Idea Lab

Freedom Fone Comes to Dar es Salaam

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda and I have just returned from Dar es Salaam. We were on the road with Freedom Fone. Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled in relief when we discovered John holding up a torn piece of cardboard with Freedom Fone scribbled on it. We couldn't speak Swahili and he couldn't speak English but we made our greetings and jumped into his car for the ride of our life to a lodge off the Old Bagamoyo...

• November 26, 2009
• No comments

The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The New Journalist in the Age of Social MediaView more documents from JD Lasica. I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before. I'm jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I've come across in recent...

• November 24, 2009
• No comments

Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write). That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language. The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown...

• November 16, 2009
• 3 comments

Reporting with Mobile Phones: The Experience of Voices of Africa

by Katrin Verclas
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

(This story was written by Anne-Ryan Heatwole of MobileActive.org.) Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles. The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the...

• November 13, 2009
• 1 comment

Using Mobile Phones to Map the Slums of Brazil

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, unnamed streets meander through the hillsides. There are hospitals, coffee shops and restaurants, none of which appear on a map. Mail carriers struggle to deliver letters to homes without addresses.A new project by Rede Jovem, a Brazilian non-profit that loosely translates to "Youth Net," seeks to change that. With the help of five young "wiki-reporters" and GPS-equipped mobile phones, the non-profit is building a map of five Brazilian favelas: Complexo do Alemão, Cidade de Deus, Morro do Pavão-Pavãozinho, Morro Santa Marta and Complexo da Maré.  Mapping the Unmapped By uploading...

• November 9, 2009
• 1 comment

The New Era of Media Development, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for "ICT for development". Indeed, what is the future of media development when we're still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability. In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major...

• October 25, 2009
• 2 comments

Mobile Phones Give Africans a Voice, Make Governments Nervous

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

User-generated comments, and text messages in particular, are causing umbrage in Namibian government circles. Their unhappiness highlights the historic shift of media away from unidirectional, univocal information. This case underlines the politics entailed when the media becomes a platform for broader communication, which is exactly what's happening with mobile phones in some African countries. Things came to a head in Namibia in early October at a political rally held as part of the build-up to the country's November elections. A torrent of abuse and threats were issued at the event, and they emanated from the Namibian minister of justice,...

• October 13, 2009
• 1 comment

New Citizen Journalism Newsroom Launched in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

During the massive Highway Africa conference, two Knight Foundation funded projects, the Iindaba Ziyafika ('the news is coming') Citizen Journalism newsroom and the Nika content management system, were launched. The Iindaba Ziyafika newsroom has 10 computers and the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wirelessly and through the most amazing collection of cables!). This means anyone can walk in, write a story, download a photo and get it published on the Grocott's website, or in the twice weekly print edition of Grocott's Mail. You can watch this great SoundSlide show which captures the vibe and importance...

• September 24, 2009
• 2 comments

Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story. So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet. Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University. Participants were brought together under the auspices of another...

• September 21, 2009
• No comments

Mobile Projects Shouldn't Overlook 'Dumbphones'

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, CityCircles (formerly Daily Phoenix) attended a lunch event at Arizona State University that allowed us to have one-on-one conversations with college seniors who were interested in our project. (The event is summarized here.) This was a crucial event. ASU has a huge footprint in the Phoenix area because it has 69,000 students. They buzz around the Valley in cars, on bikes, on foot and yes, on light rail. This makes them a huge group for us as potential users and collaborators. As we talked to them, we realized that an assumption we made early on -- one that...

• September 14, 2009
• 2 comments

How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The pre-cursors to mobile phones were two-way radios, also called Walkie-Talkies, that transmitted voice signals. The first generation of mobile phone networks were similar in that they also only supported voice communications. Second generation networks, and a happy accident, gave us SMS, and third generation networks provide even more advanced mobile data services. Most mobile phone applications now use these newer channels of communication -- SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a major part of mobile phone communications. And when it comes to performing social work, voice communication is actually the most important feature...

• September 3, 2009
• 1 comment

The Power of Proximity: Possibilities for Hyperlocal Journalism in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Whether it focuses on hyperlocal crime, hyperlocal pollution and health issues, local economies (market matching information) and information about the provision of local services, this approach provides an arguably essential missing link between what citizens might find useful to know, and ways that citizens might use the information and analysis to create pressure and increase participation in efforts to change things.

• September 1, 2009
• 1 comment

When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don't have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don't have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio. Every day, and especially during cricket matches, people walk the streets with their phones pressed to their ears, tuned into their local stations, according to Huma Yusuf, a journalist based in Pakistan. In Pakistan and other countries in the developing world, mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. In June 2009, Pakistan had 94.3 million mobile subscribers, or about 58 percent...

• August 19, 2009
• 2 comments

Help Us Rename the Daily Phoenix Light-Rail Publication

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been 42 days and counting since the Knight Foundation announced that Daily Phoenix, our hybrid platform to deliver news and information to urban audiences by light-rail stop, won startup funding. Back here in the scorching confines of Phoenix, the interest was immediate. Local TV station KTVK-TV Channel 3 interviewed us on their signature program, Good Morning Arizona. It was an incredible opportunity and an enlightening experience that really helped us out. For those of you who are thinking about doing a new media project or are already working on one, the TV interview format can be a boon as...

• July 31, 2009
• 4 comments

Saving (or Destroying) Public Radio on a Mobile Phone

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is the iPhone app Public Radio Player the good guy or the bad? The critics aren't so sure. Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on ReadWriteWeb, "How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio" took the super-hero stance, but Rafat Ali opted for the villain with "Public Radio Dangerously Close To Making Public Radio Obsolete" on PaidContent. Public Radio Player, the new version of the old Public Radio Tuner, is a free application that allows users to access more than 300 radio stations across the country. With a few swipes to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, users can listen to...

• July 27, 2009
• 3 comments

Inzwa: Listen up!

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, Kubatana launched Inzwa, Zimbabwe's experiment with Freedom Fone, providing audio information via mobile phones. We'll be updating our information every Tuesday, and we are interested in any feedback to help us improve the service. How does it work? Tune into Inzwa by phoning +263 913 444 321-8 and . . . - Press 1 for 60 seconds fresh bringing you current news and views - Choose 2 to enter the doorway to chibanzi for job vacancies, scholarships or resources - Press 3 to find out about everyday heroes and take a new look at Zimbabwean activists and activism...

• July 15, 2009
• No comments

Nika System Brings Reader SMS Messages into Newspaper's Workflow

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recent research support the idea that South Africans, 15 years after the heroic levels of participation that led to overthrow of apartheid, are becoming less engaged: Membership of religious groups, trade unions, political parties, and even of sporting associations are all decreasing, sometimes sharply, in the 21st century. Whether this is about a "growing dependence on the state to provide everything" or just people getting on with their lives -- getting involved takes a lot of time -- is not clear. Bowling Alone What has caused this South African equivalent of "bowling alone"? In Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone:...

