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...
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Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.
Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.
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Using Flowgram to Explain and Illuminate
I've been advising a San Francisco startup, Flowgram, where Abhay Parekh and his team have come up with a novel Web 2.0 idea. It's a system that lets you guide someone through several websites or pages, showing various items -- but where the pages and links stay "live" for the user. Here's a smart one by a Flowgram developer, Tony Lopez, showing some great blogging tools:I've created several journalism-related Flowgrams with a focus on new media. Keep in mind that I'm still an amateur at this, as will be obvious...For example, take a look at this brief introduction to the Washington Post's...
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Try Basecamp to Organize Tools for Projects
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...
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We just wound up our Innovation Israel tour of Israel's tech community, and I'm in awe of the Silicon Valley alpha geeks I traveled with during the week. (Here's our group blog: Travelinggeeks.com.) Anyone in the media, publishing or tech business should be interested in the software applications and Web 2.0 tools (on the Web and on the desktop) that these folks use on an almost daily basis. Robert Scoble Scobleizer Firefox (web browser)FriendFeed (social media sharing) Google Reader (RSS news reader)Techmeme (a tech news dynamic link aggregator)Twitter (social network) GoogleTalk (live chat on Windows) Gmail (email) WordPress (blog software)Flickr...
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A few months back I proposed a project to the Knight News Challenge around community media tools. In a nutshell, the thought was to start a project to provide publishers, editors and developers at community media/citizen media sites with a suite of social media tools to enable a much richer degree of participation by the public on these sites. Now, plug-ins, scripts, guides and tutorials may sound pretty unsexy. But if you're just starting out in this field and want to add your voice in a meaningful way, what can you do besides start a blog? A community media effort,...
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It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.
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