It’s Not Their Medium, It’s Their Message: Seven Knight-Batten Winners Mastered More Than Tech

For proof technology is changing journalism for the better, look no further than the seven organizations honored yesterday by the Knight Foundation. This year’s Knight-Batten award winners the Sunlight Foundation, ProPublica, 48 HR Magazine, the St. Petersburg Times, Ushahidi Haiti, Publish2, and The Takeaway leveraged social networks, interactive databases, mobile messages and other emerging technologies to spread information and engage their audiences.

Technology, however, is not the real star here. A lot of the tools the winners used can be easily obtained and understood by beginning users. The Sunlight Foundation’s real-time coverage of February’s health care summit, for example, used a public embed code from The White House for its live video stream. The central tool in ProPublica’s Reporting Network, meanwhile, was e-mail. Even among the more technical projects like Ushahidi’s interactive map wiki and Publish2′s content sharing platform, technology is not the real star. The real star is the values behind each project, values anyone in news — big enterprises and small enterprises, techies and non-techies — can and should start applying today — along with the previously mentioned accessible technology. There’s nothing stopping you from being a Knight-Batten winner, or at least acting like one.

SUNLIGHT LIVE,
Sunlight Foundation

What it is: The Sunlight Foundation used data, visualizations and insight gleaned from research to contextualize real-time coverage of February’s bipartisan health care summit and promoted its work and tracked audience response with various online tools.

What it teaches: What you do before and after live coverage is as important as what you do during it.

The real-time Web renders preparation more important, not less. The success or failure of live online coverage is usually determined in days leading up to the event, not during the minutes or hours of the event itself. The Sunlight Foundation conducted intensive planning and research ahead of the seven-hour health care summit. It also monitored the audience response in real-time and after-the-fact, informing tactical decisions that day and strategic decisions for live coverage projects going forward.

REPORTING NETWORK,
ProPublica

What it is: ProPublica enlisted an army of more than 5,000 citizen reporters with meaningful (spot checking government data), even fun (photographing congressmen attending the Super Bowl) assignments, engaging its audience and extending its journalistic reach.

What it teaches: Audience contributions rise to your expectations.

Ask your audience to contribute more than just weather photos and you might be surprised by the results you get. Even if only a fraction of your citizen journalists participate in assignments, and even if only a fraction of their contributions can be used in your coverage, making users feel like they’re part of the team goes a long way toward building audience engagement and loyalty. And when it comes to things journalists can’t do or can’t easily do themselves — like monitoring direct mailings or requesting residents-only public documents in states they don’t live in — if you don’t get it from your users you’re probably not going to get it at all.

48 HR MAGAZINE

What it is: Starting the process on Twitter and ending it with print-on-demand Web service MagCloud, 48 HR Magazine in a single weekend crowdsourced a 60-page magazine, soliciting, editing, producing and publishing 70 entertaining, smartly presented entries.

What it teaches: Don’t ask “Why?” Ask “Why Not?” Or, better yet, just do it.

Create a magazine in 48 hours? That’s crazy. Yes, it is. But crazy doesn’t mean impossible. In the time most would spend hemming and hawing about how crazy it is these folks got it done. Like newspaper chain the Journal Register Company’s recent Ben Franklin Project, it’s a testament to the Web and its organizing power and its affordable, accessible tools. It’s also a testament to people and their willingness to take risks and think positively. In both the 48 HR Magazine and the Ben Franklin Project, somebody boldly, unequivocally stated “We’re gonna do this.” Then, impressed by the leader’s conviction if not completely convinced by it, others signed on. “Sure, why not?” Momentum built, and suddenly it didn’t seem so crazy. “Why not?” gave way to “We really are gonna do this” gave we to “We did it!”

THE OBAMETER,
St. Petersburg Times

What it is: With users’ assistance, the St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact.com tracked 500 Obama campaign promises, rated them as kept, compromise, broken, stalled, in the works or not yet rated and presented the tally through simple, fun, engaging color-coded graphics.

What it teaches: The million-mile-per-hour online news cycle isn’t the Web’s fault, it’s yours.

