Digital Utopia

Last year I tested Joomla as the content management system to set up a news portal for my Online Journalism course at the University of Iowa. I liked the fact that stories in the homepage could be manually ordered, so that journalistic criteria would prevail over chronological order. But the user experience for the students trying to post their stories was painful: the WYSIWYG editor in Joomla would strip out any embedding code (for video, graphics or slideshows we were generating), adding photos was a very slow three-steps process, and the system would log off users without notice after some idle time. Also, user comments were not supported by default, and the add-on I found was a pain, so we finally forgot about it. Here’s the clumsy result. A more extensive hand-coding of the template may have helped, but CMS should be about making your life easy.

Conclusion: It was a nice pedagogic experience for the students, that learned that CMSs are not always designed to suit their needs. But I had the feeling that there should be something else in the open-source world that would be more user friendly in the backend. That’s why I am intending to use WordPress. It was originally designed to manage weblogs, but the huge improvements of their lastest version and the precedent of some college news projects using it encouraged me to try it out. (more…)

Journalism Practice has just published the first article with empirical data of the international research group on participatory journalism I am participating since April 2007, informally called the “Tampere group” as it was founded in this Finnish city.

The article summarizes the results of a structural analysis of the features that 16 online newspapers offer for audience participation. It also sets up a theoretical framework to interpret the trend of participatory journalism, which we think can be applied to bigger samples. We have split the analysis of participation features into five production stages (access, selection, processing, distribution, interpretation) and found that each news website has different levels of openness in each of these stages.

The bottom line is that, overall, online newspapers are eager to open interpretation to the audience, as this is coherent with their definition of the audience as audience. Access, distribution and even processing are open to a lesser extent, but selection is completely closed to participation, as this is the core of the journalistic profession.

The issue of Journalism Practice compiles, along with a twin issue of Journalism Studies, work presented in the conference the Future of Newspapers, held in Cardiff on September 2007. There are other relevant articles about participatory journalism in the UK (by Alfred Hermida and Neil Thurman) and in Sweden (by Henrik Örnebring,  and also about citizen journalists’ routines in Israel (by Zvi Reich). Our article was updated in December for the journal.

After Mozilla’s success in the launch of Firefox 3 and Microsoft’s beta release of IE 8 it may seem that the web is all about the browser. But recent developments show very intriguing futures for the software that has become central to our lives. I see at least three different directions, all of them dissolving the concept of web browser as we know it today:

Data comes to me

Since I started using Google Reader some years ago, I browse the web less and less. Surfing is old fashioned, I’m rather sit comfortably at the porch and let RSS feeds, podcasts and mashed up data come to me. I get what I want, when I want, and only go fishing for more following suggestions from my trusted sources. Yes, Google’s search engine is also there to guide me to the unknown, but that’s anymore my main web activity. Ubiquity, one of the recent experiments at Mozilla Labs, takes this philosophy to the next step, letting users create their own mashups, combine web services wherever you are (webpage, email), to avoid what you need to do now: linking to them, browsing to them.

Apps are the browser

I couldn’t help getting an iPhone 3G. To me, its main contribution to the world is not that it makes surfing the web on a portable device doable for the first time. That’s cool, but there’s something bigger: Most iPhone apps are connected to the web and let you do tasks transparently, without the need of a browser. So, you tap on the Facebook app and do Facebook activities without having to browse to the website in Safari. May seem a small change, but when online access is (almost) everywhere (and more and more people have it) this means that browsing is not relevant anymore, the Internet becomes just a tool to perform tasks that are more powerful connected than disconnected. Mozilla Labs is also developing the concept of generating desktop apps out of websites, in the Prism project.

The browser becomes the OS

This is the most natural step if the other two mature enough. If the web is there, always, and we have intelligent apps that bring to us what we need when we need it, why do we need the OS anymore? We can have all our data online, we can have all our apps online… and load them whenever we need them. The interface then can become much more flexible and playful, touch screens (even Microsoft is working on this!) and natural language (as Ubiquity aims for) be the way to get what you want. The OS will still be there, of course, but it will be an interface manager more than anything else. Mozilla Labs have created Aurora, a prototype of a browser where the browser is “transparent”.

[Update, 16:11] I guess when I started writing this morning with the buzz about Google Chrome in the back of my mind… But did not actually mention the newcomer! Reviews previous to the release of the G-browser argue that it aims to kill Windows by letting (web) apps live a new life inside the browser. Here you have a condensed version of the comic book that Google has used to introduce the browser (it will be available for Windows later today). Reading through the comic it seems promising but just one more step towards the future of the Internet. I have come to learn that change is always slower than we expect.

Please, don’t freak out if your RSS reader does weird things with my blog posts… I have just migrated to WordPress, with hosting on DreamHost. Since WordPress released version 2.5 few months ago, I was longing for the change. Everything is customizable without almost having to use FTP, and importing and configuring the contents and layout were a bliss.

This is the first step to reactivate the blog. Talking to Alfred Hermida in Montréal about his outstanding blog on digital journalism, I concluded that it is all about discipline: I already have the routine of reading interesting posts of other blogs and news websites through my RSS feeds; I just need to add some time to write every morning about what I have saw or done that is worth sharing. I will keep online journalism as the common ground, hoping that my thoughts can be useful to the community.

A personal note: I am back to Catalonia, resuming my job at URV on September. Keep in touch online… and look forward to catch up with everyone in conferences and seminars all around!