• July 14, 2009
• No comments

VLink Offers Robust, Low-Cost Internet Service for Rural Areas

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Internet penetration in rural areas, especially in developing countries such as India, is generally poor. Telecom companies do not find it economically viable to deploy wired broadband such as DSL; satellite connectivity is expensive and often slow; dial-up (if available) is always flaky; and cellular data services such as GPRS or EDGE are quite costly to use. Newer technologies for wireless broadband such as WiMax do promise higher bandwidth, but infrastructure costs for deployment in rural areas remain high. How then can Internet connectivity be provided in such areas in a robust and low-cost manner? One could, of course, ask...

• June 26, 2009
• 3 comments

First Release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System Is Here!

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System. GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaani's MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to...

• June 11, 2009
• No comments

Student Journalists, Technologists Collaborate on News Innovations

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eight computer science students and 11 journalism master's students -- including the third "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner, whose Medill journalism education was paid through a Knight News Challenge grant -- are putting the finishing touches on five innovative new products that combine journalism and technology. One product is a tool for working reporters, one is a new way of organizing content for mobile delivery, two leverage the growing power of Twitter and one generates baseball game accounts from box scores. All of the projects demonstrate what's possible when journalists and technologists collaborate. Details of the new concepts will start rolling out...

• June 8, 2009
• 3 comments

The A Word: Information and Activism

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the central shifts implicit in user-generated information is that in many cases the user will be closer to the subject than a reporter may have been. Journalists, like ethnographers or consultants, are separated from their subjects by factors like structures of reward (salary) and professional codes (organized skepticism, systematic disinterestedness). These factors are sometimes driven by ethical positions and sometimes are byproducts of revenue structures, but have been seen as important to the neutrality and objectivity that characterize recent ideas of journalism. Citizen-created content falls in a different space; as I have said elsewhere, it starts to look...

• June 5, 2009
• 6 comments

Rethinking Community Information Needs

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Following up on the Knight Commission's work and musings on "community information needs in a democracy", Mark glaser poses a much more targeted question which has yet to be fully addressed: "What is missing in terms of local community needs"? Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs. But what about the folks that are not at...

• May 5, 2009
• 3 comments

Maps for Social Change and Community Involvement

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

2008 was the year of aggregating data related to local communities and displaying that information on maps. Knight News Challenge grantee EveryBlock, for example, labored to convince city governments to make their data more open and accessible, and then created a beautiful map interface to display what is happening where in real time. Map of the 132 calls made to police on April 22nd in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. Other examples of projects which have set out to add geographic locations to information found on the internet, and to display that information on map interfaces, include outside.in, WikiMapia,...

• April 24, 2009
• 2 comments

Waiting for the Bill (Gates) in Qatar

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It has been an exciting few weeks for Freedom Fone. We finally got back a version of our prototpye software which works with SIM cards, so we can use it here in Zimbabwe. We've been having focus group discussions with a range of people to help inform our first local deployment. And our Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, has been at ICTD 2009, giving a demo of Freedom Fone. She sent us this feedback: Here I am in Doha, Qatar with my jacket on inside a spectacular building on the Carnegie Mellon campus. I'm seated amongst hundreds of others listening to...

• April 20, 2009
• No comments

Going Beyond SMS for Cheaper Cell Phone Journalism in Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Although newspapers have gone through 150 years of evolution away from popular contributions and towards fully professional writing, technology is rapidly re-empowering non-professionals. Anyone who has rudimentary access to technology can blog or Twitter, take cell phone photos and video of dramatic moments, and quickly get them 'out there.' But does the input method matter when it comes to encouraging cell phone journalism, and particularly journalism for a 'formal' publication, like a community newspaper? Does slow bandwidth dampen amateur reporters' enthusiasm, and if cell phones are going to become significant input devices, what input medium -- short message service (SMS),...

• April 14, 2009
• 4 comments

Freedom Fone at W3C - Maputo

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, is currently at the W3C workshop in Maputo: Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. The workshop has organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), particularly the Mobile Web Initiative, and its Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group. As the organisers put it. "There are today more than half of the population living with less than 3$ a day, and lacking all kind of services (health, education, government...). The incredible growth of the mobile penetration rate last few years is providing a new hope. The potential of...

• April 2, 2009
• No comments

Community News as a Livelihood for the World's Poorest

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can a Community Producer like Samata, from a slum in Mumbai, ever become fully competitive in a mainstream market? In thinking about Video Volunteers' future work, I'm realizing we need to develop new models of community video that are scalable and allow for video to be a livelihood for thousands of the world's poor. We've developed a new idea for a program - a fellowship program where up to 200 community members across india (and when we have the resources, many other countries) would be trained in using flip cams to produce very short, very simple advocacy videos on different...

• March 7, 2009
• 3 comments

Messages From Hot Places

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I got to go to the MIT Media Lab to sit in on a gathering of researchers and graduate students involved with the Center for Future Civic Media. It's hard not to get all fangirl when going to the Media Lab. I mean, I used to read about this place in issues of Wired back before they adopted rational typography! We all got brief presentations on three projects at different stages of development. One, Virtual Gaza, took eyewitness testimonies from people living in Gaza and overlaid them on a Google Virtual Earth layer. Another, called Between the Bars, was...

• February 27, 2009
• 1 comment

Breaking Even While Staying True to the Margins

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We recently applied to present Freedom Fone: Dial-up Information Service at an upcoming ICT for Development workshop. Our application was eventually accepted, but not before concerns were raised that Freedom Fone might be on its way to becoming a for-profit entity, which would be inconsistent with the conference sponsors' objectives. This was an ironic obstacle for us to encounter, particularly at a time when we're beginning to think through what our business model is going to look like as we move toward self-sufficiency. We are committed to making information accessible to people at the margins of society. And Freedom Fone...

• February 27, 2009
• 3 comments

Cell Phone Journalism and Better Democratic Decision-Making: What Do We Measure?

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you build a culture of participation? What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives? How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus? 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa. Since 1994 'belonging to something' has fallen off significantly in South Africa. Religious affiliations, belonging to a sports clubs, even union membership is down, often sharply. Many lament the...

• February 25, 2009
• No comments

Using Technology in the Fight Against Cholera in Zimbabwe

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths. Since August last year, WHO reports there have been over 80,000 cases, and over 3,615 people have died. This is an...

• February 21, 2009
• 5 comments

Digital Migration For a Small-Town Paper in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

No, this article is not about broadcasters shifting to digital transmission. But it's about something that's also a huge change -- uprooting from known territory and heading for the unknown complexities of digital country. Switch-over in the sense of convergence is the challenge facing South African community paper Grocott's Mail. The publication is at the heart of a Knight Foundation project to exploit new technologies in order to build a participative public sphere within a small town. The paper serves a town that's divided spatially, linguistically, racially, and along class lines. There are also divisions between youth and adults, and...

