I thought as a writer you could just get paid to write

I heard that phrase in the cafe to day as I was working on lectures for next week. It was a small group trying to get their heads round arts council funding and realising that despite all the agreements in place for minimum fees the money doesn’t match the reality.

It was obviously a frustrating reality for some of the group who realised that they can’t just get paid for what they do without getting involved in all the other aspects. You can’t just write the play. You have to involve actors and put the play on. A writer can’t exist in a vacuum

I felt really sorry for them.

It’s clear that the shrinking pot of money and the way the funding worked was forcing them to compromise at the expense of the professional standards (at least professional standard rates). Just because it’s the arts it doesn’t mean that you should do it for free.

It made me think about journalism.

It echoed a phrase I have heard repeatedly over the last few weeks: “people will pay for good writing” .It was always in the context of paywalls – the latest idea in funding journalism – and in my opinion its one the emptiest phrases I have heard in a while. The reality is that good writing, on its own, is not enough. There are other actors on the journalism stage now and  everyone needs to be writing to involve them.

The solution for the group in the cafe was to scale back on performances and start the painful process of finding match funding and sponsorship to offset the cost.  Key to that was the relevance to the community. The Police, council and other organisations are looking to fund writers and creatives who get in the heart of the community.  The idea that all the money would come from above is well and truly dead.  Much as the writers wanted the distance they couldn’t have it.

Sound familiar?

Are paywalls our arts council? Are the community our match funding? I don’t know.

One thing is certain. The reality of how we pay for this doesn’t match our professional expectations and definitions. Much as we would love it not to change it already has.

The new CNN homepage

CNN have updated their website. I like the layout although I think the boxed content and the ad on the right are a little to similar and the movement of the ad is very distracting. But they aren’t going to move their ad’s around are they.

There is a shift in emphasis towards video on the site but the international version doesn’t get a link the Newspulse beta which is a shame. But few things did catch my eye with respect to video and multimedia in general.

The first thing was a neat little feature of their video player. If you drag the play head around on the video it overlays the running time . Not groundbreaking but a nice little touch.

The player overlays the running time as you drag the playhead

On the article pages themeselve many stories now have an integrated slideshow at the top. This is nicely done but it will be interesting to see how many articles get this treatment.

The integrated slideshow is a nice touch

The last thing that caught my eye was the use of video embedded in the article page. Video is presented as thumbnails in the left-hand-column which ‘pushes’ everything out-of-the-way on the page when clicked.

Video bullies its way on to the screen when clicked

I have mixed feelings about this. In one sense I’m pleased to see video in with the article but the overlay on the article feels wrong.  Many times when watching embedded video I will start it playing and listen to the content – it’s more often than not packaged content (script etc) so I can keep reading and dip back in when the video sounds interesting. (who says men can’t multitask!) This approach seems to bully its way on to the page and does little to integrate. This is made worse by the use of packaged content rather than clips with little or nothing to signpost the link between the article and the video.

I think a better option would be to go with the clickable thumbnail approach of video. Align the images more appropriately to the text and the expand your player from that point.

Still. Lots of interesting new tweaks and experiments.

I’m doing a lot more video this year as part of my digital teaching. One reason for that is we have bought a boat load of Flip video recorders to play with. That means we can do video without the big camera issues.

Whilst pulling together resources for video (I’m expecting the students to do a lot of reading around the basic technical stuff) I came across the Flip video spotlight site.

Flip Video Spotlight provides steeply discounted access to selected Flip Video products to qualifying charitable organizations. To start, charitable organizations apply online to become a Participating Partner. If approved, Participating Partners join our online community and receive access to the Flip Video Spotlight storefront. For each Flip Video Ultra camcorder purchased through the storefront, Flip Video Spotlight donates a free unit.

How nice is that.

As part of the site there are basic tips on storytelling,  shooting, production and distribution. They also have a couple of neat videos offering guidance for using for the flip. So even if you don’t fit their criteria you can still benefit from the advice

I’m very taken with the general move towards more data from primary sources. Councils, government orgs etc. putting stats, facts, figures and information online for us to use and mashup. Those orgs who are savvy enough to drive this stuff through RSS make it even easier for us to harvest this stuff and add an extra dimension to our news gathering.

Of course the public sector moves slowly when it comes to IT and it’s no surprise that there are still a majority of orgs that hide their content away on static pages. No RSS feed to help there. So what do we do?

Well we could resign ourselves to adding them to the list of pages that we bookmark and visit. A bit like those regular calls we make to keep our contacts book fresh; no bad thing. But another solution is to use on of the many RSS services on the web to ‘scrape’ the page for content and convert it in to a feed.

Preston city council (the council nearest to me at work) has a few feeds but none around the basic operation of the council – meetings, decisions etc.  This kind of thing would be great to get a feed of. So I thought I would give it a go with their published decisions page using Feed43

No feed for the dull stuff!

The first thing I did was set the search so that it showed all results. That way any new ones would show up by default. I did this by using an * in the search box. The * is a standard operator for a wild card or ‘any matches’. So it seemed a logical punt to try it.

The next step was to copy the web address to feed my RSS maker. The URL looks complex but it contains all the information needed to drive the search.

Feed43 grabs the whole page for you to explore

The first step with Feed43 is to feed it the URL then click Reload. It pulls in the whole page and then you get the hard bit. The idea with feed scrapers is to give it enough information about the way the stuff you want is presented that it can ‘spot’ the stuff and ignore the rest. This means trawling through some HTML.

You get two options

The global search pattern looks for HTML that ‘wraps’ the content you want to make in to a feed. It could be the whole table that contains the search results. But this doesn’t really help in this case.

Better to go straight to the second option which defines the specific things to look for to define an item to be added to the feed. Here’s what I put.

<td > <a href=”{%}” title=”{*}”>{%}</a></td>

In feed43 language {*} means this could be anything, just ignore it. {%} means this is important so store it.

So I can saw from the HTML that each decision in the list looked like this

<td > <a href=”http://preston.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=348&amp;displaypref=0″ title=”Link to decision details for North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation”>North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation</a>

So I told feed43 to look for anything between the <td> </td> tags regardless of what ‘class=’ said. Then I told it to grab the href link as the actual weblink, ignore the title and then grab the text between the <a> tag to use as a title.

Finding the useful bits on the page means working through the HTML

Clicking extract will filter the content and show you the results. You can see they are split in to {%1} for the link and {%2} for the title of the decision.

The filtered results display in a list

The last step is to define which of these makes up the key parts of the feed. You can see it’s pretty straightforward to fill the gaps at this point. Your feed is then ready to go. All you need to do is subscribe in the normal way

The filtered results can be added to the feed template

Moving beyond the basics

The thing that makes scraping pages difficult is picking through the HTML. Feed43 makes this easier by limiting the number of options to filter by. But if you need to push further in then you will need to explore other options. One to consider is Yahoo pipes which has a page grabber option. But you will also need to invest some time in understanding regular expressions.

I think this kind of stuff is more an more important for orgs and journalists especially when it comes to councils and government orgs. We all know how ‘mundane’ many see this stuff (important as it is). So making it in to a feed would be more conducive to newsgathering by stealth. Encourage more ‘passive aggressive newsgathering’ as Paul Bradshaw once described it.

I was browsing around the coverage of the postal strike today and came across a story on my local paper (well, local to uni) the LEP. One of the comments caught my eye less for their view on the strike and more for the opening sentence.

We get a comment thread going on one story about this and a new story appears so the comments get lost.

Having spent time listening to Amanda Michel from Propublica yesterday talking about the value of engaging your users in the process it struck me that this is a bit of a problem.

When a story breaks we let people know we have the story via a blog post or twitter alert and look to pull people to our first article. When the canary of twitter sings every looks for the detail.

In many cases these first draft articles are the ones that garner a lot of comment, they are after all the ones we pointed people to.  But when the story develops, that comment on the LEP made me realise, we often leave those comments behind. Worse still, people new to the story miss the depth of discussion and the audience. As journalists we miss out on the clarifications and developments that brings.

Related comments

So maybe there is a need to have some way of flagging related comments and discussions as well as related pages. After all the related pages will often be earlier drafts of the story and aren’t we in a social world where the conversation is just as important?

If anyone is doing this I’d love to know.

