Limpag: Bootstrap new media

Sunday, February 12, 2012

DURING the frenzied days leading to the initial launch of the project to data tag Cebu’s tourism and heritage sites using QR or quick response codes, it occurred to me to look into the possibility of geo-encoding articles and having these displayed automatically on a map.

Location data was already something that my wife, Marlen, and I kept track of because we agreed to make this part of the metadata of our articles. But what we had was just a system to link the names of establishments like hotels and restaurants in our e-books to map points that would load a map application (this is slowly being implemented in our e-guidebooks).

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What occurred to me about a week before that initial launch on Dec. 20 was not only to embed the location information in articles but also set up a system that would display all these points on an interactive map. Each map point would link to and represent an article.

I knew at the outset the magnitude of the technical challenges involved and suspected it was too much for our mom-and-pop startup. I just filed it under my to-do list’s “Someday” column.

During the second launching of our projects last Jan. 13, Smart Communications Inc. public affairs head Ramon Isberto said the logical next step for the QR code project was to display the articles on a map. After his speech, Mr. Isberto and I talked and I told him we already had the location data embedded, it was the system to automatically display the articles that we lacked. He offered to introduce us to a team in Manila that would be able to provide the solution.

His speech, however, spurred me to take another look at the task. After a week of testing and trying out various options, I found an open source and free solution. The
solution met all of our needs perfectly you could swear it was a bespoke application.

That solution also became the basis for new projects that make location data and interactive online maps the bases for digital journalism. The first one is NewsMap, which is undergoing beta test at newsmap.cebujournal.com.

The experience taught me, yet again, the impact of open source on online technologies and digital media. Technology, indeed, is the great equalizer and open source accounts
for a huge part of that capability.

Today, anyone can put up a news operation and use free and open source tools that are as powerful as those used by mainstream media companies. Where before you had to spend millions of pesos to set up a content management system (CSM) to manage articles in your website, now you can set up a CMS for free in less than five minutes.

This “flattening” (to quote Thomas Friedman) effect of technology affects all industries, especially communications and media. In the time of “the cloud,” the world is flat.

There we were, a husband and wife team of online community journalists and yet we were able to do things that fully-staffed mainstream online news sites were not able to do yet because we banked on open source technologies and were crazy enough to bootstrap digital journalism and rethink media products like e-books and its monetization and distribution.

Technology is disrupting industry after industry. One reason for this disruptive character is that advancements in technology change the economic rules of the game.

Inevitably, technology lowers barriers to entry into an industry and expands competition.

New media is ripe for bootstrapping. There has never been a better time to be a writer or content producer as now, when more people are reading or consuming content because of the rapid adoption of tablets, e-readers and smartphones.

There has never been a better time to be a writer as now when easy-to-use tools allow you to publish your own e-books for free and sell it to a global market through such online giants as Amazon and Apple.

But that transition isn’t just about the medium, it is also about the outlook. It is not business as usual: the new frontier is business unusual.

(I recently revived my new media blog at TheNewPublisher.com to curate articles and blog about my experiments on e-books, CMS and news technology.)