On the heels of a deal with Facebook to promote Olympic conversations on NBC’s Facebook page, the broadcast network today is taking one more step to improve its social standing during the big sports event. It is linking up with Storify, the social-media “story creator”, to put streams of real-time Olympic content, curated by NBC journalists, across Today.com as well as NBC’s 10 owned TV station websites. An NBC spokesperson tells me that this is by far the “biggest thing” that NBC has ever attempted with social media.

NBC journalists — 40 in all that will be in London and elsewhere — will be mining content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites. It will be the first time that journalists affiliated with the local sites will work in collaboration with the NBC News team on an effort like this.

The Storify collaboration is one of the first big, public moves being made by NBC News in the wake of the announcing the end of the MSNBC joint venture, and is a sign of how it is putting more resources into its own newsgathering operation.

And it will also be a way of NBC further exploiting some of the other efforts that it is making in social media. Specifically the Facebook page will have features like reader polls: that kind of content can now get a little more currency in the Storify stream. This year might see the most “social” Olympics ever — with the IOC, broadcasters, national teams, Facebook and many more all vying for people’s attention online during the event; this is perhaps the first Storify integration we’ve seen among them.

“The 2012 Olympic Games will be more social than ever, and Storify enables us to capture and report on the social stories coming out of the Games in a unique, web-native way,” said Vivian Schiller, chief digital officer at NBC News, in a statement. “This joint project acts as a journalism endurance test for our teams, as they scour the web for the best content and update the page continuously from now until the end of the Games.”

In all, the sites that will feature the Storify stream will be TODAY.com, NBCNewYork.com, NBCLA.com, NBCChicago.com, NBC10.com (Philadelphia),NBCDFW.com, NBCBayArea.com, NBCWashington.com, NBC6.com (Miami/South Florida), NBC7.com (San Diego), and NBCConnecticut.com.

The move could really bring Storify into its own as a product recognised by mainstream audiences. Those who are newshounds, or social media watchers will already know the site for its role in creating narratives out of people’s conversations, observations, links and more. The company had already worked with NBC in the past. It partnered with Breaking News, part of MSNBC, last year to add it to the list of feeds that work on the Storify platform. Earlier this year, Storify partnered with Pulse so that its curated streams would appear as stories on the Pulse newsreading platform. Users can also subscribe to Storify on Pulse.

“The Olympics are a primetime example of how social media can help tell the story, as athletes and fans are reporting what’s happening in real time,” said Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, said in a statement. “With all of the updates, photos and stories being shared across the web, organizations like NBC can use Storify to create a narrative and make sure all this great content doesn’t get lost in the noise.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

People love to take pictures of their food, especially with their mobile phones. And like all things mobile, apparently this activity started in Japan. “Most social networks have been inspired by East Asian tech trends,” declares Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi on this episode of Founder Stories (watch the video). At least that is where the idea for Foodspotting came from when her co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski was visiting Japan and noticed everybody snapping pics of their food with their phones. Now Foodspotting geotags those pics and lets you share them with your foodie friends.

Darabi, who started out as the manager of digital partnerships and social media for the New York Times , talks about how Foodspotting got started, its mission to help “the world discover great dishes,” and some of its recent traction. The company recently raised $3 million, now has more than 650,000 downloads of its iPhone app alone, launched an Android app, and its website traffic doubled in January. (This interview was taped in February before SXSW).

In the video segment below, Darabi and host Chris Dixon talk about her earlier role at the New York Times, social media in general and consuming news via Twitter versus a newspaper. (Note that here Vivian Schiller reference was made before Schiller resigned from NPR earlier this month). “I still drink the Kool-Aid, I love the Times,” she says. Dixon says he gets all his news from Twitter.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve fiercely debated the merits of the iPad (here and here and here and here) and whether Apple’s “magical” device will transform the mass market. The question, of course, is not whether the iPad is the leader in the tablet market but whether the iPad will become the iPod of its market. And if the iPad is indeed the iPod, how does that shape the digital strategy of publishers?

At the Big Money Untethered conference in New York this Thursday, a cluster of top publishers including Donald Graham (CEO, Washington Post), Carolyn Reidy (CEO, Simon Schuster), Vivian Schiller (CEO, NPR) and Sarah Chubb (President, Conde Nast Digital), gathered to answer those questions and evaluate the explosive tablet market (according to Forrester Research, there will be 59 million tablets in use by 2015). We pitched a simple question to the panelists, does the iPad change everything and how is it transforming their business? Their answers in the video above.

Excerpts :

Vivian Schiller, CEO, NPR

It’s definitely a transformative device…[iPad] is the most distributed, well known tablet, there’s no question other manufacturers will come in with other variations of the tablet but the idea of this new form factor is a really exciting one.

And for us, the way that it’s transforming our business is we have created an application for the iPhone, excuse me for the iPad, there’s too many i’s out there! That is really designed specifically for the form factor of the tablet…and it is designed for the size and scale of the iPad…it’s been tremedously popular we’ve had over 350,000 downloads so far and there are only 2 million iPads in circulation. So what is that 1 in 6?

I would never bet against Apple.

Carolyn Reidy, CEO Simon & Schuster

I would say that it has transformed our industry because it is the first reader that has enabled us to combine text with video…It’s the first thing that will enable us to do children books, to make digital children books, to make enhanced e-books, and to actually make a combination of video and reading book that is not an app. In our world it’s very difficult to do an app it gets lost…the audience for a book is not the size for most of these apps that sell hundreds of thousands.

Jacob Weisberg, Chairman, The Slate Group

I think when the history of the era is written, it’s the Kindle that will be seen as the breakthrough device…even though it’s already been superseded in many ways by the iPad…It was really the Kindle that ushered in the post-Gutenberg and showed that a printed book was no longer necessarily the best way to read a book.

The iPad is a great toy…Everybody wants one, but the question is, is everyone going to need one?…In the short to medium term, I think the iPad is going to be very dominant…but long term I’m not sure I would bet on it as the dominant device because I think Apple does have the tendency to make the same mistake again and again, which is that it likes closed systems….It doesn’t like the messiness of the internet but unfortunately messiness is part of what makes the internet the internet.

Sarah Chubb, President, Conde Nast Digital

I think that the iPad is transformative because it’s changing how consumers think about the mobile web and how they think about content consumption…

To me it’s not really about the iPad itself, it’s about consumers seeing that they can do things differently and enjoying it which will make them do it more…Even just one year from now, we’re going to look back on it and many, many things will have changed as a result of that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

NPR always has among the most popular news apps in the iTunes Store. Its latest iPad app has been downloaded 350,000 times, according to CEO Vivian Schiller, who spoke this morning at Wired’s Business Conference in New York City. Considering that only about 2 million iPads have been sold, about one in six iPad owners have downloaded the iPad app.

Asked whether she minds getting links from Google News, as Rupert Murdoch and other news organizations like to complain apparently do, she responded: “I have no problems with that whatsoever. I am not in the camp of Google bashers, Google sends a lot of traffic to us. We want our content to be as easily discoverable as possible.”

Of course, NPR’s mission is to provide free journalism to the public, so she is not a big fan of paywalls either. As listeners shift to the Web, NPR is committed to following them and serving them there as well. Ignoring consumer preference, she notes, would be a “path to destruction.” She estimates NPR’s Website traffic to currently be around 12 million unique visitors per month.

To the extent that other traditional media outlets talk actually start erecting paywalls and blocking Google, NPR and other open media sites will benefit.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch