Morning Links: January 28, 2009

By Joshua Benton

— Mark Briggs asks: What’s your video SEO strategy? (That is, how are making sure Google and other search engines are sending traffic to your videos?) He points to this study by a consulting company on the issue.

Google can’t (yet!) understand all the words spoken in your videos, so even if your subject screams “Chicken McNugget” throughout a video, no one Googling for those tasty white-meat nuggets will come across it without a little search-engine optimization help. This is one reason (among many) we publish transcripts of our videos whenever we produce a new one — Google can read transcripts just fine.

— The New York Times opens up an API for its weekly bestseller book lists. Looks interesting, but it’s a shame they don’t seem to be opening up any of the data underlying the list — that is, the sales-data secret sauce that is used to determine who’s No. 1 and who’s No. 7. That would be a fun data set to play around with.

— Bill Cunningham is the Times’ street-fashion photographer, and here is his audio slideshow from inauguration day. I link not because of the photography, but because of how blogger Jason Kottke linked to it:

Be sure to listen to Cunningham’s wonderful narration; he even gets choked up when describing the moment of Obama’s swearing-in. I wish all journalism were this professionally personal (if that makes any sense).

Emphasis all mine.

Morning Links: December 3, 2008

By Joshua Benton

— Blog pioneer Jason Kottke writes about how the “broken windows” theory of policing applies to web sites. In other words: If you want good behavior from comments, you need to keep the place looking clean.

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to “own” their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same.

(Fellow blog pioneer Derek Powazek has made a similar argument some time ago, with concrete steps news sites can take.)

— Old Media New Tricks has a good interview with Aron Pilhofer, one of the NYT’s data/visualization gurus. Aron: “[F]or my little group, 2009 is going to be about community and about enabling the journalist to be more of an aggregator and curator…”

— If you liked the NYT’s recent piece on local independent news startups, you might enjoy this look at their British equivalents. (Although the Brits, in this case, seem less interested in muckraking investigations and more interested in giving quotes like “We are punk to their [local newspapers'] stadium rock.”)

— Tony Rogers quotes me defending the baby boomers from the charge of having ruined the American newspaper business.