As news breaks there are millions of people tweeting about it, updating their Facebook statuses, but it’s hard to make sense of the huge river of information.

Both Storify and Storyful allow to to pick tweets, blogs, websites, as well as Flickr photos and YouTube videos, and put them all together into one place.

Each presents you with a dashboard, into which you drag and drop whichever tweets/photos/links take your fancy. It’s a good way of adding some extra social info to an article. It was heavily used last summer during the UK riots. Today the singer Whitney Houston has died, and there are dozens of curated stories on both Storify and Storyful. I’ve done a couple of very quick examples on the Liverpool FC striker Luis Suarez, who has just (finally) apologised for his racist remarks against Manchester United’s Patrice Evra.

Once you have ‘written’ your story (or, rather, copied lots of other people’s stuff) and published it, you can grab an embed code and stick it on your own website. WordPress.com won’t allow you to embed it into a post, but you can send it directly as a new post from Storify instead. Instructions here for that. I’ve sent the Luis Suarez Storify to my Posterous account for the purposes of testing.

With Storyful you need a pro account to do this, it seems. Boo, hiss.

Otherwise, there’s not much to choose between the two. Storyful offers you a display of people on Twitter that you follow, which is useful and seems obvious – wonder why Storify doesn’t. But then again Storify sends straight to WordPress, Tumblr and Posterous, which is the killer feature.

See also: Ifttt – at last, something useful on the internet

Blogging - any old way

Right, er. So I had planned to review my blog (third of fourth blog I’ve created recently – promise to stick with this one) after three months, to take stock and see where I’m ‘at’, as they say. Which should have happened on 19 January but completely slipped me by.

As such, I’m going to bypass the main event and go straight to the highlights. What’s worked, and what hasn’t? In a simple, easy-to-follow, and more importantly easy-to-write, ahem, list of three.

1. WordPress is by far the best publishing tool for blogs. By far. In the three months I have dabbled with Tumblr (too transient and Twittery); Posterous (too quiet); Squarespace (too expensive and a bit dull) and Blogger (way too dull) until I finally settled on WordPress. It has easily the best choice of ‘themes’ and easy to manipulate CSS, really intuitive CMS and loads of ways to manipulate, bend and stretch your site as you want it. Which, to be honest, has to be a given. Any publishing tool that won’t let you publish something exactly how you want it? Nah.

2. Think mobile. Another star for goody two-shoes WordPress is how their sites look great on mobile and iPad. The mobile view is nothing fancy, but simple and adequate. And their’s the nice ‘swipe’ theme for iPad users. Squarespace, on the other hand, doesn’t have mobile versions. At all.

3. The most powerful social referral of traffic is Facebook. I get some from Twitter, Pinterest, and of course Google, but these are all teeny tiny balls of fluffy kittens cowering next to the mighty Zuckerberg army of killer giants. Scary, worrying, but you just can’t not use Facebook to get your stuff ‘out there’.

Which apart from anything may show that: 1. I can’t make my mind up; 2. Mobile is the future; 3. Social is more important than search.

See also: Best blogging platforms – which to pick from

Photo by ToastyTreat87 on Flickr under Creative Commons

News:Rewired held in London on 3rd February 2012

A few days ago I went along to the excellent News:Rewired annual conference in London. It was a gathering of journalists, photographers, CEOs, entrepeneurs, bloggers, other content creators looking at the latest tools of the trade.

I decided straight away not to liveblog the event – there was already teams of others doing that – or to even tweet frantically (leave it to the youngsters, eh?), so giving myself the chance to listen a little closer to what was being said.

Now, a few days on, I can crack my knuckles and, settled in next to a log fire, get down to a bit o’ bloggage.

Much has already been written, and rightly so because a lot of ground was covered. Many good write-ups here. A lot of the day was split into different sessions, so nobody could attend all and soak everything up. For me one of the most interesting aspects was the amount of time given to social media:

The keynote address was by Liz Heron, the New York Times’ social media editor. There was also a session in social media optimization; another session in ‘searching social media for news’; and a final debate on ‘setting social media standards’.

This is not surprising, given the rush to embrace Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and soon Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr and Instagram. Liz Heron talked of social media skills being a natural part of the journalist’s repertoire. We would all agree.

But during a session on exploring paid-content models, some interesting stats about social media use by news websites emerged, which stuck with me.

