I've been getting a lot of positive feedback and a few questions on this little button, which we featured in the February edition of the Bulletin.

Since finding out about 2D barcodes, I've been thinking that they're remarkably under used. With around 172.4 million smartphones sold in 2009 there are a large number of people out there with devices capable of taking full advantage of integration between newspapers and the mobile web.

While some news companies are (justifiably) putting resources into their mobile websites and apps, there are also consumers who still actually both buy the paper and own a smartphone - people like me, for example.

QR codes (a type of 2D barcode) provide a very low cost option for driving traffic to a web site from the print newspaper, increasing user engagement, and generally offering another aspect to print newspapers which consumers take for granted on the internet - multimedia and sharing articles.

If I'm reading a interesting article on a news website, I can (on most modern websites) share the article with friends and colleagues on Twitter or Facebook with a single click.

This is an important and growing source of readers for news sites - social media is fast catching up to search engines as the biggest source of traffic on the net.

Richard Titus, CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital, speaking at the Media 2010 conference cited this statistic:

"Last month, there were 8 billion links clicked on Bing, and Google. Those are people going out on a search engine to find something, and then clicking it."

"There were six billion links clicked on social media. So Facebook, bit.ly, Twitter, et al.," he said.

"That's almost 75 percent of the same traffic, except actually I would argue that that 75 percent is more valuable, because most of those links were from me to my friends."

However, this sharing is not easily available from the print edition, short of cutting out an article and showing people, or going online on your mobile, trying to locate the article, minimising the link, then putting it into twitter or facebook.

QR codes can change this.

Using three freely availably online services, I put a QR code into our newspaper that when scanned with a mobile phone, takes you to twitter with a link to the online version of the article ready to go in the Twitter status. It's a three click process if you're already logged in to twitter, and this process could be streamlined with a custom app.

How to:

First of all, you need the html for the link. In my example, I took the article from our newspaper and put it online with the following URL:

http://www.panpa.org.au/Public/Template5/ThreadView.aspx?tid=27161

Then, you need to run this URL through a link shortening service, ideally one with statistics built in so you can measure the use of your short link. I used bit.ly for this, to get the following URL:

http://bit.ly/d4aURd

The next step is to format a URL that will open twitter with your link in the status ready to go, and anything else you want included, such as your newspaper's twitter name or a short description of the article.

The syntax for this is pretty straightforward. You need twitter, and then the "?status=" command followed by whatever you want inserted. Use "%20" to create blank spaces.

http://twitter.com/home?status=http://bit.ly/d4aURd

Or, with @panpa_tweet (our twitter username) inserted:

http://twitter.com/home?status=@panpa_tweet%20http://bit.ly/d4aURd

Now your link is all ready to be converted into a QR code, which will carry the URL information into print.

For this, I used the zxing project's QR code generator an open source QR code project. Switch the drop-down box to URL, plug in your twitter URL, and then click on generate. You can see my finished code here.

Now your QR twitter button is ready to be put into your paper!

Pundits worldwide have been asking the question ‘Can Apple save publishers?’

The new Apple product was launched yesterday, and is something like a scaled-up iPod touch or iPhone (without phone function), featuring a 24.6 cm touch screen and access to the same applications store as the iPhone and iPod touch.

As of today, I’ve read no less than six articles speculating on whether or not the iPad can “save” newspapers. The consensus seems to be the new platform will help, but it’s no silver bullet for financial woes.

Speaking at the launch was Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times. He presented a New York Times reader application developed specifically for the iPad.

In the photos and descriptions of the event, the reader makes use of the larger screen to go for an “interactive newspaper” design similar to the Times Reader 2.0 application, rather than the list-style layouts common to iPhone applications.

Most of the discussion around publishing on the iPad looksat three ways of monetising content on the platform: selling individual editions or subscriptions, advertising, and selling premium services.

The first is the most obvious, as publishers have alreadystarted to use Apple’s app store to sell their content. The Guardian sold 70,000 apps at £2.39 each a month after launch, and GQ magazine has sold some 12,000 digital versions of its January issue.

