Testing the concept at NOSop3 in Hilversum

May 2, 2012 • 11:44 am

Last Thursday (26/04/12) we were at the news floor of NOSop3 to test our concept. We wanted to know how the news subjects are chosen en how the editorial staff can work with the selection of the ‘online reporters’. We started in the morning with the gathering of the news. The staff meeting started at 10 am. In this meeting every reporter pitched an on going news item. A selection of those news items is written down on the board, some items are for the web others are mainly for the TV broadcast.

News subjects:

  • Orange campsite Olympics London 2012
  • Reportage refugee North-Korea
  • Animal Cops, cancelled too soon?
  • Chinese soap Bo Xi Lai
  • Portrait Jan Kees de Jager/ debate government cutbacks

After the first selection was made we started to search for online reporters who are active on Twitter. For two of the news subjects we tried to find online reporters because those subjects were interesting and active on Twitter. Around the other subjects there was not much happening on Twitter so our selection was:

  • Portrait Jan Kees de Jager/ debate government cutbacks
  • Animal Cops, cancelled too soon?

We wanted to select Dion Graus from the PVV as an online reporter about the Animal Cops, but sadly he doesn’t have a twitter account. Frits Wester, reporter from RTL tweeted a lot about the Animal Cops that day, but we couldn’t select him because he works for RTL. We selected the account of the Dutch animal welfare organisation, they want to keep the Animal Cops and proof the benefits of those cops. As second reporter we wanted to select police chief Henk van Essen, he is strongly against the Animal Cops because it is at the cost of the deployment of the regular police force. Henk van Essen has a Twitter account, but didn’t use it in the past few months. More options are other police spokesman or people involved with the 144 emergency calls. But those are quite hard to find on Twitter. It is possible but it is quite a job for the editorial staff. In the end this news item wasn’t selected as TV item. So we had to choose the other news subject anyway.

NOSop3 broadcasted a portrait about demissionair minister Jan Kees de Jager, for us this was a good link to the cutback debate later that day, the agreement was made possible by Jan Kees de Jager. The debate was the online topic of the day. We selected quite a few online reporters and discussed them with the NOS editors. In the end we have chosen for Jelmer Uitentuis, Jaap Jansen and Roland. This worked well, in the end those three reporters tweeded a lot about the government cutbacks.

Jelmer Uitentuis, political young blogger

Joost Vullings, reporter NOS Radio 1

Jaap Jansen, active political Twitter user

Sander Etman, student with a strong own opinion

Roland, PVV enthusiast with a lot of debate on his Twitter profile

Watch the newsbroadcast NOSop3 of Thursday 26/04/12 here:
http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1250327

Wereldkans voor beginnend (web)app-developer!

April 13, 2012 • 2:11 pm • , , , , , ,


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Email Menno Jongejan voor meer info op interactivenewsformats@gmail.com

PDF: vacatureiOSdeveloper

All your API’s are belong to us!

April 13, 2012 • 1:08 pm

 

Yesterday SETUP, a centre for creation and innovative new media in Utrecht, organized a session on API’s. Goal was to show that without any knowledge of API’s it is still possible to create a cool, arty mashup-website, using input from different API’s and freely available webtools.

The evening was led by self-confessed professional nerd and API king Heinze Havinga of Leftfootmedia. After a short explanation of what API’s are and what you can do with them by Phd candidate Anne Helmond, we took off and started building our own Procatinator-clone. Combining the Soundcloud-api, the unofficial Google text2speech-api, Twitter-api, Flickr and webtools Yahoo Pipes and IFTTTT we created our very first mashup on ducks. Because everybody loves ducks! Result: an arty website on which tweets about ducks are converted to speech, stored on a Souncloud-account and played on a website, accompanied by duck pictures and some ambient music. How cool is the result?! This cool!

Afterwards there was time for drinks and networking. Valuable lessons where learned on the technical difficulties of our second screen-application and the use of the Twitter-api.

