Some good tips for mobile app development, marketing and evaluation
1) Boring doesn't sell
2) Your App is Good, not Great
3) Track Your Success,
4) Advertising (I'd include Marketing)
5) Highlight Features

Read through for more narrative/explanation

Great posts on tools/strategies to help support publishers in curation and aggregation. Two separate things btw (as noted by previous link). A definite must read.

"Curation platforms, which have moved beyond the RSS feed, provide varying levels of automation, functions and technology to suit a media company's needs. News organizations are even investing in curation platforms; the New York Daily News holds a stake in LOUD3R and The Washington Post recently acquired the personalized news aggregator iCurrent.

While publishers choose to utilize aggregation and curation platforms in a variety of ways, the main point is clear: Many media companies see benefits in collecting content from around the Web. Publishers find curation can attract and retain readers by offering the best of all content, rather than the best of just their own content. Here are a few ways publishers are deploying these platforms to add to their site's content"

Parsing the differences bw curation, aggreation and indexing. Important when thinking of jouranlism/publishing and community strategies and what your communities want.

I think I have to get on tumblr…

Check out these winners, especially Sunlight's coverage of the healthcare summit and ProPublica's citizen reporting project.

"Sunlight Live attracted nearly 43,000 viewers, 9,800 livebloggers, and more than 1,300 tweets…. They showed how to add journalistic punch to a carefully orchestrated government event, adding context and insight to the proceedings.. they go a step beyond to make it fun and engaging, creating a social experience around the event.”

ProPublica’s Distributed Reporting: "This investigative news site is systematizing the process of crowdsourcing, conducting experiments, polishing their process, and tasking citizens with serious assignments. Its more than 5,000 Reporting Network members have conducted spot checks on federal stimulus spending, unraveled loan modification stories, and tracked the oversight of state nursing boards, among other efforts. “This is a major step forward with how we understand crowdsourcing,” the judges said."

Seems like a great tool for real-time, community interaction, altho I worry about how trolls would take advantage and pollute. Seems moderation (i.e. staff resources) would still be needed.

"How do you get your users to interact with each other? That's a question Envolve, a new Facebook-like chat feature for websites, is trying to solve. While we have seen a number of similar services in the past, Envolve is one of the best website chat tools we have seen so far. While most sites now give users the ability to comment on blog posts or review products, website chats like Envolve offer a far more interactive experience by allowing users to chat with each other in real time."

"he latest version of social news site Digg is currently in restricted beta, with an additional 20,000 users added at the beginning of July. The new version adds the ability to "follow" people or publishers via a feature called "My News." This will be the default Digg home page, and it's prompted many to compare the new Digg to Twitter and Facebook. 198diggsdiggAnother big change is that publishers may now automatically submit their content."

"With the new Digg, publishers may opt in to having their articles auto-submitted to Digg via RSS feed. But will this stop the gaming?…The idea, said Rucker, is that the power users who succeed at attracting followers will become "tastemakers."

HuffPo integrates foursquare into their services. Check it out…

Sunlight Foundation has a great post on the ins-and-outs of managing a hack-a-thon…. Take a look…

While I think utilzing the more personal & casual platform of tumblr is a great strategy, I wonder how the biz side is going to feel about community not coming to the main web site. Or is the proportion of audience members on tumblr small enough that it doesn't matter? Or is the idea that new communities will be introduced to the media outlet via tumblr? There's much to follow here.

"Tumblr, known for its sophisticated user interaction features, has become the media's preferred platform. As it turns out, by a Tumblr spokesperson's count, there are around 20 traditional media outlets..

"…'The most exciting part is seeing publishers like BlackBook and Newsweek finding unique ways to use Tumblr that are hugely complementary to their normal publishing routine.' "

Mark Coatney, the Newsweek editor who started and maintains the magazine's Tumblr, agrees. "I think Tumblr is a great tool because it allows a really easy, natural interaction with the audience."

The Economist has claimed success with a new mobile-phone-based magazine sales ploy this week, as it reported its overall operating profit had climbed three per cent to £57.5m for the 12 months to April.

In the annual report of parent company Economist Group, its UK managing director Nigel Ludlow outlined how interest in the new sales system had grown since it was launched.

He said: "We started an innovative way for readers in the UK to buy their copy of The Economist. Readers can elect to receive a text message on their mobile telephone summarising the main stories from the issue about to go to press.

"Readers can choose to buy that issue by replying, triggering a charge to their credit card. The copy is then delivered overnight. Interest in the service has grown significantly since launch."

This is the group that I'm looking for TMC members to work with on a hack-a-thon. I'm SO EXCITED.

Interesting to think about mobile made podcasting from two perspectives.

1) To continue to encourage new forms of citizen reporting, ranging from getting the user's perspective/opinion, their observation of an event and or their interviews. This can all then be compressed, shared, packaged on social media sites (facebook groups, twitter and on organization's site). Increased interaction with audiences=increasing community building and sharing opportunities. The questions are: what types of issues, events would be best utilizing this idea? Who in your current audiences are ready to do this? What prospective audiences would you want to reach?
2) To deliver reporting, perpsectives from your own reporters/staff. What a great addition to both on-the-spot reporting/analysis You may be twittering an event all day, can you do a short audio round up? Can you audio broadcast in addition to your tweets? Think about potential new audiences you could be reaching as well.

It's The Media Consortium's MediaWire program on steroids with tech, apps, citizen engagement integrated. The collaboration is the Public Media Platform, a partnership bw American Public Media, NPR, PBS, Public Radio International, and Public Radio Exchange.

"The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country."

The Public Media Platform is “a series of platforms that will allow all of the content from all of those entities — whether news or cultural products — to flow freely amongst the partners and member stations, and ultimately, also to other publishers, other not-for-profits and software developers who will invent wonderful new products that we can’t even imagine,” said Vivian Schiller of NPR.