayer said. “In very similar ways, we have created a social experience around media content…They’re not building a fantasy farm. It’s very well-grounded in daily news, daily events that they already think about.”

Like other social networks, Scoople sees potential value in the information that people share about themselves. Instead of paying money to participate, players dole out opinions and demographic data that can then be mined. In other words: Scoople provides a game-like experience, but that doesn’t actually make it a game. At its core, Scoople is actually a polling company, or at least that’s what Mayer intends for it.

“Not only do we have demographics, we have the opnion profile,” Mayer said. “So as we grow the user base, and as we grow over time, we grow the opinion profile. We can make very interesting correlations. That’s going to be the core of the company as we move forward; the data.”

Mayer won’t get specific about the number of people playing, but he says Scoople has collected “well over a quarter-million opinions,” with the average user’s opinion profile consisting of 50 responses. For now, the company is sharing some of the data it’s gathering on its website. Down the road, the idea is to charge third parties for access to that data.

Mayer says he could also introduce sponsored questions for another revenue stream. The example he gives is that Nike might want to ask Scoople players who spend a lot of time reading the sports channel about their sneaker style preferences. (It seems like a strategy that could also encourage advocacy-oriented questions. For example, a political campaign could sponsor a question that casts its candidate in a positive light and have that question appear after a story that raises questions about his or her opponent.)

An exchange of personal data is already at the heart of social networks like Facebook, and that makes plenty of people uneasy. But collecting user data also represents revenue opportunities for news organizations, which must navigate a fine line between preserving public trust and potentially infringing on individuals’ privacy. The tremendous value of social readers, for example, isn’t just the traffic boost that news organizations get. The ability to know who readers are, and who they’re connected to, is huge. Scoople takes this concept and adds a mechanism to track what people think, as well as how opinions change over time.

“The speed and scale of how news distribution works today is unprecedented,” Mayer said. “On the other hand, you have opinion research and opinion polling companies that operate the same way that they did 10 or 20 years ago, calling you up and asking your opinion without any context. We felt, let’s start to merge these worlds.”

Photo by secretlondon123 used under a Creative Commons license.

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