Interview with Rob Prass

March 12, 2012 • 8:56 am • ,

On the 6th of March 2012 we did an interview with Rob Prass, teacher at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The reason why we did the interview is because Rob knows a lot about Television and Interactive Television Formats.

Before we asked Rob some questions we told him about our own research about Interactive News Formats, Second Screen and Gamification of the News and we showed him some examples we found during our research. Rob told us that there are some other examples about Interactive News Formats on the website of broadbandbananas.com

We asked Rob if we missed some example about Interactive News Formats, Second Screen and Gamification of the News. According to Rob we did a good research about our subjects and he told that some companies (Example like imgzine.com) in the Netherland are working on Augmented reality based on news.

During our interview we ask Rob about his own experience with Interactive Television Formats. He said that the BBC is working a lot with HbbTV and the BBC have a good user survey and we should take a look at it.

The interview with Rob was very useful and he gave us a lot of tips!

 

Research Document: Interactive News Formats // Living document

March 9, 2012 • 2:27 pm • , , , , , , ,

Meeting ExMachina

March 9, 2012 • 10:43 am • , , ,

On a sunny thursday afternoon our team met up at ExMachina’s industrial-looking office in the center of Amsterdam. In store was a brainstormsession with ExMachina’s COO Thomas Glas.

As leading interactive game developer ExMachina has developed several second screen applications for prominent costumers like The Voice of Holland and Germany’s Next Top Model, using their Play-to-TV platform. Function: creating interaction, stickyness, exposure and data analyses tools for their customer.

It ended up being a very inspirational session with some great learnings we would like to share with you. Let’s first cover the basics.

First, Thomas reminded us of the great reach NOSop3’s media mix has. There are great possibilities to incorporate these in one overall platform, and is a great marketing tool. Next to that, the news program is live on air. This offers great opportunity for engagement. According to Thomas there are three phases around the live program: prologue – program – epilogue. These are the three phases around the program to work with. And don’t forget about the opportunities for second screen during the radio show.

Second, it’s all about the user. Thomas’ shared his companies philosophy of never being ‘more than one click away from your target audience’. In his view its tremendously important to cover all platforms and all media. And about it being all about the user: keep it simple and complementary for the user, and use the users sensitivity for impulses. Example: when creating a quiz, use the statistics in your show. Users enjoy the feeling of having contributed. You need the users’ feedback. Let him know this and reward. Engagement is key. As is completing your feedback loop.

Last, Thomas shared one of their succesfull Belgian concepts: an interschool battle where schools, through a second screen application, participate in a quiz resulting in an overview of Belgians’ best high school. Knowing NOSop3 has a desire to reach schools or publish content on their trend screens, this might be an interesting approach.

We are well on our way towards concepting. Interesting times, interesting people and flow is high. We are looking forward to telling you more about our concept phase soon!

Presentation by Journalist, TV-maker, anchorman

March 7, 2012 • 7:35 am • , , , ,

On tuesday March 6th we’ve visited the educational “minor-television”. They invited Art Rooijakker who works for Dutch TV and gave an Q&A on making television.

We found out that the “makers” in Hilversum are not working that much on connected-tv formats, which gives us the possibility to bring something new!

It was an inspiring talk on the business in Hilversum and how to get there.

Remotely.TV

February 29, 2012 • 8:53 am • , , , , ,

Last week I used the second screen application Remotely.tv on the iPad while I was watching the 8 pm NOS news broadcast. For each television program Remotely.tv combines Twitter conversations with extra information gathered from Wikipedia and Google Maps about the subjects related to that program. In this way all social conversation about the different television programs are shown on one website.

The extra information shown is quite basic for now. Information about chemical elements, geographic locations and persons are shown in the Remotely.tv timeline. At the moment it really works for detailed information about persons referred to in a television program. At a glance you see the current age, occupation and resent work for each person mentioned on television.

Remotely.tv is currently in Beta-status. Sometimes extra information is given for obvious matters like water, Europe and the Netherlands on unnecessary moments. And every now and the algorithms portray the wrong information altogether. Like during the NOS news broadcast I watched: where the Dutch queen Beatrix was mentioned on the news and Remotely.tv interpreted her Majesty not as the queen of Holland but as Linux-based operating system BeatrIX, based on information on Wikipedia.

