Wavii’s iPhone app

Remember Wavii? It’s the instant news feed for any topic, letting you follow issues and people from news sources around the world. Newsroom use cases include reporters on a beat or a homepage producer wanted to stay up-to-date on the latest trending news. The company has just debuted its newest 2.0 app for iOS devices.

From Wavii’s announcement, new features of the app:

• Smoother navigation, commenting and social sharing: The new app has a streamlined look and feel, it also includes a new social bar that lets you see what stories your friends have interacted with and enables you to easily share your thoughts too. You can also quickly share stories via email, or over to Facebook and Twitter.
•  More updates for any topic: A wider range of the world’s events as short, simple status updates in your newsfeed.
•  Quick and easy discovery of new topics to follow: Provides quick access to category feeds like “Popular,” “Tech,” and “Entertainment”, making it easier to discover new and interesting topics that you can follow to personalize your experience.
•  More ways to get started: You can now use Twitter or an email address to sign up, in addition to Facebook.

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Included in this week’s round-up is a ranking of top social media management software; an analysis of global  participation in social interactivity; the value of using roundtables for discussion; a look at the profile of a “change agent”; a look at how well brands measured social media ROI in 2011; and a discussion about readiness when launching an online community.

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The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists

This list from NPR made me physically LOL when I first read it. It’s spot on when it comes to the reaction you see in the comments sections of many stories, not just the year-end lot. It’s appropriate fodder to start with as you wade into other year-end lists.

Top 10 Longreads

The Longreads founder pulls together his team’s favorite of the longform stories and articles this year. Bonus: Readers submitted their own best of 2011 lists as well. These should keep you busy until next year’s list comes out.

The year in media errors and corrections features Osama/Obama, Giffords

Regret The Error is always one of my personal favorite end-of-year roundups. It makes me feel better about any errors I may have let slip when I see the truly colossal oopsies that made the air or print. This year’s listing — including never-to-be-lived-down classics like “Obama Bin Laden is dead” — doesn’t disappoint.

The 50 Funniest Headlines Of 2011

From a “horse herpes outbreak” to “meatball sandwich horseplay” Buzzfeed’s roundup is amusing even if it’s impossible to be all-inclusive. It’s probably not surprising that a surprising number of these have to do with food or animals, is it?

The Ten Worst Media Disasters of 2011

In case you’re more a fan of the worst lists than the bests, here’s a round-up of media moments some important people would like to put behind them as they head into a new year. Read it and resolve not to make this list next year.

Top Ten Comedic News Stories of 2011

If you enjoy CSPAN and CNN as much as the not-news shows on that other C-channel — Comedy Central — then this list will make you grin. It’s the top 10 funny stories this year from “political comedian” Will Durst.

The Year in News 2011

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism says the economy topped the 2011 news cycle, taking up some 20 percent of the news hole — up from 14 percent in 2010. Mideast unrest came in a distant second, followed by the 2012 Presidential election. Read the full study to see what else rounded out the top stories of the year based on coverage.

Finally, if you haven’t had enough, Fast Company made an amazing mashup of 2011 best and worst lists. It’s a bit overwhelming but more than a bit worth grazing.

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Newspapers are good at throwing share buttons and sidebars and embedded widgets and image carousels and lists of related items into their story pages online. News design isn’t pretty, and the consumption experience online is often distracting and disjointed if you’re not using an RSS reader.

Now there’s a new tool that wants to fix that by “de-templatizing” news design. It’s called Scroll, and its brought to us by familiar faces Kate Ray and Cody Brown, who also created Nerd Collider and Kommons. continued…

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Cable and broadcast anchors weren’t the only ones giving on-camera commentary on the 2010 midterm elections on Tuesday night. You can add Politico and The New York Times to the list of traditionally non-broadcast news outlets providing live commentary and updates.

Politico had hourly video updates starting at 8 p.m., as well as pre-election feeds and clips of various concession and victory speeches.

The New York Times, on the other hand, had a new video up every 30 minutes, starting at 5:45 p.m. EST until 12:15 a.m. For each video, a pair of Times staffers offered commentary and analysis while overlooking the newsroom.

