Content Wise

Follow the Stanford Web Workshop Online

For the next few days we'll be in sunny Monterey, teaching workshops and directing the Web site critiques at Stanford's Publishing on the Web conference.

If you're there too, we looking forward to meeting and working with you. If not, we invite you to tune in to some of the action online:

• Read the combined stream of Twitter messages from conference-goers who are participating in our "team reporting" exercise. As they attend sessions, they'll post micro-messages that highlight useful factoids, surprising insights, and quotable quotes from conference speakers. If you have a Twitter account, you can add your own comments to the stream by including the label "#pow08" at the beginning or end of your "tweets."
• Follow the conference's official Twitter (both during and after the event) for announcements, updates, etc. If you have your own Twitter account, click "follow" while on the workshop's Twitter page; that will automatically add all official postings from the conference to the updates appearing on your own Twitter page.
• Check out the Web workshop's social network.
• Get a vicarious version of the killer view here by clicking on the image at right. It will take you to a Web cam run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And start making plans to attend this conference next year.

Surveying the Digital Revolution in Book Publishing

The International Herald Tribune just published a good roundup of the digital developments that are reshaping book publishing.

Reporter Eric Pfanner starts with Google's recent deal with American authors and publishers allowing the company to sell electronic versions of titles that are out of print. That covers most of the world's books, he points out.

"But the agreement is only one of many initiatives under which books are making what may be the biggest technological leap since Gutenberg invented the printing press."

He goes on to survey predictions of digital sales, trends among suppliers and consumers of mobile readers, and digital programs undertaken by European libraries.

Crowdsourcing the Presidential Vote With Twitter

Among the coverage of yesterday's remarkable presidential election is yet another remarkable application of the microblogging platform Twitter: a sort of nationwide team-based journalism exercise to report on potential problems at polling places.

The Twitter Vote Report project enlisted a slice of that very large crowd of folks who cast their ballots on Tuesday to monitor moods, wait times, irregularities, and many other indicators of how the voting process went.

Volunteers sent in field reports via their Twitter feeds or by texting on cellphones and other mobile applications. Vote Report invented a few "hash tags" for the occasion to facilitate the concise updates: "#votereport" to tag the message as an official field report, "#good" for no problems, "#wait" to report delays in getting into a booth, "#machine" to signal trouble with voting machines, and so on. (For more details on the hash tags, see Vote Report's explanation of how to participate.)

Various Web-based tools, some pre-existing and some created just for this project, enabled viewers to tune in to and follow the ups and downs all over the country. It was pretty amazing to watch the national flood of "tweets" in real time.

At a more local level, here, at right, is what a query for our neighborhood zip code turned up on Twitter Search. (How'd we miss the bake sale?)

Sporadic peeks at Twitter Vote Report yesterday suggested that despite isolated missteps, for the most part the voting went smoothly. We may hear more as folks pore over the streams.

But regardless of what the effort turned up, it's how the project tackled this reporting job that should interest Web publishers. Once again, social media and crowdsourcing point in some tantalizing directions.

What can your crowd help you report on?