Knight Foundation expands into investment with an Enterprise Fund: I missed this while on vacation last week, but as a sort of expansion of the Knight News Challenge, there’s now a 10 million dollar Knight Foundation fund to invest in for-profit companies. I continue to think this is a good idea.
Best of Digital News Design Winners: From March 2011, SND’s online news design award winners.
A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map: Alexis Madrigal, like many who have commented so far, are impressed with Tackable’s tablet news map app. Me, too.
Machine Learning Fairy Dust: A warning against putting all your innovation eggs in a natural language processing basket. One key reason to be wary? Accuracy of most automated tagging services approaches “good enough” at best without a healthy dose of human intervention to tune the system.
Google Prediction API: Seems like a useful resource for building inexpensive personalization tools for news, depending on how structured your metadata is at the start. Warning: This is a Google Labs project, which makes it seem like it could vanish at any time these days.
Today’s Newark Star-Ledger centerpiece story runs without a headline. Intentionally: Charles Apple notes a piece of engaging print design on the front page. It’s a seemingly banal photograph with three grafs of text above it that draw the reader in, revealing at their close the backstory of the image. It works well.
From @-reply triage to journalistic meme-tracking: How NPR may scale Andy Carvin’s Twitter curation: How do you take @acarvin’s methods (I think the tools already exist) and build them into a news organization’s social media production workflow?
Recent open source work and other projects we’re excited about: Free open source tools from the Chicago Tribune news apps team. Census, Twitter, regional boundary data, etc.
How to make a heatmap in Google Fusion Tables: Seems useful!
Social Memories: an Infographic Book of your Facebook Activity: Your very own Feltron report, if you don’t mind that it’s limited to all the information it can get from your Facebook account.