A recent post in the Guardian’s Apps blog reported that the newspaper had been able to get more than than 2 million readers use its Web app, since its launch in June 2011.

It decided to break away from the Apples apps ecosystem when the latter sought an increased share of subscription revenues. "The sticking point for the FT was less about Apple’s demand for a 30% cut of subscription revenues for people signing up from its native app, and more about a lack of access to data on those subscribers. The FT says its app has boosted its mobile business to the extent where it now drives 12% of FT.com subscriptions and 19% of traffic."

The runaway success - if we can call it that - of the FT app, raises interesting questions about the approach newspapers should adopt to delivering content on multiple platforms. Being a financial newspaper might mean having a different readership matrix compared to a general newspaper, but still, will this approach work for a general newspaper too?

I had in a previous post said why news sites should consider responsive design as having solutions to the design problems caused by the diversity of devices, platforms and screen sizes. This is how Smashing Magazine had in an article described responsive design: "Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market."

I had also in another post described how sites like the Boston Globe seem to have embraced responsive design.

Well the BBC has long-term term plans to incorporate responsive design into its mobile sites and later extend it to its main sites as well.

       Image credit: BBC

“The BBC certainly isn’t the first to use responsive design, but we do believe we’re the first big news site to start to use it for such a large audience, certainly in the UK,” said a recent post on the BBC Internet blog. "Our plan is to gradually "optimise" and deliver essential features roughly in order of device size and complexity, starting with the smallest and simplest."  The mobile website and apps account for 26 per cent of BBC’s traffic and at some point the figures will account for more visitors than the regular website. So, the future lies in the responsive way, the post says.

A few days ago Frédéric Filloux said in a post on The Guardian’s Monday note, "For the first time in our history, Facebook drove more traffic to guardian.co.uk than Google for a number of days, accounting for more than 30% of our referrer traffic. This is a dramatic result from a standing start five months ago."

"Eighteen months ago, search represented 40% of the Guardian’s traffic and social represented just 2%. Six months ago – before the launch of our Facebook app – these figures had barely moved."

It makes sense for news sites to make use of the huge Facebook base to push content and attract traffic, especially when it the volumes are so astoundingly large. So what’s this app? And how does it work?

Many media houses had partenered with Facebook last September to try out these new generation apps that aims at promoting what’s been called "frictionless sharing" In the case of the Guardian app, readers get the option to try it out when they visit the site. If they choose to do so they end up reading stories in the Facebook app environment and get to see the gamut of Guardian stories in a context that is driven by the Facebook actions of a mass of readers.

The Guardian on Facebook

This is how the Guardian’s Matin Belam described it in a blog post some time ago: Our Facebook app is an opt-in alternative way to read our content. We don’t specifically edit it or choose which articles appear. It is entirely driven by user actions, and we were able to build it because of the Guardian’s Open Platform API. Any article, video, photo gallery, podcast or audio clip available in the API can appear in the app. Any link to the Guardian that appears within Facebook is a gateway into the app, whether posted on one of our on Facebook pages, or organically shared by someone pressing the Facebook share button on our site.

The so called frictionless sharing has its share of critics, particularly because it raised privacy-related questions. Would you want your Facebook friends to know about what you have been reading on the Guardian site (though you can control it using Facebook settings)?

What kind of readership and reading accounts for this huge surge in traffic? Are they likely to grow the pool of new regular readers? Is the app turning occasional readers into regular ones?

Filloux believes that the app extends the site’s access to a large group of young people and gives unique insights via Facebook metrics. But the readers are hardly of the persistent kind and above all the dependence on Facebook should be viewed with caution, he says. That is a very sensible way of looking at it.

The tool, Timeline, was created by Zach Wise, a journalism teacher, who found that existing tools did not  meet the requirements that he was seeking.  

It is JavaScript and CSS based, and renders timelines in the browser. "It can pull content from a JSON feed or from content stored in a Google spreadsheet. The open-source code is available on GitHub."

Which essentially means that timelines can be created without dependency on Flash.

