Tuesday, March 27, 2007

A new "Wikipedia" from the founder of Wikipedia

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

A column about this: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=120401

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Google's Next Generation Search

Read/WriteWeb interviews Google's Matt Cutts on the topic of Next-Generation Search. Topics discussed include personalized search and semantic technologies, SearchMash, Google Base and using structured data, vertical search, fighting web spam, and how Google is going about indexing video.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Mashup Tools from TechCrunch

I haven't had time to play with most of these, but Dapper seems like a strong candidate for making web page scraping easier:
Dapper is a web based application for generating XML for website content. You create “Dapps” (web services) by using Dapper’s virtual browser to grab content from web pages. Dapper is trained by feeding it several example urls that hold examples of content you’re interested in. Dapper looks at the similarities between the pages to take a guess at the important content to pull from the page. After Dapper has analyzed the page, you can narrow down the fields on the page you want to track.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

France Bans Citizen Journalists From Recording Violence: Because If It's Not Recorded We Can Pretend It Never Happened

From Techdirt:

Yikes. We thought it was pretty bad when some schools thought the way to stop bullying was to ban YouTube or ban cameraphones on the belief that without a record, perhaps the bullying wouldn't happen (but more likely because without a record, school administrators could pretend it didn't happen). However, the French Constitutional Council has taken this concept to an entirely new level, approving a law that says that only professional journalists can film or broadcast acts of violence. If you happen to be walking along the street and see a violent act and film it with your cameraphone, you may face time in jail. The article notes the sad irony that this decision came out on the anniversary of the Rodney King incident. Under this law, if Rodney King had been attacked today, the guy filming the video would now be facing jail time. It's as if they believe that by banning the recording of these incidents then the incidents themselves go away. It's head-in-the-sand governing, and it seems ridiculous that anyone would think this is a good idea.

A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side

The NY Times run a story about one of the contributors of WikiPedia... "In a blink, the wisdom of the crowd became the fury of the crowd. In the last few days, contributors to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, have turned against one of their own who was found to have created an elaborate false identity. "

Monday, March 5, 2007

Mashup Contest

For those in the class that did their programming in reporting project with congressional data, you may be interested to enter your mashup into the Sunlight Foundation's Mashup Contest. $2000 prize for the winner.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Police Use YouTube

A patrolman looking to identify suspects posts surveillance video on YouTube hoping to get 300+ people and organizations to do the job. He claims using YouTube is easy. He accredits the arrests to police work and not YouTube.

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Open Editorial Meetings

Newsrooms around the country are experimenting with how assignment desks can connect directly with viewers and readers. In today's Al Tompkins (from the Poynter Institute) Morning Meeting, he talks about this novel bridge between the audience and the journalists.

USAToday.com prepares impressive relaunch

Gannett (the news company behind USA Today) has been announcing in the last several a relaunch tha will include enormous “crowdsourcing” and “networked journalism” features. At least that is what they say. Here a sneak preview.