Category Archives: Newspapers

Newspapers, Libraries, SEO … and Chocolate

Posted on by

In an article on the most popular online stories of 2010 in the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, Whitney Mathews discusses writing headlines with “‘Google juice'” to attract traffic — In other words, using the principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — Mathews talks especially about a syndicated AP story in April for which they made the headline “iPad vs. Kindle” — With this short, pithy headline, the article has consistently been in the top ten hits in Google searches ever since (which I confirmed several times in the last few days), and of course has brought a lot of traffic.

I’ve been aware of the importance of choosing language carefully to bring search engine traffic since the early days of Hardin MD, before SEO became big business, and I’ve been surprised that libraries have been so slow to put it to use. Recently I’ve been paying attention to publishing and journalism because I see that people in those fields are thinking about many of the same digital-future questions as librarians. So I was glad to find, in the Lawrence story, that journalists ARE thinking about crafting their stories to be found by Google. A bit of googling (searching for SEO newspapers site:edu) showed that Lawrence is not alone — There’s a lot on SEO and newspapers.

How about libraries? …

Comparing journalism to librarianship, searching for SEO libraries site:edu finds very little — Actually, I’ve been doing this search periodically for several months, and have never found anything in the top ten, until today I did find one piece, a Word document from Binghamton University Libraries (YAY!) on using SEO for their web pages.

In the dotcom part of the online world, SEO is a given — Why have libraries not used it more? I’ll be writing more about this in the next few weeks, so keep watching.

What’s Chocolate got to do with the story? …

It just happened that this week, as I was reading about SEO in Lawrence, I was also following a NY Times story with the catchy title Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate. This was a lengthy article about an innovative Phoenix nursing home, with only incidental mention of chocolate, but the smart headline writer with some SEO-savvy used the word to get attention — The story was in the top ten most emailed NYT stories all week, and I suspect the chocolate hook had a lot to do with that.

And finally, with my mind on chocolate and libraries, I found this cute little article that was my most popular tweet of the week, no doubt showing the (SEO) power of chocolate! …

ericrumseytemp: How about a Library with Chocolate instead of Books? NY Educ Dept says NO! http://nyti.ms/fJoGlI

Thanks to my son Brian Rumsey, who lives in Lawrence, and brought my attention to the Journal-World story.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumseytemp

Double-Tapping on iPhone to Optimize Web Pages

Posted on by

Here’s a quick on-the-fly way to optimize Safari web browser pages that are not created with mobile optimization in mind — A quick “tap-tap” with a finger on a column of text (often the middle of three columns) will zoom the text in that column to fit the iPhone screen. This is especially useful on news and blog sites, as in the first example below. In the library realm, it works nicely on LibGuides pages, in the second example. It works in landscape as well as portrait view, and with pictures, as shown in the third example (Hardin MD) below.

The first example is from the Chicago Sun-Times:

The Dermatology LibGuide page from Hardin Library, University of Iowa:

A page from the Hardin MD Gallery, showing the utility of double-tapping for pictures. Note that the size of the picture decreases to fit on the screen, instead of expanding, as in the text columns in the previous examples.

A good 1-min video demo of double-tapping at Todd Ogasawara’s MobileViews blog is here.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumseytemp

Curating Mobile News: An Opportunity for Librarians

Posted on by

Sarah Houghton-Jan reports in an article a few days ago that a new PEW report shows the growing tendency of people to get news from the Web. She suggests that librarians should jump on this, and offer our skills in filtering, teaching finding-skills, and creating tutorials. I like Sarah’s idea, and take it a step further — As Sarah mentions, one of the findings of the PEW report is that mobile devices are providing a growing portion of online news, so I suggest that an area of news curation that especially needs librarians’ skills is mobile news — I’ve been watching for news sources that have mobile apps or mobile-friendly sites, and I find that they vary a lot in coverage and quality — They’re in great need of the curatorial skills of librarians!

Sites that I like (with screenshots below) are: New York Times,  AP-News, The Guardian, The (London) Times, and Reuters. I especially look for good pictures. The best of the sites listed here for pictures is AP-News — Note that the bottom left screenshot below is a report of the recent earthquake in Chile, with an AP-News gallery.

For news-related pictures, I’ve found that the best sites are not traditional news sites, like the ones listed here, but other, blog-like sites — As I discussed in an earlier article on Haiti earthquake coverage, great pictures for that (and for the Chile earthquake as well as other news subjects) are at The Big Picture/Boston.com and the Hyderabad News WordPress site.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumseytemp

The Future, it’s in the Metadata

Posted on by

Spurred on by positive reaction to my recent article on metadata, I did more digging in Twitter, and came across this interesting tweet from Christian Science Monitor librarian Leigh Montgomery (@CSMLibrary):

#Journalism future? ‘It’s in the data.’ #Metadata, that is – makes the #news last, rather than a perishable commodity http://tr.im/lmetadata
9:52 PM Jul 22nd from web

Montgomery brings an interesting perspective, with feet in the world of librarianship, where metadata has been a focus for a long time, and in journalism, which has only more recently begun to awaken to the value of metadata. Montgomery’s tweet links to a blog article (The Future, it’s in the Data) by journalist Carrie Brown-Smith (@Brizzyc), who interviewed Montgomery. Here’s an excerpt …

