Last night I saw a fantastic show on PBS Frontline about the future of news and reporting that's an absolute must-see. Among the things it discusses:

• How the internet is changing news, with in depth analysis from major players in the field.

• How newspapers are trying to adapt to the internet and being forced to adapt to the internet.
• The role of newspapers in society.
• The role of bloggers in journalism.
• The importance of in-depth reporting.
• Local news reporting vs. in-depth international reporting.
• Using the Chicago Tribune's ownership of the LA Times as a case study, an absolutely fascinating analysis of whether newspapers should be publicly or privately owned.

Luckily PBS has the show online. The show is definitely must-see viewing for anyone who is remotely interested in the state of the news and the future of news, blogging and reporting.

Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/part3/
Video: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/view/ and click on "Part 3" (or BitTorrent, not that I necessarily condone that).

The other two parts in the four-part series do carry a somewhat controversial subject matter (government going after journalists and journalism). I haven't seen those first two parts yet, but suffice to say that this third-part is not controversial at all and is one of the most fascinating reports I've seen on TV in a long time - thoroughly recommended viewing!

If you had a chance to see it already, let us know what you thought! 

CNN.com is the main national type of news site I visit on the web.  I do so out of habit and because I really dislike the websites of alternatives like MSNBC and Fox News. 

But they are starting to lose me due to the way they are using video.

(1) Our office is an open space and so to watch videos I either have to annoy my co-workers or unplug my headphones from my iPod and plug them into my computer.  And that's when I don't have my computer muted.

Due to this I really don't watch many  videos during the day.  I'm going to CNN to read news articles, blog entries and such.  For text.

So what's the problem?  CNN is now all about video and its hard to find the text.    Of the items on the homepage, roughly 50% are web videos (see graphic on right for an example). 

I don't mind that they have lots of video.  That's great.  But I wish it all wasn't so intermingled.  Having to scan and discard 50% of the content is not a pleasant user experience.  I'll probably switch.

(2) CNN is still displaying videos in Windows Media Player format (which means I've had problems playing them in Firefox).  And they are still popping up their videos in controlled windows using javascript.  I hate that.  Please switch to Flash (which more people can see anyway) and stop using pop up windows.   You just shouldn't do that stuff anymore.

CNN isn't the only one making this mistake.  The John McCain for President site does as well by devoting pretty much its entire homepage to video clips and surprising users with video on what look like normal buttons/links at the bottom of the page (you are either muted or yelling at my whole office dude). 

In summary, I think people are going a bit too far in an effort to embrace the whole web video thing.  Video is a great and powerful thing, but not all the time and not in every circumstance.  Please remember that sometimes your users just want to read some text and move on.  Video should always be opt in.

Blog entries about customer service seemed to be following me around yesterday so I figured I’d write a blog post about it. 

First, I read “Seven steps to remarkable customer service” over on the extraordinary blog, Joel On Software.  Joel is the head of Fog Creek Software which makes the excellent FogBugz bug tracking software.  The post is specifically about support for software products, but is relevant to anyone who does customer service in their job (which is just about everyone really, isn’t it?).

His first tenet is perhaps the most valuable: fix everything two ways.  He writes:

Almost every tech support problem has two solutions. The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution: a way to prevent this particular problem from ever happening again.

After reading that I immediately came across an example of a company attempting to fix a problem two ways.  Due to ice storms, JetBlue has had to cancel a large number of its flights (23%) over the last week or so.  People were stranded in airports.  Folks sat on runways for 8 hours.  Your classic planes, trains and automobiles nightmare.  Jetblue was and is under a barrage of criticism for the their poor handling of the situation.

So what are they doing?  Trying to fix the problem two ways.

To address the specific customer problem, they are reimbursing the people who were caught up in the delays.  Here’s the payment schedule according the Consumerist:

• Delays 1-2 hours: $25 off a future flight
• Delays 2-4 hours: $50 off a future flight
• Delays 6+ hours: Free round-trip ticket

To solve the long term program, JetBlue has announced a Customer Bill of Rights.  Here is a list of some of the changes that have been taken to prevent this kind of event from occurring again:

• All non-airport crew members of JetBlue will be badged and ready to go if needed to be called upon
• Increasing number phone lines open for changing reservations
• Tripling the size of the group that schedules pilots and stewardesses

To announce the Bill of Rights, CEO David Needleman posted a video on YouTube explaining the plan of action (embedded after the jump).  The YouTube video has been viewed 33,000 times so far.  A nice use of social media I think, although they should have done a better job with the web during the crisis itself. 

