Reuters Spotlight APIs
Image via WikipediaAndrew Lister from Reuters Labs shared with me their brand new API product called Spotlight. The APIs lets you pull Reuters stories, videos, photos and full article content as RSS feeds or XML/JSON or even as RDF.
Getting started is easy - signup on spotlight.reuters.com, activate your account and you have an accesskey to call the APIs.
The APIs let you pull Reuters content (articles, full news text, photos, videos) for a particular edition ( US, UK, Japan, India, China etc.) and a channel ( e.g. Top News, Entertainment, Business.).
The API call is a simple HTTP request with parameters and their values mentioned in the query string. There is no API authentication but the apikey is required for tracking usage. A sample request looks like:
With every piece of content returned, you do get some interesting metadata, such as related categories e.g. for this article about “Wedding bells for Bush’s daughter Jenna draw near“
<category term=”Washington / US Government News” />
<category term=”Living and lifestyle” />
<category term=”Domestic Politics” />
<category term=”Online Report text item” />
<category term=”United States of America” />
<category term=”Canada” />
Another useful feature is that Spotlight does integrate with Reuter’s Open Calais and can return you more entity data from the Calais analysis. E.g.
Facility: Rose Garden, Texas ranch
Organization: Virginia Republican Party, University of Virginia, White House, U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
IndustryTerm: media reports, media glare, refused media
Company: Constellation Energy, CNN
Country: United States, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq
Person: David Alexander, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gordon Johndroe, Tricia, Jenna Bush, Henry Hager, Virginia Lt. Gov, Larry King, Oscar de la Renta, Laura Bush, Live, Edward Cox, John Hager, Chris Wilson
ProvinceOrState: Virginia, Texas, Maryland, Maine
Some more examples feeds:
Videos for US top news:
Photos for US Sports news:
Another notable feature are the editorial/admin APIs (they call them Information Feeds) which a publisher to build editorial controls around what data is being pulled from these APIs. E.g., if I had a CMS I could use these APIs to build an editorial page showing what kind of channels or content is available through the Spotlight Feed and help an editor configure it for the system.
Questions that I have for the Reuters folks:
1. How often is the data refreshed in these feeds?
2. How are updates for articles published? Are there identifiers that can help an app refresh the data on its side.
3. Is there any caching that Reuters is doing?
4. What are Reuter’s policies about getting the full article body from Reuters and then re-publishing on another site?
Before you get all excited to build apps that make you money, an important point to notice - the APIs are for non-commercial use only. So do make cool things that helps the world in free non commercial ways.
The Spotlight APIs follow the launch of Reuter’s OpenCalais API. Its all about the APIs!
Ann Grimes (Stanford) about online news
Newstools gave me an opportunity to interview Ann Grimes, Acting Director, Graduate Program in Journalism at Stanford.
a. What are the things in online news that you see are changing the dynamics and logistics of journalism. And what is the future of online news?
Big declines in print readership and advertising. Little innovation and investment, industry-wide - with key exceptions (Dow Jones under Murdoch and Washington Post, for example). Cost-cutting and layoffs are hitting newspapers hard. Meanwhile, big upswing in online readership. News sites are among the most popular and trafficked. The problem: Online ads still command only 10 cents to the $1 of print ads, so the revenues aren’t keeping up and online growth is projected to slow to single digits. While lots of innovation is happening on the content side, little innovation is happening on the ad/revenue side. That is where the conversation needs to go.
b. We have seen a tremendous use of online tools and portals in the elections this year. People have campaigned, raised money, criticized other candidates, asked questions, participated in debates online and the list goes on. How do you think the new online face of campaigns affects the politics - in good and bad ways? Also, do you plan to write your book “Running Mates” again with the new trends on online campaigns?
Online activity both by campaigns and from citizens is a very positive development, in my view. We are seeing more citizen participation (example: Moveon.org) and the blogger who leaked the Obama “bitter” comment, which has certainly impacted the national Democratic campaign. We’re seeing mainstream media opening up, allowing citizens to actively participate in TV debates - several moderators have taken online questions live throughout the primary season. While many people think the primary campaigns have lasted too long, I actually think it’s positive. Voters - whether Democrat or Republican - are demonstrating that they believe this election matters. “Running Mates” is on the shelf, for the time being.
c. You seem to have covered technology and business for big media houses? What are your thoughts about the new online technology hubs - techcrunch, gigaom, scobleizer and this list of online tech and biz bloggers keeps going on.
These blogs feed you instant news but a lot of times I think these sites are great - they regularly beat the print media and are giving local newspapers (Mercury News and SF Chronicle) a run. NYTimes had an interesting story a few weeks ago about the tough pace of blogging. Here’s the link: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop - New …
I’ve written hundreds of stories. While covering the Venture Capital beat for the Wall Street Journal I wrote several about the lack of transparency in the venture captial industry that got some attention. Here’s a page one story.
WSJ.com - Venture Capitalists Scramble To Keep Their Numbers Secret
By ANN GRIMES Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL …. In general, that amount of disclosure is legal: Venture-capital funds are only lightly …
e. What do you think about “citizen journalism”?