So Remotely.tv needs some time for fine-tuning but they will get there in the end. We like the idea behind Remotely.tv, and are very interested in the possibilities this platform has.

Somewhere next week we have a brainstorm session with Mark van de Crommert from Remotely.tv. We will write about our ideas and first concepts later this week. So stay tuned…

A meeting with the assigner

February 21, 2012 • 3:25 pm • , , , , , , , ,

An early morning for us students, as we were expected at the NOS head office on Hilversums’ Mediapark at 9 in the morning. In store were a tour of the NOS news floor and a meeting with James Tjan, project coordinator New Media. Our primary goal: gather information on NOS’s new media projects, inform Maike of our progress  and get an overall feeling of NOSop3’s atmosphere.

First of all NOSop3’s Maike Olij gave us a grand tour of the NOS news floor. The actual news floor of NOS is enormous. “The biggest of Europe”, as Maike proudly stated. The news floor consist of several ‘islands’, all with their own subject (ie. economy) or specialization. The Sports-department has their own floor. We had the chance to see the actual broadcasting studio, which is much smaller than it looks on television. Well, they say television adds a few pounds, right?!


 The tour finished right in time for the daily NOSop3-meeting. During this meeting all possible subjects for internet, radio and television are discussed. Our team was given the opportunity to contribute to todays news, resulting in a post on NOSop3’s website. Team Interactive News Formats represent!

After being delayed by meetings we met up with James Tjan. James is the big man when it comes to the implementation of New Media formats and researching possibilities. During this useful meeting we learned a lot about the efforts the NOS has been putting into the development of Second Screen-apps and Connected TV opportunities. Result is a good overview of these efforts and how we fit into this picture. James was visibly happy with the fact us four MediaLAB-talents whereworking on format design as well.

We strive to keep him happy and blow NOSop3 away with an incredible format. So stay tuned!

Check that promo!

February 13, 2012 • 1:21 pm • , , , , , ,

It’s monday today, in our freezing MediaLAB-office on the seventh floor of the Singelgracht building. Introduction week is over, and time to get serious. In this post:  our first meeting with the assigner, MediaLAB possibly powered by Nespresso, Curating Reality-seminar and as promised our promotional movie.

Our first week was a busy one. Lots of meetings, getting to know the team mates, presentations and a day of seminars on thursday. Wednesday we had our first meeting with Maike Olij. Maike is our assigner and works for the NOS. Being very open, Maike gave us the opportunity to fire our questions, enabling us to precisely clarify the scope of the project. We have learned that just about anything is possible, as long as it’s innovative, fresh and involves the watcher. The project emphasis on the web.

The MediaLAB kindly supplied us with a Nespresso coffee machine, but no pads. As we all know Nespresso pads are expensive and students are poor. All of them. So we initiated contact with our hopefully soon-to-be friends of Nespresso, asking them for a half year supply of coffee cups. In return we offered them a bumper in our promotional movie. Let’s see what Nespresso responds.To be continued!

Cool speakers on friday’s seminar Curating Reality at the OBA (public library of Amsterdam). Tunesian blogger Sami, who played an important role in the Tunesian Spring online, gave a presentation on the important role social media played during the rebellions in his home country.  Jeroen Smit, Professor of Journalism at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen, inspired every aspiring investigative journalist to take matter in own hands and “stop complaining and start thinking”. Webwerelds’ Brenno de Winter elaborated on his ventures with Trans Link Sytems’ OV-chipkaart and The Guardians’ Roger Smit showed how masses of data can be streamlined and simplified with infographics. Useful stuff!

In the previous post we promised you our promotional movie and we are very proud to show you our final result. The movie was edited by team member Marcha-Lie Moal. Idea by all team members and the shots where made at the Magere Brug in Amsterdam.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikRZnqejY0w[/youtube]

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