beta.boston.com

[Updated 4/27 with another visualization]

The New York Times R&D lab announced its first commercial product today, and BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com are pleased to be offering it to brand advertisers.

Ricochet lets a brand choose an article from the Globe or Boston.com that will be  interesting to its followers and fans.  The brand then gets a unique URL which, when tweeted or posted on Facebook, sends readers to that article with the brand’s ads displayed next to it.

Here’s how business-software company SAP is using it with a New York Times article:

Brand advertisers also get access to the R&D lab’s Project Cascade, which will let them see the content spreading across the Internet.  Here’s a visualization of a Globe story from earlier today about overuse of exclamation points!

[larger version].

In these visualizations, pink dots are tweets and yellow dots are clicks on those tweets that pass through bit.ly; clicks that go only through t.co are untrackable.  Each circle is 90 minutes of elapsed time since the first tweet.

Here’s a cascade with a story about Sen. Scott Brown promising to release his tax returns, showing how @ChuckTodd’s tweet was hugely influential.

[larger version]

And just to be meta, here’s the Cascade this post generated:

[larger version]

You can read some more about Ricochet in AdAge.

If you’re interested in learning more about how your company can leverage Ricochet, please contact Michael Bentley, Director of Digital Product Management, @mikebentley or (617) 929-8709.

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Google today launched Schemer, a website to “help you keep track of everything you want to do so you’ll always have a scheme up your sleeve.” 

Boston.com knows a thing or two about things to do around Boston, so we’ve created a bunch of schemes that you might be interested in.  You might want to:

• Waddle along on the Duck Boats
• Take a free peek under the Golden Dome
• Find Espresso Love
• Catch some rays at Revere Beach

Or you can tell the world, with one click, that you’ve done any or all of these activities.  Here’s the full list.

Schemer is tied in with the Google+ social network, so you can share your plans with friends and get suggestions from them.  If you follow Boston.com on Google+, you’ll see all of our activity ideas.  We’ll keep adding to them as well.

Here’s a video the Scheming crew put together to explain the service:

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By Matt Carroll, Globe reporter and Hacks/Hackers Boston organizer

If the “curated” web becomes all the rage, then Ziad R. Sultan hopes to be among the first to get there. Sultan has founded a company called Nextly that he hopes can capitalize on what he sees as the next big leap forward in the Internet’s growth.

“Curated” refers to the idea that someone helps sort through the jungle of information that is the web and finds what is relevant for you.

Sultan believes the curated web will help users more easily find information that is more tightly focused on what they need.

“I care about being guided to the right content,” Sultan said.

Sultan, who is also at Longworth Venture Partners and is CEO at Marginize, spoke to about 30 people at a Hacks/Hackers Boston chapter meeting at the Boston Globe’s Innovation Lab on April 10. He pointed out that much of the web is curated informally – one-third of Tweets include a link, for instance.

The idea of Nextly, which is still in the very early stages of development, was demonstrated to an appreciative audience, many of whom signed up to be Nextly testers.

The theme of the meetup was “How to Keep Your News Site Sticky.” Also speaking was Sean Creeley, a co-founder of Embed.ly, which helps developers to embed any URL through one API, allowing them to turn posted links into videos and more. The meetup was organized by Hacks/Hacker member Stacey Resnikoff.

Hacks/Hackers Boston is also a co-sponsor of next month’s Boston Innovation Challenge, a two-week long hacking event designed to help solve Boston’s real-world problems with mobile technology.

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Last February, Boston.com hosted its first hack day, with the theme of “Making Boston Better.” We had a great turnout, with 20-plus teams working through the weekend on some great ideas.

Since then, we’ve been to a lot of hack days ourselves and started to think about what our next event should look like. After meeting with our counterparts at Harvard Business Publishing, the organizers of the new Harvard I-lab and other interested partners, we thought we would try something a bit different this time around.

  Though the Boston Innovation Challenge is in essence still a hack event, we’ve decided to run it for a longer time, 3 events over May 5-19 to give teams longer to work on their ideas. We’ve also themed it around mobile and are asking teams to consider one of four areas that the group thought could use some attention –

•  Culture & Entertainment - Help people discover, share, and experience events.
• Connecting under-connected communities (Ethnic groups, regional groups, causes) through social networking, video, multimedia, events.
• Job creation - Matching opportunities with people looking for them using technology, multimedia and collaboration tools.
•  Startups - Tightening the bonds between any new business initiatives to encourage collaboration and job creation in the area. 

We also want to encourage teams to work to get a broad set of expertise – developers, designers, writers, product managers, businesspeople and marketers – to work on their concept.

The Boston Innovation Challenge is also a great event for a company to put together a team (or two) to work on an idea that helps make Boston a better place, perhaps even letting the team work some time on the clock to hone the idea. It’s not required, but we think it’s a great way to let some of your best and brightest to work on something new and represent the skill and expertise of your company.

We’ll be assembling a few Globe and Boston.com teams and working over the next month to get the word out through casual meetups and events where people can come together, meet others to join a team or just to learn about the event.

