PubForge Blog

Most public media sites, even those with a strong news focus, show relatively poor overall loyalty stats, with the average visitor coming twice a month or less. The standard report segments in Google Analytics don’t give a very clear picture of what differentiates the loyal visitor, who returns twice a week or more to your site, from the visitor who beams in from a search results page and is never seen again. This makes it difficult to do testing that targets the loyal visitor.

Fortunately, this can be overcome by using the newish (still in beta) “advanced segments” feature at Google Analytics. Here’s how to create and use an advanced segment that looks at monthly traffic from the loyal visitor–one who visits the site between 8 and 100 times during the selected period (I limited the visit number to 100 on the assumption that people who hit your site more often than that are using it for a browser home page):

1. Go to your Google Analytics Dashboard
2. Under Settings, select “advanced segments”
3. Select “Create new custom segment”
4. Under Dimensions, expand “visitors” and drag “Count of visits” over to the “dimension or metric” box.
5. Under “Condition” select “Greater than or equal to” and give it a value of “8″
6. Select “Add ‘and’ statement”
7. Drag “Count of visits” over to the “dimension or metric” box.
8. Under “Condition” select “Less than” and give it a value of “100″
9. Name the segment something like “Deeply Loyal” and click “Create Segment”

Now the new custom segment can be compared with standard segments such as “All visits” using the advanced segments tab on any report page.When I applied the segment to traffic at North Country Public Radio, I got some immediately useful information:

1. Frequent return visitors account for a little over 20% of visits and of page views. This means that my loyal visitors don’t visit more pages on any particular visit than does the general visitor.
2. A little over 30% of views to NCPR’s top three pages (home, news, and listen) come from the loyal segment. So loyal visitors are 50% more likely to visit one of the top destinations than are visitors on average.
3. The real jump, however, comes with features that are visitor-contributed or visitor-interactive. More than 50% of visits to our popular Photo of the Day page come from the loyal segment. More than 40% of visits to our top blog destination come from the loyal segment. Increases over average loyalty of 250% and 200% respectively.
4. The lowest scoring pages among the loyal segment were individual story pages, with less than 10% of views coming from the loyal segment. Individual stories are primarily reached via search, or via syndicated feeds, and so are often outside our core visitorship.

These findings suggest a number of strategies:

1. To increase the overall loyalty of visitors, increase the opportunities for interaction and content contribution on your top destination pages.
2. The loyal segment is more likely to already be a paying supporter, so member messaging on the pages most popular with loyal visitors might focus on membership upgrade and referrals to other pages with interactive features.
3. Popular pages more often viewed by the less loyal could be a target for new member recruiting, content-specific micro-giving, “about the station info,” and referrals to pages related by search topic.

Dale Hobson
North Country Public Radio

Bill Haenel of Haenel Communications Technologies has added geotagging functions to the main content modules of North Country Public Radio’s custom implementation of his open-source CMS, Public Media Manager. These features operate within both the news module and the events calendar module, adding precise geocoordinates to individual stories and events, derived from text addresses entered by the content creator.

These coordinates are exported from the CMS database into the site RSS feeds in “georss:point” format. By passing the geoRSS feed address as a search query to Google Maps, the feed items can then be rendered on a Google map that will update whenever a new item is added to the feed.

Why bother?

The internet is structured to serve communities of affinity much better than it serves communities of residence. A topical search term, for example, gives you a much better presentation of relevant search results than a geographical search term does. That is in part because content creators have traditionally had much better tools available to provide topical metadata, than they have had to provide location metadata. GeoRSS can provide that missing dimension. This is of increasing importance as traditional media continue to disinvest in local reporting. Geocoding resources also add an extra dimension to content syndication and collaborations where place may be as important as topic.

