Klikinsäästäjä Oy:n iPhone-sovellus on noussut app storen uutiset-osion ladatuimmaksi. Kova suoritus, onnittelut tekijöille!
Klikinsäästäjä on Ampparit meets Reddit meets Meltwater -tyypinen appsi: ilmeisesti yhdistelmä käyttäjien tekemää aihekuratointia ja käyttäjien tekemiä tiivistelmiä, joiden käyttövoimana on turhautuminen epäselviin otsikoihin. Sovellus myös pelillistää klikkiotsikoiden tuottamista, korostaen ugc:n merkitystä. Tarjolla on myös aiheiden suodatusta ja lukulista-toiminto.
Kiinnostava nähdä, mihin suuntaan tämä kehittyy. Bisnesmallia ei maaliskuussa perustetulle startupille ole vielä nähtävillä – mainokset tai mainoksettomat tilaukset lienevät mahdollisia, mutta miten ja kannattaako, vaikea sanoa.
Yritys on saanut Tekesiltä rahaa, ja sovellusta kuvataan hakemuksessa näin: “Facebook-sivun ympärille rakennetaan moderni ja käyttäjäystävällinen monikanavainen uutisvirta-applikaatio iOS- ja Android-alustoille. Applikaation keskiössä on paitsi ylivertainen käyttäjäkokemus, myös disruptiivinen vapaaehtoisuuteen perustuva mainonta-ajattelu.”
Disruptiivinen vapaaehtoisuuteen perustuva mainonta-ajattelu? En tiedä mitä se tarkoittaa. Säästä klikki, katso sen sijaan mainos?
Olennainen kysymys lienee se, ottaako nykyinen klikinsäästäjän Facebook-yhteisö tämän omakseen ja ryhtyy lukemaan suomalaista mediaa appsin kautta.
Hieman keskeneräisestä sovelluksesta ei käy ihan selväksi, miten tämän avulla luetaan uutisia nykyisiä käyttöliittymiä paremmin. Personointia ja kuratointia löytyy jo esimerkiksi Hesarin sovelluksista ja Ylen uutisvahdista. Yhteisö on läsnä Facebookissa jo ja löytyu esimerkiksi Redditistä. Meltwater ja vastaavat tarjoavat aihepiiriseurantaa.
Muuttuessaan appsiksi Klikinsäästäjä joutuu tekemään muodonmuutoksen. Hauskasta huumoriyhteisöstä pitäisi tulla toisenlainen, ehkä vähän vakavampi media. Nykyisin Facebookin uutisvirtaan ilmaista sisältöä tuottava yhteisö pitäisi saada palvelemaan itseään ja sovelluksen omistajia. Voiko Klikinsäästäjä elää Facebookin ulkopuolella?
Jos Klikinsäästäjä-yhteisö keskittyy sovelluksessakin klikkiotsikoihin, se palkitsee klikkiotsikoiden tekijät – klikeillä. Jos taas aihepiiri laajenee, yhteisön käyttövoima voi hiipua ja vastaan tulee digimedian tavallisia kysymyksiä: mistä raha, mistä sisällöt, miten esittää sisällöt.
Ison nettimedian näkökulmasta Klikinsäästäjän appsi on ennen kaikkea Amppareiden kaltainen palvelu, joka kerää otsikoita yhteen ja tuo hieman liikennettä sivustoille. Google Newsin kohta julkaistava uusi amp-versio ja Apple News pelaavat samassa liigassa. Kilpailu skenessä on kovaa.
Klikinsäästäjästä mediat voivat oppia kuitenkin yhteisöjen ja etusivujen rakentamista. Mielenkiintoisia media-alan startupeja Suomessa ei ole liikaa – klikinsäästäjä on ehdottomasti yksi niistä.
Kirjoitin kirjan, ja se on otettu vastaan myönteisesti.