• February 19, 2009
• No comments

Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source. The history started in the buzz around the World Summit on Information Society which helped to move OSS into the mental horizon of non-techies like me. When the Rhodes journalism school where I work acquired Grocott's Mail, the local newspaper in 2004, we had to install a load of new PCs to accommodate students who would now...

• February 5, 2009
• No comments

Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Read the article, or listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services....

• December 17, 2008
• No comments

Iindaba Ziyafika: The News Is Coming

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The news has started to flow. It's a trial-trickle from township teenagers, through to other social groupings in Grahamstown. With the kick-off of phase one during 2008, citizen youth content has crossed the chasm of age difference to reach the older readers of the Grocott's Mail newspaper. This is an early manifestation of the Knight Challenge project titled Iindaba Ziyafika, which aims to use cellphone technology to deepen a local public sphere in which Grocott's Mail is the primary place for a meeting of minds and formulation of public opinion. It's not just age differences being spanned, but a legacy...

• December 11, 2008
• No comments

When a Cell Phone Is Bigger Than a Yacht

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Despite the global warming reports snow covered the Moscow roads and rooftops just on time this year, preluding to the urban installation of the New Year trees all around the city, bringing romanticism into the hearts of the Muscovites, and inspiring citizens to upload new Christmas-related videos (along with those featuring car crashes) at the http://mreporter.ru/, a citizen journalism project recently launched by the Rossiya TV channel. 'Mobile Reporter' is similar in its concept to the CNN iReport. A cell phone is called mobile phone in Russia, and videos are often taken by the mobile phone cameras, and the most...

• December 7, 2008
• 2 comments

Freedom Fone Goes on the Road

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone had its first public debut at the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2008 Forum in Cape Town, 14-17 November. The event was a great opportunity to deploy Freedom Fone -- even in its software prototype state. We prepared different content for each of the four days of the conference, and ran four "channels," or options which users could access when they phoned in: Highlighted Sessions, Interviews with Presenters, Culture and Inspiration, and the Feminist Tech Hunt, which was run in association with Take Back the Tech. We took advantage of South Africa's deregulated VoIP and rented...

• December 1, 2008
• 1 comment

The Includer
Episode 11
$100 Solar Project

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Peter noted that many people are weak from HIV/AIDS and they need alternative work to laboring in the fields. He also notes the great need for electricity because, for example, people in his part of rural Kenya typically turn off their mobile phones after 6:00 pm because they are saving the battery power because they have to walk a long ways to recharge their batteries.

• November 21, 2008
• 7 comments

Plans for Beanstockd Mobile

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently we've been getting a lot of emails from people seeking advice on applying for the Knight News Challenge. We're excited to see so many of our friends and fans of Beanstockd applying to the contest! Good luck, and for some advice writing the full proposal, be sure to check out this article by Amy Gahran. This week, I wanted to give some insight into our plans for a mobile application and how this feature fits into the game. The mobile app will actually be an integral aspect of the project from a conceptual standpoint. The overall goal of the...

• November 3, 2008
• No comments

The Challenge of Bringing Net Access to Poorest Areas

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, I've given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible for a tiny portion of humanity. Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India, where 700 million people live, it must be a far, far smaller number. When all of us English-speaking urbanites have forums to share and learn and grow, but vast numbers of people don't, it only increases the inequality of the poor. In addition to their financial poverty, they are becoming...

• November 3, 2008
• 1 comment

Who's Watching the Elections?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct. Every election, we also provide a roundup of basic information for voters: how to find your polling place, voting rights, special instructions for first time voters. And, who to call to report problems at the...

• October 24, 2008
• 1 comment

MobileActive in South Africa

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brenda Burrell, technical director of Kubatana.net has attended the two previous MobileActive conferences and has found them very useful. It was at the 2005 MobileActive Conference in Toronto that Brenda first discussed the idea of Freedom Fone and where she was able to meet developers to help her make her idea a reality. In 2007 Brenda traveled to Sao Paulo as a participant at MobileActive. In 2008 Kubatana submitted a request to MobileActive to facilitate a presentation on Freedom Fone with a live demo. We were pleased to be accepted and three members of Kubatana attended MobileActive in Johannesburg. The...

• October 22, 2008
• 2 comments

The Includer
Episode 4
Phone + USB = Brilliant

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the ability to connect to peripherals, the phone becomes an open, expandable system. People can use phones as the heart of a computer system, in a similar way to a laptop or PC. They can write emails more easily, type messages for discussion groups, enter text into web-forms, etc. The ability to download information from the web and print it out will benefit the wider community.

• October 12, 2008
• 1 comment

Mobile Reporting Gave Raw View of Political Conventions

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The most dramatic example of how our mobile coverage played out was on the final night of the Republican National Convention. While thousands were preparing to cheer McCain’s speech inside the convention center, our Wisconsin reporter, Charlie, was hot on the trail of an anti-war protest gearing up outside. His “tweets” began…

• September 23, 2008
• No comments

Start with the Low Hanging Fruit with Software Development

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A key component of Freedom Fone is the software development we will undertake over the next two years. Last weekend Brenda and I met with a handful of people who have experience with open source development projects like those we'll be undertaking. We got to share our ideas and experiences to date developing the Freedom Fone prototype, and we benefited from their contributions and suggestions. Much of what they recommended resonates with some of David Cohn's blogs and the importance of being iterative. See for example: Eliminating the Fear of Being Open Growing a Community and The Importance of Being...

• September 15, 2008
• 1 comment

The Travails of Taking a CPU Tower from Zimbabwe to France

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brenda and I went to Paris recently for a development launch and brainstorming meeting for Freedom Fone. In addition to picking the brains of a small handful of experts in the field, we thought it would be a good opportunity to have some of our equipment assessed. So in my bag I packed my own laptop, and digital audio recorder, a Voice Blue 4-SIM card GSM Gateway, and a full sized CPU tower, as well as the various power cables and USB connectors for this equipment. The tower didn't fit in the elegant, cabin sized roller bag we'd hoped it...

• September 15, 2008
• No comments

Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Even though we're still a few months, and a telephony server with a PCI slot, short of our first deployment, the Freedom Fone creative team has been hitting Harare's arts scene. In an effort to train our ears and give our digital audio editing fingers a work out, we've been recording some audio at a few public events. A few lessons we've learnt along the way: 1. If you're at a public event with a sound system, make friends with the sound engineer At a discussion evening at Harare's Book Cafe on 21 August, we were able to get right...

• September 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Street Team Exclusive: Palin Liked Romney, Paul In Primaries

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in February, on Super Tuesday, MTV News/Knight Foundation Street Teamer Dani Carlson did a Flixwagon mobile phone interview with Alaska Governor -- and now presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate -- Sarah Palin, who had some interesting things to say about energy policy and the "party machinery." In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul "cool." "He's a good guy," she added. "He's so independent. He's independent of the party machine. I'm like, 'Right on, so am I.' " She also spoke about feeling allegiance with former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. "He said all the right things about...