Francois Nel, an academic, gave an interesting talk comparing the digital strategies of The Guardian and the Daily Mail [disclaimer, the company I work for, Northcliffe Digital, is owned by DMGT, which also owns the Daily Mail and the Mail Online. But it was his research anyway, not mine].

Mr Nel compared the newspapers’ two print products, their two websites’ growth, their iPad apps, and their social media strategies.

He argued that at the same time as Mail Online has become the world’s largest news website with a 60 per cent year-on-year growth, it has managed to steady the decline in print circulation of the Daily Mail. It has an iPad app which promises users their ‘favourite website’ in an app. It does have a Facebook page with just over 17,000 ‘likes’, and a Twitter account with 55,000 followers. DMGT is doing very nicely, financially speaking, Mr Nel told News:Rewired.

Then he turned to The Guardian, saying how the print edition had fallen by 14 per cent year-on-year, and the website had seen smaller growth than the Mail Online. It too has an iPad app, which promises ‘today’s paper, beautifully delivered’ (note, not the website, but the paper).

Where The Guardian does get bigger numbers is in social media – 300,000-plus Twitter followers (and that’s just one of many Twitter accounts it uses) and with more than 285,000 Facebook fans.

Mr Nel made two very interesting conclusions. First, he said The Guardian was wrong to use digital channels (web and iPad app) as a substitute for print – that is, giving people the same content in both formats. The Mail Online, he argues, gets it right by separating print from digital, and offering a wholly different product. That’s very interesting to any journalist who will have heard the phrase “newsroom convergence” repeated a few hundred times or so over the past five years.

Secondly, he argued that consumers needed to think about ‘reciprocation’ – by which I think he meant that Guardian readers (and one would guess that there were many at News:Rewired) should be thinking more about what they were consuming for free, and start choosing to pay for it. (I may have not interpreted the finer points he was making there).

But for me, there was a third question, surrounding the use of social media. The figures clearly show that The Guardian has far more reach on social media than the Mail Online. Indeed they have even made a Facebook app so users don’t even have to go to the Guardian website. (More on how that works, beautifully explained by The Guardian’s Martin Belam, here] More social reach, but struggling as a business. So, what’s the point of getting the most Facebook likes and Twitter followers?

Of course social media serves a purpose to journalists, bloggers, businesses, organisations, just about anyone. You can bet I will be tweeting and sharing this post. But I do wonder if the rush to embrace it may not one day be a Second Big Mistake made by the news media.

We did it once – when we put all our content online for free. Now it’s too late to turn back the clock. With Web 2.0 we’re not just making content free, but we’re putting it on other platforms.

Where’s the pot of gold going to come from?

See also: NUJ pay claim down from 30% to 3% – how times have changed

Nexus S Android phone

Android mobile telephones are made by different manufacturers but all use the same ‘Android’ operating system, built by Google.

It is said to be an ‘open source’ OS because Google allows programmers, companies, individuals to take the basics of the code and add their own layers, twists and user interface. It is also thought of as being ‘open’ because there is a vast range of mobile phones running Android, unlike Apple’s iOS, which can only run on iPhones and is not licensed to other hardware makers.

It is a bit like the desktop computer war of the 1990s between Mac and PC; Apple’s Mackintosh was for Mac only (albeit it was briefly licensed to 3^rd parties during a spell when Steve Jobs wasn’t running the company) while Microsoft’s Windows was licensed to every computer manufacturer.

Google has its own version of the App Store. It’s called the Android Market and most apps are available there. Google’s vetting isn’t quite as tough as Apple, so there some more obscure apps to try out, but also more danger of apps with viruses.

The openness of Android means it has quickly become the world’s biggest mobile OS (200 million devices worldwide as of November 2011). It scores some points due to the fact that devices with Android are usually cheaper than iPhones, and does well in the bonus round by virtue of the fact that Android phones come in all shapes and sizes. Want small? Check. Massive like a tablet? Check.

However, there are some downsides of Android’s open sourceness, and companies’ ability to control the experience of the phones.

They are:

1. There are many phones for sale in the UK which are running old operating systems several years old because the manufacturer of the handset won’t support an upgrade. That means the phone won’t be able to perform the latest technological tricks. This will mean you may find yourself in an awkward social situation such as your neighbour using facial recognition to transform their phone into a hover board, while yours won’t even support predictive texting.
2. Phones have layers of what has become known as ‘bloatware’, the handset makers’ own user interface built on top of Android, which is usually ugly, pointless to the user, full of ads, and makes the phone sluggish.
3. Phone-makers build their own market place, and fill the phone with their apps which aren’t as good as Android apps. You have to repeatedly ignore these obstructive flashy signals and find the hidden paths to the real app store, the real music player, the real email tool, for example.

