Curating images from the protests in Turkey via journalists on the ground
Posted: June 5, 2013 Filed under: user-help | Tags: collaboration, demo, hashgordon, journalism, n0tice, n0ticeTurkey, pictures, protest Comments OffWith such an avalanche of images circulating across social media platforms, curating a gallery of pictures which can be trusted for their authenticity during times of intense activity is now much more difficult than it was in the early days of social media.
The coverage of last weekend’s protests in Istanbul, for instance, included many RTs of images of hundreds of people making their way across the iconic Bosphorus bridge - leaving twitter users unable to tell the difference between an ongoing protest and the coverage of an earlier marathon.
If you’re working outside of a large news company without access to specialised services such as Storyful or Blottr, you’re faced with two broad approaches to dealing with this dilemma.
1. Put the work in yourself to verify the credibility of the image using some of the many free tools available (eg. Exif data, background checks on those users submitting, checking any location tags etc.) no problem if you’ve the time and the knowledge to do that work.
2. Only use content from trusted sources to cut down on the potential for errant postings – and this is the way the gallery above has been compiled.
The images on this page are a small selection compiled from a few of the journalists I worked with in Istanbul earlier this year who I know strive for accuracy in their journalism. The embeddable gallery uses twitpics tweeted by;
Pinar Dag – you can see her work on this website http://pinardag.com/pd or follow her on Twitter @pinardag.
Ahmet Yılmaz Vural - see his work at http://ahmetyilmazvural.com/blog @ahmetyv
mehves evin – see her work here http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com or follow on Twitter @mehvesevin
If you’d like to use the gallery on a website or blog, the embed code can be found here at HashGordon.com using the search term ’n0ticeTurkey’. Please notice I have added an extra level of moderation to prevent spamming which means only images I have personally ‘n0ticed’ will appear in the gallery.
The tools used to create it are all available for free as part of the open journalism toolkit here at n0tice.org and demonstrates a form of collaborative journalism that can be carried out with contacts or invited contributors; via a ‘call out’ to an audience of existing users or by harnessing the efforts of multiple bloggers and journalists if you work in a newsroom.
There’s more information about setting up these social picture galleries here.
How to map local election candidates using n0tice
Posted: April 9, 2013 Filed under: user-help | Tags: candidates, elections, local, mapping, may2, n0tice Comments OffFirst you’ll need a notice account and then set up a noticeboard to work on your project. There’s instructions on how to do that here.
I created this one: http://elections2013.n0tice.com.
The next stage is to decide what information you want to show. For the example here I chose the candidates name, their home address, which political party they represent and which division they are seeking to be elected to.
All of that information is contained in the ‘nomination of candidates’ documentation which the local authority you are reporting on is obliged to publish. These examples are from North Yorkshire County Council and were found in a specially created Elections section on its website but they might also be filed under ‘council and democracy’.
Now you’ve got the raw data, there’s a choice of ways to ingest it into your noticeboard. If you’ve a large number of candidates, using the spreadsheet function could be useful – instructions on that here. In this case with a relatively small number of candidates I simply typed them into the system as follows:
Click the blue ‘post’ button.
Click on the blue ‘new report’ button.
Complete the form as shown below.
Click the blue create report button.
Once you have all the data on the noticeboard, creating map is simple. On the right hand side of the noticeboard you’ll see a small preview of the map with the pins from the addresses you’ve created. Click to expand and you’ll be offered the choice to share or embed.
If you’d rather carry out some design work then the web link will take you a KML file to treat in the usual way. If you’d like something that looks like the map at the top of this page – give me a shout on sarahATn0tice.com and we’ll sort you out.
Using n0tice to track conference coverage
Posted: February 12, 2013 Filed under: Features, user-help | Tags: conference, delegate, hashgordon, n0tice, noticeboard, organise, storify, twitter Comments OffPicture the scenario – you’ve got the time agreed, bought your ticket, travelled across the country and, finally, you’re there, tweeting away from the conference. You know you’ll not forget that speaker/link/picture/reference because it resonated so well with you but then you return to the office to share it and……it’s nowhere to be seen. If you’d had the foresight to favourite some tweets then maybe you can gather your thoughts – or hope someone creates a Storify which happens to curate your choice of tweets – or alternatively, have everything automatically tracked in n0tice for later, leaving you the time to concentrate on post-conference socialising. We’ve already tracked several events using the n0tice tools so here’s how to set it up to capture everything from an event and give yourself a break.