I recently posted about how to add a quick form using Google docs. Kasper Sorenson left a comment asking if it was possible to update an image dynamically

Sometime ago, I wanted to create a dynamic chart based on values that were being entered into a database (in this case we used Google Spreadsheets). Basically if I was to export the chart as a static image, it would be outdated after an hour.

The chart created in the spreadsheet can be embedded instead of exported as an image so in principle you could update it. But I thought I would give it a try.

So, here is a form made using Google docs forms.

That drives a spreadsheet that drives an image:

Update: Well, I hope there is an image there but there seems to be this weird thing were you can’t see the image if you aren’t logged in to Google docs. Odd!. It seems you need to be quite specific about how you share the sheet before you then share the image. But you can also add a chart as a gadget and this seems less temperamental. Down side is that this is also a little unpredictable for updating. Not ideal but still, it’s free.

Add your data to the form and refresh the page and you should see the graph change. Okay the page refresh is not ideal but hey, it’s free.

How does it work

Selecting the whole column means you pick up new entries

It works by picking the whole of the results columns the graph rather than specific data cells. With very little info in it it looks pretty sparse but as the results come in it will change. So not a perfect result but not bad.

When to use it
It might be useful if you were tracking fuel prices over time. Add the data and map the timestamp against the price. Add a postcode field the form and you could also output it as a map.

Most of my teaching today has been about the basics of online presentation – online writing etc. As an exercise I pulled some council news from the web to give us something to work with.  It was a simple story, a local council by-election. But it had some nice angles to explore – turnout etc – and it was on a patch I was interested in as part of the Bespoke project running out of the University.

I was really pleased to see some of the third year print students immediately looking at tables and graphs as a way of displaying the result. They were using Word to hack out the copy and used the Chart generator to make pie charts. A few things tripped them up.

The first was the generic colour scheme for the charts. The election results included Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates. But you can see that the biggest result was formatted as blue – a bit of a problem when it was a Labour win.

A win for Blue?

Changing the colour of the data is pretty easy in Word 2007. Just right-click the segment and pick Format Data point. Pick Fill from the list then check Solid fill. Pick and colour and click close it’s done.

That's better. A win for Labour.

But then comes the next problem. You have to get the image out of Word.

In principle this is not too hard. Simply highlight the image, copy it and then paste it in to an image editing package to save it for the web. Of course it’s that last bit that is the pain – especially if you don’t have a decent editor to hand. And often the image is squashed or distorted.

Using online services

As an alternative solution to using Word or needing an image editor, I suggested using Google docs. The spreadsheet option allows you to create a chart which you can then share or export as an image. Easy to do

• Enter the data
• Select the data you want to work with
• Use the Wizard to make the chart

Easy to use but limited

When the image is saved there is a neat option to export the image

Getting an image out of Google docs Google spreadsheet chart

The image it chucks out looks pretty good but you can see that we have the same problem with colour, that we had with Word. Unfortunately there isn’t much we can do about that.

The Chart API

One option is to delve a little deeper in to the thing that helps make the google charts – the Google Charts Api. Unfortunately the code is a little arcane and often needs a little more effort to understand the construction of the chart than a visual hack around.  Luckily there are plenty of third party sites that offer wizards for google charts.

Jon Winstanley has a great little app for quick charts and it also allows you to pick colours for your data.  It still requires a little concentration around the data structure but it works well.

Another is James B. Allen’s chart generator which has a more of a WYSIWYG feel to it.

Appropriate use.

There are other chart apis and chart builders but the open and free tools from Google are really tempting and, with the help of people like James and Jon, some easy to use third-party apps.