The Web’s accelerated news cycle drives politicians to make all kinds of promises, and usually, helps them get away with it. In July, when all eyes seem to be on the thermometer or the Gulf Coast, remarks made 19 months ago in a snowy New Hampshire square don’t fit the live, latebreaking model. It’s so refreshing, then, to see the Web leveraged to break free from horse-race journalism and hold leaders accountable. Why journalists, with virtually unlimited Web space, don’t share the overwhelming portions of their interviews that don’t make it into stories has been a recent topic of discussion in online journalism circles. A fine argument in favor of this is it’s easy and cheap to do and at least few users are likely to find it useful or interesting. The even better argument: Like the Obameter, archiving interviews serves as a check on the 24-hour news cycle — something that wasn’t a big deal initially and was left out of the story might become story-worthy later — and promotes accountability — from journalists as well as sources.

USHAHIDI HAITI

What it is: Ushahidi Haiti and its international volunteers utilized the open source Ushahidi platform to aggregate e-mail, social media, Web and text message reports from the Haiti earthquake zone on an interactive map. The geo wiki pinpointed in near real-time damaged infrastructure, security threats, public health resources and other variables. It proved to be a useful resource for journalists and others following the disaster. It proved to be an invaluable resource for emergency responders. In no uncertain terms, Ushahidi saved lives.

What it teaches: Those you’re trying to cover (or rescue) collectively know a lot more than you do.

Those who respond to disasters and those who cover disasters typically carry out their work in a very centralized manner. The authorities funnel operations and communications through a purportedly omniscient command center and media regurgitate the command center’s messages like they are the only and final word. As a result, each party misses important stuff, or at least gets to it later than it should. In how it was developed and how it is used, Ushahidi is a posterchild for the power of decentralization. It didn’t rise from Silicon Valley power brokers searching for a profit-making patent. It rose from Kenyan citizen journalists responding to a humanitarian crisis. It doesn’t depend on manufactured authority to broadcast a presumed truth. It organically grows authority through the wisdom of groups to reveal a constantly updating snapshot.

PUBLISH2 NEWS EXCHANGE, Publish2

What it is: Publish2 streamlined content sharing through its custom-built platform, enabling news organizations of all sizes to create networked newswires free from the restraints and expenses of traditional, centralized cooperatives.

What it teaches: There are times when it makes sense for competitors to be each other’s customers.

Like Ushahidi, Publish2′s News Exchange illustrates the power of decentralized networks. It also supports the notion that instead of going down together, even rival news organizations should learn to work together. There are important stories today’s leaner newsrooms don’t get around to covering. But, maybe a competitor does. Who the buyer is and who the seller is can flip on any given story, so, there’s a mutual interest to pool resources. And even on stories every news organization in town can get to, there’s often little marginal value in having every last news outlet there over a smaller amount. I expanded upon this last point in my proposal for an iTunes for news called Regional Online News Trading Posts:

I’m not saying cross-town outlets shouldn’t still try to one-up each other’s coverage. The fear that the other guy might have it and you won’t promotes better journalism.

But, what about when you know everybody’s going to have it, and, it’s, let’s face it, not that great of a story? Is the opportunity cost of five news organizations sending five reporters to get the same canned quotes and staged photos from a police dog-and-pony show hyping a mid-level drug bust really serving the audience? How about four or those news organizations have the fifth cover the cops’ theatrics while their reporters are off at the unemployment office, prisons and mental health parity bill hearings probing the root cause of their community’s drug problem?

SOURCING THROUGH TEXTING, The Takeaway

What it is: Radio journalists tapped residents in Southwest Detroit to be the assignment editors for stories about their community, soliciting and following up on text messages reporting community problems like illegal truck traffic and describing their Mexicantown neighborhood in a few words. The approach, since replicated in Miami’s Little Havana, engaged nontraditional listeners and informed nontraditional stories.

What it teaches: Meet your audience on platforms it prefers, not those you or other media do.