Filming, editing and producing regular videos throughout the night — that’s no easy task, especially considering the inherent stress of Election Day. Plus, commentary was already rolling on all cable and broadcast channels.

What do you think? Is adding more talking heads to Election Day coverage something news outlets like Politico and The New York Times should continue?

– Chris Dunn

Mobile: NYT brings video, graphics to election dashboard

If you weren’t near a computer on Tuesday night, The New York Times’ election results dashboard was the place to go for results. The site presented mobile-friendly versions of its maps. Individual races were easy to find.

The graphics were very well done, and were easy to read on a mobile device. Clicking the Senate, House or governor tabs showed the user a list of each race in that category, with vote tabulations (and varying shades of red and blue) for each race on different rows.

But what set the Times’ effort apart was the availability of those video updates (that Chris wrote about above) on mobile devices. Not only were taped updates available on mobile, but so was the election night live stream. Unfortunately, these video updates were only available in Adobe Flash. While I was able to enjoy the updates on my Droid, which runs Android 2.2 and has Flash installed, users of the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad were not able to watch the videos, since they were unavailable in HTML5. But instead of serving the Apple device users with an error message, the Times smartly removed the video tab for users on these devices.

– Ethan Klapper

WaPo’s #votemonitor crowdsources Election Day, TBD tries Foursquare

The Washington Post actively turned to Twitter this Election Day, in search of tweets from voters. By using the #votemonitor hashtag, The Post curated tweets and brought them into a running liveblog, powered by Storify. (Read more about Storify here.) The liveblog had a national focus, and excerpted news coverage from local news outlets nationwide. The Post also did a live Twitter videocast on Tuesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, TBD.com encouraged its readers to check in to Foursquare and share tips. Over 100 people participated in their experiment. Foursquare was tracking Election Day check-ins on a special map, and was awarding voters the iVOTED badge. The methodology for the badge did confuse some, including my colleague Kevin Loker:
.bbpBox29531754449 {background:url(http://a1.twimg.com/profile_background_images/25438588/2009-07-25_13-04-15_205.241.135.200.jpg) #131516;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

CNN.com also used Twitter, and set up a neat map in an effort to track voter attitudes.

If you consider Twitter to be a main source of news (as I do), the speed at which election returns were coming in did not disappoint. Twitter was a fast way to monitor election returns and calls. And, tweeple noticed the speed, too:
.bbpBox29523038807 {background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1286916367/images/themes/theme8/bg.gif) #8B542B;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

And finally, some interesting news on the Facebook front. Over 12 million people clicked the “I Voted” button that was presented to Facebook users over 18-years-old on Election Day. Facebook staff found that in 74 percent of House races, the candidate with the most fans won that that race. In 19 Senate races, that number was 81 percent, reports PCMag.com.

– E.K.

WSJ.com uses a flash-less results map

Maps are always big during election season, but the Wall Street Journal’s Results by State map caught my eye because it didn’t use Flash. What does this mean? It’s compatible across all browsers and devices. In fact, mobile compatibility was one of the big initial goals for the project.

“Mobile support was something we knew we wanted right out the gate,” said Albert Sun, one of the creators of the map, via an IM interview. “From the very beginning wanted it to be a single map that would work across as many platforms as possible.”

In addition to Sun, Jon Keegan, Susan McGregor, Mike Sullivan, Alex Lowe, Kate Ortega, Jovi Juan of the WSJ.com News Graphics team spent many long nights together to pull it off. They began planning two months prior to the election and implementation one month prior.

The map lets you filter down to Senate, House or Governor races and zoom into states and districts for detailed results. You can highlight called races and identify changes of control. The map also features visualizations for seat net changes and vote percentages.

“Stylistically we wanted to be able to use the same Albers Equal Area projection that print side uses for their US maps and we thought it was really important that when zooming into the map people be able to recognize identifiable features other than the shapes of counties and districts,” Sun said. (What he’s talking about is the use of Google Maps in the background for users to more easily identify their distrcits).

On the technical side — The map uses the Raphaël JavaScript Library for vector drawing and it does the Google Map projection using a library called arcgislink.

– Lauren M. Rabaino

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