Graphs and charts are an obvious and easy way to show people data, especially as they scan for detail. Of course in all of this chart magic, one thing is worth noting. Perhaps the best way to present the information is the simplest:

1. Labour: 656 Votes
2. Conservatives: 283 Votes
3. Lib Dems: 239 Votes

These are my links for August 25th through September 20th:

• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Red Kayaks and Hidden Gold (copy 1) – This is an astute and balanced survey of how public participation is reforming journalism. Kelly sets out clearly and calmly the big questions posed to the news media by changing communications technology and the increasingly demanding and creative citizenry of our digital world.
• Newspapers get the kind of communities they deserve » Nieman Journalism Lab – quot;The reality is that many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value.quot;
• Google CEO says paid online content won’t work for general news – Editors Weblog – According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, publishers of general news will find it hard to charge for their online conten quot;In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity,quot; Reuters quoted him as saying. quot;So my guess is for niche and specialist markets … it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news.quot;
• I have 3,571 tweets that show that Twitter isn’t for lunch anymore – Robert Scoble rounds up why twitter is useful for him. Don#039;t let scale put you off here. These uber users spend so much time with this stuff that we benefit from their mistakes and workrounds.
• In Uganda, citizen journalists fill news gap during riots – Blog – Committee to Protect Journalists – A though provoking look at the way citizens are stepping in to fill the gaps left by reporting restrictions.
• UMG v. Veoh: Big Win for Online Video | Electronic Frontier Foundation – quot;Veoh, an online video hosting service similar to YouTube, qualifies for a DMCA safe harbor that protects the service from monetary damages for copyright infringements committed by its users.quot; An interesting development to watch
• Online Audio Editor : Myna – Good grief. This aviary stuff just gets more and more useful. This time an online editor. This cloud is getting more and more silver by the day
• The 5 Big Myths Of Social Media – quot;some of the myths..some thoughts on why they are simply myths and what your brand can do to get past themquot; And if the word Brand puts you off there, remember, you are a brand online
• Tools to build an engaged online community | Socialmedia.biz – A cracking presentation – with handouts – from JD Lasica.
• Nieman Reports Social media roundup – Thanks to @lauraoliver for the link to this weighty round up of journalism and social media from Nieman labs
• A year-by-year tour of how Twitter has been taking over the world | Royal Pingdom – Thanks to @gordonmacmillan for the pointer to these nice maps showing the spread of twitter. As he says quot;one for a powerpointquot;. Wonder if there is a correlation here with the way virus spread
• YouTube Insight adds Cool New Discovery Analytics – Angela grant pointed me to this nice overview of the changes to YouTube#039;s analytics. In particular quot;new features including stats on mobile users, subscribersquot;
• Nieman Reports | Ours, Theirs and the Bloggers’ Zones: Compatible, Yet Different – Shane Richmond reflects on his experiences at the Telegraph and how the approach to community has matured quot;Over the years, creating community on the Telegraph’s Web site has come to mean a lot more than someone leaving a comment at the bottom of an article.quot;
• The Web At A New Crossroads – A post that looks at the history of the web and where it may take us. But this is no dry history lesson. This is more a history of the approach to getting information online. A great post
• Josh Halliday.com: UK journalism students – join the CollegeJourn project! (Is this thing on?) – Josh Halliday quot;can see no reason why all journalism students in the UK (and elswhere) shouldn#039;t be joining in the CollegeJourn global collaborative reporting project on University healthcare.quot; He#039;s right
• If You Printed The Internet … | CreativeCloud – A great set of infographics that show what printing the internet out would actually take. Good fun and nicely executed.
• Twitter Hastag search – Yes, a hashtag search, but one with a difference. This one quot;Returns an HTML table of tagged tweets that you can paste into a spreadsheet for analysis or archivingquot; Great stuff
• CloudMade Makes Maps Differently – Interesting tools for maps including a nice option to change the colour scheme of your map
• The Data Liberation Front (the Data Liberation Front) – The theme is labored but the content good. Using various google apps to share and store
• Twitter tips for journalists | Save the Media – Old hat to some. Helpful reminders to all.
• How to make readers pay for news | Monday Note – A really detailed and interesting pre-amble to the whole pay model debate in media.
• Jeff Jarvis | Let’s build an ecosystem around hyperlocal bloggers | Media | The Guardian – Jarvis pushes the news ecosystem to hyperlocal levels. But the focus on metro level ideas, for me, highlights the reasons why it may be a great model in the US but would need some serious thought for UK success.
• How to customise your browser for effective online research – A great list of tools for web research from the Help me investigate crew
• Technolo-J : Using social media to improve our readers’ experience – quot;We need to learn more about our readers and be willing to interact with them. We can no longer simply speak to our community; we have to be a part of the community. And that#039;s only possible by understanding and participating on these sites.quot; I Agree, but only up to a point. Many of the communities we should engage with are not visible online. We should get out there and get along side them. Then, perhaps, help them get online.
• 10 People You Won’t See on Twitter Anymore – A nice round up of the annoying users on twitter that (if new rules are to be believed) we won#039;t see anymore.
