Podcast: ReportingOn allows journalists to ask & answer questions for better reporting

Ryan Sholin’s Knight News Challenge funded project ReportingOn just hit version 2.0 with a new design and some new features that Sholin hopes help journalists improve their reporting by connecting journalists on like beats together.

The site itself looks similar to Twitter and Yahoo! Answers and is centered around people asking questions and receiving answers from knowledgeable people. For example, technology reporters can get together and seek help from each other. The site is also a great tool for journalists to discover knowledgeable people that they don’t already know.

In fact that discovery of new people is one reason Sholin isn’t currently allowing people to important contacts from Gmail and other services. He wants journalists to meet new experts and sources, and believes that meeting new people can only help journalists’ reporting.

Asking and answering questions is the heart of ReportingOn. For instance Chris Amico recently asked, “I’m looking into US foreign aid funding and spending. Anyone know a good source for data on the subject? Especially which agencies/departments (USAID, DoD, State) distribute funds?”

That question was met with a response from Chrys Wu, “Start with foreign aid data from U.S. Census Bureau: http://tr.im/sm4e . Information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis may also be useful to you: http://www.bea.gov/scb/index.htm”

Users have profiles that show their recent activity, how many questions they have asked, how many questions they have answered, whether people liked their responses and more. Users now get points based on whether or not people like their answers. This point-based system is an incentive for users to submit quality answers and is also a way for people to see how knowledgeable and helpful a user is.

Sholin said on the ReportingOn blog that the point system will be expanding in the future:

A points-based system in RO 2.0 helps feed the egos of power users while acting as a guide, beat-by-beat, to who might have a good answer for your question.  There are still leaderboards to be built, and I’m thinking up other ways to use the points system to motivate users, especially as the network gets off the ground.

ReportingOn originaly had a 140-character limit like Twitter, but Sholin got rid of that feature/limitation. He realized that it works well for Twitter, but ReportingOn questions and answers sometimes needed more space:

As has been pointed out more than a few times, Twitter is a good place to start an argument, but a really poor place to finish one.  Although I’d hesitate to frame the sort of exploratory, qualitative Q & A that could happen on ReportingOn as “argument” or “debate,” I’d like to believe that highlighting a “good answer” as noted by the person who asked the question will help lead to a permanent archive for reporting resources in a way that Twitter simply doesn’t do.

To put a finer point on it, if I ask a question of my followers on Twitter and I get a great answer, I get it in a stream of replies that are useful to a certain subset of Twitter users at that moment, but fly right by in the stream and never come back unless I pull them out of the flow of Twitter and display them somewhere.  At this particular moment in time, Twitter’s search functionality is highly ephemeral in nature, as it starts and stops indexing from time to time, and rarely dips back in the chronology as far as might be useful.  So where the quick-answer utility of Twitter stops, the long-term archive of ReportingOn begins.

ReportingOn is still young and doesn’t have a large user base, but it does hold promise to help connect journalists from around the country who cover similar topics and beats. Journalists working together can be exponentially more powerful and impactful than journalists working alone. Collaboration is here to stay.

Some topics discussed in our conversation:

• How can ReportingOn help improve a journalist’s work?
• How does Sholin envision ReportingOn being used after it becomes more popular?
• What’s next for ReportingOn? What new features may be developed?
• ReportingOn’s code is open source. What could news orgs do with that code?
• Why would someone want to leave an answer?
• And much more.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.

Thursday Dose of social media: How to get retweeted

HOW TO: Get retweeted on Twitter – Getting retweeted on Twitter is a great way to gain more followers. It turns out there is a science behind getting retweeted. Here are a couple of take home points from this excellent post:

• People like links — Tweets with links in them are much more likely to be retweeted.
• Complex tweets get retweeted — This may seem counter-intuitive, but tweets that require a higher reading level are more likely to get retweeted. Don’t try to make your tweets more complex to get them retweeted, but rather, don’t dumb down your tweets either.

This post over at Mashable also has a bunch of sexy charts and graphs.

ReportingOn 2.0 is live — Creator Ryan Sholin dubs it as “the backchannel for your beat.” Here are some excerpts from Sholin’s post announcing the new version:

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it’s a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in.

We’ll have in-depth coverage of ReportingOn 2.0 soon. But I strongly encourage journalists to check it out ASAP.

Google enhances Gmail labeling with drag and drop feature, retires right-side labels — I’m on the record as saying that Gmail is the best e-mail solution around, especially for work. It’s powerful search features alone make it great, but Google keeps improving Gmail, making it even more irresistible for content producers:

Of the more innovative features that has been added is the ability to drag and drop messages into labels, just like you can with folders. You can also drag labels onto messages too. It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them, making it easier to change labels than going to the Settings function. This feature is huge for those people who complain about Gmail not having some of the drag and drop features of Outlook.

Facebook for iPhone 3.0 Coming Soon – Preview and Details — The biggest take away from this story is that nearly 25 percent of iPhone users us the Facebook app. That’s simply staggering.

The Facebook app is quite good, and it’s probably one reason why the network is growing much faster than the faltering MySpace. In addition, the new Facebook app looks incredibly good. Later this summer, the Facebook app will be getting push notifications.

Facebook started as a Web site, but it has moved into other grounds, like mobile apps. This is a lesson that content producers, journalists, newspapers and others should take to heart. Just because you start doing one thing, doesn’t mean you can’t do something else (especially something that is the logical next step).

Twitter increases API limit to 150 –This is huge news for Twitter users who use Twitter clients. Before, power users would run out of API calls (it was set at 100) and would have to wait for their API limit to reset every hour. This increase certainly makes clients like TweetDeck even more irresistible for work purposes.