beta.boston.com

You may have noticed a few changes on the Boston.com homepage today. 

For longtime Boston.com users, the most notable development is our new Boston.com logo – a more modern and compact design than the logo we’ve used since 1995. We've tested versions of this logo with our users and the end result was a bigger version of the same font, without the wave effect. We’re confident this graphic will translate more effectively across all our platforms – desktop, mobile, print and, eventually, on our newspaper delivery trucks.

At the same time, we've moved a few elements around and added a few new featured positions in the left and middle columns of the homepage. You’ll notice you can share content straight from our homepage more easily now. You can also easily follow Boston.com on Twitter and Facebook.

Our producers and product teams continually monitor a host of metrics on how our content is performing, including what is being shared and tweeted. So it was important to us to feature content going viral and promote easy sharing. For that reason, you will regularly see a "trending on social" content feature that highlights our most shared content.

These are just a few of the changes you’ll see on Boston.com in 2013, as we continue to expand our content, video offerings and social media connections. We simply want to provide you, our reader, with the best possible experience, across all your screens.

By Joanna S. Kao, January 2013 GlobeLab intern

Today is the last day of my month-long internship at GlobeLab. Coming in at the beginning of the month, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I spent last summer interning at WaPo Labs, a similar group at the Washington Post, but I was pretty sure that apart from the name, things would be pretty different. For my internship, I worked on redesigning and refactoring parts of SNAP, a database and visualization of Instagram photos around Boston, and created a spin-off project using it. I named the spin-off app “FoodPic.kr” — the app takes a location as an input and then displays a panoply of Instagrammed food images taken around that area (I got hungry pretty often this month in the lab). The idea is that people can use the app to find a place to eat based on how the food looks and the type of people who frequent it.

  Interning at GlobeLab didn’t mean that I just sat (or stood) at my Steelcase adjustable standing desk being a code monkey — we also had great ideation sessions on our wall, newly painted with ideapaint. I probably shouldn’t give away all of our ideas, but if you check back on GlobeLab once in awhile, I think you’ll be rather delighted with the projects in progress.

By Joel Abrams, Senior Product Manager

I'm a contrarian, so instead of the usual top list, I decided to put together a bottom list. 

Note: All of these are actual search terms that users typed into the search box on boston.com in 2012, but they aren't the true bottom. Our analytics system only let me get the top 100,000 search terms, and many are actually quite prosaic. These are my selection of the most obscure, random, and unlikely to yield useful results.

mass. witches assembling to end tim tebow's season, keep tom brady's alive

Video of unknown male murder feburary 19 2012

bhjgffghyfgfrfdfffffffffffffffffffffffjhghuehwyhbhhduddddddddiyhygugy yugy

Sex in Kenya

and rabbi akiva said it was 200 plagues as we got closer to the sea

What are the two qualities looked for in choosing sled dogs?

what do it look like when the sun tern to a blak hole

why globe is placed on the table in every office?

internet explorer and its helpful features

Would you wait in line 8 hours for a beer?

What's the most popular search on Boston.com? Same as it was last year: obituaries.  The most popular topical term of the year? Liberty Mutual.

By Alvin Chang, data visualization

It took weeks to clean up homicide data for our Bowdoin-Geneva project. I was ready to map it and move on. But I was unsure about one of the data point, so I looked it up in the Globe archives. I found this 1993 story about Jose Lizardo's murder:

They followed the well-trod path of generations of immigrants before them, three brothers, journeying to Boston from afar to open a corner variety store in a time-tested pursuit of the American dream.

But on Saturday night, two of them came face to face with a nation’s nightmare: a handgun-toting thief who walked into their Dorchester shop, demanded all their cash and fired shots that within hours would end one of their lives.

For me, that story — which was written by our new boss, Brian McGrory — turned a dot on the map into a person with family, friends and a life narrative. It reminded me that, too often, we forget what the dots on our maps represent. That realization helped me transform a conventional crime map into this interactive.

It's not always easy to mix data and narrative, but there are three things that made this possible in the newsroom.

1. Resources: As a reporter, one of my biggest challenges was introducing contextual metrics into my stories; as a data journalist, one of my biggest challenges has been humanizing the numbers.

Thankfully, newspapers archives are full of stories that humanize the world. We often forget about these resources because so much of our job is about getting new things. But one of the biggest breakthroughs in this project was finding the incredible breadth of archived material that can give life to our storytelling.

