Webb explained how she had asked online what were the big trends for journalists. One of the main choices was mobile. But Webb said mobile was a generic term, just as you would say internet.

She argued that journalists aren’t thinking of technology in a granular way, which makes it hard to work out what is coming next. There is a serious gap between journalists perception of technology and how people are using technology.

The first trend is the real-time web. People now expect to find content as soon as it is out there, said Webb.

Among the tools she highlighted for use by journalists was the browser Flock.  It aggregates content from the real-time web from different social media sites, including Twitter.

Samepoint monitors conversations across different sites, such as comments on Facebook, MySpace and more. Socialmention does a similar job but also monitors how people feel about your site or content.

Webb also highlighted Rsscloud, an app that removes the lag time between publication and an updated RSS feed. And there is a plugin for WordPress users.

The importance for journalists is that Facebook and Twitter are changing consumer expectations as they are shifting towards real-time information.

Her second trend was light blogging, which enable people to publish faster, with fewer barriers in the way. Examples of this are Tumblr and Posterous. This means there is going to be ever more content out there but it also makes it easier for journalists to set up blogs.

Up third was personalisation. But Webb says this isn’t about allowing users to change the colour of your website.  It is understanding that consumers want a customised, personalised experience.

Pandora does this for music lovers.  Webb also highlighted how Bing highlights search results based on what it thinks will interest you.

Webb showed how personalisation is happening by talking about PSearch, a plugin in development from Microsoft that searches your hard drive to try to provide more relevant results.

The fourth trend is interactive TV. What Webb means by this is providing ways of viewers to manage their viewing, being able to discuss it with friends, buy what they see on screen and more.

One way this is happening is with TVs that have widgets built-in, allowing for a richer display of content on screen.

Webb saw how publishers could use TV widgets to provide breaking news, curate video and provide new sources of revenue. She argued this could save local TV news by engaging with younger consumers who tend not to watch TV.

Her fifth trend was identity recognition, such as Midomi that will tell you what you are listening to.

She talked about how a new feature in Picasa will now batch identify the people in photos and will auto-complete names from your Google contacts.

A similar tool is Face.com that tags photos in Facebook. As of July 2009. it had scanned 1.5 billion phots  and 2.3 billion faces.

And there is a new application that is coming out that would recognise someone’s voice.  Webb couldn’t say who it is. But it will seek to authenticate voices.

The implications for journalists is that you have to control your digital identity. For reporters, auto-tagging of images will help them find photos of people in the news.

A news site could also use a tool like this to identify and auto-tag photos.

Trend number 6 is augmented reality. Webb showed an example from Living Sasquatch. Augmented reality could provide 3d representations of, for example, baseball players.

Webb revealed how using Yelp on an iPhone 3GS will show an app called Monocle. To reveal it, go to Yelp on the iPhone, shake it and Monocle will appear. Layar does something similar.

For Google Android phones there is Wikitude, which finds information to label what you are looking at, taking the data from Wikipedia.

AcrossAir provides augmented information about subway connections, while Robotvision draws its information from Bing, Flickr and real-time tweets of where you are and what you are looking at.

At number seven is user-generated sensor data. This is data taken from cellphones that can track where people go and when.

Vitamin D is a new tool that identifies people and objects in video, learning to recognise patterns.

This means that all video is searchable and any surface could be searchable.

Time was running short so Webb rushed through the last few trends.

At eight is mobilife, such as scanning QR codes with your cellphone. For example, Starbucks has a way of putting your card on your phone and use that to pay for coffee.

For news, QR codes could provide portable hyperlinks, said Webb.

Trend number 9 is what Webb called geolocation 3.0. Loopt allows a user to locate themselves and businesses around them. The Offender iPhone App provides information about criminals in your area.

Webb said trend combines data with geography, offering new outlets for information gathered by journalists.

The last trend was the Internet of Things. The basic idea is that everything has an IP address and everything is inter-connected. Centralen uses this technology to track flowers.