• September 2, 2008
• No comments

Gustav Information Sources

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is a great selection of new media information channels already to go even before Gustav has touched down in the U.S. These include: A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning: A government Gustav Twitter feed A Gustav Wiki with centralized information: And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers....

• August 31, 2008
• 1 comment

Barcamps in Bolivia and Madagascar

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tellingly, when you search for "barcamps" on Google, the first location-specific reference is not San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle. No, it's Bangalore, once known for its large British military station, and today the so-called Silicon Valley of India. BarCamp Bangalore has already held six events over the past couple years, starting in April of 2006. Barcamp Bangalore 7, held once again at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, will take place on September 13 - 14 and include a "hack night" to develop web applications using open web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails. In February I wrote a...

• August 27, 2008
• 2 comments

What's a Good Challenge for a J-School Innovation Class?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I noted in my last post, the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism education was financed via scholarships from the Knight News Challenge) will be among the students enrolled in a Medill School "innovation project" class. Between now and when the class starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore. Right now there are two competing ideas, neither of them yet specific enough to organize the class around: Civic engagement...

• August 25, 2008
• 4 comments

An Olympic Moment for Mobile Media?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been a lot of hype in mobile media circles about how the Summer Olympics are signaling a watershed moments in broadcasting and media access on the fly. According to Nielson, 23 per cent US and 17 per cent of UK mobile internet users will be tracking the games through their phone browser, and 45 of US mobile video users will watch the Olympics on their handsets. Are those significant statistics and if so HOW significant? Depends on who you talk to. Based on the fact that only 3 of US cell phone users regularly watched video via...

• August 19, 2008
• 2 comments

Partner With a University to Jump-Start Innovation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Pacheco and Chris O'Brien wrote recently for IdeaLab about ways newspapers (or other media) can innovate successfully. One approach that wasn't mentioned (yet): partner with a university. Academic institutions are full of smart faculty members, including experts on innovation, technology, audience behavior, journalism and the business of media. Even more important, they are full of young people who are "wired" for the contemporary media world and can do amazing things if given an interesting challenge and the right amount (not too much, not too little) of coaching and direction. At the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where...

• August 15, 2008
• 1 comment

From iPhone to Facebook to Live Photo-Blogging

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On some level I was live photo blogging (plogging?) from that party, complete with comments on some of the images. If we could create an application, which wouldn’t be hard, to upload iPhone pictures automatically to a blog or to the front page of a newspaper website the possibilities are endless.

• August 14, 2008
• 2 comments

Is There a Marketplace for Local Storytelling?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently took another look at Organic City, a project launched in 2006 to provide residents of Oakland, California with a place to listen to and share stories about happenings in their respective neighborhoods or to take audio and video tours of the city - all created by locals. The stories are tagged to specific locations in the city via a Google map, and the site also offers a special mobile version allowing stories to be uploaded and downloaded via a cell phone or other mobile device. Organic City is one of thousands of locative media projects created over the...

• July 24, 2008
• 1 comment

Virtual Voting: Finding Our Audience Where They Roam

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that we are several months into the project, we thought we had conquered, or at least tackled, most forms of new media. Our Street Teamers’ work appears regularly on mobile video carriers, a mobile wap site, several websites, and on-air via MTV’s broadcast networks.

Then, a few weeks back, I was approached by an MTV colleague about a whole new area of distribution that, I have to admit, I had hardly considered before: THE VIRTUAL WORLD. I’m talking about something right outta web 3.0: a 3-D, interactive, virtual reality experience where one can have a “second life” via their avatar persona—a walking, talking, digital version of their better selves--online.

• July 18, 2008
• No comments

Hero Reports Website

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The "Hero Reports" website project turns the anti-terrorism "See Something, Say Something" campaign on its head, to visualize security as civic connectedness.

• July 17, 2008
• No comments

Getting Closer to SMS Journalism

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In August, we start some initial workshops with high school learners, to discuss with them what it takes to be "citizen journalists" - contributing content that the mainstream will publish. What's more, the content is constrained by being 140 characters long - sms is the method of communications for now. Over the course of 8 workshops, 80 learners in their penultimate school year will be trained about optimum Cit-journ in this way ... all over two months. The workshops, to be run by university journalism students and co-ordinated by colleage Sipho January, will cover the skills of contributing opinions, news...

• July 10, 2008
• No comments

Life in a Failed State Certainly Isn't Boring

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's hard to convey how important it is for those of us "left behind" to vicariously experience the richness of these networking opportunities.

• July 7, 2008
• 1 comment

$100 Laptop Redesign

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A new laptop design for the one-laptop-per-child project is being worked out. They have removed the keyboard and replaced it by a touch screen. This turns into a touch sensitive keyboard during normal operation, and the laptop can be used as an e-book reader otherwise. The price is $75, which sounds too good to be true. I used to be very critical of the OLPC project during its earlier stages because I could not understand the rationale behind giving a personal laptop to each child, instead of having them access a shared PC in a kiosk for example. The kiosk...

• July 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Empowering Poor Communities through Mobile

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is one vision of the mobile future aimed at one of the most (technologically) overlooked segments of the U.S. population...low income and ethnic communities. Imagine a Latino youth living in East Oakland, California - one of the toughest urban neighborhoods in America: "My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional). -On my cell phone I have my...

• June 22, 2008
• 11 comments

Live-Blogging Future of Civic Media Gathering

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am in the swanky Stata Center at MIT for the conference on "The Future of Civic Media," put on by the new Center for Future Civic Media. Nearly all the Idea Lab bloggers are here in attendance as the Knight Foundation is using this gathering to help all News Challenge winners get to know each other and collaborate more. It's also a chance for this new Center at MIT (which got $5 million in funding from Knight) to show some off some of its early work and thinking. Mitch Resnick, another Idea Lab blogger who...

• June 12, 2008
• 4 comments

Civic Media Innovation Camps

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've just arrived at MIT in Boston, where the Future of Civic Media conference is being held over the next three days. Attendees are gathering to compare notes, soak up new ideas (including some smart technologies devised by students here) and tease out ways to maximize the impact of civic media in our lives. Here's a proposal that I'll be bouncing off the assorted thought leaders: Civic Media Innovation Camps. The camps would be one part road show — trainers and local new media experts sharing learnings around social media technologies, case studies, interesting experiments and success stories --...

• June 11, 2008
• No comments

African Cell-Phone Media: Hostage to Policy Delays

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a couple of delays in implementing our Iindaba Ziyafika - the news is coming project around cellphone journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation - but the tardy policy context in South Africa is also a constraint. At present in South Africa, at least six out of ten adults have access to cellphones, but their main use is for interpersonal conversation. The notion that these are devices that can also be used to receive, and contribute to, journalism is not well-developed beyond sms comments sent to the mass media. What could begin to change this culture is free-to-air television...

