Almighty Link

When the public needed a service to find things on the internet, some journalists wrote about how a new breed of search engines were providing that service … while Google disrupted the way people found information.

When the public started looking for niche sites about topics they cared about, journalists wrote about how enigmatic blogs were providing that service … while blogs disrupted the publication and of niche content.

When the public needed someone to point them to news that they cared about, mainstream media talked about how Matt Drudge linked to other sites to provide that service … while Drudge Report disrupted the idea of a trusted brand.

When the public wanted a cheap way to buy and sell things online, newspapers wrote about how Craig Newmark  created a community as he provided that service … while craigslist disrupted the world of classified advertising.

When small businesses needed a cost-effective way to get their message in front of a web audience, and web site owners needed revenue, reporters wrote about how Google provided those services with AdWords and AdSense … while Google disrupted targeted advertising and marketing.

When the public needed a way to gather all their sources in one place, journalists wrote about how RSS and feed-readers gained popularity and provided that service … while RSS disrupted the distribution of online content.

When the public wanted to send and receive small bits of information as it happened, reporters examined the perceived value of Twitter while the microblogging provided that service … while Twitter disrupted the speed at which information traveled.

As the public becomes overwhelmed by the amount of unfiltered data coming from social media and networks, as the value of real-time search rises, and as lifestreaming gains popularity, what will news professionals do?

Journalists and news organizations can choose to “cover” these changes or they can choose to actively disrupt news and storytelling — and provide a much-needed public service — by distilling all the white noise into informative, cohesive and easily-consumable stories.

My solution is a storystreaming platform, but I want to know what ideas you have. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Social media sketch courtesy of Birger Hartung via Flickr. You can see an updated version here.

Sponsor message: Jsavers offers journalists their own WordPress blog for $5 a month.

No, this blog post is not really sponsored. But you sure did notice my fictional sponsor, didn’t you?

I’ve been kicking around the idea of simple, human-placed text ads that could appear at the top of any (textual) blog post or article. This kind of ad would travel wherever RSS readers were used.

The idea seems plausible, but I’m no expert in this field, so I have many questions that I hope you can help answer:

• Why shouldn’t blog posts include hand-placed textual advertisements?
• Can humans do a better job than Google at determining contextually relevant ads to serve?
• Who would match the ad to the content? Editorial or advertising staff?
• Are consumers more likely to read sponsored messages that aren’t shoved into the right-hand side of a site?
• Would an ad unit like this require ad-serving software?
• What tools would need to be built to facilitate the quick research that human-placement would require?
• Would this change the way editorial and advertising staff work together?
• Would a sponsor’s message appear as an article’s summary in search engine result pages?
• If the answer to the previous question is yes, would that decrease the article’s chance of being clicked?
• What are the SEO/SEM implications for the content publisher? For the advertiser?

If you want to read more about ads in RSS feeds, Problogger has a good page of RSS advertising options and WATblog has a post all about RSS advertising.

After posting my idea for a platform that would allow any piece of content to blossom into a real-time curated story powered by social media, Kol Tregaskes pointed out a similar project called Purefold.

Purefold also aims to gather content from users to create a cohesive story. It seems to be aimed more for entertainment, marketing and advertising, but the similarities with storystreaming are undeniable. The project is being developed by Ag8 and Free Scott, a new entertainment division from film directors Tony and Ridley Scott.

The concept, and the tie to Blade Runner, is described in this video with Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and Ag8’s David Bausola and Tom Himpe.

As I was chatting with Joey Baker about the idea last night (make sure to check out Joey’s related Vancouver Project), Bausola joined the conversation and I was able to ask him some questions about Purefold. Here is the information he shared.

1. 
   zeroinfluencer @ksablan @joeybaker With Purefold, we utilizes the aggregation of bespoke RSS feeds to construct the narrative relevancy for particpants. 01 Jul 2009 from Tweetie
2. 
   ksablan @zeroinfluencer Yes. I think I understand from video. The idea seems to parallel some thinking about gathering and “publishing” of news. 01 Jul 2009 from web in reply to zeroinfluencer
3. 
   zeroinfluencer @ksablan Exactly; the operation is designed to run like a news room with film makers – objective is real time storytelling. 01 Jul 2009 from Tweetie in reply to ksablan
4. 
   ksablan @zeroinfluencer As the number of people sharing INFORMATION in real-time increases, so does the need for real-time STORYTELLING tools. 01 Jul 2009 from web in reply to zeroinfluencer
5. 
   zeroinfluencer @ksablan The structure of storytelling changes too; narrative ‘universes’ have to connect just like their audiences do. #singularity #CC 01 Jul 2009 from Tweetie in reply to ksablan
6. 
   ksablan @zeroinfluencer Figgis’ Timecode goes online. With varying types of elements (video, text, audio), wonder if best to start w/chrono timeline 01 Jul 2009 from web in reply to zeroinfluencer
7. 
   zeroinfluencer @ksablan Synchronicity is important, but there is no real need for timeline in singularity storytelling; events are clustered not sequenced. 01 Jul 2009 from Tweetie in reply to ksablan
8. 
   ksablan @zeroinfluencer Interesting. When do you plan on having a sample Purefold “story” to show publicly? 01 Jul 2009 from web in reply to zeroinfluencer
9. 
   zeroinfluencer @ksablan They are roughly 40 prototypes on Friendfeed, but we need to explain a few ‘how to’ first – expect those within next few weeks. 01 Jul 2009 from Tweetie in reply to ksablan

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Update: Here is a link to Purefold Discussions group in Friendfeed.

A post on Old Media, New Tricks asks if the era of live-tweeting is over, to be replaced by lifestreaming.

The use of a lifestream — a chronological aggregated view of your life activities — to tell news is very smart, not just for obviously major events, but also for small stories that sometimes come to life and require more thorough and real-time documentation.

Thinking of each story as an individual “life” helps identify the opportunity for developers to create or modify a platform that can meet the needs of news organization, a platform for “storystreaming.”

1. Story-centric: Current lifestream solutions, at least those I’m familiar with, document a person’s life, but every story includes multiple characters, events and plot. A storystream platform needs to document a the events of a story, not a person.
2. Realtime curation: A good news story probably shouldn’t include the many distracting, unrelated actions in that person’s lifestream. To use a cliche example, we don’t need to know what our protagonist had for breakfast. A storystream platform needs to give an astute curator the ability to filter content as it arrives. [Distracting caveat: I did say a good "news" story. Some of the best "story" stories include tasty details, like the color of the hot sauce that our protagonist pours on his fried eggs every morning. Might lifestreaming harken the rebirth of narratives?]
3. Integration: Any piece of information can become a story. If a news site already produces a blotter, each item should have the ability to become a story and a storystream. It isn’t enough to be able to provide a widget that can be embedded into a current publishing platform via a content management system.

Twitter fans, don’t fret. Lifestreaming won’t replace “microblogging,” and neither will the umpteen other Twitter-killers that surface every month. Instead, we’re witnessing the growth of a web-based storytelling ecosystem, with each tool relying on the other to survive. The way I see it, Twitter is becoming the all-important bottom feeder that the storytelling ecosystem relies on for survival.

By the way, my observations come from my own experiences when I created the following presentation back in January, which ReadWriteWeb used in it’s post, Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web!

If you want to learn more about lifestreaming make sure to follow the Lifestream Blog by Mark Krynsky.

Hat tip to Daniel Honigman for asking me for my thoughts on the post.

Update: I had the chance to talk with David Bausola, who is working on a similar project.