Journalists could use this to track the actual movement of newspapers and magazines, providing remarkable details of what people do with the product.

Here are the top 10 stories on Reportr.net for 2008. It is an eclectic mix, dominated by the Spitzer scandal:

1. How to follow the US election results online
2. The mystery of Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s MySpace page
3. The rights and wrongs of Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s MySpace photos
4. How did the BBC lose a million US readers
5. 31 essential online tools for journalist
6. Creating a student journalism website on a budget
7. BBCNews.com readers criticise ‘stuck on’ ads
8. How to find out anything about anyone online
9. The media and the online life of Ashley Alexandra Dupre
10. BBCNews.com senior editor joins NowPublic

Wishing  everyone a happy and prosperous 2009.

And yes, it is supposed to be “:Vocalo”, as Rubinowitz explained at the start of the talk.  The colon is a deliberate attempt to create an emoticon.

:Vocalo is its own distinct radio station which downplays its relationship with Chicago Public Radio (CPR).  Rubinowitz explained that this was again a deliberate decision, as it is aimed at a very separate audience.

CPR has an audience that is 91% white in a city with a much more diverse population.  :Vocalo is targeted at reaching these communities who don’t listen to public radio because they see it as not aimed at them, not local enough or simply too stuffy and elite.

Rubinowitz described :Vocalo as a hybrid social network, user-generated content site and radio station.  Or, in the elevator pitch, a cross between YouRadio and MySpace/Facebook.

So it aims to be younger, more vibrant and diverse than CPR, in the hope of creating a third space between home and work for the Chicago’s communities to get together, share and discuss events in their city.

The station is available both on the radio and online, offering a mix of progressive music, user-generated content and hosted talk shows.  What makes this different from CPR is that the hosts are often non-professionals drawn from the community, such as teachers.

Rubinowitz explained that launching the radio station was not without issues.  Some at CPR were concerned it would turn into amateur hour on the radio, or that the public radio station was trying to be something it wasn’t.

As she put it, if you do something like this, you can expect a backlash from the “old crowd”, as she put it.

:Vocalo is a work in progress and expanding the reach of its radio signal.

It seems to be a good way for public radio to reinvent itself, not by slightly tinkering with its established format, but by creating a separate station to reach new audiences in new ways.

The text of my talk is available after the jump (or download as PDF). The presentation is on Slideshare:

When journalists go backstage: Reassessing privacy for social media
By Alfred Hermida
Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia

Presented at the annual conference of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, Saturday 9th August 2008

In this talk, I will explore how the explosion in social media on the internet is changing the ways journalists work and the issues this raised in terms of privacy and ethical behaviour.  I will argue that journalists need to take account of the context in which personal details are published on social networking sites and reassess approach to privacy and intrusion.

The name Ashley Alexandra Dupre may be familiar. Otherwise known as Kristen, she was identified as the woman at the centre of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s sex scandal.

In the space of a few hours, the life of this 22-year-old became public property – journalists were able to uncover a wealth of information about her, from photos of her in a bikini to intimate personal details of her troubled childhood.

Her instant fame, or infamy, led Ms Dupre’s lawyer to lash out at the media for thrusting his client into the limelight without her consent and publishing suggestive photos.

But she made it easy for journalists. Like so many young adults, she lived much of her life online, providing revealing personal information on social networking sites for anyone who cared to read it.

In the words of veteran editor Roy Greenslade:

When stories break it is customary for reporters to do all they can to discover as much as possible about the people involved. The willingness of people to place so much material about themselves on the net has made that task much easier for journalists.

In the past, the media would have turned to family or friends to find personal photos of people who suddenly find themselves in the headlines.

The growth of social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook has made it much easier to get hold of this material. Since it is digital, it is easy to copy and replicate across the web. And it all gets indexed and cached by Google, making it easy to find.

The way the media feeds on the personal material on social media sites raises questions about what can be considered public or private in an Internet age.