“Omassa tyylilajissaan Totuuskuutio on kelpo teos. Sen visiot resonoivat hyvin nykypäivään, jota varjostavat turvallisuuspalveluiden laajamittainen nettivakoilu sekä sosiaalista mediaa pyörittävien tahojen tapa kerätä tarkkoja tietoja ihmisten yksityiselämästä”, kirjoittaa Toni Jerrman Helsingin Sanomien arviossa.
“Kirja seurailee avoimesti Ray Bradburyn Fahrenheit 451:n ja George Orwellin 1984 dystopioita, mutta kirja toimii ilman taustatuntemustakin. Lukukokemuksena romaani vaikuttaa ennemmin piilotetulta nykyjournalismin ja tietoyhteiskunnan kritiikiltä kuin ihan puhtaalta kaunokirjallisuudelt”, kirjoittaa Janne Luotola Tekniikka&Taloudessa.
Toistaiseksi kovimpaan ylistykseen on päätynyt Lukutoukan kulttuuriblogi: “Mutta kun oli virtaa ja täysi into lukea, tämä oli mahtava kokemus. Tahtoisin vain huutaa maailmalle: lukekaa tämä!”
Ylen kulttuuriohjelma Strada suhtautuu myös myönteisesti: “Esa Mäkisen romaanissa painajainen alkaa siitä, kun nettiä kontrolloiva yhtiö Celsius väärentää naisen kuoleman syyt – saatuaan maksun lääkeyhtiöltä. Romaanissa koko yhteiskunnan muistikuvat todellisuudesta alkavat olla rankasti editoituja.”
Myös muunlaisia juttuja kirjasta on tullut.
Olin vieraana Seppo Puttosen ja Nadja Novakin Aamun kirjassa.
Totuuskuutiosta oli poiminta Ylen Radio 1:n päivän mietelauseessa täällä ja täällä.
This post contains the tutorials for my workshop at Nordic Data Journalism Conference in Ã…lesund, 30-31 jan 2015. This is an update on my previous post on the subject.
All these tools are free to use and to embed to media websites. Datawrapper is bit complicated and Fusion Tables has some very good alternatives, like CartoDB.
INTERACTIVE MAP OF YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT
This exercise is to make interactive map with Google Fusion Tables. The idea is to get data on life expectancy from World Bank, merge the data with country borders and style it.
1) Go to world bank website: data.worldbank.org. Get data “Unemployment, youth male (% of male labor force ages 15-24) (national estimate)” . You have to download the excel file. (Click “Download data” on upper right hand corner and choose “Excel file”.) Direct link to data here.
2) Clean the data.
– Remove empty and unnecessary rows so that the years are in row one. (Right mouse click on row number, choose delete)
– Remove unnecessary columns: years from 1962 to 2010. Â (Do not remove country code)
– If you want, you can leave more years and calculate difference between 2011 and 2004.
– Save the file to your desktop.
3)Â Upload data to Google Fusion Tables
–Â Open Google Drive and click “New”. Select Google Fusion Tables (if you don’t have it as an option, click connect more apps in the bottom)
– Select the Excel file have saved to your desktop. Click Next.
– If column names are on the first row, your data is good. Click next.
– Give the dataset a proper name. Future you will thank you for this.
– Click Finish and the file will be uploaded.
4) Next you have to get borders for countries to make the actual map. Do the following:
– Search for “IMF / ISO country codes with KML”. Direct link here.
– Click on first hit. The file should open on Google Fusion Tables
5) Next you have to merge the World bank data with country borders. Do the following: – On the border data file you just opened, go to File menu and select Merge
– The file you just uploaded should be first in the list. If not, use search (surely you renamed the file). Choose the file. – Select “ISO 3 Letter Code” from the left and “Country Code” from the right. Check the match. – Select all to be merged.
– Click “Merge tables”, and click “View table”
6) Open the “Map of Geometry” tab. If it’s not present, add a map tab. Â (Click on the red + button).
– Zoom in to see borders instead of dots
7) To change map colors, do the following: – On left sidebar, click “Change feature styles”
– Choose Polygon Fill Color
– Go to Buckets tab. Select Divide into “2” buckets and choose 2011 as the variable.
