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...

Visualization tool: ManyEyes from JD Lasica on Vimeo. At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from the co-creator of Many Eyes. Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall." Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and... continued...

Huang Qi, the Chinese dissident who had been working to uncover information about school buildings that collapsed during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, was formally arrested last week for illegally possessing state secrets. He had been in detention for weeks. Huang had already served five years in prison on charges of inciting subversion after publishing many articles critical of the government on his Web site, http://64tianwang.com/. He claimed that he was badly beaten in jail, and suffers headaches and depression. The parents of children who died in collapsed school buildings have been considered a possible threat to the... continued...

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

The participants of "Media Mobilizing Project":http://www.mediamobilizing.org/ and "Juntos's":http://vamosjuntos.org/ Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach. Please check out the first video "Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers":http://ourcityourvoices.blogspot.com/2008/06/trabajadores-imnigrantes-existe-la.html continued...

The iPhone is released. The world stops. While surfing around on the Internet today, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming that the only news worth talking about is the release of Apple's 3G iPhone. Of course, there are plenty of other notable and interesting conversations taking place online (among them: the ethics of for-profit fundraisers, a Danish island's march toward energy independence, and how English is "evolving into a language we may not even understand") but most of us don't know how to find those conversations as we navigate through our personal echo chamber of bookmarked websites, subscribed RSS... 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...

Ryan Mark, one of the first two winners of our journalism scholarships for computer programmers, wonders why it's so hard to get usable government data. I wrapped up my second quarter of journalism school and my daily reporting class a couple of weeks ago. Learning firsthand what goes into a simple news article gave me a new-found respect for the work that's required. Making call after call, leaving messages with people who will never call you back, and then taking notes while paying attention to what somebody is saying is quite a difficult way to spend a day. The Internet... continued...

Here at MIT, summer means time to dig into our research. A group of us at the Center for Future Civic Media is working on a white paper defining "civic media." We are interested in how civic media is empowering new user-creators, with related effects on governing elites. Inspiring people to take action, through access to information and the public spotlight, is a familiar goal to those of us on the team who used to be journalists. We used to facilitate the agency of an isolated person or community to make the government act for justice or change. It often... continued...

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

I believe IdeaLab readers would benefit from a wide range of posts related to important developments taking place in the participatory media movement. With that in mind, here are two interviews that bear on that subject: The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse... continued...

The short story: People are starting to ask me how they can get involved in Spot.Us. The site won't really be ready until the Fall, but I hate telling people to wait. In an effort to start community building, so we don't lose track of ideas and to keep everything transparent, I'm happy to point people to the Spot Us Community Wiki. It's not high-tech but this wiki, combined with a blog and a third party e-commerce solution is enough to organize "community funded reporting." If you are a citizen and have a story idea or a reporter and want... continued...

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... continued...

As I delve more into Printcasting, I've been learning about the relatively new and growing POD movement -- which stands for Print on Demand. And every new leaf I turn over is another confirmation of what we suspected when we originally entered Printcasting into the Knight News Challenge. There's an all-out technology revolution happening with print which, until now, newspapers have largely missed out on. Here are just a few examples. For this first one, I have to thank Medill student and journalistic-programmer Brian Boyer who introduced me to the service. When I met Brian at the MIT Future of... continued...

For the past several years I've been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It's called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it's gaining adherents all the time.Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has... continued...

Halfway through his Medill graduate journalism education, programmer Brian Boyer reflects on the paths that might lie ahead: When I first spoke to Rich Gordon about becoming a "programmer-journalist," the meaning of the term was unclear. Not being the sort to be concerned by ambiguity, I dove into journalism school with no plans for what might come after. Six months into my re-education, I still don't know what to do with myself, but the potential jobs for which a programmer-journalist would be well suited are becoming clear. I will try and enumerate them here. Also, I will try and avoid... continued...

I've spent the last couple weeks with my head in the wires, so to speak, thinking about things like technology platforms. And lest you hear that term and begin to tune out, stay with me. The reality is that in today's media, all of us are need to be a little semi-geek (to quote Amy Gahran from last year's News Challenge contest). First, I have a significant decision to report. After a lot of thought, discussion and hand-wringing, we've finally settled on a technology platform for Printcasting: Drupal. And we have contracting needs galore. If you're a Drupal developer (or... continued...