Some example maps:

North Country News Map: the latest twenty audio news features from North Country Public Radio. GeoRSS feed source: http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/topicalRSS.php

A Year of Hard Choices Series Map: All the stories in an audio series on the economic impact of the recession in Northern New York. GeoRSS feed source: http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/topicalRSS.php?topic=hardchoices

NCPR Community Calendar Map: All today’s events from the North Country Public Radio Community Calendar. GeoRss feed source: http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/upnorth/comcal/rss.php

Basic work strategy:

To get buy-in from content creators, the process had to be dirt simple from their end. On the news side, reporters were provided with an Ajax look-up tool as part of the story submission form. They enter a text-based address, such “Canton, NY” or “80 E. Main St., Canton NY.” This queries the Google Maps API, returning latitude and longitude for the address. These coordinates are written into the story metadata in the news database when the form submits. On the calendar side, prexisting venue addresses were converted into latitude and longitude via a bulk query to the Google Maps API and were added to the venue table in the calendar database. A tool was then added to the venue creation form that would do the look-up as a background process upon creation of new event venues. In this way, content creators were not required to enter anything but a standard text address.

Feed modification:

To exploit the new geodata, the existing site feeds needed to be modified. The feed type had to be modified to reflect the geoRSS namespace. At the item level, the latitude and longitude had to be called out in valid georss:point form. And, of course, the feed needs to be valid RSS in all the usual ways as well.

Address to geopoint “on the fly”

Why use latitude and longitude in the database when the Google Maps API can do the look-ups on the fly? This can be done in theory, but runs into problems in application. If you are mapping only a few items and your traffic is low, this can work. We found that we quickly used up our query limit (15,000 queries per IP in a 24-hour period) at the Google Maps API using this method. Once the limit is reached, Google will not process the feed until the new 24-hour period begins. The better approach is to query the API once when the content is created. Thereafter, the feed item delivers latitude and longitude, which is read without further processing. Also, the number of lookups requested by a text-addressed feed hugely slowed the rendering of the map, and would often time out before completion.

Untagged content:

We found that it was important to have a default location for when no specific location had been applied to the content. In our implementation, we use our headquarters location as the default. This way, all items in the feed have a valid geoRSS:point tag.

Multiple items at the same location:

Google Maps does not stagger map pins for multiple items at the same location. This means that only the newest item at the location can be delivered by clicking on the map. This is a practical problem for NCPR, where we might have multiple reports from our state capital correspondent all located as “Albany, NY.” This can be addressed in a number of ways. Applying different street adresses to each item will differentiate them on the map. In practice, I have been manually editing the coordinates, offsetting them by one minute of latitude or longitude in different directions. A better approach we are looking into is to introduce a random “fuzziness” factor into locations that do not have street addresses. This would provide a unique latitude and longitude to each item, exposing them as discrete pins on the map.

More information:

For stategic implementation and other topics fuzzy enough for an English major, write to me: dale at ncpr dot org. For code and other deep geek: write to bill at hcomtech dot com.

It took me a long time to warm up to Twitter. On first glance, it looked like a huge potential time-suck with little payback–one more social media platform to distract my audience from my main site. I’d see that question header “What are you doing?” and the answer was always the same–trying to figure out what this is good for. However, over time I began to see instances where it served my immediate needs as a web manager, and could serve my audience. A successful strategy to use Twitter will focus on places where those two converge.

Example 1: Tweeting the pledge drive

For years, my membership director had wanted a simple mechanism to project frequently-changing messages onto the home page during pledge drives–to update totals and new members, to promote special drawings and to point to special content. Twitter makes that easy, even in environments where non-web staff are not normally able to publish directly to the website. Here’s how:

1. Open a twitter account
2. Share log-in info with the person/people who will be posting. They can either post directly from the Twitter site (http://twitter.com/yourusername), or they can download a Twitter client such as twhirl that will allow them to post from their desktop or mobile device.
3. Log-in to Twitter. Select “Apps” from the menu at the bottom of the page. Select “Widgets” from the Applications page
4. Select “other” if the feed is going to display on your domain site.
5. Choose either the Flash widget or the HTML widget. (You can control the appearance of the HTML widget using CSS)
6. Copy the code for your selected widget and paste it into the page at your site where you want the feed to appear.