– Click “Use this range” to select range based on data
– Click Save. A styled map will appear.
8) To style popup, do the following:
– On left sidebar, choose Change info window
– Select country name and 2010 to be only active fields
– You can style the popup more, if you know HTML. Use the Custom tab.
9) To publish the map, you must make it public. Use Share button on the upper right corner. Then use Tools/Publish to have the link.
DATAWRAPPER: GRAPH OF YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT
This excercise shows how to use Datawrapper.
1) First log on to Datawrapper.de and make an account. You have to provide a working email to verify your account.
2) With Excel, make data that contains top 10 countries with highest youth unemployment (Use the data from previous excercise). First row must contain headlines Country and Youth unemployment
3) Go to datawrapper. Click Create chart
4) Paste your data to the field. Click Upload and continue
5) Describe your data in tab 2. Put the link to the world bank data here. Click “Proceed”.
6) Select chart type. Click tab “Refine” to sort data, if necessary. Click tab “Annotate” to put headlines in place.
7) Click proceed to publish the chart. Download it for your own server or buy single license.
MAKE A TIMELINE WITH TIMELINEJS
This is tutorial for making interactive timeline with TimelineJS. You’ll need a Google account for this.
2) Go to “Make a timeline”. Click on the button that says Google Spreadsheet Template
3) When the window has opened, click “Use this template”. You will see a Google Spreadsheet document. This document contains the content of the timeline. One row is one slide.
4) Remove rows 5 to 9 from the file.
5) Enter some content for first slide.
– Go to row 2 in the spreadsheet.
– On row 2, in column “Headline”: Write a headline for the timeline. (“Battle of Britain”)
–Â To cell “Text”, write content for the cell. (“Our timeline shows events of WW2.”)
– Add image by adding valid url to “media” field. (Use:Â http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Battle_of_britain_air_observer.jpg/300px-Battle_of_britain_air_observer.jpg)
7) Repeat part 5 for rows 3 and 4. Make up some content and images from Wikipedia.
8) Click “Publish to the web” from pull down menu “File”. When a dialog opens, click “Start publishing”
9) An url will appear to the bottom of dialog window. Copy it to clipboard. The URL looks like this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet…
10) Go back to TimelineJS page. Paste the link you copied to field “Google Spreadsheet URL”
11) Click “Link to preview”. You’ll be seeing a working timeline.
12) You can add rows to Google Spreadsheet. When you reload the timeline, it should reflect the changes.
GOOGLE FORMS
This is an excercise to make small crowdsourcing project with Google Forms. Remember, that Google won’t accept very large data sets: size limit is 400 000 cells.
1) Go to Google Drive and select Create Form.
2) Enter name and select the default theme.
3) To Form Description enter the headline and some explanation. Be clear: what you are asking the users?
4) Enter the first question.
– Put the question to field “Question Title”. (“When and how did you meet your spouse?”)
– Select type of question from “Question type”. (“Use Paragraph text”)
– Click “Required question”. It forces the users to fill this field
– Click Done
5) Enter question for Email.
– Click “Add item” and select “Text”
– Enter “What is your email” to Question title
– Click “Data validation”. Select “Text” and “Email address”. This is to verify that users really enter email.
– Click Done
6) Edit the confirmation page to reflect what the user will see when he or she sends the form.
– Edit the text in “Your response has been recorded.” field.
7) Send form or embed it in your page.
– Click “Send form in the bottom”
– Copy the link and send it or share in social media
– If you want to embed the form, click embed button in the dialog. Copy the Iframe.
 INTERACTIVE IMAGES WITH THINGLINK
This is an excercise to add interactivity to image with Thinglink.
Tästä päivästä alkaen Google on ryhtynyt poistamaan joitain hakutuloksia EU-oikeuden päätöksen perusteella. Jos tuloksia on poistettu, Google ilmoittaa siitä sivun alareunassa tekstillä: “Osa tuloksista on ehkä poistettu eurooppalaisen tietosuojalain nojalla.”
