Project Management 101

Dan Schultz
1:41 PM | bio | Comments: 3

Whenever I tell someone that I'm majoring in Information Systems the response tends to be something along the lines of "Ahh that's nice... What's Information Systems?" For the first two years of my college education my answer was just "think of it as Computer Science lite." The real answer is much better: Information Systems is the art of applying technology to improve processes and help people accomplish their goals. Since most IdeaLab readers and writers are ultimately aiming to do exactly this in the field of journalism, I figured it might be nice to give a crash course in... continued...

Topics: Best Practices
Tagged: gethering requirements, information systems, project management

A Call for Quality Comments

Dan Schultz
7:30 PM | bio | Comments: 4

A few days ago I was snooping around Digg when I noticed a popular submission titled The Difference Between Digg and Reddit. I clicked, eager to learn, and was presented with an image juxtaposing two very distinct flavors of user-submitted comments surrounding the breaking news of Tony Snow's death. The first comments shown at Digg offered generic words of respect that you might expect to hear about a public figure that passed away. The top comment at Reddit, however, was a bit more candid to say the least. The discussion that followed ranged from folks saying "maybe I should join... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation
Tagged: comments, digg, group think, rating

World of Digitalmediacraft

Dan Schultz
8:03 PM | bio | Comments: 3

There is one reason and one reason alone that I haven't catastrophically dropped out of college yet: I avoid World of Warcraft as though it were the plague. In case you are unfamiliar, World of Warcraft is an incredibly popular game made by Blizzard Entertainment in which players take on the role of an adventurer in a Tolkein-esque virtual world alongside thousands of other people. Obviously the game must be fun, but what makes it dangerously addictive is that the more you play the more you can do and the better you can do it. The result is an incredibly... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Technology
Tagged: citizen, journalist, user history, world of warcraft

How to Create a Reader-Driven News System

Dan Schultz
10:59 PM | bio | Comments: 0

We all know that the "audience" analogy no longer represents the way journalism should work. We know that the people reading the news have opinions, perspectives, and facts that are relevant to the conversation. Some of them just have observations, but others are reporters at heart or maybe they have the wordsmithing abilities of a columnist. This post is about how the news system I've been blogging about can be driven by user generated content and collective intelligence. In a larger sense, however, it is about the way in which any news organization can make the move past the one-sided... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation
Tagged: collective agenda, moderation, user contribution

Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

Dan Schultz
9:00 PM | bio | Comments: 0

Before I went home this summer I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Twedt, a reporter at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who teaches one of the few journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon. I told him about the Idealab and the user driven system I've been writing about here. The first big question he asked deserves a well thought out response: "What if the users don't contribute?" Steve is right; a developer can't rely on user contribution unless he/she is sure users will contribute. Since one can never actually be sure about that, we are left with three simple tasks: hedge... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: aggregation, participation, personalization, user generated content

Connecting People, Content, and Community

Dan Schultz
11:55 PM | bio | Comments: 2

One of the main goals of online information design is to present content in a way that allows users/readers to find what they want. Tagging, the digital extension of newspaper sections, is one technique used on just about every modern news website as a way to help users browse or search, but that isn't the only way it can be useful. Through tagging we can use computers to intelligently distribute content and enhance the media conversation. I'll take the context of a global aggregation system and go through the way I think this can be done, walking through the steps... continued...

Topics: Technology
Tagged: community, geotagging, intelligent algorithms, location, tagging, targeted content

Tying it All Together

Dan Schultz
12:49 PM | bio | Comments: 0

The IdeaLab bloggers have spent four months talking about technologies, roles, and rules surrounding journalism and digital media. Now it's time to take some of the insights from those posts and design a system that will allow citizens and journalists alike to inform the media conversation, connect with their communities, and democratically drive the social agenda. I'll give an overview of one possible system here; over the next few weeks I'll explain each piece of it in more detail. System Elements Geotagging - by tagging content to physical location it is possible to personalize it without losing the benefits of... continued...

Topics: Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: citizen, geotagging, journalist, news system

Journalists, Citizens, and the Media Conversation

Dan Schultz
5:23 PM | bio | Comments: 1

In my first post to this blog I said that the professional/citizen journalist debate was a "topic best left for another day." It seems that the time has finally come for me to put my two cents out there, and I'll be doing it by exploring what it means to be a journalist and a citizen in this digital world. Ultimately, though, I hope to convince everyone that although it may seem difficult, there doesn't have to be a tradeoff between quality and democracy: we can have it all. continued...

