WILLTech Blogthing

A place for the WILL Digital Geeks to explain what the heck they're doing

[socialmediadesk]

Hi all,

We’ve got big social media news to share today! Content platforms are finally releasing tools that fully embrace the power of video.

1. Twitter just joined the world of video-sharing. This morning Twitter announced that users can now upload videos (up to 30 seconds long) and send...

[willtech]

Pop Up Archive: Breakthrough in Speech to Text?

For the past year I've been working with a startup called the Pop Up Archive to improve the way WILL is archiving digital audio. It's one thing to save a number of files in some form of managed digital storage - and in WILL's case it's a very large number of audio files. The challenge is knowing what the files are. Metadata is the yin to a bitstream's yang; without it, we can't really claim to be preserving anything. 

Why should we care about preservation? Because media technologies and formats are changing so fast, the only way to keep things accessible is to manage them over time.

So we have many thousands of digital audio files and we need metadata. We typically create a basic title for each asset, and keep things like creation date, producer names, and usually a short description and some subject terms. But if you were looking for anything more granular, or if you were looking for Google to be able to search for anything significant contained in the audio itself, you would be disappointed.

This is where the Pop Up Archive comes in. They are developing next generation speech-to-text technology that appears to represent a breakthrough in accuracy. Automatic transcription of audio is one of those hard problems. The audio quality can vary from great to terrible. Music or noisy background environments can obscure the words. Accents and specialized vocabularies can complicate things further. 

But check out this transcript for one of WILL's audio archives:

https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/1472/items/10811

Here's one of a recent WILL News story:

https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/1468/items/29493

Here's an interview with the writer Jean Thompson talking about her recent book The Witch and Other Tales Re-told:

https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/1468/items/28294

Are these perfect? Not yet, but the improvement over anything I've seen before is astonishing. Most importantly, they are good enough to make the audio content indexable by Google, and accessible to people with impaired hearing. The full meaning of the audio content is accessible.

Let's just use the word "accessibility" to mean universally usable by all. That's what we're trying to do with public media. If we're going to do that with audio, we need to extract the semantic content from the bitstream and make it accessible. A year ago, we signed up with the Pop Up Archive to try and make that happen. They're moving forward faster than I imagined.

[willtech]

Website refresh brain melt

I remember a web conference keynote on the theme of Don't Redesign Your Website. The notion was if you've got good content and people know how to use it, why mess them up by changing it?

Oh how times have changed. More specifically, screens have evolved and mobile has changed everything. 

It was more than four years ago when Ethan Marcotte published the article on Responsive Web Design that started us on this new wave. It took a while for most designers to make the transition to an approach that is now obvious and unstoppable. If we haven't reworked our sites and web content to be responsive to the screen sizes people are now using to access, our sites are failing. 

I rebuilt the WILL website using RWD techniques in 2012 to 2013. The process involved a complete migration of data, and a total rewrite of every line of code using the Foundation framework. It was lots of heavy lifting, but the results were worth it. Little-known factoid: we restructured our website database from 300 columns to about 30. This alone allowed a huge increase in site performance. 

Let's face it: those websites we built in the past were a huge mess.

The truth is every website I've ever built looked great when launched, but after a year I began to hate what I'd done. This is partly an artifact of me learning more about design each time, and partly about how fast the web is evolving. Web design ain't what it used to be, if it ever was. 

So now I'm embarking on the next quixotic quest to rebuild my rebuilt site. But unlike our village elders since we first started piling timber on stone, I'm tearing out the foundation.

Quite literally in this case, as I'm replacing the Foundation framework with Bootstrap. Why: Bootstrap has features that balance mobile-first design with the flexibility I want in the new site. It's under active community development, and is extremely well documented. And I'm sure I'll come to hate it in the near future. 

What I want for the present is radical clarity. That's the feeling you get when you go to a website, and you know what it is. You know what you can do there. And you can just do it. This is the golden snitch I'm going for right now with the new WILL website. 

What I have right now is nothing but code filling my screens, the back of my optic nerves, and haunting my dreams. Until January 2015...wish me luck!

