Category: Technology

The New York Times’ gift to BlackBerry users

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A few weeks ago, my BlackBerry notified me that a new version of the New York Times app was available. I downloaded it but didn’t expect much. Previous versions had been slow and kludgy, and I found that I preferred the Times mobile website instead.

But version 1.1.1 turns out to be a major improvement. You can download the latest Times content to your BlackBerry, either all at once or section by section. That means you can use it in places where the cell signal is erratic or non-existent, like on a train or in a subway car. (I’m pretty sure that was true of earlier versions, too, but those just weren’t usable enough for me to test.)

It also means that you don’t have to wait for pages to download every time you click, as you do with the mobile website. Stories load quickly and are presented on one page — no additional clicks just to read one article. And though the screen on my BlackBerry Tour is tiny, it is also ultra-sharp. I can pretty much plow through the whole paper without experiencing eye fatigue. It’s a nice, under-publicized utility at a moment when most of the media world is focused on the sleek but expensive iPad. I’d love to see the Times make the software available to other newspaper companies — starting with its corporate cousin, the Boston Globe.

Mobile has emerged as a crucial outlet for news organizations, and I have a bit of advice for them: Don’t give it away. Though I staunchly believe that users won’t pay for basic Web access, new delivery platforms require new revenue models.

Yes, there are ads (mainly house ads) on the Times app, but there’s only so much you can do with a tiny screen. The app should be free only for customers who already buy the paper through some other delivery channel, whether it be print, Kindle or Reader.

The Times app has me feeling better about my BlackBerry these days. I still plan to upgrade to an iPhone or a Droid when my contract expires next summer. But now, at least, I find myself gnashing my teeth a little less.

How Google’s phone services are pushing the law

I made my first phone call with Gmail this morning — to Mrs. Media Nation, who was sitting in the kitchen, about 20 feet away. This is very exciting, and is likely to revolutionize phone-calling. Not just to the kitchen, either.

Farhad Manjoo of Slate tells you everything you need to know.

Gmail-calling does raise two interesting questions:

  1. Given how popular this may prove to be, is the series of tubes wide enough to handle the traffic? This may prove to be a huge test for broadband capacity.
  2. Will Gmail-calling prove to be the death knell for laws that prohibit you from recording your phone conversations without permission?

My second question requires some explanation. I am now planning to run out and sign up for Google Voice. Now that I’ve seen the glory of placing a call from my computer, I want to be able to receive, too. And Google Voice lets you record your calls if you wish.

This is fully in accordance with the overall Gmail philosophy. Google encourages you to save all except your most trivial e-mail messages. It does so by giving you enormous capacity to store your mail on its servers and to search through them instantaneously.

Gmail Chat, which I also use from time to time, saves everything as well.

Massachusetts is one of a number of states in which it’s illegal to secretly record a phone conversation (or a chance encounter on the street, for that matter). I teach my journalism students that if they want to record a phone interview, they should get permission, press “record,” and then say, “I just turned on my recorder. Is that all right with you?” That way, you’ve not only got permission, you’ve got proof.

But with Google encouraging a recording/sharing culture, are we going to end up with millions of accidental law-breakers? What will be the best approach for dealing with that — changing the law or educating the public?

Google Talk may well prove to be yet another example of technology running ahead of the law.

Instant update: Carly Carioli and Bob Ambrogi tell me that Google already offers protections against secret recording. See this. In fact, now I’m tempted to say that Google doesn’t go far enough. If it sends out an automated message informing the other party that a call is being recorded, then why not allow that on outgoing as well as incoming calls?

The resurrection will be (slightly) delayed

The idea that Apple’s iPad would save newspapers and magazines, always dubious, is so far not even getting a decent tryout. Evangelists for the iPad put forth a vision of users switching from free websites to paid apps.

