RealClearPolitics: Winning the Digital Journalism Race

Not long ago I castigated Congressional Quarterly for presenting high-quality reportage on political polling via a blog. They’re missing a great journalistic opportunity–to present daily analysis of the latest state-by-state Obama vs. McCain polls in a way that takes full advantage of the interactive visual medium that is the new platform for journalism.

It’s a classic case of old media not understanding what to do with their great stuff. Failing to “unlock the value” of their work, as they say in the corner offices.

Anyway, I’ve since discovered that such a map–a dataviz, or datavisualization, in web argot–exists. Unsurprisingly, it’s the work of a new media firm unburdened by an analog heritage.

The map is produced by RealClearPolitics, an online-only political analysis operation.

The map is a thing of digital beauty, a tool that lets you dig into good polling data smartly analyzed and interact with it by imagining various scenarios.

What if current polling holds through November? [Results shown above, pre convention "bounce."]

What if Obama wins Virginia and New Mexico and the rest of the ‘04 results are unchanged? [Obama wins by a hair.]

What if McCain sweeps the rust belt of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan? [McCain by a mile, even if he loses Florida, etc.]

You can base all of these scenarios on the latest polling data so you can see how realistic your own speculations are.

It’s great work, a simple dataviz that presents best-of-class information in a fully interactive way that delivers a very high level of public service. It’s “civic engagement” on a screen.

If old media doesn’t start winning this kind or race soon, there will be no doubt who will carry the contest for the media future.

No matter who the President is.

DNC Exposes a Gap in the New Media Ecosystem

As part of my utterly ineffectual campaign to embarrass the journalism establishment until it capitulates to my irresistible wisdom, I’m doing my best to boycott mainstream media coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

There are 15,000 journalists in Denver. There are 4,000 delegates.

At a time when news leaders face the urgent need to reinvent themselves around crushing economic changes, they’re squandering precious journalistic resources earnestly covering an event that’s part infomercial, part pep rally and part goofball Americana parade. All right now, let’s listen to State Sen. Rhubarb Buttwhistle’s intro to Gov. Louis Meander’s tribute to Adlai Stevenson! Tough questions, you say? Tell me, Mdme. Janie, is this convention hat really from 1956?

Yo, journalists: Is this what you went to school for? Isn’t there a meth lab in a house jointly owned by a city councilman and a corrupt contractor catching fire back home or something?

So anyway, I figure this is a great time to check out the emerging media. You know, those bold, independent voices unfettered by the groupthink of corporate media and resistant to the virus of party politics.

I went looking for a source that pulled together an eclectic mix of the best independent voices from non-mainstream, non-corporate media. Certainly some new media visionary was at this task right now, mining the indie datastream for precious nuggets, producing a truly fresh, truly independent, crisply edited feed representing news and opinions spanning the spectrum of politics, age, gender, lifestyle, social class and headwear preferences.

Um, no.

I found four varieties of DNC blog aggregation going on.

Big Brands (Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico) These mainstream outlets simply have their staff use blogging software to get their content on the screen faster. Also saves money on copy editors. Independent? Not so much.

Digital Algorithmic Aggregators (DayLife, Topix) These wrap a skin of a harried producer’s choices around an armature of machine-generated content, usually from mainstream sources. Curated? Not so much.

Lefty Blogs (Huffington Post) and Righty Blogs (RedState). Interesting for three or four clicks. Then, very quickly, thin and stifling.

I spent well over an hour searching for a dispassionate curator who undertook the task of presenting an eclectic mix of high-value content representing a range of views, avoiding both mainstream news and an ideological filter. I searched in vain.

I guess it makes sense. Big media brands are invested in promoting their own folks. Lefties and Righties want to ventilate only the viewpoints their benefactors embrace. The machine aggregators just want to assemble eyeballs at the lowest costs.

All of this exposes an interesting gap in the new media marketplace. Lots of great independent content is being created from and about the convention. Nobody I could locate is making an intellectually honest attempt to select the highest quality stuff and make it accessible in a single place with a single RSS feed. If it included multiple media–pix, Tweets, videos, etc.–so much the better.

I know there’s an audience for this. I know there are people capable of producing this.

And yet. . .there it isn’t.

The digital media marketplace being what it is, I wonder if this task isn’t best suited to a journalistic foundation or university program. [This isn't a grant proposal, honest.]

Of course, it’s entirely possible that there is a politically independent, journalistically sound effort to curate the best non-MSM content produced by a variety of sources coming out of the DNC in something like real time.

If so, I’d love to hear about it.

It would make my pitiful solo boycott of MSM DNC coverage so much more satisfying.

Salesconx: Business Slow? Sell Your Contacts!

I’m getting really skittish about proclaiming some new Web 2.0 scheme spectacularly stupid, wrongheaded, or immoral.  It seems like every time I do so the scheme immediately gets traction and the perp gets rich.

