E-Media Tidbits

hypernarrative.com The "newsriver" navigation for www.en.nl shows the hourly ebb and flow of news.

"I think you might like the experiment we are doing," he wrote. And bloody hell was he right.

The first thing that strikes me about the site is the bar chart across the top of the page, replacing the traditional banner. This is a "newsriver" -- a navigational device based on the premise that there's a continuous flow of news (on bar for each of the past 24 hours). Down the right column is a list of articles from the past hour. When you mouse over individual bars in the newsriver, the list of stories displayed in the right column changes.

That's news culture shift number 1.

Culture shift number 2 is the list of inbound links to each article -- something built into the very fabric of blogs (pingback) but so far either anathema to mainstream publishers ("send our readers elsewhere?"), or difficult with existing content management systems. But with this simple move, the site demonstrates that it's part of the conversation.

RELATED RESOURCES

Read more E-Media Tidbits. Get E-Media Tidbits as an RSS feed: * Copy this link and add it to your feed reader Subscribe to receive E-Media Tidbits by e-mail: * Sent Monday-Friday, 5 p.m.

At the bottom of the page are recent images, social bookmark sites, most commented articles from the past 24 hours, most important, and most viewed.

The "most important" list is also worth a look. I asked: How do they decide which stories are "most important?"

Baan explained, "We are using around 10 variables to decide what's important news. The variables we're using right now are pageviews, visits from external sites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (four options) and the press agency urgency variable (three options: normal, high, very high). By showing 'most important' next to 'most viewed' we can easily see how it works and adjust the settings to make it better. It's not perfect yet, but it already works remarkably well.

"We could extend this even further (tags, edits, tag removals) or skip some. All the variables are connected to points, we can set a default amount of points to a variable and define or redefine the value for the site.

"We also made a tag sniffer that scans the text on certain names and auto-tags the article."

Next, Baan plans to build a community that can help improve this site with ideas or criticism. The newspaper is already talking with readers via a NING social network, where users can contribute new ideas and discuss the site (in Dutch). But clearly that is just the start.

Said Baan, "For example, we could connect a popular social network to the site and use what your network reads to alter the presentation of the news. Or make section pages, or a front page."

All this is possible because of a Holovaty-esque focus on the power of databases.

"The most important object is the database," Baan recently wrote on his blog. "We designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization."

This means they can do "almost everything. We can make mashups, feeds, and aggregated pages. We can hook into social networks, extend wiki functionality, and more. Technically, everything is possible."

Keep an eye on this one.