This same process could be used to make the home page available to a reporter covering a breaking news story, or to report quickly evolving content such as election returns.

Example 2: Syndicating existing news and blog content automatically via Twitter

Tweeting in real time is burdensome. However, you may have content from your site CMS and from blogs that can be automatically fed to Twitter via RSS feed. Here’s how (using twitterfeed):

1. Open a Twitter account
2. Open a twitterfeed account
3. Log in at twitterfeed and select “go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)”
4. Select “Create new feed”
5. Enter your Twitter username and password, and the URL of the RSS feed you want to send to Twitter. For best results at Twitter, configure the feed to show title only, to include the item link, and to shorten the link address.
6. Select “Create”
7. Repeat 4-6 to include multiple feeds.

Each time a new item enters your RSS feed/s, a tweet will go out containing the headline and link.

Example 3: Aggregating your content from multiple sources into one location using Twitter

One of the disadvantages of the Web 2.0 environment is that it can fragment your content and your audience across many locations. You may have a main news site, several blogs, multiple comment mechanisms, a Facebook page, a Flickr photo-sharing account, etc. Twitter provides a simple mechanism that can bring all that content together back on your site. It employs a combination of examples 1 & 2 above. Here’s how:

1. Open a Twitter account (see Example 1. above)
2. Open a twitterfeed account
3. Add all the RSS feeds for the services you want to aggregate to twitterfeed (see Example 2. above)
4. Get a Twitter widget (see Example 1. above)
5. Paste the widget embed code where you want the aggregation to appear in your page.

Now, whenever anyone posts a news story, makes a blog post or comment, writes on your Facebook wall, uploads a photo, whatever–it will appear on your main site in a single location.

Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher and editor-in-chief of A List Apart, spoke to several interesting web development issues in a new video posted on Big Think. Though not as smart or celebrated as Zeldman, I’ve been thinking similar things: we’re at a point where open source tools, and open sharing of core ideas and code, enable any one of us to build great standards-compliant websites.

I was a bit floored at about 3:30 into this video when Zeldman reveals that A List Apart is moving from a Ruby on Rails CMS to ExpressionEngine.  As PubForge people may well know, I’m a big fan of EE and have been using it to build all my websites for the past two years.  Some in the open source community regard EE as a compromise in principles or something, because it’s produced, sold, and maintained by a company so its not technically open source.  My feeling has always been that EE is based on open source technologies (Apache, MySQL, and PHP), has an open API, and a huge community of developers working collaboratively around it.  The company that produced EE, EllisLab, supports it fanatically and continues to improve the product. And it only costs $99 for nonprofits (plus potentially additional dollars for certain add-ons).  EE isn’t open source in the same way Red Hat Linux isn’t.

I just want to say without offending anyone that while the whole world seems to be drinking the Drupal coolade, I think there are other legitimate CMS choices.  It seems to me the bottom line is adhering to web standards, good information architecture, sustainability of URIs, and the ability to interoperate with other systems.  That might be a good place to start for building a truly smart online public media system, no matter what CMS is involved.

Today Matthew, TC, and I had a nice phone conversation as part of the PubForge coordinating group.  In the absence of Bill and Dale, the agenda was a bit unfocused, but that lead us down some interested paths.

For one thing, we decided PubForge could be useful for publishing notes on a wide variety of topics, including software and tools we’re using or evaluating for possible use, and just stuff that might be cool, interesting, or whatever.  With that in mind, in no particular order, her are some notes on today’s call:

1) TC says she is being asked to develop some Flash animations for her site, apparently in the form of an animated logo.  We feel her pain, and hope her people will listen to PubForge when we say “don’t do it!” Flash can be great for certain things, but animated logos are no longer cool. We could also talk about accessibility here.

Cool things can certainly be done with Flash as an interface to content, for example I mentioned this page from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/15/us/politics/20090115_HOPE.html?hp.