Topics: Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: agenda, citizen journalist, democracy, information, journalist citizen

Media's "New" Community Role

Dan Schultz
1:02 AM | bio | Comments: 19

I just got back to the U.S. from my first visit to Rome. The whole trip was great, but my favorite part was The Roman Forum. This ancient gathering place represents, as far as I'm concerned, the epitome of community facilitation given the resources available at the time. This may not seem like a relevant anecdote at first but the point is that I think members of the news industry who are looking for a role in this crazy Internet filled world may discover that the answer to their identity crisis isn't so new after all. This post is about... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Philosophy
Tagged: anonymous, community, forum, media role

Community Organization with Digital Tools

Dan Schultz
4:35 AM | bio | Comments: 6

Last week I took a digital-communication-oriented glance at the war on Scientology being led by the nontraditional online group called Anonymous. I'm not exactly writing a part 2, but I want to start a follow-up discussion on a few of the comments made and questions posed by Anonymous about how digital media affects the dynamics of community organization. That being said, if you haven't had the chance to browse the comments of that post it's probably worthwhile. I have mentioned in the past that I want to see digital media facilitate local impact; to do that well we need to... continued...

Topics: Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: activism, anonymous, community organization, digital tools

Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media

Dan Schultz
1:31 AM | bio | Comments: 44

So far I have avoided bringing up specific events and breaking stories here even when they might illustrate relevant uses of digital media. The reason for this is that I'm not really a reporter, but I've been watching something play out over the Internet and it is just too interesting to pass up. I'm talking about the recently declared and currently unfolding "War on Scientology" that is being led by an online group called "Anonymous." It is a really fascinating case study of how current technologies and information dissemination via digital media can snowball into something that actually results in... continued...

Topics: Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: agenda, collective agenda, digital community, physical community

Physical Location is Different from Physical Community

Dan Schultz
11:59 PM | bio | Comments: 4

When I applied to the News Challenge last year there was a guideline that all proposals had to somehow further the way digital media was used to assist a "specific physical area". This is actually why my friend Ian Anderson mentioned GPS during our brainstorming session, which led right over to Geotagging. The funny thing is that we had actually misinterpreted the entire situation - we took "specific physical area" to mean "specific physical community" - yet our solution still fulfilled the requirements of the News Challenge. This post is about my suspicion that although Geotagging does connect information to... continued...

Topics: Philosophy
Tagged: geotagging, physical community, physical location

A Developer's Dilemma: Who's a Journalist?

Dan Schultz
11:50 PM | bio | Comments: 6

I just got back onto campus after a glorious winter break and I'm full of chocolate and food from the holidays. To get back into things I was planning on using this post to flesh out my ideas for content moderation in a user-facilitated aggregation system. To be specific, I wanted to find a way to give journalists a special place in the content judging process without losing a sense of democracy. Unfortunately, within 10 minutes of sitting down I realized that there was a big snag that needs to be addressed before the conversation can even begin. The Snag:... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: developers, membership organizations, standards

One Location Doesn't Cut It

Dan Schultz
9:40 PM | bio | Comments: 4

Two months ago I made a post about the fun little news application on the Nintendo Wii. Dan Burd responded to the post with this comment criticizing some of Wii News' interface assumptions: "I think it's limiting to say that each news story only pertains to one location. Many news stories are overviews of the relations between two or more countries. I'm guessing the AP thing would place them at whatever city the reporter is reporting from. I think that's a bit misleading." If you ask me, he is spot on. Burd's comment refers to global news, but the... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Technology
Tagged: geotagging, mapping news, maps, multiple locations

Traditional Tagging is Important Too

Dan Schultz
1:22 PM | bio | Comments: 0

There has been a lot of talk about Geo-fillintheblank on this blog. Much of it is coming from me, so I want to take a second to bring things back down to earth (pun!). This post is about the old standard of information breakdown: separation by topic. Since "sections" are a typical feature for most, if not all, traditional news sites and newspapers, I don't think I need to spend time trying to explain why topical categorization is useful in general. Instead, I just want to make sure we re-incorporate this navigational technique while making the mad rush towards new... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: geotagging, personalized news, tags, topical tagging