Since a very good Web browser is built in to the iPad, it was never clear why any more than a handful would pay. And, so far, there are few apps. Among the better-known is the New York Times’ “Editor’s Choice,” a free, experimental app that doesn’t include the full content of the paper. (The Globe is reportedly working on an iPad app, but I have no details.)

PressReader offers some 1,500 papers around the world (neither the Times nor the Boston Globe is available, though the Boston Herald is). But it’s based on a PDF-like representation of the actual pages in the paper, which is no way to read online.

Meanwhile, because Apple has been slow in implementing subscriptions, we have absurdities like Time magazine’s paid app, which costs approximately 650 percent more than a print subscription.

If I had an iPad, here’s what I would want: a simple way to subscribe to the papers I read every day at a much-lower-than-print price. Since I wouldn’t pay $30 a month for an always-on 3G connection, I’d want to download the entire paper via WiFi, and then be able to read it whether I was in a hot spot or not.

It’s not as though what I’m looking for is particularly exotic. In fact, two very good alternatives already exist — yet neither one of them will work with the iPad.

First, the Times and the Globe are both available in low-cost “Reader” editions, built on top of the Adobe Air platform. The Reader, based on flipping pages, is seemingly made for the iPad. But because of Apple’s ongoing battle with Adobe, you can’t run Air on an iPad. (The forthcoming Google tablet, running Air, would be a great way to access Reader content.)

Second, many papers are available on the Amazon Kindle. But though Kindle software runs on a variety of devices, including the iPad, Amazon has restricted newspapers and magazines to its proprietary Kindle devices. If you’re running Kindle software on your laptop or smartphone, you can only use it to download and read books.

So far, it seems, the iPad has been very good for Apple, but not so good for newspaper and magazine publishers. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that there are no good options even for people who are willing to pay.

Photo (cc) by Steve Garfield and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Hacking their way toward journalism’s future

I was going to try to write up last night’s Hacks/Hackers meeting at Microsoft’s Cambridge headquarters. But I can’t do any better than Kyle Psaty, who covers it for the BostInnovation blog. Hosted by Matt Carroll of the Boston Globe, the gathering brought together about 75 journalists and technology folks. What follows are just a couple of quick observations.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of Flowing Media showed off a new data-presentation tool taking campaign-finance information from MapLight.org and slicing and dicing it in a number of different ways. Interesting, though the tools Viégas and Wattenberg demo’d struck me as a little exotic. Globe technology reporter Hiawatha Bray was very excited, so I’m sure those more technologically adept than I will find uses for it.

Somewhat more down-to-earth was a project called Pinyadda, a website that combines journalism, community and social networking. Based on the presentation made by Austin Gardner-Smith, the Boston-based company’s vice president for product and development, Pinyadda may be groping its way toward a just-right space between Digg (too dumb) and NewsTrust (too hard). I’m hoping to find the time to play with it and see for myself.

I learned a few things, met some interesting people, ate some free pizza — what more can you ask for?

Crowdsourcing the pain of transcribing audio

The trouble with recording interviews is that you have to transcribe them. So after one of my forays to New Haven last week, where I interviewed people in connection with a book I’m working on about community news sites, I had a ton of audio and the unpleasant task of translating it all to text.

I decided to crowdsource the task through an Amazon.com service called Mechanical Turk. More about that in a moment. But first I want to explain my reluctance to try it.

I think the results are better when I do it myself. I have to listen carefully, which helps me seal the best stuff inside my leaky brain. I know what we were taking about, which means that I’m not flummoxed by names and unusual phrases, as any transcriber would be. And because I have an idea of how I’ll use the material, I can decide on the spot what to transcribe verbatim, what to paraphrase and what to leave out altogether. So I knew I could potentially be giving up a lot by turning the task over to others.

Some years ago I used a transcription service near Harvard Square when time was of the essence and when, most important, someone else was paying the bill. This time, faced with many hours of work, I decided to take advice given me last fall by Zach Seward and try MTurk. Seward, then with the Nieman Journalism Lab, told me that lab director Joshua Benton had used it to transcribe this talk by New York University’s Clay Shirky. I was impressed.

