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Posts Tagged ‘Popular News’

Mippin brings news and social media aggregator Buzz Deck to the iPhone

Mobile developer Mippin is bringing their popular news and social media aggregator application Buzz Deck to the iPhone. The application was originally developed for Android, and was also a winner of Google’s 2009 global app challenge.

Buzz Deck’s big claim to fame is its collection of auto-populated topic categories that simplifies the process of finding the latest news. The app uses a “card” based user interface to manage the various categories which works just like Safari’s multiple tabs on the iPhone.  Topics include general categories like “technology”, “music”, and “jokes”, and are populated by a variety of blogs and other popular sites. Buzz Deck also features social media cards that offer quick access to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

The application seems like the perfect solution for someone who wants to keep track of the latest news, but doesn’t want to manage an unwieldy collection of RSS feeds. Users can also “like” individual stories, which will train the application to deliver similar stories in the future.

It’s easy to see how Buzz Deck carved a niche for itself on the Android app market, but it remains to be seen if the app can differentiate itself among the more crowded iTunes store. Other iPhone applications charting similar territory include OhPan (which has both a free and paid version), and Fluent News Reader. The sheer amount and variety of Buzz Deck’s news categories, coupled with its social integration, will likely get it some notice upon launch.

Buzz Deck will be a free application, just like its Android predecessor, and should be available on the app store within a few weeks. The UK-based Mippin just recently submitted their first version of the application to iTunes for approval.

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YouTube Direct Gives News Orgs A Way To Accept User-Submitted Videos

Love it or hate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” — the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking news events —  is quickly gaining steam. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it. Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.

The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsible for actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, which is a task that will require additional manpower for the more popular news sites. All video content uploaded through these tools will be available on YouTube proper as well.

My biggest concern with this kind of reporting is always credibility — oftentimes you’ll come across videos on YouTube that seem like they’re relevant to breaking news, but are unable to determine who uploaded the clip. Fortunately, as an open source tool YouTube Direct allows organizations to customize their submission process. Hopefully the more credible ones will require (or at least encourage) uploaders to leave their contact information, so that fact checkers can follow up on their video reports to ensure their validity.

News organizations aren’t the only sites looking to accept user generated videos, either — YouTube Direct will work that any site that wants to upload video content, so we should probably expect to see some more creative uses in the future.

The feature is not live quite yet, but should be up by tomorrow morning.

Image by quinn.anya

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Yahoo! To Come Full Circle With News Link Curation Site

Yahoo! started out as a hand-curated directory of links and will now recognize the value of manual curation again in a new project to be run by respected online journalist Andrew Golis. That according to Golis himself, who comes from Talking Points Memo – a site widely recognized as one of the best examples of new journalism online.

“The site will be a combination of curation and original reporting,” Golis wrote this morning on his personal blog, “with gregarious linking and sharp, smart writing. In other words… I’m going to be building a team to bring the most popular news site in the United States into the news link economy.”

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We assume the new site will be enabled by all kinds of news research technologies to unearth hot content, but in creating this kind of site Yahoo is acting on a feeling many people have about the fast-flowing real-time river of news: it’s best navigated with a combination of machine and human editorial input. Information curation is hot already and will probably only get hotter as a (great) job in the near future.

Golis is currently the Deputy Publisher of Talking Points Memo. He joined the company in 2006, has a Harvard degree and lives in Sunnyside, New York. He’s married to prominent feminist author Jessica Valenti.

News found via the fabulous Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard.

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