In the past few weeks, I've ramped up development of ReportingOn. Of course, for me, that means I'm spending time early in the morning and late at night exploring different options, creating mockups, ditching everything I've done and starting over again. Here's a few paths of exploration I've been down lately: Drupal: Drupal 6 isn't ready for what I need it to do. The Views and CCK modules aren't up to speed yet, or maybe I just haven't found the right set of instructions yet. That brings me to my biggest complaint about Drupal: Although there's a huge open source... continued...

So what happens when people with computer programming backgrounds are part of the same journalism class with more traditional students? Liza Kaufman Hogan, a former CNN.com senior producer, found out this spring when she taught the introductory new media journalism class at the Medill School of Journalism. The class, "Interactive Techniques," revolves around blogging. Students create their own blogs (using Wordpress software and a commercial ISP hosting account that they establish and pay for). Class sessions focus on the critical issues involved in online journalism, from copyright to business models. Between classes, the students are required to blog regularly and... continued...

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

For people without their own web site or blog, a newspaper article can become their primary identity online. Local news sites face this responsibility most often and most intensely. Every article or blog on the internet can become part of the permanent record, but the publisher doesn't control how and when people access this information- for the most part, search engines become the gatekeepers. However, news organizations can and should take responsibility for ensuring their piece of the permanent record provides their best understanding of reality. JD Lasica (also an Idealab blogger) quoted Terry Heaton riffing on a post by... continued...

It all started in the Tetherless Computing Lab at the University of Waterloo. Our research group led by Prof. S. Keshav prototyped an extremely low-cost software and hardware platform called KioskNet, for providing Internet connectivity in rural areas. The first pilot deployment was done in May 2006 in the village of Anandpuram in the Vizag district of Andhra Pradesh (India), and has since been followed by deployments in West Bengal (India) and Ghana (Africa). But we soon realized that providing a communication infrastructure to rural areas is not even half of the story. It is useless unless appropriate applications are... 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...

TimesPeople is the beginning of a social network from the New York Times. Sort of. It's a pleasant interface and a clever application, living in the browser as a Firefox add-on that doesn't get in the way of my NYT browsing. It's simple: Hit the recommend button on any story or blog post and a link shows up in your activity stream and your friends can see that you recommended a story. The app is supposed to notice when I rate a restaurant or add a comment to a story, too, although I don't see that happening after a quick... continued...

In the 13 years I've been involved in online media, I've learned firsthand how dangerous it can be to be lead by ideology. Ideals are great, but if you become too invested in them they can blind you to the real needs of the customers you're trying to serve. And when it comes to innovation - which is part of the brand of The Bakersfield Californian newspaper where I work - the temptation to drink your own Kool-Aid is huge. So it's not without some humility that I come to you today with a confession. My name is Dan Pacheco,... continued...

Some takeaways from the Future of Civic Media conference, showcasing Knight News Challenge winners, that ended yesterday at the MIT Media Lab in Boston: • All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years. The program grew stronger as it went along. • The Media Lab setting was inspirational. This was my first visit here, and the mix of astonishingly bright students and faculty meshed well with us ruffians from the outside world. One suggestion for future gatherings: Invite student and members of... continued...

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... continued...

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 --... continued...

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... 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...

Following is part 3 of my 3-part series on open APIs and crowdsourcing community news. Part 1, Part 2.At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause. "Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part," Peter told me. A few hours after our chat,... continued...

The following is a translation of a post by Rising Voices grantee and Plan Ceibal coordinator Pablo Flores, who details some of the upcoming challenges and opportunities as the OLPC project in Uruguay spreads to the capital city, Montevideo. If we look at how the next phases of expansion of Plan Ceibal (OLPC in Uruguay), it is apparent that we are about to face some new challenges. The arrival of the plan to the capital, Montevideo, next year will bring a new unprecedented dimension to the project which involves the most marginalized communities in the country. For the first time,... continued...