I posted a query on Twitter, and several people responded by sending me a link to an online guide by Andy Baio. I decided to try it with two interviews — a 65-minute recording with New Haven Independent founder and editor Paul Bass, made on his reasonably quiet back deck, and a 35-minute conversation with New Haven alderman Michael Jones, at an outdoor café on a busy street.

My first step was to go through the cumbersome process of converting my Olympus recorder’s WMA files to MP3s, and then dividing those MP3s into five-minute chunks so that a number of different people could apply themselves to the task. By the time I got around to doing the second interview, I had stumbled upon EasyWMA, a $10 utility that took the pain out of conversion, and had finally taught myself enough about Audacity, a free audio editor, so that I could painlessly produce five-minute bits.

I was surprised by how quickly the crowd swarmed over my files — in less than a day, I had everything I needed. Unfortunately, the quality was extremely uneven. Some of the mistakes were bizarre or unintentionally hilarious. How “state of Connecticut” became “state of Kentuckian” is one I’ll never figure out. And here’s a choice excerpt from my conversation with Bass. First, the MTurk version:

They had a Sunocompass call with WBR few weeks ago to get the advice, how the membership strives. The taste and ever didn’t undership strives because I felt that if the widely suceessful they might get thirty to fourty thousand dollars.

Now, what he really said:

They had us on a conference call with WBUR few weeks ago to get advice on how to do membership drives. In the past I hadn’t done membership drives, because I felt that if they’re wildly suceessful they might get you to $30,000 or $40,000.

Following Baio’s advice, I’d set a price of $2 per five-minute excerpt. You have the option of rejecting unusually bad work, refusing to pay and letting someone else take a crack at it. I decided to accept everyone’s work, including the person who produced what you see above. But I blocked two people (including the one I just cited), so that if I use the service again, they won’t have a chance to work on my stuff.

Overall, I paid $41.80*, $3.80 of which went to Amazon, the remainder to the folks who actually did the work.

Between file conversion and preparation, downloading transcribed interviews, listening to everything again and cleaning up the transcripts, I don’t know how much time I saved. Not much, probably. Yesterday I transcribed two interviews myself, and I thought the results were much better.

On the other hand, I purposely chose my Bass interview for MTurk because it was long and he talks very quickly. It was also an unusually substantive conversation, and I knew there wasn’t much I wanted to leave out. Most of the transcribers did an OK job.

My bottom line is that, in the future, I would probably reserve MTurk for situations in which I have good audio quality and need a full verbatim transcript. Even knowing that I’ll have to do a fair amount of retyping, it’s still better than starting from scratch.

But if I’m producing normal interview notes, I’ll handle it myself.

*Addendum: Jack Shafer of Slate told me the price I cited doesn’t mean much without comparing it to the price of a professional transcription service. So I contacted a good one and was told it would cost about $140 an hour — or about $230, nearly six times as much as what I paid. That’s a huge mark-up. On the other hands, the results would have been more usable.

Illustration via Wikimedia Commons.

Talking about Google and privacy on “Greater Boston”

I’ll be on “Greater Boston” today at 7 p.m., talking with host Emily Rooney about Google’s mounting privacy problems. On Monday, Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal announced that he would lead an effort comprising about 30 states to investigate how Google came to intercept e-mail, passwords and other confidential information when collecting data for its Street View feature.

Come on and Safari with me

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Because I had a lot of writing to do yesterday, I indulged myself with some quality screwing-off time and installed Safari 5, the latest version of Apple’s Web browser. I can’t say I expected much. Safari has always been feature-laden but sluggish. The new version, though, is speedy enough that I may make it my primary browser.

