Here’s what happened. The Verge wrote this great feature and The Huffington Post “curated” it. Editor-in-Chief of The Verge was not pleased.
Formal public request. @bbosker and @huffingtonpost, please remove the content you’ve scraped from us. huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/the… Seriously.
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013What’s most egregious about this @huffingtonpost scrape is its theft of our SEO on title and text. Google “death of the american arcade”
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013@joshuatopolsky that was a story we linked out to on huffpost to drive traffic/readers to The Verge, which it looks like it did 1/2
— Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) January 23, 2013@bbosker no it didn’t.
Matthew Ingram of GigaOm jumped in to ask this very important question:
@joshuatopolsky: so if Google gives the HuffPo excerpt more prominence than the original Verge piece, is that Google’s fault or HuffPo’s?
Huffpo’s one-paragraph pull of a much longer Verge piece full of graphics, visuals and well-considered content doesn’t take away from a transformative original piece. The question is, do people click the link on HuffPo and realize that there’s a much better transformative piece out there?
Syria Deeply, Beat Page of the Future
It’s an incredible idea: one site, one beat. No front page. No sports, no business or finance, anywhere. It’s called Syria Deeply.
It’s about 25% original content, written by veteran Middle East correspondent Lara Setrakian and friends. The rest is aggregated and includes interactives, maps, and contextual material aimed to catch people up on the story without pointing them off site.
From FastCompany:
From a taxonomy perspective, Syria Deeply is the opposite of most news sites. In a traditional news taxonomy, information is divided by broad topics, like World News. Each topic is divided into subsections, like the Middle East. Each subsection is then often divided into even smaller subsections, like Syria. Each section gets smaller and smaller. Topic pages live in obscure ghettos on many news websites: auto-aggregated and ugly dumping grounds for content that happens to be tagged with particular keywords.
On Syria Deeply (designed by Brock Petrie and developed by Soumyadeep Paul and Arindam Biswas, who runs Collective Zen) the topic page is the homepage. Setrakian’s hope is that this site-wide focus on a single beat will allow for deeper, more thoughtful reporting.
FJP: Looks extremely promising.
Context, context, context. Bravo.
If you have not made it to this site, do so. This is how you cover single-topic news.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the new iOS news app Circa is really cool — incremental news for those of you using your phones and stuff — but it’s missing something: Numbers and blurbs. As an experiment for kicks, here’s what that would look like.
“So like there’s nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it’s also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator.”—
Choire Sicha: You Are Not a Curator, You Are Actually Just a Filthy Blogger
Gonna curate some links in the meantime.
Saw this yesterday, found it to be a bit of a talker, wanted to write up a response. First up: Choire has been at this long enough (he worked at Gawker nearly a decade ago) that he’s arguably an elder statesman of blogging, along with folks like Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and a couple of others. That automatically makes his opinion valid enough that we should listen, but I’m sure in a lot of ways it gives him a different take on this whole thing than someone who got into this in, say, 2008 or 2009.
So let’s take on this term. “Curation.” The first time I ever heard someone use the term in relation to Web content was in 2009, when Robert Scoble wrote this great piece about how “curation” was going to be a billion-dollar industry, once someone figured out a killer product that made it really stupidly simple to organize our thoughts into one piece. Not long after that, we got Storify, and, separately, Tumblr sort of became the place for this style of link sharing. I don’t see a billion dollars yet, but the basic idea seems to be catching on. (And no, it’s nothing like curating art. Big deal.)
But here’s the thing: I don’t think anyone is actually trying to “class up” their work by using this term. (Well, maybe except for the dude quoted in Choire’s piece.) These “curators” are just using different techniques than people were using a decade ago, and someone threw out that term one day, and it stuck.
And it’s happened before, too. Do you know how long pre-digital journalists bristled at the term “blogger” around 2004? I’m sure there’s some middle-aged newspaper columnist somewhere who once wrote a column titled “You Are Not a Blogger, You Are Actually Just a Terrible Journalist.” Do we need to rehash the purist’s argument every time someone does something a little differently? I’m sure the telegraph guys were pissed when they were shown the telephone for the first time.
So let’s get down to it: You’re not a curator, but then you’re not a blogger, either. You’re just a person with an internet connection who uses it to communicate. The quality of the information you share, report, or comment on is what matters. Not the term. — Ernie @ SFB
In case you missed it: We’ve unveiled TNR Reader, a collection of the best writing across the web curated with a TNR sensibility. Check out http://reader.tnr.com/
This is really cool. Very slick summaries, akin to Romenesko when he was still at Poynter.
I’ve been running a hybrid articles-and-links blog here (↬DF) for a while, I wrote the function that added “via” links to billions of reblogged posts on Tumblr, and I didn’t even know the difference between “via” and “hat tip” until today.Instapaper founder (and Tumblr co-founder) Marco Arment • Offering his take, in a post titled “Not a Curator,” on the “Curator’s Code” idea that’s been floating around for the past day or two. His feeling? We’re fighting over something that’s not a big deal, and the solution is going to be ignored by the organizations that it’s meant to target. “The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash,” he argues. Personally, that’s always been our goal — but that said, unlike Marco, we’d call ourselves curators.