At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," held earlier this week in Minneapolis, every session meant horizontal communication: no one on a stage, a circle of chairs with the facilitator at the same level as anyone else. John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis. He visited the earlier, far smaller New Pamphleteers and represented what is wrong with the NCMR model of conference. He dropped in without having attended the rest of the New Pamphleteers, without having had the experiences all the rest of... continued...

"Playing the News" Update - Distil Interactive I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole Rinerand I went to collaborate with Distil Interactive. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that Distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time. The system is based off XML, flash and C. Right now the XML code is what controls what is being displayed on screen and... continued...

We've launched our first EveryBlock "special report" -- an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation "Operation Crooked Code." As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We've been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we've been building the site, we've come across a number of types of information that don't exactly fit the EveryBlock mold.... continued...

I'm on an open API kick here at IdeaLab, so here's the second of three entries on the potential of application programming interface for news organizations. (I'll post a final video interview on Monday.) This is a way to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing gatekeeper and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but not the raw data itself. In this 8-minute video interview I conducted yesterday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com,... continued...

Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas). Three student-developed projects were presented at the Online News Association conference last year. This summer, the innovative digital news projects are being tested at newspapers. We were instructed to use open-source software for our projects. Open-source is free. In the open-source community, there are comparable programs for every retail package produced by the big companies. Open-source software can be well- documented... continued...

News about a potentially big deal in the newspaper industry broke just before the holiday weekend. No, not another story about a chain swallowing another chain, or news about the formation of yet another online advertising platform that's doomed to underperform. Instead, this was a kind of news that only a geek would love: MediaBistro reported, and Read/Write Web republished, word that the New York Times is planning to release an open API this summer. Huh? An API, as Wikipedia reminds us, is short for application programming interface. Those of us in or near Silicon Valley are well aware of... continued...

It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications. Here's where we stand: Two scholarship winners are now almost midway through their Medill studies. A third candidate will enroll next month. And we still have the equivalent of six full scholarships yet to award. From the beginning, I've felt that this project's biggest challenge would... 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...

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... continued...

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. That decision led to the defection of Walter Bender who had been OLPC's president of software and content and a longtime colleague of Negroponte. It also led free software guru Richard Stallman, who ironically switched to a XO laptop himself just before the announcement, to ask out loud, "Can... continued...

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... continued...

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.... continued...

I've attended a few conferences and it appears to me that most folks in journalism hate advertising. Maybe that comes from seeing the last eight inches of their story end up on the composing room floor to make room for another two column by four-inch ad or just distrust of business. I wouldn't hazard a guess. Regardless, it would seem some journalistic purists are using the current situation to seek wholly different business forms to fund journalism in general. While the national practice of the craft has been benefited by foundations, the idea that anything approaching hyperlocal can be funded... continued...

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

Today I'm publishing a guest post from Ryan Mark, one of the first two journalist-programmers attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship. Ryan is a 2004 graduate of Augustana College, where he earned a BA in computer science. He later served as technology director for ZapTel Corp., a company that sells prepaid long-distance phone cards. Ryan's guest post: One thing I’ve discovered through talking to people, including teachers and others in education, is that the Internet is encouraging more people to contribute. Well, obviously, right? I think we are just starting to learn how to... continued...

Related Content will provide an easy way for people visiting a Drupal-powered newspaper site to connect articles to past reports, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, or feature stories- to relate any piece of content on the web site to any other piece. This engages readers with the lowest barrier to participation while providing to other readers and the news organization the value of deep links. A plug-in interface for other modules to suggest related content to be connected and a data architecture that could allow relating content between sites has been completed, and work continues on the user interface.... 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...

I've been thinking a lot about just how "local" most people want to be online. The greatest myth about the Internet is that people only want to go to world online. That they only care about creating social networks with friends or people like themselves with similar interests from thousands of miles away. It is as if the cross-dressing organic gardener from Sweden connecting with those like themselves on the other side of the world (someone I met once who shared his tipping point experience with the power of the Internet) has more virtue than enabling a plant swap online... continued...

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer. Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency: Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations... continued...

Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs. Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio. Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools. I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem. As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a... continued...