All of this sounds great but won’t mean much if the changes don’t work. We’ll see.

Anyway, give the piece from Joel on Software a read.

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I’m not sure whether I’m the first or last to notice this, but Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine has launched a new blog (Prezvid.com) dedicated to what he calls the YouTube campaign.  Prezvid has been added to my feed reader. 

To give you a taste, here is a video Jarvis put together offering John McCain some unsolicited advice on his use of video on the web.  Good advice. Romney and other should take it as well.

Click To Play

Since the launch of YouTube, Flash has become the dominate video format.   The reasons are pretty simple:

(1) A higher percentage of people have Flash installed on their computers than competing formats like Windows Media Player or Real.  As of December 2006, 94.2% of folks in the US had at least Flash 8 installed on their computers. 

(2) Flash makes it easy to embed videos on your website.  Hence YouTube and the whole viral video craze. 

At this point I think it is safe to say that Flash is the industry standard for online video.  As a web development firm, we've started serving our videos in Flash almost exclusively.

I was interviewed for a story in Shoot Online a few weeks back on how Presidential candidates are using web video for their announcements (it is behind a pay wall now).  My contribution to the piece was pretty forgettable but an executive at Brightcove nicely defined the three ways you can do web (Flash) videos online these days:

(1) You can just post your video on YouTube for free and embed it into your site.

(2) You can build your own branded (or not) Flash player and host the videos on your own servers.

(3) You can host your videos using more feature rich hosting services like  Brightcove, Permission TV, Revver and Blip.tv.  Some of these services charge you, some don't. 

For me, #1 is out.  YouTube is great, but it is not appropriate for all videos.  The quality is kind of bad, their terms of service are a bit scary (see Ze Frank on this) and you don't have much control over the presentation of your video.  For me, YouTube is more of a distribution channel than a video hosting/player solution.  It can be used to complement options #2 and #3.

We've done option #2 plenty and even developed ways to include embed code in client-branded players.  We'll probably still do this for certain folks but it is sort of a pain.  I also feel like by doing this we are fighting a losing battle - our own branded players aren't able to keep up with all the cool features others are using. 

So basically we've settled on option #3 and are playing around with a variety of players.  Read/Write Web has a good breakdown of all the options.  The choices are sort of overwhelming and new features are coming out pretty much every day.  Channels available right in the video.  Embed codes within the video.  The ability to put your own ad or call to action at the end of the video itself. 

My current favorite is blip.tv.  It is easy to use, it has all the features I want, the player is unobtrusive and it will have the ability to embed my own ad at the end of the video in a few weeks. 

According to Wikipedia, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a tool that “enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.” It enables companies and individuals to posts tasks and set an amount they are willing to pay for the tasks completion. Qualified users can then scan these tasks and complete them at their leisure to stave off boredom or to make a little money.

The tasks can be manually posted by individual. Say if you want to pay someone to write a blog post or translate a document for you on a one off basis. Or you can tap into Mechanical Turk’s API and automatically have your computer program interact with MTurk. This allows companies to efficiently send requests to Mechanical Turk and fetch the data back. Companies are using MTurk in this way for tasks like the creation of transcripts of speeches and podcasts. You can see some success story here.

Ajit and I have been playing with Mechanical Turk a bit the last few days as we are thinking of tapping into it for one of our projects using the MTurk API. I think there is a lot of potential here.

In reviewing the interface I noticed a lot of people asking folks to write blog posts. Out of curiosity, I decided to use the service to pay three people $1 each to write a review of the Washington Post’s recent foray into video journalism, On Being.

Below are the three reviews so you can judge the quality yourself.

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The Los Angeles Times has a great piece today about the explostion of online video in politics.  The articles looks both at how both campaigns and activists groups are using viral video to try to impact the 2008 Presidential election. 

The whole piece is worth reading, but I found this tidbit about the McCain campaign particularly interesting:

McCain is planning his own Web version of reality TV. He has hired a videographer to record behind-the-scenes campaign moments of the senator in relaxed settings.

"What the campaign can do in a Web video is show a more personal side of the candidate," said Spencer Whelan, who works on McCain's online communications team.

I had not heard of that before.  You can see more discussion of the article over on Memeorandum. 

The Politico, a new weekly newspaper that will provide in-depth coverage of the political/lobbying scene, launched yesterday to modest fanfare. 

Interestingly, The Politico will take a sort of hybrid approach to distributing its content.  They don't seem to be aiming to attract a large print circulation.  They will distribute around 25,000 print copies of the weekly paper to various DC types at $3.50 a pop (I've got a copy of the first issue here).  Presumably, the print edition will feature long form, deep dive type of stories (it does so far).