• Five concrete steps to improving the news at Newsless.org – Top fives, and tens outlining what journalism is getting wrong are all the rage at the moment. This list has some good advice. Win the story not the morning is my personal fave.
• Daily Mirror divides opinion with move away from SEO for 3am site | News | New Media Age – quot;The Daily Mirror’s move to drop the use of aggressive headline natural search strategies for its new gossip site 3am.co.uk in favour of building a loyal visitor base has received mixed reaction from the market.quot; Hmm. Perhaps they#039;ll be relying on the trackbacks from all the bloggers moaning that they used their story without credit
• Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organization « Mediactive – If Dan Gilmor has a view on how to run a media organisation it would be worth a look wouldn#039;t it? It would
• Teaching Online Journalism » What’s your strategy for your online work? – A great post by Mindy about working out why you do what you do online and what you want to get from it should be linked. quot;So whether you’re writing a blog, or tweeting, or posting Delicious bookmarks (I mark many of my bookmarks personal, or “not shared”), or lifestreaming, give some thought to the audience. If you want a site or venue to be personal, intended for a small circle of people you know, then write accordingly. If you want to cultivate your reputation as an analyst of East Asian economics, then you’re going to be writing about (and linking to) entirely different stuff.quot;
• Now printable! Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency – Mindy puts all her quot;guides for multimedia proficiencyquot; in to one pdf document. One commentator calls downloading this a quot;no brainerquot; – can#039;t argue with that.
• Beet.TV: Flip Easily Beats New Video iPod Nano in Side-by-Side Test – Beet.tv try the flip and nano side by side and, well, the flip does a better job.
• Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data – quot;This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the 5 biggest, most cutting edge Web trends to come out of 2009quot; They start with Structured data
• ESPN Planning UK Online Sports Portal – News from paid Content that quot;the U.S. network has confirmed to us it is preparing a UK sports portal to accompany the broadcastsquot; The setanta aftermath continues…
• Forget facebook and twitter – vlogging is the future. – Filed in the quot;those who don#039;t get itquot; bin comes this doozy from Denmark. quot;Forget Facebook and Twitterquot; was the message of tonight#039;s 21:00 news broadcast. The future is called … drum roll … video blogging.quot; Welcome to the 21st century Danish broadcast news
• How to Start to Save Photojournalism – The Digital Journalist – Philanthropy only goes so far. It isnt a long term solution to the problems in the industry – according to the editorial for this months digital journalist.
• Beet.TV: CNNMoney.com Finds Huge Audience, Profitability with Video – CNNMoney explain how they quot;started video operations as a pure startup in Janaury last year and out of the gate it was profitable right away because we recognized there was an audience demand,quot;
• A swedish take on e-paper – A Swedish take on why e-paper is a cul-de-sac for newspapers. At best a transitional product but not the savior many think it is.
• Interview Techniques – Newspaper Video – A great round up, by Chuck, of advice on how to shoot video interviews from the newspaper video mailing list
• Video short, shot on the Canon 7d – a stunning looking (and interesting watch) film shot, ungraded on the new canon #039;converged camera#039;
• Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves – All true. All very well observed and all worth reading
• Broadcast Skype? – How you can use skype as a broadcast OB and what it really looks like. Great experimentation.
• A poor craftsman blames others’ tools « BuzzMachine – Is Twitter useful for journalists ? Well, even if it is to help identify the cog native gaps that need filling for people to #039;get#039; the change in the media landscape, this post by Jeff seems to suggest yes.
• Why I’m inviting you to Help Me Investigate this – Sarah Hartly asks for help to investigate quot;How much local council coverage is there in your local newspaper?quot; She#039;s using Helpmeinvestigate to do it and it will produce some good stuff.
• You must not embed the Telegraph’s embeddable video – What happens when policy come second to technology. The Telegraph make a hash out of nothing…
• : Sorry Guido, the BBC did for Duncan – Jon Bernstein ponders the role that mainstream media had to play in Alan Duncan#039;s fall from favour and Guido Fawkes#039; view that the news is now disintermediated. So is it? quot; Not yet. Instead we have a symbiotic – if dysfunctional – relationship between the blogosphere and the traditional media.quot;
• Google News Spotlight – The editorsweblog rounds-up some of the (admittedly low) comment around Google spotlight – their computer driven quot;magazinequot;. General head scratching at why and what but like a lot of google stuff maybe it#039;s a real wait and see.
• Data and the future of journalism panel discussion: Linked Data London – Paul Bradshaw draws together the threads of how data and the web (and journalism) are converging as he reflects on a panel discussion around linked data.
• 10 new routines at a news startup » Nieman Journalism Lab – Michael Andersen takes a look at the Ann Arbor Chronicle – an online news sites. It includes a nice, 10 point checklist of the average working cycle. Satisfying to see quot;6. More than 20 public meetings a month.quot;. As one commentator put it quot;It takes blood, sweat and tears to do the news.quot;
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Twitter Postings: Iterative Design (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) – Jakob Nielsen#039;s take on what the perfect tweet should look like (in terms of usability) based on an iterative design process. Interesting use of caps for emphasis which is something that I don#039;t see a huge amount of but is an obvious idea.