2. Willingness to do great journalism: At this point, we had to go into the archives, find these stories and re-publish them to BostonGlobe.com. It was a monumental task — something I could never have done alone. But to my delight, everyone I approached understood the importance of humanizing this data. Head librarian Lisa Tuite searched and compiled the stories; the wonderful Jeff Fish spent time putting the stories on BostonGlobe.com. At least three others collaborated on this project.

3. Easy presentation: To display these stories, we took advantage of our responsive website. We embedded stories from our own site, and because it adjusts to the width of your screen, it took little effort to make them presentable. It's the Boston Globe, inside the Boston Globe!

This week the Globe published the fruits of a year-long  effort to tell the story of one of Boston’s forgotten neighborhoods.

Mention Bowdoin-Geneva to the average “The Wire”-loving holiday shopper walking down Newbury Street and you’ll draw a blank. Few in the prosperous tribe that hugs the Charles have heard of it. But summer after summer, it’s a Dorchester neighborhood in the cross-hairs of gang violence, with a rate of violent assault three times that of the rest of the city.

This summer the Globe decided to go deeper than the usual “drive-by” journalism that follows shootings with an article or two, then disappears. So we rented an apartment in the heart of Bowdoin-Geneva and moved a small group of journalists in. They even slept there. The outcome is the sprawling 68 Blocks series, a 5-part, 25000-word newsvella.

And we didn’t stop at embedding ourselves in the physical Bowdoin-Geneva. What would happen, we asked, if we embedded ourselves in the virtual Bowdoin-Geneva, too? We looked at traces of the neighborhood’s lives left on YouTube, on Twitter, on Facebook – even vertical networks like ThisIs50.com. We found fascinating conversations and expressions coming from these 68 blocks everywhere we looked. But one service clearly rose above the rest for the widely ranging way it reflected the neighborhood: Instagram.

Instagram was perfect because it showed people’s lives in an intimate way: their children, their homes, their moments and big and small. And it provided a great counterpoint to the main storyline, which is one of lives darkened by violence. Instagram showed that normal lives were being lived in Bowdoin-Geneva, too.

We started by saving links to every Instagram photo taken in the neighborhood over the summer. Then we built a tool that allowed an editor to browse through them regularly and pick out pictures that seemed to tell a story. We phoned the photographers, asked them about their picture, and recorded their answers.

Check it out here.

Today, Mozilla announced the 2013 class of Knight-Mozilla Open News Fellows. The program, funded by the Knight Foundation, embeds smart developers in some of the world's best newsrooms for 10 months -- among them ours.  The 2012 fellows are also working at the BBC, The Guardian, Zeit Online and Al Jazeera.  In 2013, three other leading news organizations will be participating, including The New York Times.

Our fellow this year has been Dan Schultz, who has been working in our development team and will continue on for 5 more months. Dan has created a tremendous connection into the MIT media lab and has been experimenting with the data mining of closed captions and working on a project to rebuild Boston.com's quiz tool (among other cool things).

In 2013, we will be joined by Sonya Song,  who has degrees in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in Beijing, the country's leading university, and a Master of Philosophy in Journalism from The University of Hong Kong.

Song worked as a journalist and columnist focusing on the Internet, online media and technology sectors at various news outlets. Her writings have touched on a full range of China’s new media sector, including coverage of companies as diverse as CCTV, Google China, Baidu.com, Sohu.com, QQ.com, Sina.com, Taihe Rye Music, and numerous start-ups.Sonya is fluent in not only English and Chinese but also Perl, Python, PHP, and Javascript.

We are excited to have Sonya be joining us early next year.  Here's more on the program from the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Sonya isn't the only new face who'll be helping us innovate.  Through a separate program with the Knight Foundation, we have received a grant to hire two full time staffers to create a connection to the MIT Media Lab and other Boston area universities. We've posted the two new positions, a Creative Technologist and a New Media Catalyst, who will be working in the Globe Lab and finding ways to grow our audience, tell stories, and connect us more deeply to Boston's top universities to explore new ideas. We will also offer fellowships during winter and summer breaks for students to join us to work on interesting projects.

Chris Marstall has some more details on the positions, as well as a celebrity photo from the Lab.