As with any purchase of a mobile telephone, your first consideration will be which carrier to choose from – you will of course need to make sure you can get a signal at home, work and play, regardless of what other tricks your new phone can perform.

Then it’s quality and price. There are lots of great Android phones for sale, made by many different companies. The usual pros and cons come into play: cost of handset, monthly bill, battery performance, size and weight, etc.

Finally, when you see a phone you like, you should find out what Android operating system it is running.

When Google first launched Android, it iterated really quickly, bringing out new versions of its OS every few months. The most up to date version is OS 4.0 – also known as Ice Cream Sandwich (yes, Google likes to give dessert nicknames, in alphabetical order, to its OS versions).

In chronological order, not including the minor updates in between the earlier OS updates:

• 1.0 No nickname – September 2008
• 1.5 Cupcake – April 2009
• 1.6 Doughnut – September 2009
• 2.0 Eclair – October 2009
• 2.2 Froyo – May 2010
• 2.3 Gingerbread – December 2010
• 3.0 Honeycombe – February 2011 (for tablets only)
• 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich – October 2011
• 4.0.2 Ice Cream Sandwich – November 2011. Bugs fix, ships with Galaxy Nexus which goes on sale in UK
• 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich – December 2011. Graphics and social sharing enhancements.

Check with the salesman and make sure you get a phone with a recent OS, as there are still many Android phones being sold in UK High Street shops with Froyo – that’s already several years old. If you sign a contract for a phone with Froyo, you’re stuck with for another two years unless the handset maker decides to upgrade it, and there is no guarantee of that.

There are now dozens of mobile phones on sale. Handsets of all sizes, and prices, with all the mobile carriers. Your absolute best bet, however, is to get a Nexus model.

The best Android mobile telephones available in the UK – and indeed internationally – is the Nexus range. It began with the Nexus One which came out in January 2010, the Nexus S which appeared in the shops in December 2010, and the current latest which is called Galaxy Nexus.

Nexus phones have come to be called the ‘pure’ Android phones. That is because Google stipulates (and it only does this with the Nexus range) that the phone cannot contain any bloatware, must have the latest version of Android, and ensures that OS updates are pushed through.

These top of the range phones have been made by HTC and Samsung, but sport the word ‘Google’ on the back.

The Nexus One (made by HTC) has been discontinued – so currently the choice is between Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S (both made by Samsung). The Galaxy Nexus comes with Ice Cream Sandwich installed, and the S is expected to get the upgrade any day now. Both phones are slick, have fast browsers, and decent cameras. The technical specs of the Galaxy Nexus are slightly superior to the S, but either one of these handsets is a great buy.

See also: Apple iPhone price guide for UK customers

Rawporter iPhone app screengrab

With a camera phone in every pocket, we’re all potentially ‘citizen journalists’ on hand to film and snap interesting stuff as it happens – fires, brawls, dancing cats. Right?

Right. And the best (or worst) of it finds its way to YouTube or Flickr where it can be looked at by millions, copied and distributed to millions more. And most of the time, the ‘citizen journalist’ won’t see a penny.

A new app called Rawporter aims to change that. Currently available to download to iPhones from Apple’s app store (but we’re told coming soon to the Android market place) it provides the newsman in all of us with a way to shoot stills and video and get paid.

Rawporter allows users to upload raw stills and video (no editing, now) to their account, which is linked to a personal Paypal account. The footage is made available for anyone (i.e. mainstream media) to buy.

The company keeps 60% keeps 40% [apologies for error - thanks to Rawporter for pointing it out in the comments]  of whatever it makes from selling your video (it says to invest “in new technology” – are they ashamed of wanting to make a profit?).

I know a lot of hacks, many of them wielding iPhones – never heard any of them talk about this app yet. There’s no rocket science involved: take out phone, open Rawporter app, film video, upload, done. There are sharing options from your mobile, or from the Rawporter website.

In the spirit of, er, being bored at home on a freezing cold school night, I tested the app on my three cats. They were all even more bored than I.

So this test video won’t exactly make a million or win any journalism prizes (but it is for sale at a bargain $8.69) but this app does have a lot of potential.

See also: The Glif – iPhone stand and tripod connector