There is a future for news – a sustainable and once-again profitable future with the prospect of expanding and improving journalism by taking it deeper into our communities with increased relevance, engagement, accountability and efficiency.

That’s the view of uber J-blogger Jeff Jarvis who, when not asking “what would google do”, is asking (along with his students at CUNY) “what happens to journalism in a city when its last daily newspaper dies?”. According to Jeff’s article in the Guardian, what happens is that the local community could step in and fill the gap with something new and, most importantly, profitable.

Bottom line: after three years, we project that a blogger could hire editorial staff and advertising help – citizen salespeople who help support the citizen journalists – and net $148,000 out of $332,000 revenue. That’s a conservative estimate when you consider that a community weekly paper in such a town probably earns between $2m-$5m.

There are more facts and figures of amounts that, even with the exchange rate as it is, are pretty eye-popping.

In a comment, I questioned if there was enough of a culture of hyper local in the UK to sustain the ‘ecosystem’

Given that most of the metro blogging and hyperlocal networks in the US are driven by/motivated by/focused on politics, you also have to wonder if the legislative structure in the UK would effectively stop the kind of ecosystem you are talking about at a county, or at a push, city, level.

That prompted a response from the Guardians Kevin Anderson who noted that very little of the ‘hyperlocal’ stuff is to do with politics. Pointing to an older post he mused that there was still “much to learn from two-yr old report on hyperlocal” which, for him, underlined a key problem news organisations had.

One of the most common mistakes that news organisations make when it comes to community is trying to build participation strategies around an extremely narrow, overly-professionalised definition of news.

I have a lot of sympathy with that view. Maybe the media does look the wrong way down the telescope at this issue. But I still think there are questions to be asked about the roll of news in the ecosystem and the role the community has to play.

Is there room for a Preston City Chronicle?

Much of the tone of the debate around the ‘death of the traditional media’ is framed by the general consensus that we need to know what is going on in the community around us – it’s our democratic duty. That may not be the fun stuff. It may be the hard stuff, when the community fails. It may be the dull stuff like the endless council meetings.

The argument goes that, whatever it is, we need it and as newspapers die the gap needs to be filled. It’s in that context that many of the best examples of hyperlocal journalism seem to exist. The oft cited Ann Arbour Chronicle is a great example. The frontpage is all politics and metro news and the civic watchdog roll is one that is part of their daily routine.

But that brings me back to my comment and few (of many, many) questions.

• If sites like the Ann Arbour Chronicle are the model for a successful hyperlocal news service, will the model travel? Does it work in Ann Arbour because of the city and the way the public administration work in the US?
• What would need to change in the UK for it to work? More open government, less ‘big media’ or a more politically motivated electorate?
• Should we be trying to make it work at all?

Open09 seems like the perfect opportunity to ask those questions.

