Gaming meets journalism: HuffPo takes a step

Ran across some really cool news today. Huffington Post announced that it is implementing a badge system as part of a way to build up its user community. For now you have three possible badges on the site: one for having a lot of social connections across the site, one for adding a lot of comments, and one for flagging inappropriate comments that ultimately lead to deletion.

This is huge, and I can’t state this enough. It’s taking some of the game-oriented concepts found in location-based apps such as Foursquare or Gowalla and implementing them in news delivery. These simple games build on the notion that object collection in gaming can be rewarding, and by applying them to news formats HuffPo encourages behaviors complementary to what the news site wants to accomplish.

When I got to Lehigh I hardly imagined being the guy advocating gaming concepts in news, but here I go again. I have already said quite a bit about gaming and news, such as the potential with Foursquare, Gowalla, and transmedia as a way of bringing context to our news (the latter of which is an offshoot of a great panel at SXSW), but it’s emerged as a running theme on this blog over the course of the year

This is not an entirely new idea. Gawker, for example, uses tiered comments by giving the community’s best users a star icon. Gizmodo also recently unveiled a tiered system where valued users get better placement in the commenting thread. It’s a recognition of a lesson we’ve learned in blogland: comments and community are content that should be valued in a same what that the original article should be valued.

Here’s what I love about HuffPo is doing by taking this to another level: the gaming aspect has a purpose.

The third badge, called “Moderator,” is given to those who are on the lookout for comments that clash with the site’s mission of civility. The concept of community moderation in comments is not new, of course, with Slashdot being a good example of how it can work well. The badge isn’t given for random flagging, though, but rather for flagging posts that eventually get deleted. Quality over quantity when it comes to moderation.

I wonder whether in doing it this way it also helps teach the user community about the site’s values by having people flag inappropriate comments with the site’s values and mission in mind. At the SXSW “Future of Context” panel we talked about gaming as a type of learning about the news, but this could be an extension of that by showing users what it means to be a user in a news community.

At the same time, the “Superuser” badge (boo for stealing that one so shamelessly from Foursquare) is given to prolific commenters. So right away you have two badges that work together to increase comment volume while also allowing for ways to up the quality.

There are good reasons to think HuffPo’s system is going to work. Nieman Lab noted that by emphasizing quality in comments it actually led to more and better comments in the Gawker universe of products. This makes logical sense; if I think my post is going to be buried by the community, I will try to make it entertaining, witty, insightful, etc.

The one I’m excited about is the “Networker” badge because this is at the heart of the scholarly stuff I think about. My dissertation argued a new type of social capital known as Web-network social capital, which basically consists of the networks and ties created in user communities for the purposes of building that online community. The badge looks like it has potentinal to start increasing and rewarding network ties. We’ve already started seeing people thinking about Farmville and the potential for building social ties through gaming. WNSC has the potential to explain some of what we’re seeing, and sites that look to build it are helping to create something unique in the process.

When I argued for WNSC, I was looking broadly at social networks and blogs. What excites me about gaming entering the news is that this is a further area for study and a potential growth area for news sites interested in building up communities that help serve a site’s core mission.

HuffPo says it will be adding more (my suggestion: “I’m on a boat”). Of all the new avenues I’ve seen in news this year, Gowalla tours and this effort by HuffPo are two that have my eye. Gaming holds a lot of potential for news outlets, and I hope they’re paying attention.

Gowalla: Trippin’ on journalism

A few months ago I blogged about Foursquare and its journalism implications. The post was pretty well received and it created a tremendous conversation online, but I wanted to post an update on our first foray into location-based offerings here at Lehigh.

When I was at SXSW last month I got my first look at Gowalla, which is similar to Foursquare in that it uses location services, check-ins, and little incentives for keeping you in the game. I like Foursquare’s interface a bit better and find their badge system more appealing, but Gowalla has a couple things it does better.

First, you can create trips. What this means is a user can go to the Gowalla site and create a themed trip (“top places to eat downtown” for example) that a user’s Gowalla friends can then participate in by following the trip by going to the places listed and checking in on their smart phone. I like this because it means you can have people participate in social mapping, but in a journalistic sense it also lets us put geolocation layers on stories and let the audience experience key locations in a story themselves. And Gowalla has done a great job integrating the Google map function into the application so that getting walking directions is easy. Read more

Hitler meme: What, did newspapers take over YouTube too?

