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... continued...

Rather than trying to talk about what is being talked about and covered most on this blog, here's another way of representing it: The above is a "word cloud" created on Wordle, a tool that sorts through text on a webpage, blog, or document and spits out a visual representation giving prominence to the most frequently appearing (source) words. Not surprising that words such as "news" are large and prominent on IdeaLab, but look at the size of "data" and such words as "can" and "will".BTW, it appears that Wordle only indexes current discussion, a kind of snapshot in time,... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

This week YouTube announced it's very own citizen news channel, and assigned a news manager named Olivia Ma, to run it. You can apparently reach her at citizennews@youtube.com Just for fun, here is our own Dan Gillmor, talking on YouTube about how web censorship is affecting citizen journalism, posted prior to the launch of the YouTube Citizen news channel. Hopefully we will see more of him and his students, and the great work of such projects as Global Voices there.... continued...

Some of the most interesting discussions and demonstrations at last week's NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley centered around making the changing news landscape sustainable. Here are some of the ideas I heard, along with a few of my own: 1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts. Examples: -An online/offline service which people pay journalists to help them navigating local political/business channels. i.e, the fastest way to get a building permit approved or knowing which local developer to talk to about a project. -recommending a trustworthy plumber of mechanic. This idea... continued...

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!... continued...

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... continued...

An interesting piece appeared in the Friday, April 11 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, calling for a New Deal-like investment by America in youth and technology. The basic argument is that a new generation of technology savvy youth could be put to work leveraging their digital skills to create socially useful tools and engage in 21st Century public service. The OpEd sites a study listing the US as much lower down in rankings for broadband penetration (24th among industrialized countries), and uses this as reason to put millenials to work bettering our nation's online offerings. What such studies often... continued...

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... continued...

An interesting battle of the blogging titans was covered in the "Bits" section of today's New York Times. It's basically an exchange between popular technology bloggers (and blog owners) Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali. Their differing views are worth examining because they touch on a hot button issue in blogging and journalism: How are new for-profit business models impacting blogging and the journalistic integrity of bloggers? In their personal scrap Mr. Arrington and Mr. Ali are tackling the difficult question of profitability models for blogging. Mr. Arrington seems to favor a monopoly approach, where blogs are brought together to form... continued...

Returning to Chris O'Brien's Business Model Challenge, here are some suggested approaches and models from the perspective of an entrepreneur and strategic consultant. For a more rigorous approach I would absolutely check out Chris's recommended NewspaperNext report. That said, let's try and smash some boxes or at least poke some holes in existing ones... 1) MyPaper model: Going beyond the trend in news aggregation and self-customized news portals like NetVibes, why not think about physical papers that are delivered to your door (or on the Web/mobile device) which combine your specific preferences for local, national, and international news + features... continued...

The good folks at Netsquared in San Francisco are sponsoring a Mashup Challenge, designed to encourage civil society and social benefit organizations to submit innovative new ideas for Mashups(web_application_hybrid) supporting social change. Of the 50 or so entries submitted so far, a number of them have a news angle that may be of interest to journalists and the larger media community. For example, a submission called Community News & Caring Map is aimed at allowing writers to know where their readers are geographically located. The idea being that if you know more about who your audience is, the better you... continued...

According to this new report released by We Media/Zogby, two thirds of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news and nearly half now get their news online. The report suggests that 29% of Americans get their primary news information fromTelevision, 11% from radio and only 10% from newspapers. Is traditional media really dead or dying? Is journalism itself the problem or is it all about a shirft in medium and not the quality of journalism itself that is itself the cause of our dissatisfaction? Or are these the wrong questions to be... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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.... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

MobileActive.org posted an interesting interview with "Artivist" Ricardo Dominguez, who is working on a locative media project designed to assist immigrants crossing the border to the U.S. from Mexico. His work-in-progress concept, called the Transborder Immigrant Tool, leverages GPS enabled cell phones to aid in the safe passage of desert border crossers. "The device seeks to reduce the number of deaths along the border by helping immigrants locate resources such as water caches and safety beacons." Not only is the tool seemingly well designed (read below) for the population it targets, but it seems relevant for remote and wilderness emergency... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

A good post on declining circulation and what that means in the context of the Web in this TechCrunch posting. "Readership of newspapers has continued to decline in the United States as more readers turn to online sources for news, according to the NY Times. The Audit Bureau of Circulations figures show that newspaper readership dropped 3% compared with the year before. Some newspapers fared better than others, with the US Today recording a 1% increase in circulation, along with the LA Times 0.5% and the Philadelphia Enquirer at 2.5%. We've written about the decline in print media many times... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

Some interesting work being done interactive games for use by the news media. For example, ImpactGames (makers of Peacemaker), is working on expanding its business strategy to encompass a model of interactive participation in current events. ImpactGames is in talks with some of the major news sources about creating portals that would allow viewers to "Play the News". Hear more about this latest work and how it relates to current events and the concept of interactive news... continued...

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.... continued...

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... continued...

It struck me as interesting yesterday when I heard a former reporter and journalism professor refer to training ordinary people to become journalists as "elevating" them. As a non journalist it made me wonder if that is how most professional journalists still view their work and trade - as being "elevated"? If this is a common view among journalists then no wonder it is proving so difficult for traditional journalism to come to grips with citizen journalists and the like? I wonder if indeed part of the mindshift that still needs to take place is not just citizens learning to... continued...

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... continued...

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... continued...

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...... continued...