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Boston Globe announces Knight/Mozilla fellow

By Jeff Moriarty, VP of Product

The Globe is pleased to that through its partnership with the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, we will have a developer joining our team next year to help build out future projects at Boston.com and Bostonglobe.com.

Dan Schultz is currently a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the Information Ecology group. At the Lab, he is also a Research Associate at the Center for Civic Media and says he has learned how to make almost anything. Before coming to MIT Dan received a B.S. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about “Connecting People, Content, and Community.”

Here's a photo of all five new fellows being announced today in London.

We're excited to see what innovations Dan will build with us.

#innovation #knight-mozilla #jeff moriarty

Building the new BostonGlobe.com

As we began to design and architect the new BostonGlobe.com site in fall of last year, we knew that we had a unique challenge and opportunity – to design and build a news site from scratch in 2011 with all the technologies available today.

We set out to understand what readers wanted most from a new experience, with a process based on research, focus groups and user testing.

What they told us has guided us to create what we believe is a highly usable, readable and journalistically-focused experience.

I had recently arrived in August from a year-long assignment in the New York Times Company as SVP for product management at About.com, a site with almost a billion page views a month, largely driven by searches on Google. It was our job to optimize the product for each and every visitor coming over from Google.

As a user of multiple devices – laptops, iphone, iPad and any others I could get my hands on – I became obsessed with the idea of automatically delivering the perfect layout for each user based on the device they were using at the time.

As I arrived at The Boston Globe in August, we all became intrigued by really pushing the envelope with this concept.

Then we met Todd Parker and Patty Toland at The Filament Group in Boston, whose team had popularized the concept of Progressive Enhancement (and written the book on it). They also worked closely with Ethan Marcotte, who had written a ground-breaking article in May 2010 that pushed thinking forward around the idea of Responsive Design. (And later wrote the book on that.)

They also had Scott Jehl on their team, who worked extensively on the jQuery and jQuery mobile frameworks used across the Web.

The concept of Responsive Design spoke to us and our strategy of building a newspaper of the future that was truly built for our belief in a mobile future, where more people would be accessing us from a mobile or tablet device than from a traditional desktop.

We also have always found mobile sites, which group devices together and display a “mobile” version of the site, to be inferior and hard-to-manage. Sometimes they look good on your device, sometimes barely passable.

We wanted “one codebase to rule them all”: to allow our editors and producers to build the site once and have the site adapt itself based on what device you had at that moment. We knew that more and more devices would come on the market, and we wanted a site that would take that into account without our having to design for specific brands.

We found an all-star team of designers at Upstatement, who had already been converts to responsive design philosophies and were the perfect partner to execute the design concept and make the Boston Globe.com work visually on all screen sizes. They did the detailed and deep thinking in order to design for 6 different resolutions:

1200 px wide - For example, high res desktop browser

960 px wide - For example, regular res desktop browser

768 px wide - For example, horizontal iPad layout

600 px wide - For example, vertical iPad layout

480 px wide - For example, horizontal iPhone layout

320 px wide - For example, vertical iPhone layout

Through javascript and other methods, the site detects your screen size and the features that you have available, such as a touchscreen and local storage capabilities.

The site then delivers the most appropriate layout and fetches images at a resolution that makes sense. If you're on a phone, only a small image file is loaded; page components like the section header and navigation morph to leave more room for content; and clickable areas get larger given that you are using your finger instead of a mouse.

We believe that the options this will give us in the future will be limitless – knowing you are on a small screen, perhaps there are different types of content that we should highlight at the top of the page? As mobile advertising continues to grow up, different ads can be targeted to different screen sizes, placed in the optimal position for readability and response rate.

With this smart design, we realized that we were taking full advantage of the most popular app on any device – the Web browser.

So we also built offline reading capabilities into our My Saved feature, which allows users to tag stories to be saved for later reading or just to be able to have for quick access. I like to think of My Saved as a sort of playlist for my content, allowing me to queue it up for reading later, in a quick stream.

Our development team also built My Saved to work across devices, so that you can save stories on a desktop and then open the My Saved app on a phone or tablet. The stories in your queue automatically synchronize to that device, downloading to local storage for offline reading.Our engineering team decided to leverage the high-performance programming language of Erlang and an Mnesia database to handle the volume of calls. Erlang has seen a resurgence since Facebook used it to help power its high-volume chat feature.

With all these capabilities, we saw that we were building a Web app and saw opportunities for building a set of native applications as a lower priority. We still intend to launch native apps and are thinking through the capabilities that a native app would provide that would allow us to create something very targeted at the needs of an app user that does something very different.

We consider this just the beginning of the life of BostonGlobe.com and are already planning to add features over the coming months that will continue to build on our goals of creating a site that does the tremendous journalism of The Boston Globe real justice.

Jeff Moriarty VP, Digital Products The Boston Globe @jeffmoriarty about.me/jeffmoriarty

#boston globe #boston #journalism #tech #jeff moriarty

Winners of #bostonhack

By Jeff Moriarty, VP of Digital Products

The winners of the first Boston Hack Day Challenge are KnowEssentials and Boston Green, which demonstrate the wide variety of hacks created in a mere 48 hours. The first is an SMS message system to connect people without smartphones to food, shelter, and health resources in the community; the other is a website to show people the green spaces near them and activities going on there.

Winner of the Best Mobile App (as well as the crowd favorite) is Drunken Stumble, a mobile app to help you plan a pub crawl (including walking directions and taxi numbers at the end). Winner of most-Boston-centric hack is CanHazParking, a website to tell you whether you can park or not where you are. Best use of Geo-location went to Accessible Places, a crowdsourced app to let you find out, as the name implies, what locations around town are accessible. Best News hack went to Big News Boston, a visualization of what news from Boston.com is being read right now (we’ll be bringing that app to our site once the developers get some sleep and clean up their code). Best Social hack went to a team called Zombie Programmers, who created a crowdsourced app for Green Line trains, ahead of the MBTA releasing official data.

Once these apps are stable, we’ll be featuring them on beta.boston.com.

A few comments from the judges on their way out: Globe Publisher Chris Mayer says “it was tough to choose between the great collection of apps.” Laurel Ruma of O’Reilly media says “it’s exciting to see such innovative uses of open government data and to see Boston take its place on the national scene as a city for developers.” Another judge, Scott Kirsner gave his take on the winners in his blog on Boston.com

Here’s a video shot by the Globe that captured some of the fun the participants had hacking, as well as the announcement of the winners.

Thanks to everyone who came and participated. It was a fun and productive weekend. We’ll try to do this again next year. With even more Red Bull.

#bostonhack #boston #hack day #jeff moriarty

Winner of the Best Mobile App (as well as the crowd favorite) is ...

#Innovation #Jeff Moriarty #beta.boston.com #hack day #APPs

I am pleased to welcome you to our new site, Beta Boston. Our plan is to use this space to update you on the evolution of Boston.com and the upcoming launch of the new BostonGlobe.com.

The launch of this little area of Boston.com ...

#beta.boston.com #Jeff Moriarty