Pew Internet’s Mobile Access 2010 report, released earlier this month, noted that minorities are more likely to own a mobile phone than whites and are more likely to use their phones to access the Internet. Based on those numbers, it’s not surprising a majority-minority neighborhood like Detroit’s Mexicantown responded to The Takeaway’s mobile outreach the way it did. Rather than generalize from national surveys like Pew’s, however, news organizations owe it to themselves and their audience to seek out detailed statistics on what platforms and tools are popular in their community. Blindly following national trends is a good way to miss or even alienate would-be customers and squander revenue opportunities. For instance, while the conventional wisdom is that Facebook is huge and MySpace (for all but musicians) is dead, danah boyd and other researchers point out that that’s not the case among all demographics.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Kraftwerck.

D.C.’s New Local News Shop

Local news sites are, if you think about it, the boutiques of the online information economy. Yet too often they behave more like big-box stores. They overflow their virtual shelves with wire stories and re-written press releases users can get anywhere while talking about community building a lot more than actually doing it.

The soon-to-launch D.C. area local news site from Allbritton Communications is anti-big-box. TBD.com is planning to carry a selective mix of elegantly presented, high-value news unique to its site and is getting to know its neighbors by name (or at least screen name).

• Selective: TBD editors have made it clear they’re not going to try to cover everything. They’re going to focus on big regional stories and on neighborhood news and information. Stuff that falls in between isn’t going to get much (digital) ink. For what it doesn’t get to itself, TBD isn’t going to be shy about linking to other sites. (Not unlike when a shop directs a shopper to a business across town when the other place has an item it doesn’t. Online and off, in news and in retail, this builds trust with the customer and the other merchant, promoting return visits and reciprocal referrals.)

• Elegantly presented: TBD’s homepage is expected to be less cluttered than most other news websites’. And, replacing the sites for WJLA-TV and NewsChannel 8, TBD.com should include its share of visual storytelling packages.

• High-value: Editor Jim Brady told Poynter that TBD will emphasize timely content that helps people make decisions. Heavy use of geocoding, meanwhile, will help personalize TBD’s offerings.

• Getting to know its neighbors: TBD has staff members — led by Editor & Publisher Editor of the Year Steve Buttry — dedicated to nurturing relationships with local bloggers and engaging its audience on social media. Its blog network has already eclipsed 90 members and it’s using social media to organize in-person meetups with them and others in the community.

Of course, TBD hasn’t even flipped over its open sign yet. It remains to be seen whether the site can sustain what it’s started, follow through on what it’s promised and make money doing it.

The third point is the biggest question. A lot of parallels have been drawn between TBD and fellow Allbritton property Politico, but Politico still makes most of its money from its print edition. TBD.com has no print counterpart. Of course, that means it avoids the printing and distribution costs that dominate traditional newspapers’ expenses. Perhaps it will make it work. One thing’s for sure: Plenty will be watching to see whether it does.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Gary Simmons.

Celebrating Free-dom: The Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project

Full disclosure: I reported for Journal Register Company newspaper the Daily Freeman from June 2004 to October 2005.

At first glance, today’s Web and print editions for the Journal Register Company‘s 18 daily newspapers might not appear terribly different from any other day’s. That was part of the point of the rapidly-reinventing-itself chain’s bold Ben Franklin Project. JRC wanted to prove that free does not necessarily mean cheap, that free or near-free online tools can achieve the same production values as pricey proprietary software.

Take a closer look at the papers’ digital and print Ben Franklin Project editions, published on Independence Day to signify the company’s independence from proprietary systems, and you’ll notice they are different.

You’ll notice stories suggested and edited by audience members. You’ll notice crowdsourced solutions to community challenges. You’ll notice videos putting a fresh human face on persistent issues like immigration and unemployment. You’ll notice interactive maps pinpointing user-identified problems like risky roadways.

This was the Ben Franklin Project’s other, ultimately larger point: That free tools can improve both journalists’ coverage and their relationship with their audience by making the news process more participatory.