So it’s with some trepidation I introduce you to Salesconx, a marketplace for the sale and purchase of personal business connections. Essentially you can sell access to your contacts–I mean the actual live people you know personally and/or have done business with–in an open marketplace. You can also buy access to others’ connections.

Connections are priced anywhere from $35 to $1,000 and up.

I know, I know. I had a hard time wrapping my brain around this at first too. Could this marketplace be as nakedly crass it appears?

Let’s look at one current listing, which appears in the “Buy” section. This is where people make their connections available to buyers.

In this case, Kris N says he has a “strong connection” to the chairman of an oil drilling company in Thailand. He is offering anyone who wants to buy crude an introduction to that chairman for $100.

It’s not clear whether the CEO knows that Kris is charging $100 for a meeting with him (or if the CEO thinks maybe he’s going too cheap). Whether Kris’s connection to the CEO remains “strong” will depend, I suppose, on whether Kris’s introduction is beneficial to the CEO or just time-waster.

Let’s look on the other side of the market, where people say how much they are willing to pay for connections to certain kinds of people.

This guy sells high-end custom men’s clothing. He’s hoping to get introduced to some agents that represent professional athletes. [Good prospect targeting, by the way!] He’ll pay $35 for an introduction.

The secret sauce of salesconx.com seems to include aspects of eBay, eHarmony, LinkedIn and those blood banks that pay for pints of plasma.

It is easy to ridicule this as a tool by which grubby salesfolk pimp out their Outlook files for some extra cash.

Let me strain to view this another way.

The charitable view is that Salesconx is a marketplace that can produce win/win/win scenarios. Mr. Thai Oil gets someone to buy his crude. Someone who needs oil is hooked up with a key decision maker. They are unlikely to have met otherwise. The fact that Kris got $100 for his trouble is kind of icky–dishonest, if it’s not revealed to Mr. Thai Oil–but not intrinsically harmful.

[An actual real-life salesguy from Salesconx called me on the real live phone an hour or so after I signed up for an account. He thought I was a real community member; I told him I was a blogger. He told me the site will use a ratings and recommendations feature, like eBay offers, so anyone who makes a bad match will get rated down by the community. And (he said) Salesconx will either refund money or give credits to anyone disappointed by the quality of a connection.

[I tried to find written elaboration on this but the Salesconx FAQ isn't posted on the site yet. Beta, I know.]

Taken up a notch and viewed from 30,000 feet, Salesconx is a remarkable economics testbed. It provides a platform by which the most important intrinsic currency of commerce–personal connections–is assigned a transparent market price.

So why does this all seem so spectacularly stupid, wrongheaded and immoral?

For me, it’s because I can’t imagine being on either end of that transaction.

I like it when people I know match me up with talented people, point me to a good deal or recommend a product. And vice versa. Social media like LinkedIn, Yelp and Twitter have oiled that machinery. So have pleasant nights of drinking and chatting.

But no money has changed hands in those transactions. If someone in my personal network who knows I buy software silently recommended a vendor hit me up–and quietly pocketed $60 for his tip–I’d be disgusted. If LinkedIn had a Circle of Hell [not a bad idea, by the way] I’d send that contact there with one brisk click.

Now I’m no salesguy. And sales culture appears more tolerant of things I consider vulgar. I also realize that transparent “introductions” are different from stealth pointers toward unwitting sales prospects.

Who knows? Maybe Salesconx will help millions of people unlock the value in their rolodexes, and help billions of dollars change hands efficiently and legally. As a press release on Salesconx points out, a lot of money is spent trying to develop sales prospects. This could just be a faster way to do it.

Hey, maybe by 2011 “free” networking sites like LinkedIn will be seen as sweet throwbacks, relics of the days when people actually helped each other along without collecting anything in return.

As I said, I’ve been wrong about this kind of thing before.

Which brings me to the punchline: According to the press release, on Sept. 9 Salesconx is expected to announce series A funding.

Digital Journalism Worst Practices [Reprise]

Two weeks ago I published an entry about the list of finalists of the 2008 Online Journalism Awards. I was impressed overall with the quality of the entries, and emerged with a sense of hope about the future of digital journalism [should a business model ever be discovered to fund it].

But at the bottom of the entry I included some of the Worst Practices in Digital Journalism the winners also exhibited. A few days later an e-mailer suggested, correctly, that I’d “buried the lede,” as we say in newsrooms. This is to say my list of worst practices got lost at the end of an entry about good practices.

So: I’ve reposted the Worst Practices part here. Enjoy. Or not.

Segregating “video” from other parts of a package, or even labeling it as video. Media of all types should be integrated into a whole package. Calling out “video” rings of an anachronistic brag: “Hey, lookit, we did some video, too!” I demand this practice be stopped immediately.

Layering a show-offey Flash entry page above the package. Flash pages waste time, bandwidth and user patience. They add no value. They impress nobody other than their own designers. Stop it, I tell you, stop it!

