It wasn’t long ago that Google pulled the trigger by offering check-ins with the Latitude service. Now, the company is stepping up the game one more notch by offering rewards for those check-ins, starting in Austin for SXSW.
Akin to what you see with Foursquare, Google is offering status gains (from Regular to Guru), depending on how often you check in with the service. There’s even a progress meter that will show how far away from your next rung of success. What’s really interesting though is the next paragraph in the blog post:
In addition to pride, you can now unlock check-in offers that places have created for your status level. So, a restaurant or shop can give their Regulars a reason to keep coming back and their Gurus an awesome reward for their loyalty. Check-in offers can be as creative as places want for any of the three status levels. You can find places where check-in offers are available in Google Maps for Android search results and Place pages.
Are you reading that the same way that we are? Loyalty-based check-in rewards sure does seem like a direct shot at Foursquare to us. What’s unique though is that you’ll be able to pre-view loyalty rewards directly from Google Maps, so you can better plan where you want to go, instead of just having a happenstance reward.
Check-in offers are launching in Austin, but should move out to the rest of us soon. Want to make sure you’re in for the best? Here’s a list of 5 from the 60 places where Google will be launching the service:
Update:paidContent states that Google’s Marissa Mayer is refuting the idea that Google is entering the daily deal space. Mayer states that Google is simply “experimenting” with Latitude during SXSW. We shall wait and see…
The New York Times released Thursday a finished version of the Recommendations platform it quietly introduced in beta in late January.
Available at nytimes.com/recommendations and on the “Recommended For You” tab on article pages, the tool is designed to help logged-in readers “see through the news fog,” as NYT lead technology reporter Nick Bilton put it. It serves up recommended stories based upon the kinds of articles visitors have read.
“We wanted to make the site more engaging, to expose content to our readers on a more customized, personalized basis — and not customized in the way you select your topics like a My Yahoo or iGoogle, but more of a passive personalization,” Marc Frons, CTO of The New York Times, explains. “We created an algorithm that exposes users to content they may not have seen otherwise,” he adds.
The algorithm is one of the most sophisticated we’ve seen on a news site. When serving up recommendations, it calculates a number of factors, including recency (visitors who tend to gravitate toward breaking news should see recommendations for more timely topics), sections, topics and keywords.
A New Model for Curation
Recommendations is part of a broader exploration of new curation and aggregation methods for Times readers. For time immemorial, the editors of the Times have determined what appears on the cover of the paper and, beginning in 2006, what appears on the front page of nytimes.com.
Now, the front page of nytimes.com shows recommendations from one’s Facebook network alongside stories chosen by Times editors. Visitors can easily navigate to the “Most Popular” tab to surface stories that have proven most popular among bloggers and readers.
In the future, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the front-page content of nytimes.com divided into three sections: one for stories recommended by human editors, another with stories recommended by one’s social network and a third that delivers stories chosen by the site’s internal recommendations engine.
“The challenge is to balance recommendations that are editorially driven, based on what editors think is important, with recommendations from the social sphere and algorithmic recommendations, based on what you’ve read and who you are, your own likes and dislikes,” Frons says. “It’s something we’re constantly looking at and experimenting with.”
It’s a tough challenge, especially in light of the Times‘s emphasis — and subsequent reputation — for editor-driven curation. So far, the Times has proven to be open-minded and progressive without overwhelming readers, for which we commend them.
Over the past few weeks, many worries about the death of journalism have, well, died. Despite shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters, journalism is in fact thriving. The art of information gathering, analysis and dissemination has arguably been strengthened over the last several years, and given rise and importance to a new role: the journalistic curator.
The concept of curating news is not new. One can look to the supply-chain process of a news organization to see that several roles (editor, managing editor, etc.) have curation as a core competency; that is, the organizing of information filed by reporters into a deliverable packages for readers.
But with the push of social media and advancements in communications technology, the curator has become a journalist by proxy. They are not on the front lines, covering a particular beat or industry, or filing a story themselves, but they are responding to a reader need. With a torrent of content emanating from innumerable sources (blogs, mainstream media, social networks), a vacuum has been created between reporter and reader — or information gatherer and information seeker — where having a trusted human editor to help sort out all this information has become as necessary as those who file the initial report.