…where is the line between promoting the good work of others and simply lifting it? Naughty aggregation is analogous to pornography: You know it when you see it.David Carr (via soupsoup)
See all that stuff around the text? It’s white space. Tumblr user Max Temkin’s new news project is quick info minus clutter, updated once a day. “I’ve always wished I could get my news on a plain white page with a few well-curated stories; no ads, no social media, no comments,” he writes. “I got tired of waiting for someone to build that page, so I made it myself.” Minus the newspaper, this reminds us of the approach of the old Frontpages tumblr (whose loss we’re still upset about and we miss greatly). Just the links. Nothing more, nothing less. Give it a follow.
“Whether you’re at a conference or at home … you now have storytelling at your fingertips.” Storify co-founder & CEO Xavier Damman’s totally psyched about bringing his popular online story-telling tool to the iPad. While Storify, which pulls content from a variety of social networks, does not contain all the functionality of it’s Internet-based counterpart, the team at Storify is confident that they’ve successfully migrated the core Storify experience to iOS. The team also added an additional function not found on the Storify website: The ability to tweet, inside the app, while creating a story. Have you tried it yet? source
Been playing with some ideas for trying to push interesting news stories on Pinterest. Here’s our board. Above is something we’ve been calling “Tech Number of the Day.” What would you guys like to see us do with Pinterest? Follow over there, and suggest ideas! We’d love to hear them!
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Social Media: Evolving From Long Form To Push Button
In the evolution of social media over the last decade, the trend has been a move from long form content, which has high friction of participation (both on the production and consumption side) to ever lower requirements placed on a user to participate in a conversation.If I were tumblr I’d be so insulted by this article. Pinterest is del.icio.us with pictures. Tumblr is community and expression in a way that is genuinely unique on the internet, at a scale that is completely unmatched. Articles like this are one more reason I have so much disdain for most Silicon Valley trend bloggers.
Pinterest is a bad example. While it certainly is an interesting product, Percolate (well, prior to its pivot) and it’s ilk are far more interesting. Problem is, too few curation apps focus on the power user, and those that do (Storify) push too far in one direction at the cost of more simplified interfaces. Balancing the two is the way to go. Tumblr gets closest to this at the moment. Tumblr should consider figuring out a way to easily tell multi-part stories in posts simply. The issue is not that curation needs to be dumbed down; the issue is that it needs to be fluid.
imwithkanye asks: What is the one piece of news you wish you would had written or reported? Whose work do you admire the most?
» SFB says: Regarding the first half of that, I feel like, honestly, I try to catch as much as I can, but sometimes the beast that is limited resources can really get in the way. I wish the site could’ve done more with Occupy Wall Street some nights. I wish I could give equal weight to the natural disasters that come along (we covered Thailand’s recent flooding a little too lightly, for example). But with just a handful of writers, you have to be careful to ensure that your appetite is as big as your stomach. So often we’ll cover one story really well if it’s big enough, or touch on four or five at a time.
As for the second part: I’ve always told people that my two biggest inspirations in doing this blog are Andrew Sullivan and Charles Apple. You guys all know Sullivan. Some of you hate his work or obsessions with Trig Palin or whatever. I tend to think that he set many of the basic templates for mixing news and opinion in a blog; he’s a trailblazer, plain and simple. As for Charles Apple, he runs a newspaper-design blog that is more of a direct influence on what I do. When I started the site, I asked him for feedback; I still cite his site pretty regularly. I came from news design, and while SFB’s focus is broader than that, the numbers and blurbs come from those roots. Beyond that, I find ProducerMatthew’s work to be super-inspiring. — Ernie @ SFB (Alright, Office Hours over for now; we have one or two still sitting around and we’ll get to those over the next few days.)
What are the main differences between ShortFormBlog and a traditional news media outlet?
The most important thing is the pivot — the idea of the blog is broad enough that we can make stuff up as we go along. One day we might be a breaking news outlet, another day we’ll be the opinion page and another day after that we might be the place to go for serious analysis or conversation. The effect is that we’re a little all over the place, but you’re guaranteed to get a bit of a mix from us. We don’t do much reporting, but we instead focus on aggregating content. Whether it’s finding a photo or a video from the scene of a big story before anyone else, giving a drab economic story a fresh coat of paint, pontificating like Jay Rosen or Andrew Sullivan, or cracking wise on Herman Cain, the mix is what matters.
We do this all with a small staff, so we’re not perfect, but we think it works well for us. There’s a little bit of opinion in the mix, too. With this type of content, opinions have a great way of taking the content and turning it into something with a touch of emotion. I think people want snark from a site like this, they want perspective, they want direction. We try hard to make that content fascinating. :)
Thanks to Jacobo Corujeira for giving us the opportunity!
Copyright 2009-2013 Ernie Smith • Ask us stuff! • E-mail us • Follow us on Twitter • Follow us on Facebook