There has been an explosion in social media. Web 2.0 is characterised by online social applications, where we leave a digital breadcrumb, through photos on Flickr, profile on Facebook, posting to NowPublic, blogs on WordPress, videos on Revver

To suggest that social media is new is slightly misleading. After all some of the most popular early internet applications were message boards and forums. What has changed is the scale of involvement and the emergence of accessible and compelling online social platforms that enable interaction, collaboration and the sharing of content

Research conducted this year by Universal McCann into the impact of social underlined what other similar surveys have found. There is an ongoing shift towards participation, with users increasingly producing their own content.

Take one snapshot of the study into social networking sites, used by an estimated 300 million people worldwide. According to the Universal McCann report (PDF), these have evolved into platforms to organize a user’s internet experience, with people posting a massive variety of content.

Much of the information available on this very public forum is what might have been considered private.  We can understand what is happening by applying the notions of frontstage and backstage spaces developed by sociologist Erving Goffman.

Goffman argued that every person actively creates different “presentations of self.” Some of these are intended for the public – what he called “frontstage”. Others are presentations of self only for private spaces – what he referred to as “backstage.”

The frontstage space is where we perform our various roles, as teacher or as student. But the backstage spaces where, in a sense, we step out of character, perhaps showing revealing behaviour that would be inappropriate in a public context.

Until recently, most of the interactions between journalists and the public were largely frontstage interactions.   But digital technologies, and in particular social networking sites, change all this.

Now journalists are routinely going backstage in pursuit of a story – After the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, many students were upset by the way reporters trawled social networking sites for people affected by the tragedy. The students thought of these spaces as private and were critical of the practice of digital door-stepping by reporters.

Some of us might be surprised that anyone would consider a webpage to be private. But it is helpful to understand why teens might consider MySpace to be their backstage.

The internet has become the place to hang out for teens. Instead of chatting in the playground, or going to the shopping mall, today’s youth go online. One of the leading researchers into these new social spaces is danah boyd, a PhD candidate at the University of California (Berkeley). She argues that as parents have tended to restrict the physical movements of their children, teens have turned to the Internet to escape from these physical limits.

Social networking sites offer an arena for teens to do what teens do – express themselves, make friends and make sense of their place in the world. Profile pages are a place to say, “this is me” to friends, which explains why some MySpace pages are a cacophony of design. They reflect a stereotypical teenager’s bedroom.

A teenager might consider this virtual bedroom as a private space, open only to friends.  This is their backstage. But it is also part of a global network of information, where anything you publish will be archived, be discoverable through a search, and be easily copied and disseminated to anyone in the world.

boyd argues that most people who join social networking sites believe in the concept of “security through obscurity”. The idea here is that unless someone is of particular note, why would anyone be interested in their profile page or their comments.

In this context, privacy comes through obscurity.  This is a very different way of thinking about privacy. It is less about being about been able to control information about oneself, or about being left alone. But more about been one of millions, finding privacy in the masses.

This collapses as soon as one of those names in the masses becomes “newsworthy”. Instead of being famous to 15 people, we become famous to millions.  Suddenly your backstage presence takes frontstage, made public is a much broader audience than was intended. The result is that we have a generation growing up online that think very differently about privacy as technology has transformed perceptions of what’s public and what’s private.

Research in the UK indicates public unease with journalists using material from social media. A recent survey conducted for the newspaper watchdog, the Press Complaints Commission, found that almost four out of five people online would change information they publish about themselves on the internet if they thought the material would later be reproduced in the mainstream media.

Despite these concerns, only just over half of users think before posting information that it might later be used by third parties without their consent. The survey also found that 89% wanted guidelines to help prevent personal information – such as private photographs – being use without consent.  The regulator shied away from new rules, talking instead about self-regulation, perhaps recognizing the challenges in trying to control the web.