Globe Creative Technologist Chris Marstall showing John Hodgman around @GlobeLab. Behind him are Tweevee and Snap, two social media experiments developed in the lab.

The Knight Foundation recently gave the Globe a 1-year grant to collaborate with MIT's Center for Civic Media. The idea is to take a few great ideas from one of the many academic organization studying the changing news industry and turn them into actual, real-life products! Whether they would be stand-alone websites, smartphone apps, or features of boston.com or bostonglobe.com, these will be usable, helpful, and, hopefully, profitable. 

Last month we announced the grant (you can read Nieman Lab's coverage here). Today, we're ready to start hiring. The core positions are as follows:

New Media Catalyst 

The New Media Catalyst acts as a liason between the Globe and MIT’s Center for Civic Media, as well as other academic departments that study the news. The Catalyst finds exciting, relevant research and brings it into the Globe’s innovation and product organization. S/he works with researchers, product managers, our Creative Technologist and other internal developers to turn ideas into realities that can be used to delight and inform our millions of digital readers. apply here

Creative Technologist

The Creative Technologist, working in conjunction with the Catalyst and outside researchers, turns promising research from MIT’s Center for Civic Media and other news-industry-focused academic departments into working software that will delight and inform the Boston Globe and boston.com’s millions of online readers in new and unexpected ways. This is an opportunity to collaborate with some of the smartest researchers in the world on projects that bring Greater Boston to life in completely new ways. apply here

The work will be centered in @GlobeLab, our new media experimentation and demo space a few feet from the newsroom, with frequent trips on the red line to the MIT Media Lab. Interested? Click on one of the links above, or email me directly:

Chris Marstall: [email protected]

Note that these are one-year positions only.

By Matt Carroll, organizer of Hacks/Hackers Boston

Music, art, games, and context – who would’ve thought of the all the different apps that could be created around the presidential debates?

Inspiration and creativity were the bywords of the weekend, as Hacks/Hackers Boston held a “Hack the Presidential Debate” hackathon this past weekend. At least 40 people participated between Friday night and Saturday. The idea was to create apps that could be used for the third and final presidential debate Monday night (Oct. 22.). The event was sponsored by Hacks/Hackers, The Boston Globe, and the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, which hosted the event.

Two winners were picked. Debatify claimed first place. The app wraps music around spoken clips from the earlier debates. Debatify was a crowd-pleasing hit, inspiring waves of laughter from the crowd and judges.  It was created by Joanna Kao, Jennifer Hollett, Dan Siegel, Max Rothman, Ying Tan, and Leon Lin.

The second place winner was Potato, which placed contextual art and links to stories alongside a live transcript of the debate. Team members were Alvin Chang, Jin Dai, and Matt Carroll. The app was created using software written by Dan Schultz. (Hopefully, a link will be up by the time of the debate Monday night.)

Other entries: Xin Xin and Gabriel Florit worked on an app that created artistic data visualizations, which might help show the emotional state of the candidates or how often they referred to different topics.

Andrew Inglis and Chris Amico worked on a game that would be played by two people, who could score points by guessing which words would be used by the candidates. The idea of the game was to help unite people of opposing political beliefs in an interesting, fun way.

Schultz also showed off an app that scrambled the transcripts, making it seem as if the candidates had been drinking.

By Mark Lewis, Sr. Product Manager, Boston.com  One of the great joys of bringing RadioBDC into the Boston.com family has certainly been the “Live in the Lab” concert series. For the uninitiated, the “Live in the Lab” series is a steady stream of musical acts that perform in the Globe Lab. Typically, the Lab hosts a band for three to five songs, largely acoustic. To date, we’ve had six bands: Animal Kingdom, The Lumineers, California Wives, Bloc Party, Stars, and the sixth, Minus the Bear.

Much like anything else, we’ve come a long way in the way we produce and distribute the concerts to the Boston.com and RadioBDC audience. We thought it was time to peel back the curtain and show off how we tackle set-up, warm-up, lights-up and tear-down. In this post, we focus on what it took to get Minus the Bear live on air.

4 pm (minus 1 day to show)

RadioBDC director Mike Snow begins the stage build-out by setting up the speakers, microphones and monitors for the band. He’ll also set up the mixer (Mackie ProFX12) that will serve the live studio audience and the live video feed. 