Vaikka osa poistoista voi olla perusteltuja, myös talousrikolliset, pedofiilit ja poliitikot ovat pyytäneet itselleen kiusallisten tietojen poistamista. Tämä tarkoittaa sitä, että Google.fi ei enää välttämättä löydä kaikkia olennaisia tietoja netistä. Etenkin väärinkäytöksiä paljastaville tai poliitikoiden menneisyyttä kaiveleville toimittajille tämä voi olla vahingollista.
Hakutulosten poisto on mahdollista kiertää. Se tapahtuu käyttämällä Googlen kansainvälistä, Yhdysvalloista toimivaa sivua Google.com. Google ohjaa suomalaiset käyttäjät lähtökohtaisesti Google.fi –sivulle, joten Google.comiin pitää osata mennä. Se tapahtuu näin:
JOS OLET KIRJAUTUNUT GMAILIIN TAI VASTAAVIIN PALVELUIHIN Mene osoitteeseen http://www.google.com/preferences#languages ja vaihda käyttämäksesi ykköskieleksi englanti. Kakkoskieli voi olla yhä suomi. Tämän jälkeen kaikki haut tulevat automaattisesti Google.com –saitilta.
Tässä harjoituksessa yhdistetään kaksi keksittyä dataa: ravintoloiden määrä kunnissa ja huomautuksen saaneiden ravintoloiden määrä. Sitten lasketaan, missä kunnassa on eniten huomautuksen saaneita ravintoloita suhteessa ravintoloiden määrään. Aineistot ovat keksittyjä.
3) Kopioi Huomautuksen saaneiden ravintoloiden määrä -data uuteen excel-tiedostoon. Järjestä data kunnan nimen mukaan.
4) Järjestä ravintoloiden määrä -data kunnan nimen mukaan. Kopioi se kohdan kolme datan viereen.
5) Tarkista, että joka rivillä on sama kunnan nimi. Voit käyttää Excelin funktiota “”=IF(A2=C2;”OK”;”Virhe”)””
Laskeminen
6) Laske ensimmäiselle tietoriville, kuinka monta huomautuksen saanutta ravintolaa on suhteessa kaikkiin ravintoloihin. Laskukaava: =D2/B2. Kopioi sama kaava kaikille riveille.
7) Järjestä taulukko laskukaavan sisältävän sarakkeen mukaan.
HUOM: Todellisessa elämässä tekisin tämän yhdistämisen Accessilla tai Excelin Vlookup-funktiolla, mutta tässä harjoituksessa yhdistäminen on tehty mahdollisimman ymmärrettävästi.
This post contains the tutorials for my workshop at news:rewired conference in London.
MAP WITH GOOGLE FUSION TABLES
This exercise is to make interactive map with Google Fusion Tables. The idea is to get data on life expectancy from World Bank, merge the data with country borders and style it.
1) Go to world bank website: data.worldbank.org. Get data “Life expectancy at birth, total (years)” . You have to download the excel file. (Click “Download data” on upper right hand corner and choose “Excel file”.) Direct link to data here.
2) Clean the data.
– Remove empty and unnecessary rows so that the years are in row one. (Right mouse click on row number, choose delete)
– Remove unnecessary columns: years from 1962 to 2005. Â (Do not remove country code)
– If you want, calculate difference between 1962 and 20011.
– Save the file to your desktop.
3) Open Google Fusion tables here.
– Click “Create”.
– Select the Excel file have saved to your desktop. Click Next.
– If column names are on the first row, your data is good. Click next.
– Give the dataset a proper name.
– Click Finish and the file will be uploaded.
4) Next you have to get borders for countries to make the actual map. Do the following:
– Search for “IMF / ISO country codes with KML”. Direct link here.