- You’ll need a user account – sign up at n0tice.com.
- Once logged in, go to the ‘my noticeboards’ link and click to ‘set up a new noticeboard’.
- The noticeboard will be the place where all your content is saved and published online – think of it as your workspace – but it is public on the internet so give it a name which will mean something to people searching for the event.
- Log into feedton0tice.com and follow the instructions to set up the feeds you require eg. twitter, flickr etc. using the guide here.
- Sign off, sit back and enjoy your conference.
Once your ‘bot’ (automated feed) has captured everything on the noticeboard, there several things you can do next. Check through the feed and easily create your own report of the events main points by selecting the ones you want and using the facility to embed the tweets into a story, like this from last week’s Virtual Community Summit in London. @CarolineRadar tweets: The offline world is a minefield – managing expectations of what moderators should manage is very difficult, esp parents #vircomm13
@AthikurRehman tweets: Online Strategies should be driven by #SocialMediaAnalytics Monitoring can help brands with great insights #vircomm13 @VirCommSummit
And you can write a commentary around the individual items in a similar way to Storify. @vdimauro tweets: fantastic storify board of #vircomm13 – proud to have been a part of this amazing day! http://t.co/SfwRxzjL via @emoderation
With pictures, you can use the HashGordon.com app to create a picture gallery like the one at the top of this blog poast. I created that by using the filter to only publish the few pictures I selected from the entire number by ‘n0ticing’ them. There’s full details about using this tool here.
Using Feedwax.com to curate information
Posted: October 23, 2012 Filed under: Features, user-help | Tags: curate, feeds, feedwax, n0tice, noticeboard, rss 1 Comment »
Picture illustrating feeds in action by francescopozzi on Flickr.
In among the new features launched with n0tice 2.0 is the platform’s first internal app - Feedwax.com.
It’s already attracted some attention from tech-savvy journalists like Sarah Marshall so how does it all work?
Essentially it’s a feed curator that geocodes the content. As others have pointed out in recent work in this area, the geo-tagging of content isn’t as commonplace as you might expect but, once geographical data has been attached to a piece of content, there’s a wealth of options available for the journalist or blogger to explore in delivering it to new platforms, services, tools or environments such as Augmented Reality.
Feedwax.com can help with this. Here’s a couple of scenarios to illustrate ways to use it:
1. Monitoring or tracking a feed of information
This could be for your own benefit as someone interested in a particular dataset or for live publication.
I’ve recently set up two such accounts one (PlanBot) which automatically publishes the planning applications from my local council and other one (HagueBot) which tracks my local MP’s constituency activity. The PlanBot provides an alternative to the local reporter’s unenviable task of wading through printed council papers and has the advantage of running in realtime rather than waiting for the local town hall to compile and distribute the details. Because the area being covered is geographically small I felt there was a benefit in letting all applications through but it is possible to add a staging-post and simply select those likely to be of most interest for your readers for publication in larger districts or if you want more selection control for editorial reasons.
The datasets to produce this feed can be found thanks to the hard work of OpenlyLocal.com here: http://openlylocal.com/councils/all
The second case (HagueBot) takes one feed (the RSS automatically created on the www.theyworkforyou.com site) but blends this with a feed created via Feedwax.com which searches twitter for the MP. Any combination of feed or search can be used across all the major social media platforms and again, it can be published direct or to an internally controlled list.
2. Creating a story map from activity on the internet
Because every piece of content is geo-tagged, the content being produced on n0tice.com can be easily mapped (lots of examples, and instruction on how to do that here – link) and now the feed curator gives anyone covering a topic another tool in gathering the required data from activity that’s already out there on the web ready to map.
To do this means setting up a noticeboard specifically for the story – it’s a process that takes about 1min – think of it as your project space for the story. Then select the searches you’d like to build feeds for eg. a specific hashtag on twitter and feed it into your noticeboard.
