“The atomic element is the story”: This American Life navigates a future that goes beyond broadcast » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

The episode versus the story

excerpt from an original post

"...TAL’s website and mobile apps have long been organized like the broadcast. You can download the whole episode from iTunes or stream it from the show’s website or mobile apps.

But users often don’t want the whole show. “Right now people often share an episode, but they’ll say, ‘Act 3!’ Or, ‘Fast-forward to this time!’” Lind told me. For users, he discovered, “the atomic element is the story, rather than the episode.” That might seem kind of obvious to web publishers, but it doesn’t necessarily fit with the narrative philosophy of the show — a handcrafted hour of storytelling, woven together by a common theme. “I think we’re sort of purists, in terms of wanting people to get the entire episode and to encourage them to listen to it as a whole,” Lind said.

Lind is assembling a UX team to make the TAL website more user-focused. Individual stories recently got their own play buttons, and soon they will be broken out into discrete posts, each with a dedicated URL and share buttons — a similar approach to the one taken by, say, WNYC’s On the Media. Every story will get full transcripts, a first for TAL, in part to improve search-engine optimization. (The only textual content that accompanies the show’s stories at the moment are radio-style promos, purposely spare and titillating but practically invisible to Google.)

TAL has hired a Boston company called 3Play Media to convert all 437 hours of its radio content into text, dating back to the show’s 1995 debut. The company makes software that transcribes speech automatically, but a team of humans has to review each one for quality control (and make editorial decisions: Should we remove Ira Glass‘ um’s and ah’s or transcribe them?).

Radio is an art form as much as a medium. Doesn’t a transcript ruin some of the magic? Aren’t the producers worried people will read, not listen to, the stories they’ve labored to tell? The staff is going to have to get over it, Lind said, and that includes a certain bespectacled host. Lind said the benefits of the updates will far outweigh the drawbacks. “I think that for every person who comes and just reads…there’s going to be 10 more people who find the audio because of it.”

The team is also working to add richer metadata to stories, with tags for locations, people, era, topic, and mood. So you might search for “mood: angsty; topic: love; decade: 90s” and find, for example, Episode 42: “Get Over It!” (And a lot of other stories, too; this is TAL, after all.) TAL is working with 3Play to design a custom XML format for categorizing its content.

In mid-May, the TAL site added an optional registration system, which allows listeners to build playlists and mark their favorite episodes. It also allows the show to keep a closer eye on who’s using the site and how. Lind said about 2,300 people had registered with the site as of last week, a modest number in his estimation; the TAL website gets about 40,000 visits per day...."

Talking The Talk: Verbally Lets The Speech Disabled Communicate Using The iPad (For Free)

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By Rip Empson:

"Intuary, a mobile app startup, recently launched its first app, called Verbally, which is designed to bring speech to those without. Verbally is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solution built for the more than six million people in the U.S. suffering from speech disabilities — caused by Lou Gherig’s Disease, stroke, brain injury, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, autism, and more. The app allows users to tap the words they wish to communicate onto the app’s keyboard, or choose from pre-prepared words or phrases, which are then in turn transmitted into audio phrases...."

BadBadBad, a "Transmedia Underground Novel," Has Frustratingly Brilliant Debut - San Francisco Art - The Exhibitionist

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By Benjamin Wachs, May 20, 2011

"Burlesque and a bullhorn: Jesús Ángel García at the helm.

​Jesús Ángel García had intended for the launch party of his underground novel BadBadBad to be a "transmedia" extravaganza that would change the notion of what a book launch could be. He didn't quite get there.

"This is a transmedia novel by a Luddite writer ... so we might have some issues," he said.

And issues there were. The Fivepoints Arthouse projector wouldn't acknowledge García's laptop for a while. There was supposed to be an album that went along with the book. (There is none yet.) There was supposed to be a movie, too. (Only certain sections have been completed.)

"I have a complicated relationship with technology," García said.

So what he ended up with was just a kickass book launch party -- the kind that opens with a woman passing around whiskey shots in Dixie cups from a platter. But he's working on it. And although "transmedia" might not be the clearest vision, whatever it ends up being just might be the future of literature -- if the damn projector will work (which it did eventually).