For journalist the question becomes what newspapers and magazines may legitimately publish and what can rightly be considered private at a time when these lines are becoming blurred.

This debate is emerging in the UK media, as traditional definitions of privacy fit somewhat uneasily into social media. This is from Siobhain Butterworth, who is the readers’ editor for The Guardian Newspaper”

Privacy is about intrusion rather than secrecy and the question is whether you have a reasonable expectation that something is private, rather than whether you have done or said something in public. These concepts are not easy to apply to social networking sites where the point of the exercise is to share information with others.

In this context, it is valuable to apply the notion of frontstage and backstage to social media.  We need to understand the context in which personal details or photos were published and assess the impact of their use in the media.

Some news organizations are realizing the social media requires a rethink of established practices.  Earlier this year, the BBC tackled the question of using personal photos from social networking sites at a meeting of its Editorial Policy board, which sets out editorial guidelines.  This is what it said:

The ease of availability of a picture does not remove our responsibility to assess the sensitivities in using it. Simply because material may have been put into the public domain may not always give the media the right to exploit its existence.

The use of a picture by the BBC brings material to a much wider public than a personal website that would only be found with very specific search criteria, as the corporation has acknowledged:

Consideration should be given to the context in which it was originally published including the intended audience, the impact of re-use on those who may be grieving or distressed, and the legal issues of privacy and copyright.

This sort of internal debate is healthy for the media. Journalists should consider the context in which information was posted on social networking sites. People use different sites for different reasons – they might be on Facebook just talking to friends, on Flickr sharing photos with their family and on MySpace to publicise their music.  These spaces have emerged as the virtual backstage for a generation of digital natives.

This is not to say that people don’t also have a responsibility too in posting private details online. To quote the person who created the web, Tim Berners-Lee:

Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it’s all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well

The guidelines on the use of social media by the BBC reflects concerns about protecting the brand. But they also recognises that the corporation should not trample into these spaces.

For example, the guidelines say “We should be sensitive to the expectations of existing users of the specific site. If we add a BBC presence, we are joining their site rather than the opposite”.

They also caution against using social media for short-term gain based around the lifetime of a particular TV or radio programme: “We should take care not to give users the impression that we are interested in setting up a fully interactive profile or page if that page is then neglected or abandoned after it has achieved a one-off short term purpose”.

The BBC should be commended for recognising the need to respect online communities and not simply use social media as a promotional tool for its output.

The guidelines on the personal use of social media reveal the BBC concerns about potential damage to its reputation. For example, they note that “through the open nature of such sites, it is also possible for third parties to collate vast amounts of information”. It cites the fact The Shawshank Redemption is the most popular film amongst the 11,899 members of the BBC network on Facebook and 8% list their political views as “liberal”.

David Jordan, director of BBC Editorial Policy and Standards explained the rationale behind the guidelines, stressing the BBC’s concern about being seen as impartial and objective:

What I hope we’ve created is something which is common sense. It does not restrict BBC staff from conducting legitimate activities on the Internet. But it does raise awareness of how crucial the BBC’s reputation for impartiality and objectivity is.

What appears missing from these guidelines on the use of social networking sites by journalists. This has been in the news recently due to the Spitzer scandal, when the media plundered the MySpace profile of Ashley Alexandra Dupre for her photos.

The BBC has been debating the ethics of taking material from social networking site. But these guidelines fail to tackle this area

It discusses how young adults such Ashley Alexandra Dupre make it easy for journalists and bloggers to find out intimate details about them by posting deeply personal information on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

The creator of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, summed up the issue when he told the BBC:

Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it’s all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.

Her court-appointed attorney, Kelley Drye’s Don D. Buchwald, has attacked the media for invading his client’s privacy.

The press release (PDF) from the attorney says the alleged call girl was “thrust into the public glare at age 22 without her consent”.

He goes on to accuse some outlets of violating journalistic norms by using suggestive photos of Ashley for commercial gain. The release suggests that “certain of those photos were obtained in violation of Ms. Dupre’s privacy rights and federal copyright law”, adding that the use of these “may well constitute violations of federal copyright laws”.