Timeline via kwout

And some months ago ProPublica had released TimelineSetter, again an open source tool for creating interactive HTML timelines. It uses input from CSV files to generate the timeline.

The tool has gained a set of users from the media world.

"You don’t have to be a programmer to use it, but do you do need to be comfortable using software from the command line," the post on the ProPublica Nerd Blog had said. "TimelineSetter works by simply “baking out” static assets. It doesn’t require a server at all, and can be hosted anywhere."

The Blog also had a very recent post explained in some detail exactly what goes into the making of a timeline - no better way to understand how the tool is being used.

There are different kinds of metadata specifications that could be  used and rNews is the name of a new specification that’s  being developed in relation to the presentation of news content, based on an existing technical specification called RDFa. 

I had said that  it might take some time for it to be finalised and adopted by media organisations. It doesn’t seem to be taking that much time - the New York Times has started implementing it and in a recent post has come up reasons, compelling or not, as to the advantages that accrue from doing so.

This blog had also tracked the emergence of another specification called Schema.org,  proposed by  Google, Bing and Yahoo will help sites "learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. "

Schema.org  subsequently expanded its support for rNews, and what the Times implemented is a "Schema.org-flavored variant of rNews".

So what are the advantages of implementing rNews, according to a post on the Times’ Open blog?

Better presentation of news story elements in search results: "rNews may not improve your search rank, it promises to improve the quality and appearance of your search results. In other words, rNews can help with the other SEO: Search Experience Optimization."

Better link generation in an automated environment: "When a social site or aggregator creates an automatic link to a news document it must scrape the relevant metadata from the target page and hope for the best. With rNews, however, publishers can explicitly provide the metadata needed to create attractive links. "

Better support for third party tools:  "Modern publishers rely on a variety of first and third party tools to manage, monitor and curate their content. Many of these tools could offer a better value to the publisher were they to better understand the content’s underlying structure. "

The post also charts out the first steps in exploring rNews; the success of the standard will lie in its widespread adoption and implementation.

The mobile apps vs mobile sites or browser-based apps issue is a tricky one that all sites have to deal with.  As Mr Nielsen observes, building device-specific apps are expensive. What’s worse is that they make the delivery of content a nightmare because of the complexity of content presentation associated with different device-specific environments.

But then, apps provide a better user experience overall, so they make sense now. "Mobile applications are more usable than mobile-optimized websites because only limited optimization is possible during website design. An app can target the specific limitations and abilities of each individual device much better than a website can while running inside a browser."

But some sites like the Financial Times have famously switched over to mobile web apps in recent times and have done fabulously well. But as Mr Nielsen notes the reasons have had more to do with business aspects than usability, "publishers are tired of having a huge share of subscription revenues confiscated by app store owners."

Mobile apps will become even more expensive to produce and sustain because of the diversity of emerging platforms.

But Web apps will triumph in the long run because "mobile sites will retain some cross-platform capabilities, so you won’t need as many different designs. High-end sites will need 3 mobile designs to target phones, mid-sized tablets (like Kindle Fire), and big tablets. Using ideas like responsive design will let you adapt each of these site versions to a range of screen sizes and capabilities. The same basic UI design will work for both a 6.8-inch tablet and a 7.5-inch tablet if you simply shrink or stretch things a bit."

He’s unsure when the shift will happen, though. "Today, if you are serious about creating the best possible mobile user experience, my advice is to develop apps," he says.

The Financial Times Web app was able garner over one million users from the time of its launch in June 2011 and November that year:

"The launch of the FT Web App has significantly boosted mobile and tablet traffic. FT.com now sees 20% of total page views and 15% of new B2C subscriptions each week coming directly from mobile and tablet devices. These readers are also more engaged, with FT.com users who register on mobiles and tablets 2.5 times more likely to subscribe, as well as being more active in giving feedback."