[willtech]

Capital Adaptation

Most folks wouldn't even yawn over the news that Capital One is purchasing the experience design group Adaptive Path. If you know about Adaptive Path at all, you are one of the .0002 percent of human beings who knows what UX means (it's "user experience"). If you do know about UX, you almost certainly know about Adaptive Path. Because the little San Francisco design firm founded in 2001 during the dot-com crash has basically defined what we know as good UX design today. 

Adaptive Path has been at the heart of digital user experience research, teaching, consulting, and practice for more than a decade. Co-founder Jesse James Garrett wrote The Elements of User Experience, the seminal guide to user-centered design. Adaptive Path has consulted some of the smartest organizations including NPR, Twitter, and Flickr on how to improve the usability of their digital products. They sponsor one of the most important user design conferences (it will continue), and have freely shared their insights with the global web design community. As the mobile age rolled in, the design approach advocated by Adaptive Path has proved itself across the exploding universe of digital devices and platforms.  

So what's a stodgy old bank doing buying them?

I suspect that someone at Capital One has vision enough to see the future in which user experience is the difference between failure and success. And that future is arriving fast.

Consider your experience on your bank's website. Here's mine: 

This is their "upgraded" site launched just a few months ago. I won't even bother to detail all the ways in which it is clunky and hard to use. On a phone it's impossible. This site is their second "new" site in five years, and each time the usability gets worse. 

The current Capital One website isn't lightyears better:

Bookmark this and check back a year from now. Hard to imagine an Adaptive Path design will look anything like this.

It's easy to beat up on corporate websites constructed in the pre-Responsive age. And it's not easy to re-build a massive site that relies on legacy data and IT infrastructure. But what's easy isn't the point. Survival and success are the point. 

For today's users of digital services, expectations are much higher than they were two years ago. We expect things to simply work wherever we happen to be. We expect clarity in how to use things. We are being taught what to expect, and how delightful a digital experience can be, by designers who have adopted a user-centered approach. 

But there's still a massive gap between the expectations of today's users, and the majority of corporate websites and digital services. By acquiring Adaptive Path, Capital One is betting the bank on filling that gap.

[willtech]

Big Data in Public Media

Denver, July 12, 2014 - I spent the past four days at the PMDMC discussing the widening variety of ways in which digital technology is being applied for fundraising and membership cultivation for public media. This is an important discussion and I supported the merging of Digital Day with the PMDMC, since digital folks and fundraising professionals often speak different languages and we need to find ways of combining our efforts on behalf of the mission we share.

I’m leaving Denver concerned that the mission of public media was such a small part of the discussion at this conference. We had a wonderful lunch during which Patricia Harrison spoke about our role in addressing the high school drop-out crisis, and Gabriel “Asheru” Benn moved the entire crowd with his art. Hodari B. Davis and Brandon Santiago from riseupproject.org spoke about the power of youth telling the stories of their lives in their own voices, and how public media could build a bridge between communities and bring marginalized voices to the center. This was a powerful and moving moment that reminded me again why I work so hard every day. I work in public media, but I work for the people we are here to serve.

After lunch we turned our attention to all the analytics and data about those people and how to monetize it. This was the main theme of the PMDMC: how to capture, analyze, and leverage the growing amount of detailed Big Data

about our audiences to grow our fundraising and membership base.

Now, I understand this is important to the future of public media. Data is now at the center of conversations about how organizations of all types conduct their business. Public media cannot fail to incorporate data practices that inform its fundraising. We are increasingly tracking users behavior on our websites and the growing number of digital platforms that can provide vast amounts of data about their habits and interests. We face new challenges in harnessing that data, and the technology of Constituent Relationship Management is now very important to the entire non-profit sector. The range of technologies we need to be good at has grown and we are in danger (once again) of falling behind. We need to master the vast amount of data now available to us in the digital realm.

What has me feeling queasy is we are only talking about data in the context of membership and fundraising. But data is at least as important in the context of journalism and service to our communities.

We had a great discussion between our technologists, marketing, and fundraising professionals about using data to increase our revenues.  And that’s fine, but we also need a place to discuss using technology and data to increase our positive impact on the people we’re here to serve.

