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Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.

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Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.

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Ellen Hume

Finding Political Sleazemongers

I have invited researchers at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media to participate in an effort to blow the whistle on groups who are falsely presenting themselves as "ordinary bloggers," but instead are paid to spread false information about candidates during the 2008 campaign in viral internet campaigns to influence voters. The project, already involving students from Columbia and Harvard, traces the IP addresses of these content originators to track those who are sending out large packets of these identical negative messages and claiming to be individuals. But a MIT researcher protested that this kind of research was not to...

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Featured Comment

Media companies been trying to use technology to build new audiences and business models for ages now. Feels like too little, too late.

Hiroko Tabuchi
Journalism, Technology Starting to Add Up

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