“Curation,” says Sayid Ali, owner of Newsflick.net, “gathers all these fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content.”
Curation as an Intermediary
Andy Carvin, senior strategist for NPR who runs their social media desk, finds meaning in the word “media.” “It means being in the middle — in this case, between sources and the public. So curating … really isn’t that different than what reporters have always done; it’s just in real time and a hell of a lot more transparent.”
As Ernie Smith, editor of ShortFormBlog sees it, curators are like tour guides. “Good curators know where to find interesting things because they know the paths and can provide a knowledgeable voice to make things a little easier to parse. A good curator can see a clear direction and show others the way.”
Curators help navigate readers through the vast ocean of content, and while doing so, create a following based on several factors: trust, taste and tools.
Building Trust
Unlike a reporter who is immersed in a particular industry or beat, a curator often has a day job. Some are in the media industry and have access to their publication’s news sources; others are obsessed with the news and want to provide their network, community or followers with what they think is important. But the common thread between curators is that they are viewed as trustworthy sources of information.
Torie Rose DeGhett, a staff writer at Current Intelligence, and blogger at The Political Notebook, agrees. “Curation has to be credible. If all I do is use my curation to attack somebody, or if I blatantly try to confuse an issue or make it seem like something it isn’t, that’s wrong on a fundamental level. If I do that, then I can’t be trusted as a source and people should have no reason to take what I do seriously.”
Building trust is important to validating curation as an evolutionary form of journalism, and many curators believe they should be held to the same standards as journalists.
Ethical standards and transparency (like citing/crediting sources) are essential in building trust in a curator. DeGhett says, “The point is to share [news items] and lead people to it, not to claim it as your own… [But] my selection of sources is intended to make an argument, and to support certain things, not to present everything that’s out there or every side.”
Carvin’s transparency is a great template for curators. “I publicly describe my Twitter feed as a one-man newsgathering operation that’s open to the world for viewing.” He relies on people to feed him information, which he retweets to his followers and lets them “help me figure it out by translating, adding context, finding independent sources, etc.”
However, some curators believe that since they are not journalists creating content, journalistic standards don’t necessarily have to apply.
The market researcher, curator and blogger who goes by the name “Kateoplis” says since “there’s virtually no editorial content attached to the articles we promote,” curating information doesn’t have to be held to the same standards as reporting. She continues, “We simply highlight the most valuable posts.” She does, however, believe there should be ethical guidelines to help curators, and in her role as an editor of the Tumblr news section, she provided their guidelines.
Smith thinks “that curators should have more freedoms than traditional reporters in a couple senses, in that part of the appeal of good curation is that it carries the person’s footprint. Opinion isn’t really a bad thing, and in fact gives the content shape in this context.” When considering reporting standards, he continues, “the important part is 1) That it’s consistent, and 2) That it’s accurate. You have to do a little more direct listening to readers as a curator, because in a lot of ways, they are your sources.”
Determining What’s Newsworthy
When a reporter covers a beat, they come up with story ideas via different methods — something in the industry that interests them, seeing a news hook another reporter may have alluded to (or missed), suggestions from their editor, and story ideas from a public relations team. And more often than not, reporters stay within the confines of their beat. Curators don’t have to.
Curators aggregate and reblog content they find interesting, or think their readers will find interesting. Curators also seem to fall into one of two categories: Aggregation and reblogging content without any editorializing, or providing additional thoughts as part of their reblog, retweet, etc.
The blogger behind PantslessProgressive determines what’s worthy of reblogging by “finding out what others are saying about that source, by observing who they interact with, and by the frequency and depth of their activity.”
DeGhett reblogs “if it provides information that I think is really important to know or have awareness of — something about veteran’s issues, gay rights, transgender awareness, etc.” She’ll reblog if an article makes a great point or “brings up a great fact I think everyone should know.”
Even though curators share certain characteristics of editors, they don’t enjoy the exact same role. When a curator gathers information for their community, the content is something they are passionate about. Reporters, as we’re taught, are not supposed to be passionate and interject opinion into their story.
What’s Next For Curation?