That the papers — some with circulations as small as 6,000 — even attempted this ambitious project is groundbreaking for their famously slow-to-adapt industry. That they pulled it off is a remarkable feat. The executive behind this and other innovations at JRC — including citizen journalism labs and in-house testing of the latest tech tools — was rightfully celebratory in a blog post to employees this morning, exclaiming, “Take a bow. You did it.” CEO John Paton also rightfully recognized that this is only the beginning.

The success or failure of an initiative characterized — by organizers and observers — as revolutionary can be judged only over the long-term. Merely sustaining the type of work showcased today will require more hard work, especially as the novelty — for employees and audience members — wears off. Building up the Ben Franklin Project into what the journalism history books (history tablets?) would consider a revolution will require a lot more hard work.

• It will require a firm technical and strategic grasp of the tools used to produce today’s editions. Employees, who had just over a month to learn many of the free tools they used, are by their own admission still getting the hang of pagination program Scribus. Microblogging service Twitter, meanwhile, is of greatest value to news organizations when they use it to converse with audience members and sources (two-way/pull/new-media thinking), yet many JRC papers use their Twitter feeds only to push out links to their stories (one-way/push/old-media thinking).

• It will require abandoning these tools at the drop of a hat and learning new ones as better alternatives come along.

• It will require engaging audience members — meeting them on the platforms they’re already using or educating them about the platforms they should be using — to the point they don’t have to be persuaded to participate.

• It will require not letting the new way of doing things disrupt what was right about the old way. As empowering as they are, interactive tools are a complement to thorough, old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting, not a replacement for it.

• More than anything, it will require a bottom-up embrace of the digital-first, innovation culture Paton is evangelizing. No print-versus-Web, us-versus-them, that’s-not-part-of-my job whining.

Since a lot of people might have been too busy eating hot dogs/watching others eat (way too many) hot dogs, launching fireworks/watching others launch fireworks to follow JRC’s Ben Franklin Project coverage, here’s a sampling of what the 18 papers produced:

• The Daily Freeman of Kingston, N.Y., asked social media users and passers-by what they thought the city should do with a condemned motel, broadening the official discussion ahead of a public brainstorming session.
• The Daily Local News of Chester County, Pa., on one of the nation’s higher-risk days for drunken driving incidents, shared online comments from victims and offenders and their families on how drunken driving has affected their lives.
• The Daily Tribune (whose BFP site appears to be empty — please advise if it’s located elsewhere) of Royal Oak, Mich., conducted an e-mail/snail mail/Twitter survey to determine its audience’s “Great Sports Hero.” The winner? “Mr. Tiger” Al Kaline.
• The Delaware County (Pa.) Times live blogged the production of its Ben Franklin Project paper and website, complete with behind-the-scenes videos.
• The Macomb (County, Mich.) Daily was among the papers to source stories on social media, posting on its Facebook page last month, “If anyone has successfully connected their kids to nature and/or physical activity outdoors — in big or small ways! — we would love to hear about it for a story…”

• The Mercury of Pottstown, Pa., followed up on a road-rage-related shooting by mapping the spots users consider most prone to road-rage incidents.
• The Middletown (Conn.) Press was among the papers to share first drafts of stories with audience members ahead of final publication. Here’s the early version of its story on the cancellation of a municipal fireworks display. Here’s the final version.
• The Morning Journal of Lorain, Ohio, shared community reaction to a Wal-Mart store under construction on the west side of the city.
• The Morning Sun (whose BFP site I couldn’t locate — please advise if you find a link) of Mount Pleasant, Mich., offered its audience a detailed explanation of the Ben Franklin Project — via text and video — in a post by its executive editor.
• The New Haven (Conn.) Register, appropriately, surveyed its Facebook fans, Twitter followers and others about the future of the news media, receiving thoughtful responses instructive for it and its audience as they respond to each other’s changing habits in these transitional times.
• The News-Herald of Willoughby, Ohio — one of two papers to pilot the Ben Franklin Project last spring (the other was weekly Montgomery (County, Pa.) Media) — probably had a little too much fun producing its video promoting its favorite-hot-dog-condiment contest. Proving new media are changing more than just the news industry, it also published a multimedia piece — including a chat on its regular site — on funeral webcasts.
• The Oakland (County, Mich.) Press explored perceptions of bias in history textbooks. The topic was recommended by attendees at a town hall forum organized by the newspaper who probably weren’t even thinking about the Independence Day news peg.