• June 11, 2008
• No comments

Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers. Best known for her film Control Room(film), Noujaim believed the power of the films could help the audience see beyond our differences to the humanity that binds us together. Or, as the tag line declared, "4 hours. 24 films. A new way to see the world." Pangia Day, as it came to be called, took place on May 10th at 18:GMT, 11 am PDT, at...

• June 10, 2008
• No comments

Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Apple's announcement yesterday of a GPS-enabled iPhone is further fanning the flames of excitement around location based services and mobile social networking. Being able to connect with friends (and strangers), and to interact with your immediate environment via your smartphone is the new new thing. But we still have a ways to go with all of this mobile-enabled location activity... The economic opportunity is a big one, which is precisely why so many services are coming on line, and why so much attention is being paid to open mobile platforms (i.e., Android and LiMo) that will fertilize the space. In...

• June 10, 2008
• No comments

From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently began playing around with a new service called GeoGraffiti, which allows you to post or access voice notes or "markers" while at a specific physical location using any cell phone. I like the idea of localized, user generated information which GeoGraffiti is a platform for. Everything from getting traffic tips to the real time reviews and tips on local restaurants or places of interest. Think of it as a kind of mobile Yelp (user generated reviews on business services, entertainment, and events) using voice instead of just text. The other nice feature of GeoGraffiti is that is allows...

• May 25, 2008
• 2 comments

Any There at Where 2.0?

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where 2.0 happened May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot just south of the city. This annual event, now in its 4th year, is a strange mix of grassroots geo-enthusiasts and entrepreneurial geo-hackers. Where 2.0 is primarily a developer's conference, so the majority of time and certainly the focus was on tools and how they function and less on how these tools are being used. (Or not being used. For the most part, location apps are in beta.) There was definitely the Field-of-Dreams-feeling, "build it and they will come." The exceptions were the tools and apps in the social...

• May 19, 2008
• 3 comments

Knight Announces News Challenge Winners

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hello from sunny Las Vegas! I am here for the E&P Interactive Media Conference at the Rio Hotel, but also to welcome the next round of winners in the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge. These folks will soon be blogging here on Idea Lab, and it's quite a group of winners. (To see the whole list of winners, go here, and for Knight's press release on the winners, check this out.) Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen (pictured below) announced the winners at the conference this morning. I think the most exciting aspect of the next round of winners is...

• May 14, 2008
• 2 comments

Medill Grad Students Study Locative Journalism

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At least once a day I ask myself how locative media can be used to more fully engage and connect folks to their communities. The question for this blog is a bit more focused: how can locative media and geo-localized content find form in the art and craft of journalism. And then to my surprise and excitement, LoJo, a new voice, enters the frey and expands the discussion. From www.lojoconnect.com: Shorthand for locative journalism, LoJo is the name of a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies....

• May 12, 2008
• No comments

Locative Media in the Newsroom

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a short sampling of some of the ways that mainstream media in integrating locative (location-based) technology tools - some of which already been discussed on this blog. The folks at LoJoConnect are also conducting a survey of how newsrooms are using locative media. Take the short survey here and pass it along...they will be sharing the results. For folks intersted in locative media and news, it will be one of the topics covered at this weeks NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley. Hope to see you there!...

• April 27, 2008
• No comments

Seero Makes Location the Center of the Story

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seero, a new startup, is a "live on location," geo-broadcasting online app that mixes gps and video streaming by broadcasting and mapping in real-time. With the service, you broadcast live video, geo-tagging the content in real-time as you go. If folks are logged on to the site, they can follow in you in real-time; or if they aren't online at the moment, the content, including the geo-tag is archived and accessible. The application highlights exploration. And to date, their most prominent geo-broadcasters are those journeying the world, but as with any broadcast, it's only as good as the content. I've...

• April 27, 2008
• 1 comment

Tell Me You Hear the Writing on the Wall?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Microsoft's Tell Me subsidiary announced the launch of a new audio service for the BlackBerry which allows the user to conduct local business search, get directions or traffic information, etc. using voice commands. Apparently, by uttering a singe word like "coffee" your GPS enabled Blackberry will do an automatic search (in this case via Microsoft Live Search) and provide you with the nearest cafe links, directions, phone numbers, etc. That's a cool feature to have, especially as our "smart" phones get smaller and their screens way too damn small to read. Of course voice activated software has been around for...

• April 24, 2008
• No comments

A Blogger Posse in Israel

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been busy the past two weeks readying for a last-minute trip to Israel. I'm honored to be past of a blogger/citizen journalist delegation heading to the Holy Land. The trip was arranged and paid for by the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest, which covers California and the greater West, though we'll be paying for some items. The goal is to meet and mingle with some of the best and brightest in Israel's tech field. Here's who's going: Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, Susan Mernit, Cathy Brooks, Deb Schultz, Jeff Saperstein, Brad Reddersen, Renee Blodgett, Sarah Lacy...

• April 9, 2008
• 1 comment

Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a recent meeting, a representative from Verizon and a former BET executive were discussing the seeming contradiction between the fact that African American males were early adapters of mobile technology, yet have a very low rate of posting videos on internet sites such as BET.Com and Youtube. BET tested the waters with two experiments. One involved fashion/entertainment and the other involved politics. Neither resulted in a flurry of posts, such as the ones MTV receives when it puts out a call for videos. What makes this interesting is that by all accounts African American males are not only early...

• April 8, 2008
• 1 comment

Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Buenos Aires Leads the Way Two months ago I was back in my old stomping grounds, Encinitas, California. It had been several years since I last coasted along Highway 101 as it sucks in its asphalt belly between San Elijo Lagoon and the near-perfect surf break, Cardiff Reef. I pulled off the side of the highway, rolled down my window, and inhaled the salty air tinged with the sweetness of coastal sage scrub. More than anywhere else, this was home. I still knew the names of the best surfers bobbing up and down in the Pacific as they waited for...

• April 7, 2008
• No comments

Maps That Bring Issues & Places to Life

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent seminar I helped to facilitate, health organizations and online mapping experts came together to discuss how mapping could be used to address health disparities in California and the U.S. Some current examples of useful online mapping tools in the health arena include: Healthy City: Gathers census and other locally relevant data in Los Angeles and overlays that information on maps to provide insight on health, education, and social issues. Health Map: Tracks global outbreaks and provides up-to-date information on diseases via a mapping tool Whoissick: A user-generated site that allows anyone who has the flu, etc. to...