Making Maps Work with Geo-Filtering

Dan Schultz
3:48 AM | bio | Comments: 2

It's finals week here at Carnegie Mellon, and now more than ever I don't want to spend unnecessary time digging around for information. I want my notes organized and easy to flip through, I don't want to have to look at 5 different course portals to find the study guides that my professors put online, and I definitely don't want to download and read half of an assigned paper only to realize that it doesn't matter for the test. In fact, these desires sound a lot like the desires of an information consumer in general - I would like my... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Technology
Tagged: geofiltering, geotagging, local news, maps, physically defined news

Targeted, Democratic Content Moderation

Dan Schultz
2:10 AM | bio | Comments: 3

In an earlier post I suggested a process intended to maintain journalistic standards in a globally accessible, user-maintained aggregated news site. Its key feature was a purgatory section where new articles would be rated by readers for quality, apparent credibility, and a few other traits before being published. If a report didn't get high enough numbers it would be deleted from the system or, in the case of a close call, maybe it would be reviewed by designated members of the relevant community. That description probably sounds very similar to Digg's Upcoming section, but this post should help differentiate the two. I'll describe a quick twist that turns an open and fairly loose peer review scheme into a targeted one that (I think) stands a decent chance at providing accurate regional and topic specific news without losing article integrity. continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation
Tagged: moderation, targeted moderation, user content

Tapping the Potential of Geotagging

Dan Schultz
3:00 AM | bio | Comments: 7

Last week I saw someone wearing a shirt that said "Think Globally. Act Locally. Eat Noodles." The noodles part still confuses me, but I think the rest of the message does a really good job of summarizing what I want digital media to facilitate. It seems that the key to bringing local into the inherently non-physical Internet is Geotagging and geographic interfaces. These technologies open up some innovative ways to present stories, but before looking at this idea more closely I'm going to describe the current situation from the perspective of a 21 year old media consumer in the hopes that it will illustrate the need that I'm trying to address. continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: geotagging, global, local, scope

Moderating User Content in the Land of Journalism

Dan Schultz
8:13 PM | bio | Comments: 0

When people talk about the job of a moderator, they are talking about maintaining some type of standard. During a conference panel a good moderator might make sure that all the panelists get the chance to talk and keep the audience from throwing tomatoes. For YouTube it means promoting quality entertainment and keeping out the spam. But how do you maintain standards that are as high and complex as those of the journalism tradition, and how do you keep those standards in a democratic way? We have all faced these questions in one form or another, particularly when discussing the... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: maintaining standards, moderation, user content

Navigating World News With a Wii

Dan Schultz
8:27 PM | bio | Comments: 3

Most of you have probably heard of the Nintendo Wii, an increasingly popular video game system that features motion controls. Some of you may have even played it. Part of the reason I'm mentioning it here is because I'm a dedicated Nintendo fan, but the real motive is a very interesting (and free) feature that I haven't heard much talk about: the News Channel. continued...

Topics: Games & Virtual Worlds, Technology
Tagged: locative browsing, map interface, wii news

Some Goals and An Idea

Dan Schultz
12:28 AM | bio | Comments: 4

Jay Rosen beat me to the punch but I'm still going to jot down seven goals that I think the perfect news system would address. I used this list as a foundation when thinking about how to utilize digital media and it is what I feel any type of aggregation system should include. Afterwards you'll find a quick summary of the idea that got me into this big mess in the first place. continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: aggregation, blogging, consumer contribution, geotagging, news, user agenda

Deep Thought Strikes Again

Dan Schultz
12:11 AM | bio | Comments: 1

Last year I sat down to brainstorm with my friend Ian Anderson in hopes that we could chip away at the question: "What is the Perfect News System?" An hour and a half later we had a nice list of what we felt such a system would have along with a few vague ideas about how to implement it all. Over the next few months that list and those ideas were fleshed out into a winning News Challenge proposal. Was the resulting system design actually perfect? Nope! If it was I would probably be programming right now, but I tell... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: brainstorming, system design

An "Outsider's" Perspective

Dan Schultz
3:51 PM | bio | Comments: 1

When I found out that I won the "First Annual News Challenge" I wasn't sitting in an editor's office or getting ready to talk at a conference about new media - I was in my dorm room trying to decide whether or not I wanted to order a pizza for dinner. All of a sudden I was plopped at the forefront of an industry near the brink of some incredibly exciting technological innovations armed with nothing more than a big idea, a few complaints, and my Millennial demographic. continued...

Topics: Philosophy
Tagged: hiring, new media, observations, programmers