• The Oneida (N.Y.) Dispatch, among the many publications to run editor’s notes on the project, explained how it’s “us[ing] new tools to achieve traditional goals.” It supported the column with an about-the-project video narrated by JRC Director of Digital Content Jonathan Cooper.
• The Register Citizen of Torrington, Conn., published a series of articles examining downtown revitalization. “A Common Vision” was based on Web comments, reader submissions and surveys.
• The Reporter of Landsdale, Pa., published video resumes to put a human face on the area’s worst unemployment and underemployment in more than a quarter century.
• The Saratogian of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., like The News-Herald, took a look at how another industry — in this case, the nonprofit sector — is leveraging new media.
• The Times Herald of Philadelphia suburb Norristown, Pa., combined man-on-the-street interviews, website, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail queries and an interactive poll attached to the resulting story in effort to determine who makes the area’s best cheesesteak.
• The Troy (N.Y.) Record shared some of users’ favorite vacation photos, many of them breathtaking. Also, on its regular home page, it gave prominent play to some of the JRC papers’ simplest, but most substantive, ongoing interactive features, letting users suggest stories, correct factual errors or report neighborhood problems in a single click.

DailyDev: Treemap

When I saw Mark Luckie’s post “What is a treemap? 5 examples and how you can create one” the other week I thought making a treemap would be a fun exercise for this series, in which I test drive new (to me) Web tools and techniques.

From Luckie:

Treemaps are a growing trend in online data visualization and you’ve likely spotted one or two around the web. But what are they?

Most newsies have probably seen the Newsmap, one of Luckie’s examples.

Treemaps, sometimes written as “tree maps,” display hierarchical information in a series of clustered rectangles, which together represent a whole. The size of each box represents a quantity. Treemaps also can use color to represent any number of values, but it is often used to categorize the various boxes within the treemap.

Be sure to check out the full post on 10,000 Words for more examples and advice on creating your own.

In part to simplify the styling of the chart and in part to brush up on my skills, I decided to build my treemap, illustrating the fiscal 2011 spending plan for the municipality I used to cover, in Flash.

Given that it’s been — let’s just say a while — since I tackled anything approaching serious development in this particular program (this hastily made virtual bell I used to motivate teammates in an all-hands-on-deck Web development session might have been the last interactive I produced), it took me a few days to put the treemap together. Recreating the visualization in HTML/CSS could be a future project, I suppose. I’ve seen enough of this chart for now, though.

Finished Product

Pros

• Efficiently communicates the basics about the budget. With a quick glance and a few mouseovers users get a good grasp of how the city’s money is divided up and what some of the bigger-ticket areas are.
• A lot more fun than reading a budget story or scrolling through the spending plan PDF.
• Doesn’t have to take long to do. Although I didn’t choose either of these options, as Luckie mentioned in his post, Google and IBM have tools that generate treemaps for you.

Cons

• It can be cognitively difficult for users to compare proportionate shapes with varying aspect ratios. (That’s one reason I made the blocks representing my subcategories squares.)
• Difficult to optimize for mobile, given reliance on mouseovers, and, in many treemaps, the oh-so-teeny-tininess of the tiniest blocks.
• Building from scratch and manually doing the math to determine the proportions — like I did (though I did have Google’s tool assist me with the dimensions/layout of the five main blocks) — can be time consuming!

Tip

• Flash doesn’t allow nested rollovers. Use the hitTest method if you want that behavior. For example, here’s the AS2 I used to get the Parks details to appear on mouseover:

parksMain_mc.onEnterFrame=function()
{
	if(parksMain_mc.hitTest(_root._xmouse, _root._ymouse))
	{
		parksMain_mc.gotoAndPlay(2);
	}
}

Recommend?