• April 6, 2008
• No comments

My Brief, Torrid Affair with the Nokia N95

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mobile media isn't just the future -- it's the present, big time. Recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that mobile devices (especially cell phones) are already the can't-do-without-it media tool of choice for many US demographics, especially among Hispanics and Latin Americans. (Read more analysis of this research, and what it can mean for community media at the Knight New Media Center.) Mobile is becoming a key channel for all kinds of content and communication -- so it should be a key focus for anyone providing news and information to almost any community. So why...

• April 2, 2008
• 5 comments

"Navigating Life" is No Longer a Metaphor

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once upon a time, four travelers began a global quest... So says the video that launches, Urbanista Diaries, the second phase of the Nokia's advertising campaign for its N82 series phone. The first phase of the campaign followed four of Nokia's favorite bloggers on a trip around the world armed only with, "their wits, guile, and a Nokia N82 multimedia computer." (Two of the four were already blogging on Nokia and mobile devices, and all four skew toward mobile geekiness, although with a fair amount of the artiste sprinkled on top.) Their mission? Capture the stories and the beauty of...

• March 30, 2008
• No comments

Gaming, Seriously.

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I crossed paths with "serious gaming," in a serious way twice in one week. First at the Knight Digital Media Center's Editorial Writers seminar in Los Angeles last week. Later in the week, I attended a gaming session at the Computer Using Educator's conference in Palm Springs. Both of the gaming presentations were intriguing and relevant for my work. Much of locative media work I do is with HP proprietary's Mediascape software. It's been in beta for a couple of years, but finally HP landed in a partnership with the UK's Futurelab in Bristol to put a friendly face (and...

• March 14, 2008
• No comments

Going Beyond Point A to Point B

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Phones use one of two methods to figure out where they are (and if you happen to be carrying it, where you are). The first is built-in gps. Nokia is leading the way with these smart phones, having announced four new phones earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress 2008, where 50,000 people (including keynote Robert Redford) gathered in Barcelona to talk all things mobile (but mostly about devices and less-than-innovative uses of these devices). The second way to locate your device is how Apple is doing it. Late to the game and experimenting with workarounds, location-based applications found...

• February 26, 2008
• 1 comment

How Do You Know When to Take Mobile Seriously?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How does mainstream media know when to take mobile seriously as a distribution platform? 1) When the New York Times unveils a mobile-to-PC application? The NYT's new ShiftD application allows you to move its content from one device to the other, insead of having to save and move them separately. A bit of a time saver perhaps, but not all that exciting really. 2) When key online social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook develop their own mobile applications? We're getting warmer here. When we can seamelessly do all the social stuff on our cell phones that we really like...

• February 25, 2008
• 2 comments

Super Tuesday Wrapup: the MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 & the live mobile to web experiment

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Super Tuesday was an historic day with incredible youth turnout at the polls (doubling, tripling and even quadrupling turnout from 2000 & 2004!) and so we were making our own history at MTV covering the youth vote in a whole new way - in this case, capitalizing on a new achievement in mobile technology, delivering real-time high-quality Internet-ready audio and video reporting from the campaign trail.

• February 17, 2008
• No comments

Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text. Check out some of the other work being done by Dutch artist collective De Geuzen, "a foundation for multi-visual research". The Internet of Things: The University of Washington is conducting an experiment to understand the next step in social networking by connecting objects and people in a wireless, monitored network. Beginning in...

• February 17, 2008
• No comments

Place-Based Video Games Could Transform Education

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After reading Paul Grabowicz's post Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games, I thought I'd chime in and riff off of that statement and ask: What is the value of video games in education, formal and informal, and in the delivery of information. Paul makes great point about who determines perspective. In my field of digital storytelling, we often talk about what I call "the fading glory of the third person editorial overlay." Just look at community-created content; it's a form whose hallmark is the lack of editorial overlay, which may or may not be appropriate, but often the lack of...

• February 11, 2008
• No comments

News That Moves

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

More and more cities are begining to offer digital maps to help tourists navigate their way around and locate points of interest via a mobile device. The city of Stuttgart, Germany for example, rents Stuttgart2Go - a Pocket PC device with GPS capabilities that allows a visitor to locate and map tourist attractions while on the go. As you physically approach a particular point of interest more historical information appears on your device about that site. Such devices and software like PocketMap are very useful for tourists and others needing to find their way in an unfamiliar environment. But wouldn't...

• February 10, 2008
• No comments

A Discussion of Mobile Technologies and News Making

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is an interesting academic review of how mobile technoligies are changing the news landscape. A number of important points are made, including... 1) The notion that mobile technologies in the hands of the public may be resulting in event-driven news overtaking institutionally based news. See this monster of a study on this topic. but here are some interesting stats from the BBC on how the public is engaging news organizations directly: "...In the aftermath of July 7 (2005) bombings, [14] BBC received 20,000 written accounts via e-mail, 1,000 photos and 20 videos from citizens. Similarly, in the summer floods...

• February 2, 2008
• No comments

A Private Picture is Worth How Many Words?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those of you who attended the Consumer Electronics Show last week, you may have seen this new "TV Glasses" gadget that allows you to watch a movie played on an MP3 player or cell phone. It appears to be the next evolution of what began with the Walkman and personal digital devices toward the further privitization of the public media space. While old schoolers might compain that the "iPodization" or tuning out of our culture is bad enough as it is, others might argue that such devices are no worse than someone reading a book or checking their blackberry...

• January 19, 2008
• 2 comments

Ubiquitous Networks: The Trails Of Our Digital Identities

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For a while now I've been describing the locative process as overlaying a virtual landscape on the physical world. I've been describing locative media as embedded content in place. Some people do ask, "in place of what?" In the end, it's all a way of saying Locative Media is the hybridization of the virtual world and the physical world relying upon location-enabled mobile devices (eg, 50% of cellphones) leading to the formation of ubiquitous networks full of cultural content. Sounds good. The only part of that statement that's a bit tricky is the "ubiquitous networks." Not being a particularly dedicated...

• January 15, 2008
• 1 comment

When Phones Become Reporters

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent post I shared some thoughts about the trend toward mobile phones being used to connect people in the real world - so called mobile social networking. Applying that same idea and tools to news reporting, some interesting possibilities appear on the horizon. First, a little context. Experts on the social and anthropological aspects of mobile phones, like Jan Chipchase, talk about how these devices give us the power to transcend space and time, and how our mobile devices allow for our identity to become portable and not merely attached to a particular place like our home or...

• January 13, 2008
• 2 comments

When our Phones Do the Social Networking

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the more interesting mobile media trends we may see more of this year is mobile social networking. Simply put, that means the ability for one person to connect with another via a mobile phone or other device while on the go. Think of your cell phone saying "hello" to another cell phone within a certain geographic proximity, based on identified shared interests on publicly available profiles. Typically one must sign up for or opt in to a service designed for this purpose, set up a profile, and make one's cell phone available via wireless technologies like GPS or...