– Click on first hit. The file should open on Google Fusion Tables
5) Next you have to merge the World bank data with country borders. Do the following: – On the border data file you just opened, Choose File / Find a table to merge with. (Merge is on the top menu on old version)
– Enter the name of the data you uploaded previously. A autocomplete will appear. Choose your file. – Select “ISO 3 Letter Code” from the left and “Country Code” from the right. Check the match.
– Give the merged table a proper name. – Click “Merge tables”, and click view table
6) Open the Map tab. If it’s not present, add a map tab. Â (Click on the red + button).
7) To change map colors, do the following: – On left sidebar, click “Change feature styles”
– Choose Polygon Fill Color
– Go to Buckets tab. Select Divide into buckets and choose 2011 as the variable.
– Click “Use this range” to select range based on data
– Click Save. A styled map will appear.
8) To style popup, do the following:
– On left sidebar, choose Change info window
– Select country name and 2010 to be only active fields
– You can style the popup more, if you know HTML. Use the Custom tab.
9) To publish the map, you must make it public. Use Share button on the upper right corner. Then use Tools/Publish to have the link.
DATAWRAPPER
This excercise shows how to use Datawrapper.
1) First log on to Datawrapper.de and make an account. You have to provide a working email to verify your account.
2) With Excel, make data that contains 10 countries and their life expectancies (Use the data from previous excercise). First row must contain headlines Country and Life Expectancy.
3) Go to datawrapper. Click Create chart
4) Paste your data to the field. Click Upload and continue
5) Describe your data in tab 2. Put the link to the world bank data here. Click Visualize.
6) Select chart type. Click tab “2 Refine the chart” to sort data, if necessary. Click tab “3 tell the story” to put headlines in place.
7) Click proceed to publish the chart and get Iframe code.
MAKE A TIMELINE WITH TIMELINEJS
This is tutorial for making interactive timeline with TimelineJS. You’ll need a Google account for this.
2) Go to “Make a timeline”. Click on the button that says Google Spreadsheet Template
3) When the window has opened, click “Use this template”. You will see a Google Spreadsheet document. This document contains the content of the timeline. One row is one slide.
4) Remove rows 5 to 9 from the file.
5) Enter some content for first slide.
– Go to row 2 in the spreadsheet.
– On row 2, in column “Headline”: Write a headline for the timeline. (“Battle of Britain”)
–Â To cell “Text”, write content for the cell. (“Our timeline shows events of WW2.”)
– Add image by adding valid url to “media” field. (Use:Â http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Battle_of_britain_air_observer.jpg/300px-Battle_of_britain_air_observer.jpg)
7) Repeat part 5 for rows 3 and 4. Make up some content and images from Wikipedia.
8) Click “Publish to the web” from pull down menu “File”. When a dialog opens, click “Start publishing”
9) An url will appear to the bottom of dialog window. Copy it to clipboard. The URL looks like this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet…
10) Go back to TimelineJS page. Paste the link you copied to field “Google Spreadsheet URL”
11) Click “Link to preview”. You’ll be seeing a working timeline.
12) You can add rows to Google Spreadsheet. When you reload the timeline, it should reflect the changes.
GOOGLE FORMS
This is an excercise to make small crowdsourcing project with Google Forms. Remember, that Google won’t accept very large data sets: size limit is 400 000 cells.
1) Go to Google Drive and select Create Form.
2) Enter name and select the default theme.
3) To Form Description enter the headline and some explanation. Be clear: what you are asking the users?
4) Enter the first question.
– Put the question to field “Question Title”. (“When and how did you meet your spouse?”)
– Select type of question from “Question type”. (“Use Paragraph text”)
– Click “Required question”. It forces the users to fill this field
– Click Done
5) Enter question for Email.
– Click “Add item” and select “Text”
– Enter “What is your email” to Question title
– Click “Data validation”. Select “Text” and “Email address”. This is to verify that users really enter email.
– Click Done
6) Edit the confirmation page to reflect what the user will see when he or she sends the form.
– Edit the text in “Your response has been recorded.” field.
7) Send form or embed it in your page.