A sudden urge to capture the recent skydive from space shows this in action – the feed gathered some images from instagram and tweets with the hashtag during the few hours I left it running and automatically updated a noticeboard set up for the story here: http://livejump.n0tice.com/. It was just a test experiment and took me less than five minutes to set up and start running but shows the potential using data generated on the social web to create story maps.
Follow this step-by-step guide to start building and curating feeds using Feedwax.com.
How to use Feedwax.com
Posted: October 23, 2012 Filed under: user-help | Tags: api, apps, feeds, feedwax, help, howto, n0tice, noticeboard, rss 3 Comments »Firstly you will need a n0tice.com user account and a noticeboard to post the feeds to. These could be set up for the specific story you want to create and make it clear they are automated or simply be part of your standard user profile.
Armed with these, start the process by signing into the service at http://feedton0tice.com before proceeding to the URL www.feedwax.com in a seprate browser.
The first screen shows a series of grey buttons for existing social media platforms – take your pick by clicking on the one you want to work with. If you want to geotag an RSS feed from some other source, click on the words ‘FeedWax geocoder’ in the text underneath.
On the second screen. Replace the word ‘noticed’ with whatever search term you want to build into a feed. With twitter these will often be hashtags but could also be a certain user name eg.@whoever. Or a mixture of two or more terms to refine and limit the search further.
Once complete, click the red button to ‘feed this into n0tice’
If you want to restrict the location of your search to a particular place, you’ll need to find it’s latitutde and longitutde. The map on the right of the screen can help you do this, or use a 3rd party service such as http://www.latlong.net.
The first time you click the ‘feed to notice’ button will show you a list of the content which will go into your feed and then you will be taken off to the http://freedton0tice.com part of the journey where you signed in earlier and ne asked to authorise the app. Once you have clicked the button ‘authorise access’ you will see a blue button to ‘add new feed’.
Clicking this will open up a form which has your feed from feedwax.com pre-filled in the URL.
Choose the noticeboard (project space) that you want the feed to post into from the dropdown list. If you’d like all the information located to one geography, enter its lat and long reading in the boxes and choose whether you’d like it all automated or to go to a staging post for you to approve. If you tick, scheduled, it is automated. (You can always come back and check this later if you’d rather try it manually first.)
Once you click ‘add new feed, all the content you are being offered to import for the first time will be presented to you on the next screen.
When you’re happy that the feed is containing items that you were expecting, import to your noticeboard and it will publish immediately.
If you choose the automatic option, that’s it, the site will update everytime there’s new content to post. If you chose to do it manually, you’ll need to go back into the ‘your feeds’ menu and click to import at whichever period of time suits your project.
When you click scheduled and it displays all the items that are available, on the first occasion you’ll need to scroll down the page and
there’s a button to ‘add geotagged items’
The imported feeds still attribute the original source and any other meta data associated with it such as time and date so, if ther content was some days, months or even years earlier, it will show at that point on the noticeboard’s history.
How to: Run a photography competition on n0tice.com
Posted: August 6, 2012 Filed under: user-help | Tags: competition, landscapes, map, north, northerner, photography 1 Comment »The Northerner blog has today concluded a photography competition which saw hundreds of stunning images submitted from across the north of England in a challenge which inspired readers to get involved over several weeks.
Using n0tice.com as the technology to run this meant it was a simple process for those taking part as well as providing organisers with data in a format which can be displayed on a map or other geo-tagged formats such as augmented reality.
I thought it would be interesting to detail how this was carried out in case other blogs, websites, news organisations etc. would find this useful – n0tice.com is a free and open journalism toolkit for all and not just for Guardian projects.
- First, create a project noticeboard.
The person running the project will need to be a registered user of n0tice.com and then follow through these simple steps to set up a noticeboard. The name is important here as it will become the domain name and can be used to promote your competition online, in prints, leaflets etc. In this case the noticeboard was called northernlandscapes.n0tice.com and the background and font were deliberately chosen as very plain in order not to detract from the images being submitted.
- Publicise the challenge with easy to follow instructions.