The question on my mind upon leaving Denver is: where and when will we have that discussion?

[willtech]

Illinois Public Media Digital Strategy

The following is the formal statement of Digital Strategy at Illinois Public Media. It was authored by Jack Brighton in September 2013, and vetted by the IPM Leadership team. Since Jack likes to talk endlessly about digital strategy, he also created a Powerpoint version with lovely pictures and multiple digressions, available here on Slideshare. What follows is the plain-text version.

Introduction

“Digital Strategy” has become something of a buzzword. Since almost everything we do now is digital, our digital strategy could relate to almost everything we do. But in common use, digital strategy means almost everything we do on the Internet: websites, podcasts, streaming, apps, social media, and the growing universe of online services and platforms people use to connect with Illinois Public Media. 

Maintain a solid foundation for digital publishing and distribution 

Our digital services depend on servers, software, and storage for websites, streaming media, and content management. We have a virtual server infrastructure that provides our core digital services. We have staff resources to manage this infrastructure and the applications it supports. Along with the network services and bandwidth provided by the University of Illinois, our digital infrastructure is a major competitive advantage. As a strategic concern, we must maintain this foundation over time.  This includes refreshing of essential IT systems, advancing staff skills, and aligning with the University’s technology core as opportunities arise. We will maintain good security practices for all our IT systems and applications. We will continue to evaluate the efficacy of cloud-based solutions and adjust our deployments as appropriate. Regardless of the technologies and platforms we’re using, we will maintain ownership and stewardship of our own data.

Maintain and protect our integrity and trust online as we do in broadcast

Digital technology provides powerful new ways to reach and serve our audiences more effectively than ever. Online and social media allow us to experiment and connect in new ways. We will work to build new models of digital public media, but always remain faithful to the mission of public broadcasting and our public trust. This means maintaining our high standards for editorial quality and responsibility online as we do on the air, even as we interact with audiences in new ways. 

Provide an excellent experience for all users 

We are committed to providing the best possible experience to online audiences. We will work to make our digital content easily findable, accessible, and usable. Our digital services must be accessible to all users, including those with physical or perceptual impairments. We will help lead the effort for accessible media, and work to make public media a model of online accessibility. Our content and digital services will be available on all devices. We will work to continuously improve the reach, appeal, and usability of our digital services. 

Build and engage audiences across all platforms 

We have new opportunities to build larger audiences across an expanding number of digital platforms. As our digital footprint expands, we will extend our connections with new audiences and communities. We will work to build healthy relationships in social media spaces, and leverage the entire spectrum of our broadcast and online services to deepen our impact. We will build new support relationships with these audiences, and expand the base of funding for Illinois Public Media. 

Provide staff with great tools for creating digital media and engaging audiences 

Content producers need digital tools and workflows that allow them to focus on creating and publishing great content. The foundation of our digital media process is our main website, but our content and audience engagement extends into multiple digital environments and social media spaces. We provide and support a highly functional Content Management System, and work to integrate our CMS with other broadcasting and IT systems. Our technology staff will solve the technology problems, allowing producers to focus on producing great content. 

Support internal users and push toward digital excellence 

We will provide training, documentation, and ongoing support for staff involved in creating, publishing, and managing digital content. We will work to enable and build new models of digital storytelling, journalism, and engagement. As technologies and best practices evolve in the digital realm, we will work to remain current and enable the IPM content team to reach new levels of excellence and success.

Solve the challenges of digital storage and metadata 

Managing media and preserving access to it in a time of rapid changing formats requires an archival process. Otherwise media we produce today won’t be usable or even findable tomorrow.  Our content systems will account for the process of managing of content over time, and provide for the preservation of content and metadata as technologies, formats, and storage methods change. We will participate in the American Archive project to preserve content from all public media stations and producers. We will model how a local station with a rich history can preserve it.

Provide and support standards-based web services 

We will support standard methods for exchanging data with other public media systems and platforms. We will interact with and leverage other digital content platforms provided by NPR, PBS, and other vendors and partners, to the extent they serve our digital strategy. We will participate in other online public media environments, and support efforts to make them better.  We will work to collaborate with colleagues on common core technology issues and solutions.