• Yes, but make sure the time it takes to create the treemap is balanced by the time it saves/value it adds for your audience. Also, given the increasing importance of interlinked data on the Web, which I blogged about earlier, it behooves developers to present data in semantically smarter ways than Flash. So, yeah: Do as I say, not as I do.

DailyDev: Business Card QR Code

A former newspaper guy transitioning to multi-platform journalism, I love, love, love print-digital mashups. So, naturally, I’m excited that QR codes, widespread in Japan and Europe, seem to be catching on in North America.

The two-dimensional bar codes, invented to track auto parts, are being embraced by content producers and marketers because they can be processed by smart phones to steer users to URLs, contact information, map locations and other data. The South By Southwest festival this year used them on conference name badges. A Canadian newspaper recently started printing the codes next to articles to connect print readers to supplementary online content. Anyone in Times Square a couple weeks ago might have noticed QR codes (QR is short for quick response) in advertisements on one of the district’s many electronic billboards.

I decided to apply the technology much like SXSW did and embed my contact information on the back of my business card. To do this, I used a free third-party beta service called PingTags, which links with users’ LinkedIn accounts to create sleek mobile contact pages. PingTags automatically generates the corresponding QR code and even tracks page views for you.

DIYers can make their own QR codes here. There are many free QR code generators available online, but this one has the added feature of allowing creators to change the destination of the code at a later date.

Finished Product

• The business card itself (the back is reflected in a mirror) is in the image at the top of this post.
• The QR code pointing to my PingTags page is at left.
• If you have an enabled smart phone, go ahead and try scanning the code. If you don’t have a QR reader app, you can download one here.
• If you don’t have a smart phone capable of reading QR codes, check out the page here.

Pros

• Make your business card more interesting and more useful to your contacts.
• Make a static business card dynamic by changing the content the code points to.
• Look technically hip without needing a lot of technical know-how.

Cons

• Many users don’t have phones capable of reading QR codes or don’t know that they do.
• Other mobile apps like Google Goggles and Bump can arguably more efficiently accomplish the functionality achieved in this example.
• The codes look kinda cool — I think so at least — but aren’t going to be winning any beauty pageants. (SpyderLynk‘s paid SnapTag service offers a more aesthetically pleasing alternative.)

Tip

• Be creative! Put QR codes on T-shirts, napkins, greeting cards, Twitter icons, tattoo them on your skin. The sky’s the limit. OK, maybe not that last one.

Recommend?

• Yes, but bear in mind that a lot of people look down upon QR codes as gimmicky — and often times, they’re right. Don’t use a QR code where a shortened URL will do.

DailyDev: Photoshop Fake HDR

I’ll have to get out with a tripod sometime and try it the scratch-made way, but today I faked a high dynamic range photo in Photoshop using this tutorial.

Finished Product

HDR image

Original image

Pros

• Mimic the human eye and then some by making extremely light and extremely dark areas visible at once.
• Create dramatic-looking photographs.
• Potentially rescue poorly exposed images.

Cons

• Fun to play around with, but for everyday Web publishers, limited practical applications.
• It takes time and talent to keep the HDR image from looking too fake.
• Even proper HDR images are controversial in some photography circles.

Tip

• Experiment. Don’t be scared to deviate from the tutorial recipe. Every photograph is different. Plus, there’s always several ways to skin a cat in Photoshop. Oh, and always save your original .psd!

Recommend?

• To mess around with, why not? A more subtle application than this could be used to correct over/under exposure in photo illustrations. This technique should be avoided in news photos, however; it’s distorting reality.

DailyDev: Google Motion Chart

I checked out Google’s Motion Chart gadget — for illustrating changes in multiple variables over time — in school last fall but never produced a complete, functioning chart. Today I did. It visualizes each of the 32 World Cup nations’ per capita GDP, life expectancy and World Cup wins for the last half-century.

The steps:

1. Following the format above, enter data into a Google Docs spreadsheet.
2. From the “Insert” menu, choose “Gadget” and click on the “Motion Chart” option. For range, enter the top-left cell of your data set and the bottom-right cell of your data set (including field labels), like this: “Sheet1!A1:E193″ Click “Apply”.
3. Preview your chart, give it a title, choose what variables by default appear on which axis, fiddle with some other options, such as whether the scatter plots are colored or sized according to a variable. When you’re satisfied, click “Apply” one more time, then grab the embed code by clicking on the arrow in the upper-right corner of the gadget box and choosing “Publish Gadget.”

Finished Product

Pros

• Create revealing interactive charts without any coding.
• Can import .csv files directly into the Google Docs spreadsheet, saving you from tedious data entry.
• Chart automatically changes as your spreadsheet does.

Cons

• Requires large data sets to be effective.
• Can improperly suggest correlation, causation or trends.
• Minimal control over styling.

Tip

• Don’t think of Google Motion Chart only as a presentation medium. It can be a useful reporting or research tool for spotting noteworthy patterns.

Recommend?

• Yes, but only for visualizing data over significant time spans — whether you’re dealing in hours, days, months, years, you’re going to want a lot of reference points — where trends will be noticeable and meaningful.

DailyDev: Custom 404 Error Page

It’s Friday, and apparently there’s some kind of big sports tournament going on, so, I kept today’s DailyDev simple. I made a custom Page Not Found 404 error page for my portfolio site — something I should have done a long time ago.

Here are the steps:

1. Create the HTML page and save it in your site root as “notfound.html.”
2. Add a line reading “ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html” to your  site’s .htaccess file. (Error pages on non-Apache servers are configured differently, according to this tutorial. Site owners should contact their Web host.)

Here is the

Finished Product

Pros

• Design one page, cover an infinite amount of potential broken links/typos/misspellings.
• Make the error a little less jarring for users, provide guidance that may help them find a relevant page, maybe even make them laugh a bit.
• Encourage (or automate [No. 6]) feedback so you know when your site’s not working properly.

Cons

• You’re spending time making a page you never want anyone to see!
• Many who do see it are probably just going to instantly hit the back button anyway.
• If your Web server gets lots of requests for invalid files, a larger custom error page rather than the generic one can start nipping away at your bandwidth quota.

Tip

• If your Web host has you edit your .htaccess file through a form interface, like mine does, you still need to make sure you precede the custom 404 page’s filename with a slash to indicate it’s in the root: “/notfound.html”.

Recommend?

• Yes.

DailyDev: Geotagging

Location, location, location. With the coming mobile revolution, I’ve written before, the mantra increasingly applies to a lot more than real estate. It behooves Web publishers to start semantically geotagging their content. For today’s DailyDev, I assigned locational information to a Web page, a WordPress blog post and a Flickr set.

WEB PAGE

I used geo meta tags to indicate the location of the speech that was the subject of this live coverage page.

1. The “geo.position” meta tag uses latitude and longitude coordinates. I grabbed the coordinates for the event location from Google Maps. I simply switched to “My Maps,” toggled to satellite view, placed a marker over the appropriate building and grabbed the coordinates by clicking on the marker, then on “more,” then on “send.” The latitude and longitude are part of the link in the “Message” window.
2. The “geo.placename” and “geo.region” meta tags use city, state and country information. Nothing fancy there.
3. Putting it all together, I added the three meta tags to the <head> section of my HTML document.

Finished Product

<meta name="geo.position" content="36.109018; -79.506705" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Elon, NC" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="US-NC" />

WORDPRESS POST

1. WordPress support has an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to enable and apply geotagging.
2. Once geotagging is enabled, a “Location” window will appear at the bottom of all “Edit Post” pages. You can enter in a street address, select a location on a Google map, or have your computer detect your location.
3. As long as “This post’s location is public” is checked, the location will be recorded the next time you save your post.

Finished Product

• I geotagged my post from last month’s FutureWeb conference at the Raleigh (N.C.) Convention Center.

FLICKR

Geotagging Flickr content is even simpler thanks to the photo sharing site’s interactive map interface.

