It was a big weekend in the online news field with the Online News Association’s annual conference (“ONA09″) and the Online Journalism Awards (congrats to all the winners especially the awesome folks at Publish2 who won the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism).
While I didn’t go this year (DailyMe was represented by President / Chief Product Officer — and ONA Vice President — Neil Budde), I followed proceedings closely via the #ONA09 hashtag. I was particularly interested in the various sessions on the use of data and metrics by online news organizations (#ONAmtrx and #ONAdata). As Dana Chinn of USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism (and author of the NewsNumbers blog) pointed out, web analytics is a complex area for online news sites and measuring user engagement requires looking at a number of different metrics (Dana’s presentation is available here).
One of the hits of the #ONAdata strand seemed to be the alpha demo of DocumentCloud, the Knight News Challenge-funded investigative journalism tool that plans to “turn documents into data”. The ‘data’ part of DocumentCloud is powered by OpenCalais. The semantic processing for Newstogram, DailyMe’s analytics / intelligence platform for online news sites, is also powered in part by OpenCalais, so I was glad to see it getting exposure at ONA09. OpenCalais is a great opensource resource and I’m sure it won’t be long until OpenCalais-powered functionality is widespread in the online news industry.
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