• January 5, 2008
• 2 comments

The Year of Mobile Media Ahead?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many are already proclaiming 2008 to be the year of mobile media. (Apparently 2007 was the Year of Social Media?). That means that more people will be using their cell phones and other mobile devices to access the Internet, view content, and make purchases, respond to ads, do banking, etc. Here a good discussion 7 major mobile content headlines for 2007 that helped to push or delay the mobile trend. One of the most interesting bellweather points raised in this posting is that "in just five months since its commercial debut, the iPhone has secured a 0.1 percent share of...

• December 28, 2007
• 1 comment

MTV Taps 51 Citizen Journalists for Election

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning "Choose or Lose" campaign (www.ChooseorLose.com), unveiled "Street Team '08": a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists - one from every state and Washington, D.C. - who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network.

• December 20, 2007
• No comments

Categorizing and Contextualizing Locative Media

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's holiday time, no projects to speak of, so we'll talk a bit about the theory. No doubt we'll leave a lot out, but I'm considering this a first discussion and will return to talk more about where and wither locative media. Recent discussions in locative media at the Center for Locative Media around the next-step need for categorizing and contextualizing locative media. As I mentioned before, locative media got its start in the art world. Avant-garde and conceptual artists, grasping early the potential that new and emerging technologies enabled, wanted to use the landscape as a material and to...

• December 19, 2007
• No comments

Google and OLPC's Move to Create Global Pen Pals

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Google, UNICEF, and One Laptop Per Child recently announced the launching of the Our Stories project. The effort records the stories of children from different parts of the world and places them on a Google Map. But more than just an oral/video history project combined with geotagging, the effort claims to be: A joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends....

• December 17, 2007
• 1 comment

Twitter Posse for Reporters

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jon Funabiki of SFSU and Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube The just-ended Roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement, held by the Aspen Institute and San Francisco State University in San Francisco, was more than a two-day brain jam attended by mobile industry execs, academics and reps from civic and social justice organizations. Sessions were structured to come up with recommendations regarding mobile's emerging role in the news media, politics and e-governance. One snippet worth sharing here was an idea embraced by the editor of Wired News. I mentioned to my breakout session that in1996 I wrote...

• December 13, 2007
• 5 comments

Why the Slow Uptake on the Mobile Web?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

According to a just released report by Jupiter Research, only 16% of U.S. subcribers are browsing the mobile web. According to the report, the low uptake is due primarily to lack of interest (73%) and the high cost (47%). Messaging remains the major non-voice mobile activity, with about about one-third of subscribers surveyed having used either text or picture messaging once in the last six months. The report also indicates that mobile video had only a 1% adoption rate in the mobile market. Jupiter recommends that content providers need to offer easier access to things like news and video through...

• December 8, 2007
• 3 comments

Finding Overlap Between Locative Media and Location-Based Games

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I should disclose upfront I'm not much of a "gamer." When I was younger, I found myself in a few endless games of Risk, never did understand the appeal of Monopoly, and always wanted to overlay a romantic narrative on Chess. (How did the Queen convince the knight to battle the Bishop to death?) But I did like sports. Not so much because of the gaming aspect, but because sports are generally played outdoors. Whole summers playing running bases, hide and seek, and any number of make believe games. Like locative media, location-based games take place outside. Due to this...

• December 5, 2007
• No comments

More Than Just Finding A Toilet

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A recent article on a service in London and several U.S. cities that allows you to locate nearby public toilets by texting "toilet" on your mobile phone got me to thinking about the practical applications of locative media. Many mobile advertising companies are hard at work creating platforms and services to push customized ads and real time "specials" to your mobile device as you walk by a store or drive down the street. But what about services that help you to connect with your neighbors, and enhance your community, or keep you safe. Aren't those practical too? For example, what...

• December 3, 2007
• 3 comments

"Locating" the Mississippi Blues in 3 Platforms

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

lat 33.4043 long -90.3055 Mississippi Blues Trail Tour in Google Earth (download Google Earth for free, then launch the kmz file) ScreenCast of Mississippi Blues Google Earth Geo-Tagged Project (a screencast is a video capture of what happens on the computer monitor.) Friday night arrived, our round-the-clock week's worth of work was done and it was finally time to present to all the participants and guest of the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute. Prominent leaders in the Public Broadcasting world and NGO filmmaking community had participated in panels all week: Notables from PBS, CPB, NPR, PRX, ITVS,...

• November 22, 2007
• 2 comments

Old World Meet New World: Exploring History with New Media Tools

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an interesting post about a mobile game called Amsterdam 1550 that was designed to teach local students about the old city of Amersterdam. "The game uses 3G cell phones and network to allow students to compete in finding answers to questions about the old city of Amsterdam, for history class excursion and assignment. Frequency 1550 explores the social potential of location-aware devices, inspired by the use of tracking technology and wireless media, human relationships, movement and identity; the project seeks to extend and re-appropriate the functions of locative technologies by exploring ways in which they can be socially constructive...

• November 18, 2007
• No comments

'Cheatin' Mamas and Dirty Lowdown Papas'

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're half way through our geo-tagging of three of the markers on the Blues Trail here at the National Black Programmers Consortium's New Media Institute in Jackson, MS. Yesterday, wheels up at 7 am to Hickory Street in Canton, MS to start the locating part of locative media. Our job is to investigate the question, "What happens to meaning and understanding when you locate content in a relevant place?" Hickory Street, once a thriving black neighborhood, now houses only a few dilapidated buildings and a sandwich shop. Given that, we were astounded how many people stopped to share their memories...

• November 16, 2007
• No comments

Google at the Gaspump and Other Forays Into Locative Media

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the ongoing integration of virtual and real worlds, Google announced last week that 3,500 Web-connected gas pumps nationwide will incorporate Google Maps on a touchscreen to give out directions and advertise local businesses. This is just one of many up and coming experiments to imbed interactive digital data in physical locations and to localize advertising...right down to the street level. A variety of non commercial locative media projects are also being attempted in this space - typically focusing on enhancing community and neighborhood interactions and causing people to think differently about their physical spaces. You can view a number...

• November 12, 2007
• 1 comment

Apple and Google Agree: It's All About Mobile, It's All About Location

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can't have missed the news of Android, an open source, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. Android is the flagship product and raison d'etre for the Open Handset Alliance. Many major players, including telcomms, handset makers, and chip folks. Respectable group and a full service offering...everything you need to make the gphone, without having to make it. One of the major problems with using, and certainly developing, robust apps for mobile devices is the lack of a consistent operating system or basic standards of any sort. Nothing moves forward without standardization, and with such a nascent technology, it's like the...

• November 8, 2007
• No comments

A Big Week in Mobile and What It Means for Media

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week VOIP provider Skype announced a new free phone to be available in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere (not yet the U.S.). Meanwhile, Google is hard at work on its own open software platform for mobile phones (code named Android) likely to be available soon. It is reported that the Google standard platform will be made available to anyone who joins their Open Handset Alliance. This means you aren't necessarily locked into the features that come with a phone, but can download any number of new features and even develop your own. Apple will be releasing its own freely available...