But most folks will read the paper through its website, www.politico.com.  The website appears to feature most of the content from the print edition, as well as timely, breaking news and a variety of blogs.  This strategy seems right to me.

Anyway, here's a breakdown of the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of The Politico's website.

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When I saw Senator Barack Obama’s annoucement video yesterday, I was impressed by the Flash video player the campaign is using.  I’ve looked into this before, and the Flash player Obama is using has the critical features I look for: (1) subtle design, (2) the ability to email the video, (3) permalink and (3) embeddable HTML code.  I’ve embedded the player below so you can take a look:

It turns out the Obama campaign is using a service called Brightcove for their videos.  I took a look at Brightcove and it seems like a great service. 

Interestingly, one of the features that sets Brightcove apart from its competitors is their emphasis on the management of consumer generated content.  Brightcove has a set of powerful tools that allow you to invite users to submit their own videos to your account.  You can then review the videos and publish the ones you like to Brightcove and/or your own website.  It is cool stuff.

Obviously you can do the same thing in homemade fashion using YouTube.  But Brightcove gives users a bit more control over the process and gives you access to the videos in a variety of formats. 

Speculating wildly, I’d say the choice of Brightcove is a decent clue that the Obama campaign might be experimenting with consumer generated video down the line.

Update: I see on Techmeme that Brightcove announced topday that they have raised an additional $59 million in venture capital money. Here is their press release and here is GigaOm’s story on it.

Update 2: It looks like I’m not the first to take notice of Obama’s use of Brightcove. Beet TV has more information. Here’s the key quote:

"Beet.TV has learned that Brightcove’s arrangement with Obama will be multifaceted.  It will include ongoing publication of campaign videos, the creation of a Obama "channel" on Brightcove and a syndication function which will allow bloggers and Web sites to have campaign clips published directly on their pages."

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney launched the first iteration of his campaign website recently and it is underwhelming.

I am certain that the Romney campaign has big plans for the site. But as someone who develops websites for a living I can tell you that the features you choose to include (and exclude) on launch say a lot about where you are headed. Based on the feature set, the strategy behind this site seems much more appropriate for 2004 than 2008.

Here are my main criticisms of the site:

• The design of the site is sort of generic and soulless. Lots of American flags and such. I actually think the site looks nice and professional. It just doesn’t say anything about who Romney is or what he plans to do for the country.
• The site doesn’t include a blog or any way to have a conversation online with the candidate/campaign. There are tools that encourage users to join the campaign, donate money and sign up friends for campaign updates. In other words, they have features that allow you to participate in the campaign in very focused ways, but not in the messy, Web 2.0 manner of the John Edwards campaign. No Facebook group. No MySpace profile. No link to their YouTube account. It’s as if the last few years never happened.
• The video section is great from a design perspective but the content isn’t compelling to me. The name of the section, Mitt TV, says it all. You’ve got a bunch of slick, professionally produced content that looks like it was originally developed for television. It is most definitely not a video blog. It would be much more interesting if the campaign were to buy a video camera and record stuff behind the scenes that actually shows who the candidate is. Kung Fu Quip has a good post on the problem here.

Based on how they are using YouTube and podcasts for crisis response, it is clear that the Romney campaign has an understanding of how to use the web in this day and age. Unfortunately this understanding isn’t evident from the first version of their campaign website.

Democrat John Edwards has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosphere for announcing his candidacy for President on YouTube. A little more quietly, another candidate, Democrat Tom Vilsack, has launched a video blog over on blip.tv (via WP Post IT blog).

Here’s one of his recent posts where he talks about “the power of the Internet to enable conversation between voters and candidates.”

Click To Play

Sounds like he’s been reading Doc Searls, Scoble, etc, huh?

During the 2006 cycle, lots of campaigns had staffers blogging but very few candidates wrote blog entries themselves. I think it is difficult for candidates to find the time to blog. And even if they do find the time, rarely can a candidate pull off the right tone. Blogging well requires a serious time investment. It’s just not a good fit for candidates. Better to have a staffer or consultant do it.

Video blogging, on the other hand, plays to candidate’s strengths. They meet and connect with voters every day. Video blogging is a natural extension of that skill. Bill Clinton would have made a great video blogger.

I’d look for just about every 2008 Presidential hopeful to do some form of video blogging.

The Associated Press released a list of their Top 10 YouTube videos a few weeks back. And we did a Top 10 Political Videos list back in September. So here’s a derivative post listing our Top 8 YouTube videos of 2006.

