On Feb. 8, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian launched a special News in Photos mini-site that goes beyond what most news organizations’ online photo galleries provide. In particular, it offers features more commonly found on social media sites.
Tidbits contributor and M&G staffer Vincent Maher helped design and build this site. He gave me some information about how it works behind the scenes.
Here two of the site’s most intriguing features, in my opinion:
- Visual “swarm.” Maher explained that this is “a real-time activity visualization tool that shows which photos or galleries users are currently looking at, and the users swarming around them.”
- Widget syndication. The site offers a widget — a snippet of code that syndicates photos from the site onto blogs. (See picture above.) News in Photos does include pictures from third-party services such as Agence France-Presse, which would be averse to secondary publishing. Maher says M&G addressed that by “Syndicating tiny thumbnails… [Also,] we can control which images go out to the widget, so changing that on a per-supplier basis is not a problem.”
I also like the general strategy behind this site. Maher notes that it’s mainly about getting more mileage out of M&G’s existing photo content. “The key difference lies in the value of archiving photos and in their presentation in a new format,” he said.
What do you think of News in Photos? Please comment below.