While I think that citizens have expertise in many areas and often can add a lot to news reports, I don’t think it is likely that “citizen journalists” will replace the professional press - simply because people have lives and they are too busy to do the job of professional journalists.
However, we are seeing a rise in hyperlocal sites run by a small staffs with citizen contributors. Whether those contributors ultimately are paid or not, remains to be seen. (To survive, I suspect they will be. We used to call them freelancers).
f. Finally, what for are you attending the Newstools conference?
I teach a class at Stanford called New Media Entrepreneurship, in which my students (from journalism, business and computer science) come up with ideas for new digital media ventures. I want to better understand the NewsTool methods. Students will attend the conference, too.
Web 2.0 Design as understood by a Classic/Contemporary Designer
Roger Black’s notion of web 2.0 design:
The concept of web 2.0 design is to provide a set of tools and services to your user so that they can customize your website as they like to see it. It probably will be not more than 5% of the users that would do these customizations, but that would be worth it. After all, these are the people that love you.
You already see companies like Virb, Tumblr providing these kind of controls. Netvibes, Pageflakes and to some extent MSN.com has provided some kind of control on the blocks of content that you see on your home page.
And when it comes to Web 2.0 concepts of forums, discussions, comments, ratings, user generated content - giving your user controls on how they want to see all this data helps them dig into the data. Just the flexibility to see comments in a collapsible format or a stream of comments can be useful.
Flock - Firey and foxy
Spent an hour today to use the socially connected browser Flock. They have been around for a while and I am not sure how I found them today but my guess is it was on the newly launched twitlinks.
So here it is, my social networks now part of my browsing:
The myworld tab shows me everything thats happening in my social sphere. The Friend Activity column is like FriendFeedFeed as part of my browsing experience.
I like it right now. Not sure how long I can take this social spam for all the time that I am spending on my browser (i.e. pretty much all of it).
One bad thing - it did not import all my plugins from my firefox installation. Such a pain installing them again, if I do. Plus, its feed reader can no way beat google reader.
Accidental Branding - peterman, craigslist, burt’s bees
David Vinjamuri, a professor at NYU and a professional in brand management and marketing, had a book launch today for his new book Accidental Branding. The event had some really big names on the panel - J. Peterman of the peterman brand and seinfeld fame, Craig Newmark from Craigslist, Roxanne Quimby from Burt’s Bees, and the moderator Carolyn Kepcher of The Apprentice fame.
David Vinjamuri, John Peterman, Craig Newmark, Roxanny Quimby
Each of these had a great story to tell of how things worked out for them. Basic theme was that they had that initial idea by accident but then they followed their core values they believed in to finally get the Success.
Some great things to share from each of these entrepreneurs:
J. Peterman - Break all rules and do what you believe in
Craig Newmark - Listen to your customer and “follow through”
Roxanne Quimby - Fill in the void that your consumer has with your product
Seems like self help business tips above, but very true and each of these had a story as to how they came this realization. A lot of companies have feedback forms (including daylife) and how many of those get to the right people and something gets done about it is what matters. Totally paying more attention to all feedback coming to developer@daylife.com now.
Have not read David’s book yet, but will post soon once I get on it.
Launching Daylife Cookbook
We launch the Daylife Cookbook with a whole new sassy design and 50 recipes today. Cookbook is a collection of showcases that partners and developers have implemented using the Daylife API, samples and tutorials to use the API, more lazyweb ideas that have a design but no code behind them and the API documentation.
The registration on cookbook is invite only for now. But if you got ideas, drop me a line and we will send you an account to contribute to it.
All the lazyweb ideas have a bounty, so just steal one of them, implement it and get paid.
How can a print magazine journalist start an online magazine?
You are a print magazine journalist but you want to start your own gig by launching an online web magazine.
My assumptions are that you are as far from technology and the web 2.0 tools as I am from writing a print magazine article.
Here is how I think you can start. There could be gazillions other ways, but here is one that might work for you.
Assumption: You have a team of writers, photographers and videographers. But you are missing a techie.
Here is a strategy I would suggest:
a. You and the writers on your team should start writing out articles for the magazine on an easy setup blogging platform. I believe that writing online is very very different from writing on paper. Some nitty gritties of online writing are things like how are you categorizing your article, what tags are you giving it, how many embedded links are you putting in your article body, what online sources are you referring to in your article etc etc. Also, once your team starts writing you will start getting an idea about how much material you can churn out. Plus, you have one place to see what kind of balance in amount of material you are achieving in different areas of focus that your magazine will have.
Enough said - start using wordpress.com or typepad.com to start blogging. You can even watch some videos on how to blog on wordpress - http://youtube.com/results?search_query=wordpress&search_type= or http://www.howcast.com/search?q=blog
This should take a week for you to get setup on wordpress and get comfortable writing your articles (say 1 ir 2 per day) there and develop your online writing style.
b. Step a gets you going in terms of material. One of you has to start putting together the structure of the site on paper - what we call IA or Information architecture. What sections, categories and sub-categories you think there will be on the site and how will people browse through them - this is the most important question to answer before you go to a designer to ask him to make you a design. Once you have a rough idea on paper (as a list or a diagram), you need a designer to get some comps made.