The photos are everywhere, with some sites like Gawker boasting of “Kristen: The Definitive Gallery“.

According to some reports, the impetus for the press release was the photo spread in the New York Post, which had a half dozen images of Dupre in its print edition and 20 online. The pictures are credited in the paper to Wesley Mann at Contact Press Images.

Many of the images published by other news outlets came from MySpace. The AP distributed three of those images, including the one of her in a bikini, with a disclaimer authorising the use of the photos only with reports or commentary on the Spitzer scandal. Reuters also ran the photos, crediting MySpace.

Aside from the issue of whether it is ethical to take material from social networking sites, there is the question of copyright. According to MySpace terms and conditions, “this limited license does not grant MySpace the right to sell or otherwise distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services”.

The BBC is introducing new rules that would restrict BBC journalists from using pictures from social media site without the permission of the copyright owner. In this case, is the AP the copyright holder, or is there a public interest argument for their publication?

Even though the photos are everywhere online, her attorney has warned that “as counsel for Ms Dupre we will take all steps that we deem necessary or appropriate to protect Ms Dupre from any unwarranted exploitation of her name, picture, voice, or likeness for purposes of profit”.

This seems to be a mammoth, and on the face of it, impossible task. A quick search on Google Image Search yields more than 5,000 photos.

The lawyers can’t expect to sue every blog that has republished the photos. But they could go after big media outlets that have resources and a reputation to protect.

The profile of Eliot Spitzer’s alleged call girl at myspace.com/ninavenetta was accidentally deleted by MySpace, in response to the flood of people checking out her profile.

This set off a feeding frenzy between cyber squatters jostling for control of the hottest space on the social networking site.

The profile changes hands frequently, as MySpace canceled accounts, before finally restoring Dupre’s account late on Thursday.

Most people would consider a profile on a site such as MySpace or Facebook as belonging to them. After all, this will be a space online full of personal details and often carefully crafted to show off personal tastes in music, photos and more.

But this incident shows that control of the page rests with the social networking service, rather than the user. If MySpace, Facebook or Bebo decide to disable your account, there is little you can do.

Maybe, if you are a high-profile blogger like Robert Scoble, you can force Facebook into restoring your deleted account.

At a time when millions of people are living social lives online, facilitated by social networking services, it is worth remembering that a private company can decide on the fate of these personal accounts.

Much of the background information on her, as well as photos, have come from social networking sites, such as MySpace. Gawker is looking to satisfy the more voyeuristic among us by producing what it called Kristen: The Definitive Gallery.

That MySpace page, under the alias of ninavenetta has now disappeared, displaying the message: “This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.” The page, though, is still available in Google’s cache – a reminder that web pages never die, they just end up on a server somewhere.

But the images have taken on a life of their own and are easily found online. They are just one of the tidbits of information available on the web about her. She was an aspiring rhythm and blues singer, so you can also listen to her music online.

Or you can rate her body.

It seems unlikely that Ashley ever imagined the images, sounds and words she posted online would ever make the headlines.

But it highlights how many young people are living very public lives on the web, even though the material may not have been intended for a wide audience. These social spaces on the Internet have become part of the newsgathering process for journalists.

There is something tragic about how the media, both big and small, has voraciously sought out everything it can find on the Internet about this woman. The question is whether this is an ethical way for journalists to behave.

News organisations are grappling with this issue – the BBC for one is launching new guidelines which would restrict BBC journalists from using pictures from sites such as Facebook and MySpace in news stories without the permission of the copyright owner.

Ironically, the very same social networking sites that have fed this media appetite are now taking on the issue themselves. A quick search on Facebook reveals 13 groups about Ashley, from ones saying she was in my class to others calling for her to be left alone.

UPDATE: Ashley’s MySpace profile is live again, with messages of support from her friends.