Can you believe we used to use Flash for this?
21 Stylish CSS/jQuery Solutions To Beautify Your Web Designs @ SmashingApps
-
Archives
At IdeaLab: Paul Bradshaw on crowdsourcing investigative journalism
Jun 4, ’09
6:02 AM
Over at IdeaLab, I’ve been way past deadline for a post, after (again) making all sorts of promises about helping out more over there. Until now.
After playing the modern equivalent of phone tag (Twitter DMs and e-mail across two operating systems and one ocean) for a week or so, Paul Bradshaw and I landed on Skype at the same time for 15 minutes for a quick chat about his freshly funded project, Help Me Investigate.
Here’s the post at IdeaLab, where you’ll find the full video interview.
If you want to head directly to the background on this, read Paul’s post about the funding and the next steps for the project.
Here’s why I’m so interested in this project, and in my Knight News Challenge project ReportingOn, and David Cohn’s efforts with Spot.Us, and in the Collaborative Reporting tools we launched at Publish2 recently:
I really, REALLY, REALLY want there to be easy ways to gather structured data from readers, users, journalists, and editors, and I want that data to be attached to their identity whenever possible. I want that data to be portable and exportable, so it can be displayed in any and all useful formats. I want profiles for everyone so I can track their participation, reliability, and levels of knowledge about different topics, beats, locations, and stories.
I’m becoming more and more passionate about this, with my level of surprise that no one has built the right tools for this job yet growing by the day. But we’re getting closer. Platforms are emerging. Standards will follow. Collaboration is key.
What’s the most important reason news organizations should link out to the wider Web?
Jun 3, ’09
5:13 PM
Hey RSS readers, click on through to answer the question if you don’t mind. Trying to gather some ideas for a post I’m working on. Thank you!
How Important are Avatars? – Bokardo
Jun 1, ’09
2:44 PM
Joshua Porter on the importance of avatars in social applications: “Trust is a crucial byproduct of avatars that we can leverage in design. In one of my current consulting projects we’re working on what you might call “time to first known avatar”. That is, we are trying to speed up the time it takes for someone new to the service to see a familiar face…the faster they see the face the faster they’ll get comfortable with the software. If the time it takes for them to see a familiar face is too long, then they might very well give up because it doesn’t feel as welcoming. But if we can instill a sense of presence of friends early on, we’ll have tilted the cards in our favor.”
Dean Singleton on the plight of the major metro
Jun 1, ’09
6:35 AM
[UPDATE: Predictably, this was the wrong day to bring this up.]
I get the feeling people think of MediaNews* CEO (and AP chairman) Dean Singleton as some sort of billionaire boogeyman, the last guy in the world you’d want buying your news organization, but his take on why newspapers in major metro markets are failing is pretty interesting: with scant mention of the secular shift to online news reading consumption, he attributes some of their decline to the strength of smaller suburban papers with loyal readership and advertisers, especially in San Francisco and Boston.
I think it’s certainly more complicated than that, but he’s pointing out something that few pundits outside these markets perceive.
* Disclosure: I’ve worked for a newspaper or two that MediaNews owns.
BackType Connect Plugin for WordPress — BackType
Want to import Tweets, FriendFeed posts, Diggs, etc. that link to your post as comments in WordPress? Done.
BackType Connect Plugin for WordPress — BackType