2) A discussion of CRM software occured, in which the name Convio figured prominently.  Jack said his view of Convio is favorable but limited.  Matthew said integrating it with Allegiance is problematic.  We all said this could be a useful discussion to have with more people, to find some good experiences and best practices.

3) TC mentioned a couple of webmasterly things that look really interesting:

• An open source CMS called Concrete5 (http://www.concrete5.org/) she is working with.  We didn’t discuss lots of details about it, but on the surface it looks easy to use, and follows the MVC (model view controller) approach like Drupal.
• A cool-looking CSS framework called Bluetrip (http://bluetrip.org/), enabling simple and valid multicolumn layouts, including support for the dreaded IE.

4) Jack mentioned an online video tool called Tubemogul (http://www.tubemogul.com/index.php) which allows you to upload a video to many of the top websites (including Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo!, Revver, YouTube, etc) in one fell swoop.  It also gives you analytics.  I haven’t explored it yet, but PBS has adopted it for publishing its online video.  That either makes it cool or not-cool, I can’t keep track…

5) Finally, let me mention that I accepted the task of organizing a CMS Roundtable session at the IMA Conference next month. Which means I have to find panelists to talk about various CMSs.  So I’m looking for panelists with experience using Drupal, Plone, Joomla, and Rails.  Would also consider expanding the lineup to include other systems and frameworks, especially open source ones.  I invited TC to come talk about Concrete5, and I hope it gets her to the conference!

I think we might end up with a formal CMS Roundtable session, and another informal CMS discussion, because one session isn’t enough to cover the topic.  The information CMS session will likely also include beer.

If I forgot something, I hope the other participants in today’s PubForge call will follow up.

Yours,

Jack

Cross-posted from Publist

I thought I would throw this bit of information out there FWIW. I had been wondering how people were able to get such great meta information into the links and stories that they posted on Facebook, especially when it came to stories from news websites or blogs. I found the page on Facebook’s sharing service here http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php. It listed several meta and link tags that help the share service work better. I added these tags

• <meta name=”title” content=”page_title” />
• <meta name=”description” content=”audio_description” />
• <link rel=”image_src” xhref=”audio_image_src url (eg. album art)” />
• <link rel=”audio_src” xhref=”audio_src url” />
• <meta name=”audio_type” content=”Content-Type header field” />
• <meta name=”audio_title” content=”audio_title (eg. song name)” />
• <meta name=”audio_artist” content=”audio_artist_name” />

systematically in our CMS, modifying the code to pick up the relevant content from the database when the page is hit. It works really well, and I noticed that Digg uses the same format, leading me to believe that this is becoming an important technique for distributing our content. I apologize if this is old hat to you, but I thought that someone else might benefit from this little tidbit.

Those of us consumed with passion about metadata for A/V objects (and who isn’t…) have been excited by the emergence of the PBCore. We present here an update.

In our last dramatic PBCore episode, CPB funded a multi-year project to develop a standard for shareable metadata about audio and video productions and files. This culminated in the release of the PBCore Data Dictionary and an associated XML schema, with Version 1.0 in April 2005, and an improved Version 1.1 in January 2007.

We’ll leave an actual description of PBCore for another time and place, or get full details on the PBCore site.

It turns out PBCore is darn useful. Film archives, academic media collections, and media curators including the Library of Congress are actively pursuing systems that speak PBCore. Not to mention PBS, NPR, and a growing number of local stations. At recent AMIA conferences PBCore has been a central topic. PBCore has become relevant and possibly important to all moving image archivists, because it fills a black hole in the metadata universe concerning digital media.

Color us surprised when the initial CPB project to develop and support PBCore ran out of money last August. Forthwith, the principle developers at WGBH and elsewhere proposed a second phase, to establish a PBCore change-management process, plus funding to maintain the website, workshops, and other support activities. So far the response from CPB has been PBCore who?