For starters, you might only get 2 comps made - the home page and the article page. All other sub-sections can follow the same design as the home page for now. A comp is a photo of how the page looks like, for e.g. here is a comp for design of a site that gives you news with prime numbers - http://cookbook.daylife.com/sites/default/files/cookbookfiles/primetimelive.jpg .. its a simple jpg file showing the layout.
Some good examples of magazine style layouts I recommend:
c. When steps a and b are happening, you need to do a little management of building a company too - know who is going to be on your team and start talking about your idea to people. Start forming a “Board of Advisors” who are people who like your idea, can give you advise about the magazine, can you give ideas about how to market, can give you insights into the logistics of forming the company.
d. The comps and the material in step a and b give you enough ammunition to go get angel funding. Angel funding can come just from friends like 1000 bucks each, or it can come from some small time incubator (people who invest small time in companies) or some agency. Also by that point of time - as an outcome of step c, you will have a document (a word document and a presentation) that presents your idea about what your magazine and the company is about and who are your advisors a.k.a. “evangelizers” ….
e. You get angel funding - you got money now what. I believe that since you do not have a techie on your team, you need to contract a small team of techies as your tech team - they are responsible for designing, developing the site and hosting it. That is when you start building your website based on the designs created, migrate all your data from the blogs you have written to your website and basically have a launch date that you march towards.
f. Launch! Champagne! party! MONEY!!!!!
Overall I think this should take between 2 and 3 months.
I write this post for a friend, but if you have a suggestion about this - please leave it in the comments.
Trendrr - Daylife mashup
I saw a demo of Trendrr at the Apr 1st New York Tech meetup. Seemed like an easy way to throw all your data at one place and get some graphs in basic layouts (line,bar,area charts). Mark Ghuneim well utilized his 5 minute demo slot to show what trendrr can do and how their users have used their API. The best graph I liked was the one tracking someone’s CPU usage. You can then embed these graphs anywhere you want or export the data as xml, json or even an excel spreadsheet.
So I got my hands dirty today playing with the Trendrr API to push trending data in news from daylife about any topic. Signed up on trendrr.com, read some documentation about how to use the API and jumped right in. I have written a php script that is calling the daylife API to get the data and the trendrr api to publish it.
I have hosted the script for you to create your own trendrr graphs (more details below) or download it to customize the data that you send to trendrr.
Here are some of the graphs:
Here is my feedback to the Trendrr folks:
- The API is great because its simple
- Its always tricky to keep things simple and introduce advanced features. The graph currently is exported as an image. If it could be exported as HTML, I would love to have the capability to click on the data point and go to the real source of that data. In that case, the trendrr API will need to accept a link along with each data point. The timeline widget on the daylife.com topic pages support similar functionality.
- The delay between sending the data through the API and it showing up on the graphs is pretty significant. It would be great if does not take more than a minute.
Read more below about how I implemented the mashup of Trendrr and Daylife APIs.
DrupalCamp NYC4
2 days of drupal-ogy at the Drupal Camp this weekend at the Polytechnic in Brooklyn. Lots of good people I met plus some cool modules I saw at the sessions.
My favorite drupal module was Media Mover that was developed by Arthur Foelsche from CivicActions to build this product called Drutube (lookout youtube). The whole project lets you upload your video file (in almost any regular format you can have), transcode it to a flash file (or tonnes of other formats), push it to Amazon’s S3 using a simple drupal form (yes!) and finally embed your video anywhere you want using an open source flash player that also supports playlists.
Met a couple of techie librarian enthusiasts and non profit entrepreneurs. There is a lot of buzz and excitement around these content companies for using drupal.
Robert Safuto from Awakened Voice recoreded a quick chat with me about the Daylife API platform and what I was doing there at the drupalcamp.
Google Summer of Code 2008
Google Summer of Code Program is churning along and there are lots of companies/organizations, students and mentors excited about participating this year.
I am excited about a project proposal that I have submitted this year through Drupal. I really loved the idea of how the Drupal community started throwing ideas at one place, everyone gave feedback and then projects were put on the GSoC ideas list by a few admins depending upon the community’s feedback about any idea.
The Logo design for the t-shirt was just posted by a product manager at google and its pretty “fire-y”
Another cool part - Sumit Kataria, a senior in an engineering college in India is already signing up to implement the project proposal I have submitted. Pretty awesome to see college students participating in developer communities and reaching out in the community for projects.
If you got some free cycles, you should lookup projects on the ideas list for implementing them or being a mentor. I would love to hear from you if you would be interested in helping mentor my project proposal.
Plus, I am shaping up a mashup-WEEK contest in May. If you are interested in participating in any capacity (develop, design, sponsor, hangout), let me know. I will ensure to get Daylife to sponsor a Macbook Air for the winner.