Innovate and collaborate 

With digital media still in its infancy, there are new opportunities to collaborate and innovate. Technologies, services, and business models remain in flux. In a time of rapid change, we need to explore new ideas, methods, designs, and partnerships. We can’t be afraid to engage in experiments, even though some of them may fail. Wherever possible, we should collaborate with others in public media and education to build effective new technologies and practices. We will work to be a leader and good partner in digital media innovation. 

Contribute to public media strategy

WILL and Illinois Public Media have always been leaders in educational and public media. We will continue this tradition by participating in formal and informal dialogue on public media strategy at all levels. We will learn from others, freely share our experience and vision, and work to help other stations and the public media system as a whole become more effective and successful. 

Learn constantly

The Internet as a mass medium is barely 20 years old. Change in technologies, practices, business models, and audience behavior continues to accelerate. We will embrace the demand to constantly learn. We will advocate for continuous learning as a matter of professional responsibility for Illinois Public Media staff.  We will support a range of formal and information learning activities that build on our capacity as a public media organization in the digital age. 

Embrace our role in education

As part of an R1 university we have an opportunity to lead curriculum development and instruction in the areas of our digital media expertise. We will work to engage the faculty and students at the University of Illinois, and play a constructive and productive role in its educational mission.  We will expand our engagement with education at all levels, and serve as an expert partner in improving educational outcomes and achievement. As digital media becomes more central to new models of education and instruction, we will help set new standards for excellence.

[willtech]

Digital Day "Beyond the CMS Session" in Denver - the Future of Content Management

In the beginning was the web page and it was good. We coded pages joyously by hand, amazed by this new global publishing system and growing library that could link from one document to another. The World Wide Web was the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 vision of the Memex, and turned Douglas Englebart's 1968 demonstration of networked document authoring and hyperlinks into a globally accessible reality. 

Authoring web pages by hand was fun at first but it got tedious. It didn't scale, and it required the author to know how to code. With the web growing in importance to organizations of all types, it wasn't long before the first Content Management Systems were developed. The CMS allowed a great many non-technical people to create web pages and content, and to manage large websites with lots of data. Most early CMSs were commercial products that were very expensive and used proprietary technology. But by the mid-2000s, a number of excellent open source CMS products emerged: WordPress, Drupal, Plone, Django, etc. The CMS era of web publishing has been in full bloom since 2006, and web pages have multiplied in their billions.

But now it's time to consider what we've wrought with this CMS thing. Every bit of content in our website database is awesome, and we can build the front end presentation of our content using the same CMS tool. But now we're learning the downside: Every bit of content is in our web database, and we can ONLY build the front end using the CMS.

Suddenly we're seeing the limitations of the CMS as a walled garden of content. And because CMSs was built to present content in a specific way on a website, they are biased toward web pages. But we have smart phones by the billions, downloadable apps, OTT platforms, game consoles, and internet-enabled cars and wearable devices, not just web pages.

We also now have easy access to fantastically useful data sources: weather, open government data, maps, news feeds, and APIs from a wide range of content sources and web services (including the forthcoming Public Media Platform).  These data sources can add tremendous value to our content and digital services. In addition, many of us are now using not just one web platform, we're also active on Bento, Core Publisher, COVE, Merlin, Tumblr, YouTube, WordPress, and many other social media spaces. Our digital strategies are now larger than any single platform.

As public media is seen as the most trusted source of news, culture, and inspiration, we have a major competitive advantage in helping people make sense of a world filled with so much data. We need simple ways of incorporating, reusing, and displaying data from different sources. We need new frameworks for assembling collections of content and related resources that provide insight into complex issues and events that affect our audiences and communities. So how does a station with access to a multitude of web platforms and content sources create a well-structured content strategy? And what practical steps can we take collaboratively to enable more stations and producers, large and small, to be effective in a multi-platform world?

This is the subject of the July 9th 2014 Digital Day session at the PMDMC in Denver "Beyond the CMS: Content Management Strategy in a World of Many Platforms." 