This article first appeared on the Open09 blog.

Last week I posted about a little wordpress plugin I wrote called FancyCatlist. It made a nice little category menu similar to the kind of thing you would see on Everyblock. I wrote it as part of the process of putting together one of the sites I want my students to use next year as part of their practice in online publishing. You can see it in action on the ‘work in progress’ site.

The site is a ‘beatblog’ kind of thing and in searching around for examples of different approaches to this kind of thing I stumbled back upon ‘community news engine’ Newsmixer.

Newsmixer.com

Its a nice idea and especially impressive as it was a jschool project which you can find out more about on the site itself. But the bit that caught my eye was the ability to comment on each paragraph of the content (and more as you’ll see if you go and explore)

I liked that idea as it taps in to the ‘One Par. One fact’ discipline of  basic journo writing and turns it in to a kind of microlink activitiy. It also begins to stem ideas off from various parts of an article, not just an article itself. Of course the reverse is that it could abstract all meaning out of the text. But used well, as I think it is here, I think it stands up.

So I think to myself that this would be a nice feature to have on the students publication website. But not, in the first instance,  as a way of the reader leaving feedback but as a way for me to leave feedback. A way that I could comment on each paragraph to give students feedback on what they write. I should point out that as I write this, it’s the policy of the department to keep student publications behind a firewall (I’m not so happy with that but hey ho). So feedback in the open is not a problem.

Finding a micro-comment plugin

I had a look around to see what was out there that would do a similar thing. This included poking around the newsmixer source (which is opensource) to see if it was worth using their framework. But they are using python. Great but my head (and life) is too crammed to learn that. Ryan Mark, one of the developers of newsmixer, has announced that newsmixer is heading the way of an API and there will be a wordpress plugin to tap in to all the neat features. But that seems a way off.

The next thing I did was search for wordpress plugins.  The closest I found was marginalia which looks very nice but doesn’t seem to play well with Wordpress 2.8 and even with some nice features didnt look like it would scale back to what I wanted.

So I wrote another plugin.

The Feedback By Paragraph plugin

Feedback by Paragraph is a plugin that does a number of things

• It hijacks the content of the post, looking for the </p> tag and inserts some code that attaches a pop-up box to that paragraph so you can leave comments. It inserts a little bubble with a link to open the box which also displays the number of comments there already. It only does this on the article page (what WP calls a single post as defined by the template single.php). It uses the closing p tag because it’s the easiest one to find as the <p> is often full of crap like classes etc and my regex is not really up to that. Using </p> also has the advantage of picking up any image captions without breaking the styling class.
• It saves any paragraph comments with a custom ‘comment type’ so that they can be associated with a paragraph
• It filters out any paragraph comments from the normal comment display.
• It only allows you to comment if you are an admin or the post author but anyone can see the comments.

Feedback By Paragraph

You can see it in action  the beatblog site

An issue.

This is now resolved.

There is a big issue to be aware of with this plugin.  When you submit a comment form with a custom comment_type defined  it isnt processed like all the other form elements. I’m not sure why that is but it takes an ammendement to the one of the core files in wordpress to make it (at least that’s the only way I got it to work). That means a tweak to a file called wp-comments-post.php.

Around line 40 you need to add the line

$comment_type = ( isset($_POST['comment_type']) ) ? trim($_POST['comment_type']) : null;

And around line 62 you need to change

$comment_type = '';

to

//$comment_type = '';

I know, not ideal. I’m sure there is a better way to do this which involves hooks and filters and all that. Please if anyone has even half an idea how this might be done I’d love to hear. But I have yet to find it(or understand it).

How do I use it?

You can download the plugin to try.

What next

There is plenty of flexibility in this plugin and an options page wouldn’t go a miss. I’ll be looking at setting it up so that you have more control over who sees what and perhaps look at setting a template for the comments form so that it isnt hidden in the plugin code. But for now, given that my sites are behind a fire wall it seems to work for me.

Let me know if you download and try the thing. Oh, and don’t forget that tweak of the core file.

NOTE: First bug fix! This version makes the call to the database for the comments using the generic form rather than being hard coded to a particular table. Sorry!

Visit the feedbackBP plugin page