Another lynchpin of the production, Ed Medina spends the night before arranging the platform for the camera and tripod. If time permits, he’ll drop some lights. Time does not permit for this performance.

10 am day of show (3h, 30min to show time)

Depending on how much access we have to the Globe Lab, or how productive we feel like being, we try to set up studio speakers, monitors for the band and lighting the night before a performance. That’s if we are smart. We’ve done it all in 45 minutes in some instances. The “stage” takes four 400 watt lights, two with red gels to warm the set.  In the photo you can see Executive Producer of the Live in the Lab series Chris Rattey setting up the stage video monitors. These are six monitors stacked Brady Bunch style. When not called into concert duty, these monitors usually display Chris Marstall’s innovative Boston Instagram montage. But, for the shows, we hijack the screens for RadioBDC pub and band photos (see video). Rattey has finally mastered setting this up without “herniating” a disk. Chris explains the process in this short video...

Other set-up items accomplished this early are “hanging” studio art work and setting up the camera.

11 am (2h, 30min to show time)

At this point most of the lighting and set accoutrements are in place. It’s time to break out the conduit to the web – the LiveU backpack. Boston.com invested in the LiveU backpack back in January to shoot large breaking news events. It’s come in quite handy recently with all of the live performances. Essentially, the backpack is a TV satellite truck stuffed in a 20 lb. pack. Since the pack relies on cell service (4G if available), it’s always smart to run a test early and often. Too little bandwidth and your stream can be poor. So, there are ways to dial back the quality a bit – if you have enough bandwidth, sky is the limit. The bandwidth gods smile upon us today, signal is strong.

  The pack is configured right to our Brightcove account. So, at this point, it’s plug-and-play. Getting out to the web also has an additional step – a CDN. In this case we use a company called Mirror Image. Mirror Image helps us split the video stream into three – flash, HLS (for iOS) and whatever Blackberry needs. 

Noon (1h, 30 min to show time)

Minus the Bear is definitely not on “band time.” These guys are pros and show up 90 minutes before the show to make sure everything works. Usually we have more time to set-up as bands are known to stroll in a bit late. We’re happy they are here so we can test levels and shots with actual talent. 

We’re used to a vocalist and an acoustic guitar player, but Minus has brought a full arsenal – five band members complete with three guitars, keyboard and a new one for us – drums. Another key ingredient Snow has to worry about is Program Director Paul Driscoll is recording the show on his Mac to playback on RadioBDC. Paul confirms he is getting the feed. 

12:30 pm (1h to show time)

At this point we’ve fully tested the video stream. Problem – we have moving pictures, but no audio. We run an XLR from the camera to the board. After 10 minutes we realize a mute button is pressed on the mixer. Problem solved. We listen for the audio stream with Minus the Bear warming up and realize we are only hearing music in one ear. Is the mixer only sending mono? We hope not. Darren Durlach, our shooter for the day, points out that we are taking the stereo feed from the board and it’s clear in the camera. 

Monitors are giving us fits and starts but between Snow and Radio BDC’s own Adam 12 they figure out how to get the band the sound they want.

1 pm (30 min to show time)

While the band scarfs down some of Café BG’s finest sandwiches, the production team plows through more testing. All is well with the live video stream. We now have full audio. Crisis averted.

Lucky RadioBDC contest winners start filing into the first few rows of seats in the Globe Lab. Employees from the Globe start to fill in the rest of the seats.

1:15 pm (15 min to show time)

Minus the Bear takes its place on stage and loosens up. All of the technical aspects are behind us, it’s show time.

1:30 pm (show time)

Julie Kramer is given the thumbs up to intro the band and start the show. Just have to hope all of the prep work pays off. 

1:40 pm (show time +10)

A light briefly powers down in between songs. A wall hanging drops and almost takes out the drummer. Welcome to live TV! Here is a short clip from the show.

2:00 pm (show's over)

Show is over, Minus the Bear is nice enough to take some photos and meet the fans. Another “Live in the Lab” in the books. Here is a link to the full set.

Great work by all of the people behind the scenes and in front of the camera. Time to start tearing down. Bela Fleck is in the Lab in 12 hours – time to reset for the fourteen time Grammy winner. 

The partnership was announced today:

The Boston Globe and the MIT Center for Civic Media are collaborating to bring media experiments from the university to the audience of the Globe’s websites, Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com.