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 [...]
All about databases
At IdeaLab: Paul Bradshaw on crowdsourcing investigative journalism
June 4, 2009
Technology is easy; labor is hard
December 1, 2008
Aron Pilhofer of nytimes.com on the hardware, software, and costs associated with building the best interactive data projects in the news business:
Everything we use is free and open-source. Our platform is Ruby on Rails backed by Mysql databases running on Ubuntu servers. The cost here isn’t software, or even hardware, which is relatively cheap these [...]
Sunday morning links: Data, DocumentCloud, and the Obama Bounce for news
November 23, 2008
A few things I haven’t had time yet to dig deeper on, but maybe you will:
Eric Ulken offers of 10 pieces of advice at OJR, based on his experience building the data desk at the LA Times:
“4. Go off the reservation: No matter how good your IT department is, their priorities are unlikely to be [...]
The stenography ends here
July 22, 2008
A few takeaways from this morning’s presentations at the Knight Foundation meeting today in Chicago:
The stenography ends here. The days of chasing cops and government down for raw data (crime blotter, etc.) to parse into 8 inch stories is coming to an end. Everyblock and the Sunlight Foundation are a good start. More projects that [...]
Inventing journalism
February 17, 2008
I’ve been reading Guns, Germs & Steel for months now.
(I take these bound paper items you people call ‘books’ slowly sometimes.)
There’s a number of striking stories about technology, innovation, and invention in the chapter I’m in the middle of right now. One of those stories is about the QWERTY keyboard layout, which was actually [...]