(quoting Montgomery) Librarians are precisely who have been leading in adding value and context to information … In all the ink and pixels spilled over the future of journalism I have not heard one mention of this … Information is valuable, and it needs structure, ­ keywording, and taxonomy added so it can be accessed, and repurposed.  All this is then repackaged and sold …

Brown-Smith also reports on a recent provocative article by journalist Dan Conover (@xarker) about the importance of adding data to news stories which could provide “a rich trove that could be mined to discover new connections and relationships.” (quote from Brown-Smith)

Conover’s article is a long and chatty discussion of metadata in journalism, and why news reporters resist adding it. He tells an interesting story of reporting on a house fire with and without metadata, and how coding can increase the future value of the work of reporting. He says that “the structure of [metadata] information is [now] the news organization’s primary product.” Unfortunately, though, he says, journalists hate the idea of adding this structured metadata — Why? …

Metadata coding is viewed as a library (or, in newsroom jargon, “morgue”) function … Journalism is a profession for storytellers, and our newsroom culture celebrates romantic myths that are generally hostile to structure. So I understand my curmudgeonly colleagues when they scoff behind my back at the word “metadata.”

I suspect that journalism is not the only profession that “celebrates romantic myths that are hostile to structure” 😉 … In journalism, as in publishing and libraries, discussed in my previous article, we’ve come to the interesting point when it’s the computer-library-coding geeks who will be, in Mike Cane’s words “the new publishers for a new age” … the ones who “make information do things.”

Eric Rumsey is @ericrumseytemp

Google: Pictures, pictures, everywhere!

Posted on by

Adam Hodgkin, in Google Pictures and Google Books, wonders why Google has chosen to put Prado paintings in Google Earth rather than in Google Images. In December I asked a similar question about Google’s putting Life Magazine pictures in Google Images, but putting other picture-laden magazines in Google Books. And, in another recent launch they’ve put newspapers, which also have many pictures, in Google News.

Once again I come back to the theme of this blog — Pictures are just different — They don’t fit neatly into our categories. Pictures are an important part of several different media — books, magazines, newspapers, and (of course) art — So what slot do we put them in?

Even before the recent questions arose with Life Magazine pictures, Google Magazines, Google Newspapers, and Prado paintings, there’s the ongoing, but little-noted question of pictures in the growing collection of public domain books in Google Books. In my experience, these are completely absent from Google Image Search — When will Google make this connection?

Figuring out what category to put them into, of course, is a relatively minor problem compared to the BIG PROBLEM with pictures, which is making them searchable! If there was one category to put them into that was searchable, then of course that would be the place for Google to put them!

Google Maps, zKimmer, & Google Books

Posted on by

Maps and newspapers, because they’re rich in graphic information, benefit greatly from a zooming and panning interface. Text-only books, because they’re more linear and because text is easily searchable, don’t benefit from this sort of interface as much, but books with pictures certainly do.

zKimmer.com has recently implemented Google Maps technology for viewing non-map text and picture resources, such as magazines and newspapers, which are converted from PDF format. This is an exciting development especially because it holds promise that the same sort of technology could also be used for books.

With Google’s great success using a zooming-panning interface in Google Maps, and having recently launched Google Newspapers which also uses it, the question naturally occurs — Will Google developers sooner or later also use it for Google Books?

The zKimmer screen-shots above are from a magazine (though they could easily be from a book) and those below are from a newspaper. They both show how this interface facilitates navigating a resource that includes extensive pictures as well as text.

zKimmer lacks a good search capability (it has a search box, but it doesn’t seem to work) — So it’s not ready for heavy-duty enterprise use — It’s exciting, though, because it shows the potential value of a zooming-panning interface for books. Google Books already uses panning and zooming in a limited way, for navigating between pages, but a multi-page pan and zoom, as in zKimmer, would greatly simplify picture and text navigation.

Other implementations of the Google Maps API for non-map graphic resources are a desktop collection of elegant books by the reclusive German techno-artist Markus Dressen, and a card set from the World Of Warcraft.

Panning around in Google Newspapers

Posted on by

Google recently announced the launch of Google Newspapers. The first issue (and apparently the only one up currently) is the 1969 We’re on the moon edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

What caught my attention here is the ability to pan — to move around on the large newspaper page with the mouse by dragging the hand pointer. Use of mouse panning was introduced with Google Maps, and likely played a large part in its becoming so popular. Like a map, a newspaper page poses the same kind of challenge — How to design user navigation for information covering a large surface. As with Google Maps, here also it looks like Google Newspapers has set the standard for navigation of a large-paged information source, especially one with pictures.

Panning (and zooming, which is often discussed together with it) provide an interesting and challenging concept to search, because the words are in prominent use in other contexts, especially photography and video. Surprisingly, there’s no article in Wikipedia for the concept of panning as used for computer information navigation.

An elegant demonstration of panning is at the Hubble pan and zoom gallery.

Google: “pan around” google newspapers