• November 4, 2007
• 1 comment

Locative Media and Geo-tagging the Delta Blues Continues

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our geo-tagging of the Blues Trail in the Mississippi Delta continues, albeit from afar. We've been deep in research. Using new media/online research tools, mostly archives and libraries that have been digitized--giving us the opportunity to spend all night wandering through history with unstoppable imagination, horror at the deeds of the past, but also with a renewed sense of excitement and wonder. The images I am most drawn to are the old maps. Our amazing project researcher, Ann Bennett, is deep into the process, leading us to sources such as * Archives of African American Music * Blues Archive at...

• November 2, 2007
• No comments

Local News + Local Maps = YourStreet

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An interesting new site called YourStreet will be launched tomorrow, allowing you to get hyper-local news and comments tied to Google maps. Apparently the site detects where you are located and then provides local news stories, as well as comments from other YourStreet members nearby. According to TechCrunch, "The startup has developed an algorithm that extracts geographical information from stories, such as street names, neighborhoods, and cities. It then geo-codes the articles against a longitude and latitude database so that it can place them on a map. The site will start off with regular Google AdSense ads, but that same...

• October 31, 2007
• 1 comment

Locative Media and Embedding Stories in Place

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are a little more than a week away from heading down to the Mississippi Delta to start our project: geo-tag 3 markers on the Mississippi Blue's Trial - a trail that stretches from Jackson, MS up to Memphis, TN. One of the teams was given the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale. In techno talk, we'll be using geo-spatial technology to embed stories, sound and relationships to locations. We're hoping that this re-visioning of geographic space will help visualize the invisible and/or imaginary realities, helping us to see the present in a new light...and maybe even to help forecast the future...

• October 29, 2007
• 1 comment

Reuters' Mobile Journalism the Wave of Future?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Reuters has been experimenting with mobile journalism, testing out a way for reporters to file stories from the field using videophones. The news service has given reporters a Mobile Journalism Toolkit, including a Nokia N95, a fold-up keyboard and directional microphones. The idea is that reporters could do video, photo, audio and text reports without having to use a laptop. This effort mirrors an initiative by Ganett to outfit "mojos" with gear to report in multiple media from the field. But if you peruse Reuters' special website to see the early reports from Reuters mojos, they are uneven, with blurry...

• October 29, 2007
• 10 comments

Curley's New Directions in New Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of my heroes in new media is Rob Curley, vice president of new products at The Washington Post who honed his new media chops at the online paper in Lawrence, Kansas. If you want to know where the online news industry will be in a few years, watch what Rob and his team are doing today. In this 5-minute video interview at the Online News Association conference in Toronto last week, Rob talks about the Post's remarkable OnBeing series, its new citizen media site Loudounextra.com, mobile technology, geo-tagging and more. MPEG-4 video on Blip.tv Flash video on Internet...

• October 26, 2007
• No comments

Southern California Fire Updates on Twitter

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the more interesting and practical uses of Twitter (a mobile phone text message service that allows you to connect with other users) is instant updates during emergency situations. Right now at this moment, as fires rage across southern California, you can get up to the moment information on the latest both from individuals and from local news organizations like KPBS in San Diego. These kind of tools are particularly useful and important when landline phone and even cell services become congested and unusable, and may indeed save lives....

• October 24, 2007
• No comments

Lost Connection Opportunities...

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once again, another conference that didn't fully leverage technology tools to help people connect, make new friends, and collaborate instantly and on the fly....I am speaking of this week's Online News Asscociation Conference in Toronto. Here's how it might have been different: • Conference attendees provide some basic profile information and tag key interests using one of many web based tools like Confabb.com or intronetworks.com. • Rather than having to go around the room and make introductions or describe projects, those introductions/project descriptions could have been available on the Web or on your mobile device as a session was in...

• October 19, 2007
• 3 comments

Locating Ourselves in the New Media Landscape

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm not at the conference. I'm at home. I live a half a mile from where I went to high school, a mile from where I went to junior high school, and within 5 miles of every where I've every lived...except a brief exile to Berkeley for college. I lasted one semester, returned to the City, and spent the next 4 years commuting across the Bay. I missed the cool, moist air of home. What is it about place that runs so deep and holds so tight? Take a minute to think about one of your treasured places. And yes,...

• October 19, 2007
• No comments

If You Aren't Thinking Mobile...You Don't Get It!

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am surpised how little of the discussion at the Online News Association conference going on today is around mobile media like cell phones and other handheld devices. The fact that we are approaching 3 Billion mobile users (compared to 1 Billion computer users), and that mobile use globally is growing rapidly while PC usage is flattening, should be on media minds everywhere. Just this month in India, for example, it was reported that the total number of fixed line Internet connections dropped to 9.22 million between April and June from 9.27 million the previous quarter. It may be that...

• October 18, 2007
• 2 comments

Young Americans Want New Kind of Election Coverage

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We listened. More than any time in human history, young people have more tools at their avail to consume - and create - information on the issues that are most relevant to them. So to figure out exactly what MTV's approach would be to truly engage young people aged 18-30 during this Presidential election cycle in this new, Wild West era of self-publishing and self-organization, we first had to listen to what young people themselves said they wanted. The results were simultaneously disheartening and hopeful, in the way only young people can express themselves about their future. The MTV/CBS News/New...

• October 15, 2007
• No comments

Baghdad...By the San Francisco Bay?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine your city as a war zone...like Baghdad. This project called Shadows from another place, by Professor Paula Levine at San Francisco State University, involved the transposing an interactive map of Baghdad on San Francisco using GPS mapping - complete with a warzone audio track. How does this impact our understanding of and feelings about the Iraq war...or any war? This is an early example of locative media projects that will eventually move such computer based experiences into your own neighborhood and direct reality. Imagine, for example, the ability to point your cell phone at your post office in your...

• October 15, 2007
• No comments

Political Action in Egypt Using Mobile Devices

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Using cell phones to organize protests and share information during demonstrations is not a new idea...but it is one that is changing how news is made or "unmade" - instantly. Check out this interview with Noria Yunus, who agitates against violence against women...note: the first couple of minutes are images of Israel/Egypt leading up to the interview......

• October 15, 2007
• 1 comment

Center for Locative Media Launches Beta Site

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Center for Locative Media has launched its beta site. Leslie Rule, co-director of the Center quipped, "I've birthed babies and that was less painful than launching this site. OK, not really, but almost." The mission of the Center is to engender civic engagement, develop shared community goals, and develop new models of democratic participation using place-based narrative and emerging technologies. At the site, you'll be able to review completed projects, watch on-going projects evolve, stay on top of new gadgets, delve into the theory of place-based media, and investigate mobile learning. We are always looking for content, so if you...

• October 14, 2007
• No comments