With the New York Times instituting a metered pay wall in 2010, and the Times Reader 2.0 charging a subscription fee, it’s possible the Times will try to sell subscriptions to read news on the iPad in asimilar fashion.

The iPad’s large, high definition colour screen and ability to play video content lends itself better to digital advertising than the iPhone or e-readers, though it remains to be seen what form ads will take.  No ads were shown in the demonstration Mr Nisenholtz gave, which might mean a fully subscription-based model for theTimes.

The on-selling of premium services is another approach that publishers might take. For example, the Times Reader features a link to the New York Times wine club.

Regardless of how publishers approach the iPad, it’s going to be strong influence on the digital publishing sphere. Apple CEO Steve Jobs remarked at the launch that their iTunes store already has around 125 million user accounts with credit cards linked, with all the users already used to making small payments for pieces of content. 

THE geopolitical climate of Southeast Asia is easier to understand than Google’s new communication tool, Google Wave.

So say 62 percent of respondents to a website where users rank concepts against Google Wave, while listening Avril Lavigne’s sing Complicated.

It has been developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmassen, who work out of the company’s Sydney office, right next door to Fairfax Media.

When I first received an invite to the Google Wave service, which is still in beta, I was excited to check out the “re-invention of email” into a service that combines aspects of instant messaging, wikis, google docs, and gmail. I was also interested to see how it could be used by the media.

After watching the introductory video, it seems pretty suited to collaborative editing.
It also supports rich media, such as embedded YouTube videos. However, one application that newspapers are picking up on is its use for social media.

Wave can be used instead of a comments section on a blog or story, and then it also acts like an RSS reader, as the wave will appear in the user’s Wave account, which will automatically update with new comments. If the original story is part of a “wave”, then other people can edit the post with comments and corrections.

RedEye, a Chicago-based free newspaper, has been using Google Wave to discuss stories on their website. For one story, one of the online editors will start a “wave” that anyone can join. I sat in on a few of their waves to see how it worked out.

At first, it was hard to see what the wave offers beyond a live-blogging tool like cover it live, which a few Australian news sites already use.

After people started replying directly to certain parts of comments, rather than following a linear timeline, plus embedding pictures, editing mistakes in earlier posts, and so on, it was clear how flexible Wave is as a discussion tool, especially involving rich media.

It will also get better with time as Google has opened to doors to third party developers to work with Wave to adapt it to various uses.

It’s also worth mentioning that Wave is still definitely pre-release software, as it managed to crash my browser at least twice while writing this.

CROWD-funding might be the best thing to happen to newspapers since the invention of the offset press.

Earlier this month a multimedia story appeared in the New York Times about the Pacific garbage patch, a giant “island” of rubbish floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The story, by freelancer Lindsey Hoshaw, was remarkable not because of its subject matter, which has been covered before, but because of how the story was paid for.

The New York Times said they would pay $US700 for the story and photos, though they were not able to pay the travel expenses involved.

However,$US10,000 to fund Ms Hoshaw’s trip came from an organisation called Spot.us (www.spot.us), a San Francisco-based non-profit.

Spot.us uses a system of “crowdfunding”. A pitch for a story is placed on their website, and then members of the public can donate money to fund a freelance journalist to write the story.

Publishers can also donate money to story pitches, and if they fund 50 per cent of a story pitch they gain first-publishing rights on the story. If they pay for all of it, they gain exclusive rights to the story.

Even if a media organisation doesn’t contribute funds, they still benefit as the stories are released from certain aspects of copyright under Creative Commons licensing, allowing them to be published by anyone. On the face of it, this is an exciting new model that has the potential to reduce the cost of producing news, while also engaging the audience by giving them a sense of ownership over a story. It’s hard to see how publishers can’t benefit in some
way from a model like this.

However David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, told the association non-profits were not “some kind of saviour” for the financial troubles of the newspaper industry, though they would help.

“This is not a silver bullet,” he said. “Idon’t think there is any such thing.”

There are similar models being planned for the Pacific region, too, which you can read more about in the next edition of The Bulletin.