We look forward to seeing you and hope you will join us in what we hope will be a fun and inspiring event. 

Sign up or get more information at www.bostoninnovationchallenge.com

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In creating BostonGlobe.com, we envisioned giving subscribers additional benefits even beyond the high-quality journalism delivered every day. Subscribers would have access to special events, behind-the-scenes videos, and interviews with reporters. We introduced subscribers to another of these benefits on Wednesday, March 28, when we published an e-cookbook called “Sunday Supper & More.” It is free to subscribers, who simply have to go to the Boston Globe Insiders section and follow the instructions to download the e-book to their desktop, laptop, iPad, Nook or Kindle Fire.

The idea for the e-cookbook came from the Globe’s assistant managing editor for design, Dan Zedek. He was intrigued with Apple’s recently-released iBook Author, which makes self-publishing e-books especially easy and quick. After experimenting with the tool himself for a bit, he showed off his handiwork to Martin Baron, editor of The Boston Globe, and Jeff Moriarty, vice president/digital, who were immediately excited about the opportunities this now opened up. Working with Food Editor Sheryl Julian and Janice Page, our books development editor, Zedek took dozens of the Sunday Supper & More recipe columns from our weekly Food section and turned them into a beautiful e-cookbook full of spring recipes.

This was not our first e-book. We’ve published a three-part series of Whitey Bulger books, an enhanced e-book for our “Killer B’s” Boston Bruins championship book, and e-book versions of our two books about the late Senator Edward Kennedy. There is also an e-book of the Globe’s new “Fenway Park” book celebrating the ballpark’s 100th anniversary. “Sunday Supper & More,” however, was the first e-book produced entirely in-house.

We’re excited about the prospect of producing e-cookbooks for each of the remaining seasons, summer, fall and winter. We expect many more e-books to come, in all sorts of categories. Watch the BostonGlobe.com/insiders page for more titles.

Doug Most, Deputy Managing Editor for Features

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By Matt Carroll

Baseball players’ salaries measured in hot dogs. Praying for victory, and helping out nonprofits financially. And even a treasure trove of baseball literature.

These apps and sites were among the nine that were created as part of Boston Baseball Hack Day, held Saturday in the Boston Globe innovation lab. The fun, free event brought together about 35 people with overlapping interests – baseball and programming.

Fuelled by coffee, donuts and pizza, the group impressed the judges with their creations. (Links are provided, but not all sites are operating.)

The winner was Rally Cry. When your team is down by a run, maybe you start praying for a stunning victory. Well, put your money where your prayers are – pledge some cash to a nonprofit (but only pay if your team wins). Team members were: Kenji Ross, John Hamilton, Mike Paulo, and Doug Pfeffer.

Baseball has inspired some of the greatest sports writing, and Baseball Literature is a Tumblr devoted to just that. The site was the idea of Jay Hurd, who was helped by others.

Perhaps the site that inspired the most laughter was What’s That in Hot Dogs? The team divided player salaries by the price of hot dogs in the player’s home park. With some ballparks charging only a buck while Fenway charges the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment, that cuts some salaries down to size. Team members were: Rory MacKean, Ted Lawless, Matthew Shanley, Kyle Fidler, and Chris Adams.

There’s a full list of the apps hacked together at http://baseballhackday.com, and more photos from organizer Daigo Fujiwara on Flickr.

The judges were: Ben Fry, an information designer and principal at Fathom; Andy Andres, a professor at BU, who teaches Sabremetrics 101 at Tufts; and Matt Pepin, sports editor of boston.com.

The event was sponsored by the Boston Globe, Boston.com, SABR Boston, and Hacks/Hackers Boston. 

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Are you a visual journalist with some serious coding chops? Are you a hacker with a passion for news, especially the data side of journalism? Do you love to craft experiences that help readers understand complicated and overwhelming amounts of information? Do you speak “journalism?”

We are hiring a data visualization programmer for the Boston Globe’s newsroom.

We need amazing things to happen with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We are looking for someone with a love for semantic, standards-driven web development and design. We want experience with data collection and analysis using APIs. We’re excited to find someone who cannot help the desire to create maps, charts and tools for data display. 

We want someone familiar with one or two front-end or back-end languages and frameworks and have a project or two that demonstrates an ability to take something from concept to completion … Extra credit for demonstrable experience with HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design.

This self-starter will get to cross-train, teach and share their skills with colleagues, collaborate with newsroom programmers, digital designers and site producers to build ambitious story presentations, and make cool stuff at one of the oldest, yet, forward-thinking news organizations in the country. For example, you could help users understand the health law mandate, reveal to Bostonians that they fish the eat in restaurants might be mislabeled, show the locations of deteriorating Massachusetts’s sea walls, and much more.

If the above describes you and you love the idea of being immersed in a fast-paced, buzzing newsroom, Apply! You are the person to do this job. Being a journalist for Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com is never boring. You will make a difference. Come work on the side of accountability.

Interested? You can apply here PLUS, email your info and links to examples of your work to me at mulligan at globe dot com. 

– Miranda
Design director, digital 

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