Idea Lab

Think Community? Think Maps! (Going to MIT. Part One)

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm looking into the Delta airplane illuminator at the white snow valley with scattered grayish mountain peaks of Greenland, which just recently became independent of Danmark, and comparing the view with the satellite map right behind me on the horizontal Kindle-size screen. First thought: since last summer Delta tech guys made a great step forward and significantly improved the entertainment services onboard, introducing a sensor screen and a possibility for the flyer to choose movies, games, CDs by genres and tracks. And finally build a personal playlist, which is a worthy alternative to watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...

• June 17, 2009
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Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently in Chicago, as the weather warmed inordinately from a deep freeze, with a 70-degree swing in temperature, the attention of the media and the municipal workers turned to potholes. The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street. From the Chicago Tribune story: "Byrne said a computerized map that tracks work crews and unfilled potholes will speed the patching process and added that an estimated...

• January 12, 2009
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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
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Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America. As part of E-Democracy.Org's Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area....

• March 19, 2008
• 1 comment

Kenyan Bloggers Innovate to Heal Country

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The post-election crisis in Kenya has received a good deal of blogger coverage, both at Global Voices as well as the wider blogosphere. Some say the ensuing violence boils down to ethnic animosity. Others insist that such a viewpoint is overly simplistic. Kenya's post-election crisis has taught us that cell phone airtime can become currency in times of need and that bloggers on opposite ends of the earth can collaborate on a moment's notice to push the limits of online innovation and usefulness. There has even been a meta-conversation in the U.S. tech blogosphere about whether or not tech bloggers...

• January 31, 2008
• 2 comments

One Location Doesn't Cut It

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 3, 2008
• 4 comments

It's All About the Maps

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today we're unveiling some site features on ChiTownDailyNews.org that represent, in my humble opinion, a huge step forward in the way people and content are connected on the internet. The features are focused on what's become known as geotargeting, and they're things that you won't find on any other website. Basically, we're making it easy for you to see the news and ads that are relevant to you because they take place near you. If you're a registered user on the site, you'll have the opportunity to give us your address. Our frontpage will then display a map centered on...

• December 20, 2007
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Making Maps Work with Geo-Filtering

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 13, 2007
• 2 comments

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
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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