Placing the whole 3-part, 120-inch wordroll at the center of a digital package. Long blocks of text work okay on paper. They deliver a lousy experience online. Keeping those wayback-style reports at the center of digital packages tells me the newspaper folks are still in control of the website, fighting the future, defending the interests of their print reporters and slowing the new organization’s transition to a financially stable future. In fact, how about this: Instead of sticking “videos” in the sidebar of an article, how about putting “articles” in the sidebar of a visually-driven presentation. ["Hey, lookit, we wrote an article about this too!"] Editors who take offense at that suggested inversion, I submit, may want to consider that next buyout offer very seriously.

The Web 2.D’oh! Roundup

The Print ‘n’ Read ™ Feature: How Obama Really Did It

I regularly choose a story I encounter online that I find so valuable it’s actually worth printing it out on paper for later reading. This time it’s the remarkably thoroughgoing and fascinating “How Obama Really Did It,” appearing in MIT’s Technology Review.

A remarkable piece of near-real-time history [six, count 'em, six screens long], the piece describes how and who pulled off Barack Obama’s social networking strategy.

One favorite detail: The forgotten chapter about how McCain, during his 2000 campaign, was precocious in his use of the Internet, raising $1 million online before it was cool. Author David Talbot then goes on to detail his adventures trying to deal with John ["I'm getting more familiar with computers"] McCain’s current website.

[A tip o' the fez to TechPresident for the pointer to Talbot's piece.]

Mario Sundar’s Top 10 Blogs

I’m delighted to report that this very blog . . .nearly made Mario Sundar’s list of Top 10 blogs. Oh, it didn’t make the Top 10, but it was nice to be mentioned.

Sundar, “community evangelist” at LinkedIn, proclaimed recently that blogging’s demise has been grossly exaggerated. He goes on to list his 10 favorites. After that list he mentions this humble author among those who “don’t blog as often as they did in the past. Here’s hoping they’d resume their prolific blogging sometime in the future.”

I hereby pledge to try really really hard to post [nearly] every [week]day [when my day job permits] [and my family appears in no imminent danger of forgetting what I look like entirely].

As you might expect, Sundar’s Top 10 includes a few worthies that likely don’t appear on most folks’ RSS dashboards: Jason Kottke’s 10-year-old [!] highbrow take on liberal arts and Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter, for instance.

He also includes the indispensible Boom Town by Kara ["I only do digital"] Swisher of the Wall Street Journal. Among my few brushes with fame I include my memorable visit to Hoover Dam with Kara way back in our callow youth at The Washington Post. If I recall, she purchased a swell pair of cowboy boots.

And Finally, Our Regular Sighting of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse ™

Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints rumored poised to purchase Facebook

Blogs.com: A Worthy Blog Directory [Seriously]

See the ugly row of badges on the right rail of this blog? They link to blog directories that, in theory, aggregate the “best” blogs and present their content in a way that organizes the vast, incoherent blogosphere for easy consumption.

Nearly all of them suck, including the ones whose badges I display. Go ahead, click on ‘em [on the rail, not above]. Or don’t click; I have nothing at stake. These directories deliver very little user value and, contrary to their claims, are hardly worth a moment’s notice. [I stuck them on their a couple months ago so I can see whether having my blog listed directs any traffic my way. Answer: Hardly a trickle, though blogcatalog has trickled the most.]

Which brings me to blogs.com [which must be one of the most valuable URLs in Electroland]. The site has been relaunched by its owners, Six Apart, the corporate unit behind the blog platforms TypePad and Movable Type. My observations are preliminary, but it looks awfully good to me.

Unlike many directories, blogs.com has sentient beings picking the most worthy content. Evidence suggests these beings are literate, smart and funny.

Blogs.com lives somewhere between About.com [which uses human "guides" to select content], Alltop.com [an increasingly annoying aggregation site which launched with a similar idea as blogs.com but increasingly delegates its picks to legions of Twitteurs, with results I consider disastrous] and the old-school content directories of Yahoo in its callow youth. [This Yahoo comparison is made in the TechCrunch preview post about blogs.com.]

Three favorite things about blogs.com

Though it’s a product of Six Apart, it features plenty of blogs on other platforms. God love ‘em for putting users ahead of crass self-interest.

The top entry of the day weaves together a bunch of blog entries with wit and smarts. If blurb is a verb, these folks blurb extremely well.

Its list of Top 10s are ecumenical and tightly edited, a mix of picks by blogs.com editors and various Electroland personages [Craig of Craigslist's 10 Favorite Blogs, Glen Abel's Top DVD Blogs for Smart People]

Perfect? Of course not. Spend half an hour and you’ll find plenty of crap to scrape off your shoes. But the signal-to-noise is pretty high, and I find that blogs.com’s main topic pages function as daily “news” reports that cover the basics in each area but are full of wiggy surprises.

Say, I wonder if I can get a blogs.com badge for my blog?

n.b. My blog is now proudly displaying a “featured blogs” badge on the sidebar.–Sept. 9

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