Source:  FT.com; Link: FT Web App registers one million users

The Nieman Journalism Lab blog featured a post  recently about Deep Dive an experimental project of the New York Times that seeks to use metadata (or the data that is used to describe data, like tags) to create an interface for exploring a range of stories that are contextually related.  The post said, "… instead of performing a search yourself within the Times and weeding out off-topic results, Deep Dive would provides readers a collection of stories relating to a topic." 

About two years ago Google had launched a project project called Living Stories that tried to create a time-line based contextual interface to bring onto a page stories on a particular developing theme.  The project description on the Google project home page says, "The basic idea of a living story is to combine all of the news coverage on a running story on a single page. Every day, instead of writing a new article on the story that sits at a new URL and contains some new developments and some old background, a living story resides at a permanent URL, that is updated regularly with new developments."

These are just random examples of how organisations are trying to create a better environment for exploiting the rich repository of stories that is at their disposal.

Creating a metadata enriched base for stories is becoming more important. Companies that see a lot more in metadata than a mere mechanism to  pull stories together a set of associated stories on a page will be able to push this trend further in more radical ways.

And there already are pointers towards transforming raw data into ‘narrative content’. This post on O’Reilly Radar recently described an entrepreneurial project aimed at transforming data into ’stories’ in a general context.

"A story in Vanity Fair that is the product of 30 conversations, for instance, is not something we would ever try to do. Also, stories that are more opinion based are outside our realm. But again, as more information is transformed into machine-readable data, there are more opportunities for us to use that data to expand our realm of possibility, " said one of those associated with the project.

So, data is the flavour of the season.

Blog design too becomes important, but the problem that some media organisations face is the integration of a legacy blogging platform with their modern content management systems.

In some of these systems it’s as easy as enabling a module, but the BBC recently explained how it dealt with this issue in relation to its CMS. Its blogs were hosted on Movable Type and there were "significant complications due to the hundreds of different, non-standardised blogs", said a post on the BBC Internet blog. It was found that the system " was not cost effective to undertake this work for a blogs bespoke Content Production System when compared to some of the other tools being used internally."

So a new blogging platform was incorporated into the existing CMS and a redesign undertaken.  The new design was showcased with the launch of a blog called Writersroom. "This showcases the basic design on which we’ll add new features and functionality as we upgrade around 125 blogs over the next few months."

The post has details about the stuff that are being built into the blogs

This apart, the were other problems as well: "Pages, video and audio can fail to load. Links may be broken. Audio sometimes won’t turn off, leaving users the choice of closing the app or continuing to listen against their will. Spontaneous crashes are common. Downloads continue to be a problem with many apps, particularly when consumers want to download issues over a 3G network or without high-speed connections."

A post on The Next Web some days ago cited a study to declare, "….when it comes to how information spreads through Twitter – when it’s coming from personal, individual accounts, it is likely to reach a larger audience."

The study by the International Journal of Communication showed that in Egypt and Tunisia, during the  unrest last year, "bloggers, journalists and activists were the most prominent in disseminating information, accounting together for 43% of the accounts tweeting about Egypt and 44% tweeting about Tunisia, versus just 7% representing mainstream media accounts in each of the countries."

So, individual tweets can help in extending the reach of content. The question is what do organisations do about it?

Let’s see, for instance, how the BBC has approached this issue.

It has laid down a policy which maintains a clear distinction between personal and official accounts. This is how the official guidelines distinguish the two: "Personal accounts don’t need to be complied by anyone – you alone are responsible for them. You should bear in mind the BBC social media guidelines covering personal accounts – which boil down to ‘be sensible’ and don’t bring the BBC into disrepute as anyone could potentially see what you’re posting. Your ‘handle’ (the account name) shouldn’t refer to the BBC, and in the bio you should make clear any opinions are your own and not the BBC’s. Official accounts mean tweeting within the context of your role as a BBC correspondent/reporter. We approve a limited number, aiming for a coherent stable of different and distinctive BBC News voices."

Now that seems to be a kind of balanced approach, but there are bound to be grey areas.  The social media policies of some media organisations have been criticized by experts for being too contrarian; so getting these policies just right is no easy matter