research

If you are so inclined, it’s pretty easy to criticize Business Insider — the all caps headlines, the slideshows, and content that has been “aggregated” from other sites. (And yes, BI has some mean things to say about us too.) But in the course of of the Disrupt panel on new media, BI CEO and editor in chief Henry Blodget offered several unapologetic explanations of why he and his writers do what they do.

One idea that Blodget returned to a couple of times during the panel was that of “native storytelling forms.” In other words, he said that whenever a new medium emerges, traditional media companies are always treating it as extension of what they’re already doing, leading to a lot of “square pegs and round holes.” BI, on the other hand, is trying to explore and build a business around a “new form of storytelling.”

Are phrases like “native storytelling form” just a fancy way for Blodget to say “slideshow”? To a certain extent, yes. For example, when moderator Alexia Tsotsis asked why Blodget published his profile of Mark Zuckerberg in New York magazine rather than his own site, Blodget said that he could have run it on BI, “but frankly, that’s not ideal for this medium.” As a counterexample of what does work online, Blodget pointed to a slideshow of the Canadian oil sand mines, which he said showed the “unbelievable power of photo essays.”

At the end of the panel, Blodget addressed the criticism even more directly, when he thought Alexia was taking veiled potshots slideshows (something she denied, especially since she produced slideshows in her old job as SF Weekly web editor). He said slideshows are exactly the kind of “native storytelling” that he was referring to — something you couldn’t do in TV or in print. He pointed out that BI slideshows also have a “view as one page” option, so they don’t force people to click through each slide if they don’t want to.

Blodget also discussed the idea that Business Insider publishes sensationalist “linkbait” headlines.

“You know what the definition of ‘linkbait’ is?” he said. “It’s a story that people want to link to and share.”

So Blodget has no problem publishing sad puppy photos next to Facebook IPO stories, because that’s what people want to see. He said that’s distinct from “clickbait” headlines, which may promise one thing while the story delivers something else.

He became most excited when he moved to the topic of news aggregation. BI has been accused of aggregating stories from other sites without proper attribution, but Blodget said, “Please, please aggregate from Business Insider all day long. We will only thank you.” After all, he said this kind of citation is “what magazines used to have to employ PR people to do.”

To be clear, there were other speakers on the panel  — I’ve focused on Blodget since he spoke the most and was the most provocative. There were other approaches discussed on-stage. For example, as a counterpoint to all the discussion of traffic from social networks, Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera said a lot of his content doesn’t do well on social media. After all, he’s trying to reach the movers and shakers in tech who want their “news vegetables” along with “news desserts.”

“A lot of stuff that you read on Techmeme and are happy for having read is stuff that you know wouldn’t make your Facebook feed fun,” Rivera said. (Though he was quick to add that Techmeme has fun stuff too.)

There was lots more in the panel, but here’s the real conclusion, to quote my colleague Ingrid Lunden: “We need more puppies on the homepage of TechCrunch.” Ingrid, ask and ye shall receive.

At TechCrunch Disrupt New York this morning, Luis von Ahn, the founder of the ambitious free language learning and text translation site Duolingo, announced that the site will come out of private beta on June 19. Duolingo was founded by reCaptcha founder Luis von Ahn in 2011. The site opened its private beta in late 2011 and currently focuses on teaching its users English, Spanish and German.

Von Ahn, of course, is well-known for his work on reCaptcha, which Google acquired in 2009. As von Ahn noted today as Disrupt, more than 200 million captchas are now typed in every day. This insight led to the development of reCaptcha, which doesn’t just help developers distinguish between bots and humans, but also helps to augment optical character recognition. About 10 percent of the world’s population have now helped recognize at least one word. Now, with Duolingo, the team is pushing this idea forward.

As von Ahn noted, virtually all major projects before the Internet were done with less than 10,000 people. Now, thanks to the Internet, a project that involved 100 million people become a possibility and with Duolingo, the idea is to get all of these people to help translate the web for free. The obstacles here, said von Ahn, are that there is a lack of bilinguals and that it would be hard to motivate these people to spend their time translating the web.

The language learning market, of course, is huge and millions of people pay for it. With Duolingo, users start to translate easy words and then move to complex sentences. Duolingo says its users learn about as well as those who use Rosetta Stone, and that its translations are about as good as those from professional translators (thanks also, of course, to the fact that it can compare multiple translations from multiple learners).

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line.

On the surface, Knut (pronounced Kah-noot) doesn't sound terribly exciting -- it's a pocketable WiFi-enabled device that beams you realtime stats over the web. But consider the possible applications, and you'll be much more anxious to pick one up. You can use Knut to measure humidity in your humidor, the temperature in your fish tank or even the status of a door or window. You can monitor stats in realtime, or set alerts so you'll know something's wrong before your goldfish cooks in the tank, those precious Cuban cigars you smuggled through Customs dry up and crumble or someone sneaks into your house through a window after you check in miles away on Foursquare. After popping in a pair of AAA batteries (which are said to last from 2 weeks to 10 years, depending on the battery and syncing options), you assign Knut an email address, which it then uses to communicate. Other Knuts can use the same email address, from which they'll send updates at pre-set intervals.

Knut ships with built-in temperature and battery level sensors, and it's compatible with a variety of add-ons, from humidity and vibration to door and water presence sensors. You can also create your own sensor using the breakout board. The project creators have developed a functional prototype, but they need to raise additional funds to pay programmers and buy materials for mass production. As usual, that's where you come in. The first 200 Kickstarter backers can hop on board the pre-order train with a pledge of $80, while an unlimited number of devices will be available for $95. A $115 pledge will get you a Knut and an additional sensor, while $175 will up the order to one Knut, three sensors and a three-port hub. There's six weeks left to go on the campaign, with a goal of $25,000 and an estimated September ship date. As always, you'll find everything you need in the demo video and source link, just after the break.

Continue reading Insert Coin: Knut WiFi-enabled sensor hub (video)

Insert Coin: Knut WiFi-enabled sensor hub (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 12:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.