(8) Microsoft designs the Ipod packaging….

[gv data="0pXL5_RvGrs" width="425" height="350"][/gv]

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AP writer Jake Coyle took the time to draft a good list of the Top 10 YouTube videos of 2006. The story appears all over the place.

There is just one problem though. The story doesn’t so much as link to the chosen videos, much less play the videos within the story itself. The experience is actually frustrating. I’m given a seemingly great list but no way to watch the videos without going on some sort of wild goose chase to find them.

I’m on the Internet reading your story. Show me the videos.
Anyway, as a public service, here are embedded versions of his top 5 videos (or concepts in some case).

(1) “The face of YouTube — The cute, bedroom confessions of Lonelygirl15 remain the site’s quintessential expression.”

[gv data="dZN-Wye4rDE" width="425" height="350"][/gv]

(2) “Network wake-up call — ‘Saturday Night Live’s’ “Lazy Sunday” mock-rap sketch was, in some ways, what started the revolution.”

[gv data="SRkFW1gjeL8" width="425" height="350"][/gv]

(3) “Political fallout — YouTube, like the Internet in general, has made it a specialty to reveal the gaffes and mistakes of the establishment.”

[gv data="r90z0PMnKwI" width="425" height="350"][/gv]

(4) “Floundering founders — When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in October, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen posted a goofy, unrehearsed video…”

I couldn’t find this one.

(5) “OK, stop — MTV turned 25 this year, but it became clear a long time ago that its programming doesn’t have room for music videos anymore. YouTube’s expanse is endless, of course, and the site turned a little-known power pop group into the music video sensation of the year. OK Go’s video for “Here it Goes Again” was made in one long take with the amateurish creativity that YouTube specializes in. ”

[gv data="GCjSwr7zYtE" width="425" height="350"][/gv]

[Via MediaShift]

CNBC relaunched its website a few days ago after being offline for six months due the expiration of its deal with Microsoft. Here is a quick look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the redesigned site.

The Good

(1) According to Techcrunch, the site will have between three and eight hours of fresh video content available each day. A web show called “Market in a Minute” will summarize market happenings twice per hour. Sounds good.

(2) Most CNBC anchors appear to have their own blogs on the site that are being updated nearly every day (see Phil LeBeau’s blog here). You can search for tags, sectors and companies across blogs. This makes it easy to access all blog entries that mention, say, Microsoft.

(3) CNBC Plus will allow users to watch live CNBC TV content from their computers for $9.99 a month. That is not that interesting to me, but for business users this might be a good option.

(4) You can easily save/submit CNBC content to Digg and del.icio.us (see right). I’m not sure the content here lends itself to those sites, but it is worth a try.

The Bad

(1) The design of the site feels heavy and, well, old. The whole thing has that Microsoft/MSNBC.com feel to it. The site is also very slow.

(2) Given the video focus, it is disappointing that the only option is to play Windows Media Player versions of the videos. If you are only going to offer one video option, it seems like it should be Flash given the success of YouTube and others with that format.

(3) There is no way to comment on staff blog entries (or any other site content), although they do have a weird feature where they invite you to sent them comments via regular email. As far as I can tell there isn’t any really any user generated content on the site.

(4) I don’t see anything in the company profile area (Microsoft example) that would cause people to switch from sites like Yahoo Finance (example) and Google Finance (example).

The Ugly

(1) The search is completely broken. You can see the results for a sitewide search for “Autozone” on the right (which is that there are nor results). This despite the fact that there is clearly an Autozone story on the site homepage. Searches for Microsoft also produced no results.

(2) The Video section has a promising Most Viewed feature that presumably allows you to access the most popular videos. Unfortunately, when you click on this link it says there are no results. So I guess that is broken as well.

Personal Democracy is running a series this week on the role technology played in the 2006 elections and what role it will play in future elections. They asked a group of “technologists, politicos, bloggers, and journalists” to send in their take on the issue.

The best take I’ve seen so far (including my own) was from David Weinberger, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and coauthor of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

“The old quip about AI applies: As AI succeeds, it’s no longer counted as AI. In this cycle, what was groundbreaking two years ago now seems normal. Bloggers help shape the discussion. Sites aggregate info about who’s raising money from whom. Candidates have blogs. Campaigns post YouTubes. They use the Internet to organize feet on the street. They raise money through email. And, they avoid talking about the details of their proposals by mumbling the URL of their Web site. The Internet transformation is well under way.”

You can read the first set of submissions here (mine is in this batch) and the second set here.