– Click “Send form in the bottom”
– Copy the link and send it or share in social media
– If you want to embed the form, click embed button in the dialog. Copy the Iframe.
 INTERACTIVE IMAGES WITH THINGLINK
This is an excercise to add interactivity to image with Thinglink.
This was my first impression when I looked at the program of Nordic Data Journalism Conference held at Stockholm, Sweden.
I´m attending the conference as invited speaker. I have a slot of 30 mins to tell about best practises in Helsingin Sanomat data desk, which I run.
After that, I´ll have plenty of time to listen to others. In the program, there are topics like “what is a data desk” and “using excel”.
These are good things to learn for beginners. But for once, I´d like to discuss real everyday problems about my work with seasoned colleagues in the same field. (And like in every conference, that happens also here in evening sessions.)
If I would organize a professional data journalism conference, there would be presentations on these topics:
IN APP-ANALYTICS
One of my main concerns is: do our news apps work?
We know, that the headline determines the click rate and people spend more time in articles with news apps. What we don´t know is: Do our readers click and use our apps?
We just made our first trial to record user behavior few weeks ago. We basically attached a logging event to every possible click in one of our news apps.
People did click it, 96% of all entries to article page clicked on the app. So result was good. But there were problems with the logging, so this high result cannot be trusted.
From a presentation, I´d like to hear: How to measure in-app clicks? What is a good conversion percentage?
ARE SNOW FALLS A FAD?
“Avalance it!”
This is the new hip slogan in digital newsrooms. After NYT published the avalanche piece Snow Fall, our bosses have been demanding us to do the same.
They look great. South China Sea piece, Tomato Can Blues and also the things we´ve made are visually impressive.
But the real issue is: have you actually read the whole Snow Fall?
For readers, are they better than text? Do Snow Falls work? Do we make these things just to get the WOW! -effect, not to tell the stories best way possible. Perhaps text and images would still be a better way, just like Medium does it.
My hypothesis is, that they are just thought to be nice, but in the long run our readers don´t like them more than regular well-written articles.
ETHICS OF DATA JOURNALISM
In the wake of Snowden revelations of NSA spying on everyone, the tools of data journalists need closer scrutiny.
By combining data bases we have a strong tool to get info even on individual people. As an emerging profession, we have not thought what lies in the end of this road.
All that is public and open data cannot be published, if we are to remain ethical in our work. This applies to names of real people, but also information gathering and crowdsourcing.
For example: is it ok for a (digital) newspaper to publish a database of 160000 richest people in Finland and their income since 1999? I think it is, but there could be good arguments against this.
MOBILE FRIENDLY NEWS APPS
As mobile penetration nears half of all users, we need to focus on making news apps mobile friendly. Actually, this has been so for the last two years.
It´s not easy. We have to make things work with IE8 (thanks a lot Jquery 2.0 and D3) and at the same time have things work in mobile.
Our solution is to make everything responsive between 298 and 560 pixels (our text area min and max width). We do the app in 560 and then scale it.
So, how to cope with small screens?
DATA IS GOOD, IDEAS ARE BETTER
Open data folks are obsessed with getting the data. It has been an important issue for many years and the opening of data in Finland is not yet complete.
But at the same time, we should look forward. Analyzing the data is quite primitive still almong journalists.
Where could we get better ideas from?
PUBLISHING YOUR STUFF
To Iframe or not to Iframe? That it the question everybody must answer and both replies come with a price.
We have opted for using Iframes. It gives us speed and flexibility, but the price is that we have no control of the whole (parent location href parameters, anyone?).
How should we publish our things? Are there tools to make Iframes better?
ORGANIZING THE WORKFLOW
We use Trello to organize our projects. We have a development and production servers to test and deploy our stuff. We are starting to use Git as version control tool.
I´d like to know what kind of advanced tools and workflows are used in day to day business in datadesks worldwide.
Klikinsäästäjä Oy:n iPhone-sovellus on noussut app storen uutiset-osion ladatuimmaksi. Kova suoritus, onnittelut tekijöille!