What’s at stake? Considerable time and intellectual effort to develop a really good standard for A/V metadata, something everyone in the moving image community needs. Plus a certain (large) degree of credibility, because CPB was leading the PBCore effort and now we’re in some danger of abandoning PBCore. Like we somehow just forgot about it. With this project, Public Broadcasting has been a hero to the librarians and archivists, but it looks like we’re dropping the ball just when everyone wants to play.

So let’s some of us carry the PBCore torch for the next bit while pushing for further CPB action. We might have to get a bit militant. When someone ticks off the librarians, you don’t want to see what happens. Or maybe you do…

Jack Brighton
WILL Public Media

Today, in subscribing to the Podcast for PyCon 2008, I noticed this entry:

“It almost seems like a joke: a family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, KS (population 80,000) releases an open-source web framework. It’s not a joke, of course: today Django is an increasingly popular web development platform. As an open-source community Django has been incredibly successful; in Tim O’Reilly’s OSCON keynote, he called Django “the new face of open source.” But it’s often unclear how we got here. How did a couple of programmers at a newspaper convince management to contribute to the open-source ecosystem? How does the company justify the time its developers spend on open source? And how have we as individuals and as a business had to adapt to become better open source developers?”

I was then like, “Huh! A family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas? That sounds familiar?!! Could it be? Yep, it is… Rob Curley the 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speaker who “blew the roof off the Parc 55 with a dynamic presentation, illustrating his strategy of “hyper-localism.” Curley is one of the most decorated newspaper web directors in the United States. Some called it the best keynote speech–ever…” You can read more about his keynote speech here.

I remember coming away from the conference saying “I want to do what he does!” What an exciting, energizing person, who’s making a difference in his community and in the media industry. And now to find out that he’s doing it using open source technologies, and releasing a cool new web application framework based on python to boot! I find myself saying again… “I want to do what he does!”

I know there was some talk at last year’s conference about using Pubforge.org to support open source projects both within public broadcasting as well as independent media producers from beyond broadcast.net. I know too that, in addition to Pubforge.org , there’s always the Public Broadcasting Open Source Best Practices google group. There’s also the successful open source project from WNYC and KCRW, the East West Audio server. And there’s been collaborations that have not necessarily been open-source, like the momentum around the IMA’s with the Public Media Metrics project. But I wonder if the public broadcasting community could better support open source projects?

Tell me, what do you think it will take to foster a vibrant open-source community within public broadcasting? Tell me, what do you think it would take to have some real momentum around open-source software projects?

For those of you who came away from Rob Curley’s 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speech and felt, like I did, that “I want to do what he’s doing!” And for those of you who would like to do this, like Rob, using a collaborative, open source approach, tell me, is 2008 the year for us to get organized? Is this year’s Public Media conference the place for us to start?

Tags: opensourcebroadcasting, publicbroadcasting

Pubforge.org is a resource being built by a group of folks from public broadcasting organizations interested in applying open-source solutions to common problems faced in the transition from traditional to new media.  A work group met at the recent Beyond Broadcast meeting in Boston and chose this domain to be the home for discussion about these commom problems, for shared wisdom on best practices, for shared code and recommendations, and to be a repository for useful open source tools and applications.

In order to begin the work, Bill Haenel has installed this WordPress blog into the site. This is intended to be the focus for discussion. He also installed a mediawiki into the site at http://pubforge.org/pubwiki. This will be the nucleus for articles on problems, solutions, case studies, best practices, applications and projects.

We invite everyone interested in forming and exploiting a partnership between public broadcasting and the open source development community to register for this site and to contribute via the blog and the wiki.

As a means of starting the conversation here, I would like to ask people to consider the following question: What would I like to do in new media that i can’t do now with the resources capablities and knowledge now in hand?

Here are a few from my list:

• I would like to be able to integrate content from MySpace pages created by members of my station into my station.org site
• I would like a tool that makes it easy to create Google Map mashups for our news pages
• I would like to be able to grab specific items out of mutiple RSS feeds to create custom topical and regional feeds
• I want information on standards and best practices for creating video podcasts

Please post your own wish lists, then we can start identifying ones which have existing solutions, and which ones might be targets for development assistance.