1. Log in to your Flickr account and click “Organize & Create” in the menu at the top of the page.
2. In the dropdown in the lower-left corner, select the set or other grouping of photos you want to geotag. If you want to see all photos that haven’t been assigned a location, choose “Your non-geotagged content.”
3. Click the “Map” tab at the top of the screen and drag and drop your photos into the appropriate locations on the map. You can quickly navigate to a specific address by typing it into the search box in the upper-right.

Finished Product

• Flickr permalinks geotagged sets for easy sharing. This set documents a late winter snowstorm in Laurel, Md.

Pros

• Manual geotagging is pretty simple to do, as the above examples indicate.
• More and more Web services and platforms are automating geotagging. If you tweet (eat your heart out, New York Times), for instance, you’ve probably noticed Twitter’s location feature.
• Geotagging makes your content more useful to you and others, especially mobile users.

Cons

• No standardized way of geotagging Web content has emerged.
• Services that attempt to automatically pick up users’ location are often inaccurate.
• There are a whole host of privacy concerns for those sharing as well as collecting locational data.

Tip

• The Wikipedia pages for public places include their latitude and longitude coordinates, though these too can sometimes be off.

Recommend?

• Yes. The location train is revving up. It’s time to get on.

DailyDev: ProPublica’s ChangeTracker

ProPublica’s award-winning ChangeTracker mashup, which it uses to follow edits to The White House’s website, can still be cloned to monitor the site of your choice, just be sure not to try to follow this tutorial, as I attempted to. The Yahoo! pipe it says to use is busted. Here are the revised steps, still largely based on the aforementioned tutorial.

1. Create a free Versionista account.
2. Log in to Versionista and enter the url of the page you want to track in the blue box at the bottom of the page. Click “Monitor this URL.”
3. You’ll be taken to a new page. With a free account, you can monitor up to four more URLs if you wish. If they’re from the same site you just entered, add them here. If they’re from a different site, complete step four, then repeat steps 2 through 4 for the other site.
4. Click “options” at the top of the screen. Check “Make this site archive public.” Copy the url under the checkbox and save it for later.
5. Go to ProPublica’s ChangeFeeder page to create an RSS feed for each site you’re monitoring. Paste into the box the url you copied in step 4 and append it with “all”. It should look something like “http://versionista.com/pub/19600/1/all”.
6. To give the feed a cleaner URL and to receive stats for it, run it through FeedBurner.
7. If you wish, use FriendFeed to publish your feed on a Twitter stream.

A Maryland native, I decided to use ChangeTracker to monitor changes to recent blog and news items on the campaign websites for Maryland’s governor and his challenger, who are reversing roles from four years ago.

Finished Product

• ChangeFeeder: O’Malley Campaign Recent Blog Entries
• ChangeFeeder: Ehrlich Campaign Recent Blog and News Entries

Neither of these was working perfectly last I checked. You can get an idea for what’s supposed to happen by clicking “this change” for the “June 7, 2010 7:28 PM” change on the O’Malley feed. It’s a lame change — new tweets! — but you get the idea.

Pros

• Once you find out the tutorial you’ve been trying to follow is no longer operable, this isn’t that much work to pull off.
• You can catch website changes you’d never notice unaided, all without visiting pages umpteen times a day.
• Versionista helps transparency advocates practice what they preach by providing a way to share interactive archives of their own websites.

Cons

• Like I said, I still haven’t gotten this working perfectly. This could be a problem on my end, but I’ve already invested more time than I intended in this exercise.
• To take full advantage of ChangeTracker and monitor more than five Web pages requires a paid Versionista account.
• Even with a tool automating the first step, culling through dozens of mundane updates to find one interesting one is still tedious!

Tip

• Think about the sites you choose to track. ChangeTracker works well for static pages with lots of text, less well for dynamic pages with a lot of multimedia.

Recommend?

• For those with more patience and time than me, definitely. ProPublica has used ChangeTracker in its reporting several times. ChangeTracker is a useful enough tool for novices but there’s no telling how expert developers could extend what Versionista and ProPublica have put together.