Something tragic happened yesterday for those of us who breathe a little Web culture. YouTube acquiesced to a request from Constantin Film to begin removing videos that feature a short segment from the studio’s 2004 German-subtitled movie Downfall.

Not an unusual request by copyright standards, of course, but this one is personal. The segment in question fuels one of the greatest Web memes of all time: the Hitler meme.

You’ve probably seen at least one Hitler meme video. They all have one thing in common: the same climactic scene from Downfall, where Adolf Hitler learns that his rule is about to end. The subtitles take a scene full of rage and realization and apply it to a variety of things happening in society or on the Web, including politics, entertainment, pop culture, and so forth. Here’s one of my favorites, from the 2008 presidential campaign:

Yeah, OK, we’ll get it out of the way early: “Anyone who thinks YouTube’s decision to take the videos off their service is a good idea, please leave the room now.” Read more

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With the iPad, you’ve gotta think about it

I’ve had a number of conversations in the past few days with people who don’t seem to know what to do with the iPad. Buy? Don’t buy? Is this going to change my life? Is it going to be a waste of money?

If you’re still confused, Guy Kawasaki posted a pretty good decision-point flowchart that might help you out. It’s pretty funny and even this Apple fanboy can admit it’s pretty right on.

I posted the other day that the iPad is a complementary device for almost everyone. You aren’t going to ditch your desktop and likely won’t ditch your laptop for it, although you might get rid of the latter if you don’t use your laptop for much more than news browsing, video/photos, and e-mail. No, the iPad is a device for consuming media while comfortable.

My wife’s latest issue of Newsweek seems to confirm this idea (pictured). The back page of the mag has an iPad ad featuring a person writing a fairly mundane e-mail. Interesting, but the feature isn’t the thing. Notice the positioning. It’s on the user’s lap, feet propped up and crossed.

Apple has a little more of a sell job on its hands than it had with the iPod and iPhone. The iPod was a breath of fresh air after a few years where tons of complicated MP3 players had flooded the market. It simplified the mobile music experience and solved all kinds of problems related to music purchase thanks to the iTunes store. The iPhone filled a similar void. A lot of smartphones were of the BlackBerry variety, with reputations more rooted in business use than personal use. The smartphone market wasn’t going to grow past the business base unless a smartphone came along that was fun and easy to use.

The iPad is different. Consumers have to think a little harder about whether this device makes sense for them. Unlike the iPad and iPhone, most people don’t have a tablet computer and haven’t thought about one. So people have to sit down and think about how they browse and use media before taking the plunge.

That’s why I think Apple has created ads such as the above. It’s selling features in a sense, but Apple also is tying it to a type of experience. In this case, comfortable media browsing. We’re going to see more of this, not less. Obviously Apple has to sell what the iPad can do, but it also has to help people imagine what it can be or what spaces in our lives it might occupy if this is going to go mass market.

iPad is impressive if you’re grounded in reality

I love it. I love the iPad.

I had some big expectations going in, but I was really blown away by the 20-25 minutes I spent with it on Saturday at the Apple Store in Whitehall. I have to admit I got a bit of iPad envy watching my friends tweeting, blogging, and Facebooking about getting their iPad, knowing full well I have to wait another few weeks until my pre-ordered 3G model arrives. Although I did receive my VGA connector by FedEx on Saturday, so I’ve got that going for me. …

So I did the next best thing, and that was to sneak in a little time to play at the Apple Store in between some other shopping. By 6 p.m. the crowds were thinned from what had been there earlier, but there were still pretty sizable crowds around the 12-or-so display iPads.

There was a lot of buzz in the air to go with the nonstop media coverage around the device this weekend. But the question is whether it’s worth the hype and, more importantly, that spare $500 that I’m sure we all have just lying around the house.

People are saying this will be a netbook killer or (even more audacious) a laptop killer. I don’t agree, but I do think it has a chance to kill something else: the iPhone.

Before I get to that, some first impressions: Read more