Idea Lab

iWitness Launches Tool for Exploring Social Media By Time and Place

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are very excited to announce the launch of iWitness, a free tool created by Adaptive Path for exploring social media content by time and place. We designed iWitness to enable people to explore content in new ways. We wanted it to be a vehicle for discovering what's happening in the world, in cases where time and place really matter. But we didn't just want to create an interesting, new product. We also wanted to see what could be done with the latest web techniques and technologies. As a result, iWitness runs entirely in the browser -- it has no...

• June 15, 2012
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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Developing iWitness

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

iWitness, our project to create a tool to aggregate social media by time and place, is now well underway, and we're looking forward to sharing some of our thinking about the design of the tool with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we've asked our development partners at EdgeCase to provide their perspective on the technical side of the process. Here's what Mike Doel, project manager at EdgeCase, had to say: the Process At EdgeCase, we use an agile development process to rapidly produce functionality with a minimum of waste. We combine elements of "Extreme Programming" and "Behavior...

• March 26, 2012
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iWitness Aims to Aggregate News By Time and Place

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Let's face it: The great promise of citizen media has not really been fulfilled. News organizations have struggled to find ways to supplement their coverage of news events with contributions from citizens -- and finding citizen media related to a news event is currently difficult at best. Keyword searches and hashtags provide partial solutions, but still do not differentiate between first-person accounts and other kinds of content. And although more and more services allow their content to be geotagged, few tools take advantage of this data in meaningful ways. That's where we come in. My company, Adaptive Path, is a...

• March 5, 2012
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