For several years I had been a dedicated Firefox user. But after Google released Chrome for Mac earlier this year, Firefox seemed downright slow by comparison. Chrome blazes, but it doesn’t have much else to recommend it. I especially don’t like the way it displays type — it seems like everything is either a smidgen too small or too large.

The new Safari, by contrast, is slick and attractive, and has a lot of nice touches. I’m a big fan of the Top Sites window, a graphical representation of my most-visited stops on the Web. Chrome has something similar, but the customization features are minimal. Safari also handles bookmarks nicely. Most important, it seems as fast as Chrome, and, unlike Firefox and even Chrome, it doesn’t gag on the Boston.com ad server.

The most interesting feature of Safari is something called Safari Reader. Open a page with an article on it, and a clickable label appears in the address bar. Select it and a new window opens with a nicely formatted text page. Unfortunately, Reader makes it easier to avoid advertising. But since photos within the text are displayed, I see no reason why ads couldn’t be embedded as well.

Reader is especially nice for complex sites with tiny type, such as the example I’ve included above from the New Haven Independent.

One problem is that Web designers have to write to Reader’s specifications or it won’t work properly. NYTimes.com, for instance, handles jumps with aplomb, whereas Boston.com, upon encountering a jump, incorrectly displays the first page again. Reader is going to have to prove very popular in order to force Web designers to change. But it could happen. Safari, after all, isn’t just for Macs (and PCs), but for iPads, iPhones and iPods as well.

No sooner did I tweet my enthusiasm about Reader than Alex Johnson responded by telling me that the same feature had been available in other browsers for some time. Sure enough, I found an extension for Chrome called Readability that did exactly the same thing. But it was glitchy compared to Safari Reader, which Johnson concedes is “the better option for Mac-only users.”

Safari also has a built-in RSS reader, but on first glance I see no reason to switch from Google Reader, which I love. (A lot of programs named Reader, eh?) There doesn’t seem to be any way of pulling my Google Reader feeds into Safari, which would be a minimum requirement for me even to test it.

Between Safari and Chrome, I doubt I’ll be using Firefox any time soon. I’ll try Version 4 when it is released later this year. For now, though, Firefox has definitely fallen behind.

Bringing together citizens, government and media

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIsFcydDbkw&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]
SeeClickFix is an interactive website that lets users report problems in their communities and plot them on a Google map. Because it’s an open forum, local officials can check in to see where trouble spots are, and news organizations can track them as well. The New Haven Independent is one of many news sites that posts the RSS feed for its community. The interactive pothole map at Boston.com is powered by SeeClickFix as well.

On May 18 I had a chance to sit down with SeeClickFix co-founder and chief executive Ben Berkowitz in his second-floor office in downtown New Haven. Berkowitz, a hyperkinetic 31-year-old, had forgotten we were supposed to meet, but he graciously agreed to a video interview despite having a full agenda.

Berkowitz describes SeeClickFix as “citizens working collectively,” and explains that he started it three years ago when he was trying to get graffiti cleaned up in his neighborhood. The site has been growing rapidly since the New York Times published a feature story on it in January.

Today, the company has some 400 media partners and employs five people thanks to a $25,000 We Media prize and several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of venture capital. Although the basic service is free, SeeClickFix charges media sites for certain premium services, and posts advertising as well.

One aspect of Berkowitz’s philosophy that I found particularly interesting was his insistence that SeeClickFix is not just for holding government accountable — citizens, too, should take responsibility. As an example, he pointed to a similar project, the British website FixMyStreet — a great name that he nevertheless doesn’t like, he says, because it removes accountability from citizens and places it entirely on the government.

Does Berkowitz, who previously worked as a Web designer, consider himself a journalist? He pauses before answering. “I think SeeClickFix is a tool for journalists,” he replies. “I don’t think that I am a journalist. I don’t think of us as a news organization.”

For a good example of how journalists can use SeeClickFix as a reporting tool, see this story on “the ugliest storefront on Chapel Street” in the New Haven Independent.