Mohamed Nanabhay is an internet entrepreneur and Head of Online at Al Jazeera English. During his Mozilla Learning Lab lecture last Wednesday July 27th, he articulated to the group several issues the organization faced as it grew. One of them was, “how do you incorporate media being produced on the ground as you’re broadcasting it?”
Having alternate sources like social media can lead to growth and expansion not only within the online community but within the newsroom itself.
The idea for my project, Pop!, is based around the concept of semantics in social data. It’s a way to engage with the bigger revolution at work that’s driven by social media. The tool essentially collects, interprets and visualizes collaborations already happening online.
Unlike other real-time analytic tools like ChartBeat, Pop! is not closed-off. The idea is to remain free and widely accessible – it’s a visual interpretation of real-time data for all to engage with.
Think of it as “Trending Now” on crack.
In the newsroom, Pop! can be used as part of an overall news gathering strategy, similar to Al-Jazeera’s decision to incorporate citizen content as a force majeure.
Staff can discern how to incorporate the tool as a resource, IT partner, or general zeitgeist. Newsrooms may also use the tool to resource personal accounts, lead stories, or first-hand witnesses. Citizen journalists can pull from it for their own pieces or for social timelines created on sites like Storify.
As demonstrated by Al Jazeera, perhaps the pioneer and certainly most powerful news organization in using social media to extend their reach – social media helps a newsroom grow on many different levels.
A critical part is to make sure it grows in the race to the top – by empowering citizens with news surrounding the issues they care about the most.
Learn more about the Mozilla Learning Lab
Hi Nicole! I hope you don’t mind a bit of scepticism… but wouldn’t you rather have a tool that could spot news that nobody is talking about yet than display trending topics? News has a huge social component —not just social media, in general we just like to talk about current events and share our take with other people — so I don’t want to discount trend tracking off the bat… but you’re going to have to do a damn good job of it to make it into something fresh and appealing.
One of the trending/curation websites I appreciated most was Viewsflow, though they’ve since pivoted to produce http://www.peerindex.net/ and shut down their old site. What they did was not just about spotting trending topics. They algorithmically bubbled up what opinion leaders in economics and other areas were saying and reading. That, for me, was like the special sauce an aggregator needs: not just stuff people talk about, but the promise that I can have a look at the habits, thoughts and conversations of people that matter, without having to wade through tons of twitter messages. It’s more personal that way, and as a result more engaging.
In a nutshell: do you want to produce a trend tracker on steroids, or rather take a trend tracker as your basic idea and spice it up with special sauce? Two very different things, and I kind of like the latter more.
Shameless self-promotion: http://stdout.be/2010/07/16/trends-are-boring/
Hey Stijn,
Wow, that’s an excellent point. This project can almost be splintered out into a separate one that focuses on credible sources in the media and otherwise.
Are there any sites out there similar to what Viewsflow was doing?
Hi Nicole…I enjoyed reading your thoughts and also tend to agree with Stijn about focusing more on emerging trends in the “thought leaders” segment of the population. You might want to look into partnering with Topsy.com. They’ve done some great work already in aggregating data from Twitter. It’s a search engine powered entirely on social buzz.
I think your idea has a lot of potential, in fact I’ve already benefited from a similar concept:A few months ago I was channel surfing and caught the end of a live sports brawl on network television. The broadcasters quickly went to commercials, and then acted like nothing had happened when they got back on air. I went to Google to find out what started the brawl, but it happened too recently for any results to show up. Then I checked Topsy.com, and found 6-7 freshly posted articles that described the cause of the brawl. One even had a youtube video already embedded. The best articles were floated to the top based on re-tweets, so I was able to find links to the most credible sources.I’d love to see a site like Topsy.com expanded to include data from other social sites. Adding some kind of visual representation as you described would also be really cool. Search engine of the future, anyone?
Hi Jacob,
Thanks for your thoughts and feedback here! What a great illustration of how social media can inform us about what’s *really* happening out there. Topsy is awesome – thanks for flagging it. This will definitely be in my toolbox moving forward. It’s almost like Digg, but not a separate island.
The site could definitely be more user-friendly and has definitely got my creative juices flowing about what’s possible. Yes, search engine of the future for sure. I’m surprised Google hasn’t included social-specific search yet. But even then, we wouldn’t be able to see patterns and overall trending topics.
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