This challenge had a very clear aim – to find a stunning image of The North. That in itself prompted quite a bit of debate on the blog and on twitter. Users had some clear instructions on how to take part which can be adapted for other challenges:
To take part in the challenge, you’ll need to have the basic details of where in the north the image is located, a suitable headline/title, and a brief description of what the picture is about. Submit it to us using the instructions below. Please note that by entering into this, you are agreeing to have your picture shown on this blog and on the noticeboard but the copyright for the image remains with you. Maximum size of 2MB. JPG, GIF, PNG. Entries close Friday 27 July.
To submit your picture:
- if this is your first visit you’ll need to sign-up to n0tice.com. You can do this via your existing Facebook or Twitter accounts or by creating a user name and entering your email address.
- once logged in, go to http://northernlandscapes.n0tice.com and click on ‘post a new report’
- you will be presented with a simple form asking for the information mentioned above
3. Decide the voting mechanic.
For the landscapes pictures, two professional photographers were used to make a shortlist before the vote was handed over to the public vote on the blog. Additionally, n0tice users are able to mark images as ‘interesting’ via the website or via the iphone app. Involving the n0tice users in the process in this way increases the interactivity. If your blog or site doesn’t have the ability to set up votes, the free service at surveymonkey.com or similar could be used.
4. Map the results of the challenge
All the noticeboards on n0tice.com can be displayed in a map format because every piece of content is geo-tagged by the platform with no additional tagging or tweaking required. The map is created by generating a KML file - full instructions on that here.
View Larger Map
* Anyone interested in running a project using n0tice.com or needing help to get it started can contact the n0tice team – @n0tice on twitter or SarahATn0tice.com.
How to: Embed n0tice updates in WordPress
Posted: June 14, 2012 Filed under: announcements, Features, user-help | Tags: collaboration, embed, n0tice 2 Comments »Bloggers and journalists have been quick to pick up on one of our most recent feature additions on n0tice.com – the ability to embed updates into blog posts and editorial Content Management Systems (CMS).
This feature means you can embed any update such as text, a tweet, video etc. into an article or post opening up the opportunity to use the noticeboard as an open space to liveblog or gather multiple story contributions, ready to curate into a finished, edited final version.
One of our n0tice users who has been pushing the live blog updates for its multimedia abilities is Franzi Baehrle who owns the stimulating Visual Brum noticeboard.
She recently carried out an extensive live blog using multiple updates and a variety of media.
As this blog is built on worpress.org, for demonstration purposes, I’ve been able to embed it below.
It’s the same process I used to edit just a weekend of events out of the extensive user submitted listings from The Northerner blog but in this case the embeds were made via the company’s CMS. You can see that here.
Sharing n0tice activity on Facebook
Posted: May 1, 2012 Filed under: announcements, user-help | Tags: facebook, howto, sharing, social, social media 3 Comments »If you wish to amplify your activity on n0tice through your social networks you will enjoy using the new Facebook sharing app. It will only take a moment to activate it and begin spreading your posts virally.
You will find the activation button on your n0tice profile settings page. Look for the Social Networks tab:
You must connect n0tice with Facebook first. You’ll see a button to do that on the ‘Social Networks’ tab.
When you’ve activated the app, n0tice will post things you do on n0tice to your activity stream on Facebook. n0tice will automatically update your Facebook page when you follow people and noticeboards, star things you find interesting, or post reports, events or offers to n0tice. The app does not share passive actions to your Facebook page such as what you are reading on n0tice.com, only explicit actions that you trigger such as following, posting, reposting, and voting.
The n0tice app for Facebook will help spread things you are doing on n0tice further around the world and help others to discover what’s happening.
It’s a great way to spread the word about local issues and events that you care about. You may also find it’s useful for finding a buyer for something you’re trying to sell. And if you run a noticeboard you’ll find this app may help you develop a stronger community around it.
Give it a try. It’s really easy and surprisingly fun.
If you want to deactivate the n0tice app for Facebook you can change the privacy settings in Facebook, or you can turn it off completely via your settings page on n0tice.com. You will see be a big red button for deactivating the app in the Social Networks tab.