Here's how he describes it:

"The kids are really into the YouTube, but they don't read books. So I had the idea that I'd write a book and extend it over all these platforms, so that even if people don't read underground books they'd find the novel. It started out as a basically a publicity piece, and it just kept extending until the transmedia publicity was influencing the book in important ways. So this documentary about the themes of the book has really changed the way it developed."....

Must Read/Follow: Deeper Facebook Engagement: Dissecting Interactivity

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From an original post by Michael Wu:

"Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium's Principal Scientist of Analytics, digging into the complex dynamics of social interaction and group behavior in online communities and social networks.

Michael was voted a 2010 Influential Leader by CRM Magazine for his work on predictive social analytics and its application to Social CRM. He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere's Building Community blog and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog. You can follow him on Twitter at mich8elwu.

It’s been about 3 weeks since I last blogged on Lithosphere as I’ve been busy traveling around UK and Italy for both work and play. The play part involved my wife and I traveling around UK and Italy, sightseeing and enjoying delicious food and fine wine. In UK, we visited Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Bath. And before we left for Italy we even stopped by Salisbury to see Stonehenge. Then, in Italy, we toured Milan, Florence, and Rome. And of course we couldn’t miss visiting the Vatican.

The work component of the trip involved me speaking at a number of conferences, business meetings, social media events, workshops, and interviews. I talked about a wide range of topics from social CRM, psychology of gamification, cyber anthropology, science of influence, the Facebook Engagement Index, as well as some of the more technical topics, such as machine learning, social network analysis and predictive social analytics.

Among the topics I presented, gamification was by far the most popular topic. It was heavily tweeted and several excellent blog articles resulted from my presentation at Digital Surrey (a very engaging not-for-profit community of digital professionals).

The Science of Gamification (@mich8elwu at #digitalsurrey) by Mark Wilson
The Science of Gamification on the gamification blog by Gabe Zichermann
The Science of Gamification at DigitalSurrey on GameTuned by James Monjack
Want to change behaviour? Pull the trigger on Strange Fascination by Jane Franklin
Benjamin Ellis also took some very nice photos at the event

Now that you know where I’ve been, let me return to the topic of Facebook engagement. Last time I showed you the structural similarity between a Facebook fan page and a community. By treating fan pages as communities, we can develop a whole spectrum of engagement metric from the very shallow (level 0) fan count to something that is eight levels deep. And I talked about the first two levels in my last post.

Level 0: Total fan counts
Level 1: Active fans
Level 2: Interactivity (through comments) – Commented post fraction.

Today we will examine several deeper level engagement metrics.

Disentangling Interactivities
Since the Level 2 engagement metric looks at what fractions of the posts were interactive (i.e. commented), Level 3 hones in on the interactive posts and tries to quantify how much interaction took place in those posts. This is traditionally characterized by a metric called thread depth: the number of comments a post receives. I computed the average thread depth across all posts within a fan page and plotted the distribution on a log scale in Figure 3. The median level average thread depth is about 12.5, meaning that posts on fan pages receive about 12 comments on average...."

read the full post on lithosphere.lithium.com

Could Kickstarter Be Better Than Government Grants for Artists?

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By Jolie O'Dell

"Artist Molly Crabapple has just been given $17,000 to lock herself in a paper-covered room for five days and make art until the walls are covered.

But that sum didn’t come from the National Endowment for the Arts or a wealthy patron; Crabapple, like many in her subversive art-making shoes, turned to Kickstarter to find funding for the stunt.

In her Kickstarter proposal, she outlined the basic premise of the project, dubbed “Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell.” Anyone who donated a dollar to the effort would get to watch a live stream of the whole five-day shebang. Anyone who pledged $10 or more would get to name an animal for inclusion in the artwork; donations of $20 or more would get an actual piece of the ink-filled paper sent to them. And backers who fronted $1,000 or more would get an absinthe-infused lunch with the artist.

Crabapple set a $4,500 fundraising goal; so far, the total raised is $17,000 — enough to make a short film about the project, which Crabapple says will debut online shortly after Crabapple’s Week in Hell wraps...."

AbsolutSF Creativity - Participatory Video Campaign on Facebook

Decide the ABSOLUT Capital of San Francisco
The Mission. The Castro. The Haight. Every neighborhood has 
its own personality,and every resident has something to say about it. 
So share your favorite spots, your signature cocktails and your story. 
What makes your neighborhood the heart and soul of San Francisco?