As journalism continues to evolve and adapt to advances in technology and the influence of social media, the role of the curator will continue to grow. Trusted curators, standards and better tools to filter content will be two things to watch over the coming months and years. Additionally, creating a work force of curators — whether freelancers or paid staff members — will help curation grow. Many news organizations, for example, are on Tumblr acting as curators, reblogging not only their publication’s content, but also other news sources that are relevant to their audience.
As Anthony DeRosa, proposition leader at Reuters says, “We all have access to pretty much the same information sources, aside from the investigation and journalism that people at news agencies perform. There’s enough out there for someone who simply wants to be a helpful guide, to plant their flag and be a good resource for whatever it is they’re interested in. You can use RSS, Twitter, Storify, Storyful and any number of other tools to stay on top of what is happening and be a human filter for what I should be looking at.”
Which bands performed the most gigs, and traveled the furthest, in 2010?
Concert information service SongKick has put together this infographic that shows a mixture of young upstarts like Mayday Parade and household names like Lady Gaga made the list. It’s good to see that at 77 years old, Willie Nelson’s still putting in the hours, playing 161 shows last year.
Almost all startups love press, and luckily it’s not too hard to get some extra exposure every once in a while.
For the startups that are dying for to be mentioned, here are 6 tips to get press:
1. 36 places to submit your startup
Check out this neat list of 36 places (with a few bonus ones) to submit your startup for some coverage. Since many of these places are outlets that love the latest scoop on anything innovative, and are always excited to hear from new companies, your chances of getting some press when you start here is high.
I’d even add social news sites like Digg and Reddit, since Hacker News was mentioned as a bonus to the list of 36 sites, but the trick here is to NOT submit your own startup, instead, find a friend who might be something of a power user on those sites and have that friend submit your startup to their followers and hopefully the traffic will flow on in.
2. Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
HARO is a three times daily email (five days a week), which shows you a pretty extensive list of queries from reporters looking for sources. What’s great about this service is that i) it’s free, and ii) instead of finding reporters and pitching them hoping they could use your story or conjuring up a new angle hoping someone you email might bite, you see a query submitted by a real writer who’s in search of sources for a specific story they are working on. When you already know what they want and can offer assistance, doesn’t that make your job a lot easier? Instead of spending a lot of energy sourcing media leads and figuring out smart angles to pitch them, now you know what angle a writer is looking for and can focus more energy on convincing them you’d be the right source for them to turn to in writing their story.
3. Scanning Technorati for relevant blogs to pitch
Technorati has established itself as a leader in ranking blogs according to their authority on the web, and since you can easily filter through different categories to see who’s ranked in different sectors, you can find scores of great outlets to pitch to. But the hidden gems don’t lie within the Technorati 100. Instead, they lie far beyond the first 50 or so results in any category, where you see the long-tail end of the blogging world, which is nothing to scoff at because not everyone’s going to build a site like HuffingtonPost and get merged with AOL. At the farther end of Technorati’s rankings, you find some of the most dedicated sites to their niche, with incredibly loyal (albeit, small) followings, which shouldn’t go ignored, and in fact, will be more likely than an Inc. Magazine will in writing about your startup.
4. Advanced search queries for relevant media outlets
One of the simplest advanced search queries is the related:http://www.interestingwebsite.com query, where you can pretty much ask Google what sites it thinks are related to sites you’re already looking at for press. This way, you can find tens, or maybe hundreds, of new places to pitch you which you may have never heard of before, but are clearly sites or blogs that are very interested in writing about a certain niche category your business falls into.
5. Opensiteexplorer.org
SEOMoz has been incredibly generous in offering a free version of their Opensiteexplorer tool. With this, you can get a quick review of your site’s authority within the search engines, gauging it against competitors and similar sites. But you can source awesome places for more coverage by scanning the links to your competitors, sites similar to yours or sites in your niche to find places that are clearly interested in covering topics that you fit into.
6. Blogrolls of blogs you like and blogs related to your industries
This takes a lot of willpower, Internet bandwidth and time, but you can go through all the blogs you know and have ever heard of, checking each of their blogrolls for even more sites you may have never known about before to find more places for possible coverage. Be careful though. When you’re opening thirty or forty tabs in a short period of time, your browser may crash and your Internet will slow down, so make sure you’re conquering one blogroll at a time, bookmarking any places that seem good for pitching, and closing out those sites for the next day when you’ll pitch them so you can continue onward with finding more online media treasures.