Presenters include Irakli Nadareishvili, former NPR director of technology and architect of the Public Media Platform; Bill Haenel, web developer and CMS architect at North Country Public Radio; Thomas Crenshaw, Co-founder of Circa Digital and accomplished developer for PBS, KQED and other public media; and Jon Ellenberger, web developer at WGBH. 

CMS's are still very useful and will continue to be with us. But it's time for public media to take our content strategy to a whole new level. This session will be the starting point for collaboration on that challenge.

[popuparchive-deactivated2017030]

We are thrilled to announce the incredible slate of partners working with us to build custom speech-to-text software for news organizations, historical audio collections, and religious institutions:

Curious where this idea came from? We started with some big problems:

...

[willtech]

Happy 20th Birthday Mosaic

In the timeline of new media, we spot the significant moments only in retrospect. Continuing change has caused each new development to get quickly overshadowed by the next wave of innovation.

The wiring of the world was completed in 1902, when the telegraph was revolutionary technology. Along came a thing called "wireless" which enabled transmission of telegraph signals using the electromagnetic spectrum as a carrier. By 1920 the word "broadcasting" still meant the casting of seeds in a farm field, but also information and ideas across the planet via radio waves.

Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, and we've had language for about 100,000 years. The first examples of writing appear about 5000 years ago. We've had electricity for about 120 years, radio for less than a century, television for about 60 years. We think of these technologies, and the cultural, political, and business practices that have evolved around them, as stable and perhaps even timeless. But this is an illusion based on the relative shortness of our own lifespans. In truth, we are living in a time of rapid and unrelenting change. Nowhere is this more evident than the accelerating changes in our media technology.

This is not necessarily good for us or for the planet. Our technologies are changing far faster than our culture and our institutions can adapt. But we're in the media business, and rejecting the new technologies isn't an option.

The Mosaic web browser was developed by graduate students in the Department of Computer Science about six blocks southwest of Campbell Hall for Public Telecommunication. Version 1.0 of NCSA Mosaic was released on November 11, 1993. It's a gross oversimplification to equate Mosaic with the World Wide Web, but in the public mind the web and the web browser are joined at the hip.

So today let's celebrate the 20th birthday of the web as we know it. The world will never be the same, so for good, bad, ugly, or beautiful, let's make the most we can of it.

[willtech]

Digital Storytelling after "Snowfall"

This just caught my eye as a fantastic new example of digital storytelling and web design:

http://www.opb.org/glaciercaves/

Last summer, The New York Times created a major sensation with their piece "Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek." Aside from great reporting, it represented a new, higher level of design for multimedia storytelling. The Snowfall web page took six months to build, but it generated 3.5 million page views and brought many new readers to the Times. In August the NYT published another story based on the "Snowfall genre," as it's now being called: The Jockey.

Here are links to both stories:

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/the-jockey/#/?chapt=introduction

These stories have been discussed at length and dissected by many in the web design and online journalism communities. There's an argument about whether they are one-off experiments too expensive to replicate, or if they'll become more commonplace as the authoring tools make them easier to produce. I've been in the latter camp. 

Do these represent the "future of digital storytelling"? Heck no, but I think they are sign posts on the way to that future. 

The OPB Glacier Cave story shows a few things we should pay attention to, as reported by Jeannie Ericson from the iMA from a conversation with OPB's Lynne Pollard:

Here's what Lynne told me about the dev effort: we planned to have it as the main feature for the October issue of the OPB digital Magazine. We knew from the start that we would have amazing images and video, we just had to push for the written story. For the magazine, Jason, our developer worked with the producers on the elements needed for the story, he talked to the photographers about what he would like before they went out, and talked to the animator working on the TV show to get extra animations for the web. Video content was pulled from the video taken for the TV show. It took him a month to pull all the content together for the magazine article. Because of the work done for the magazine, it took just an extra week for the web version.

So the web version took only a week to produce, since all the story elements were already there. 

I'm not looking for us to begin cranking these out. OPB does have considerably more production resources than us. But then, The New York Times has considerably more resources than OPB, and it was thought that only places like the Times could pull this off.  OPB has shown the world that this is no longer true.