News Consumption

A lot more detail and reaction to the recently released results of the Poynter Eye Track Study which looked at news consumption across different formats of newspapers and online news sites.

The revolution will be televised...on YouTube | Stanford Center for Internet and Society [beta site]

The revolution will be televised...on YouTube | Stanford Center for Internet and Society [beta site]

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

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.

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.

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. "

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.

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.

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.

Citizen Journalism

I consider Citizen Journalism to be strongly linked to Computational Journalism, as Comp. Journalism will help understand the needs for Citizen Journalists and provide guidance to build better tools for citizens to go beyond authoring and sharing eye-witness and opinion pieces.

See http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ for a great site on voices from all over the world and http://citmedia.org/.

The Wizards of Buzz - WSJ.com

The Wizards of Buzz - WSJ.com
A new kind of Web site is turning ordinary people into hidden influencers, shaping what we read, watch and buy.

(courtesy Jim Foley)

For Bloggers, Libby Trial Is Fun and Fodder - New York Times

For Bloggers, Libby Trial Is Fun and Fodder - New York Times

an interesting article on "blogging"

(Courtesy Amy Bruckman)

Nintendo Wii Interactive News Channel

Wii users can catch news relevant to them by navigating a 3D Globe and selecting regions where the users reside in. They can opt to view international, regional, or local news, all provided by Associated Press (except for the Japanese, that will be provided by Goo).

In order to make use of the Wii News Channel service, customers must connect the Wii to a high-speed connection as demonstrated in the manual and activate the System Update. Once the update is complete, the Wii News Channel will be already downloaded. To keep news up-to-date, the Wii must be connected to the Internet.

Please look at the following link for a demo of the interactive news channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VRPlnvK3Ws

NewsU Fellowship

This may be an interesting opportunity for anyone graduating at the end of this Spring and looking to get more into the world of interactive and multimedia journalism. The Poynter Institute is a very prestigious organization.

Newsmap Visualization

I know we'll be studying news visualization next week, but I came across this today. This newsmap displays the topography of the whatever's on Google News at the moment, using a treemap visualization algorithm to determine the size based on the number of news results for each story.

Google News Breaches Copyright

Apparently a Brussels court has ruled that Google News breaches copyright law, and uses the material without the Authors consent.

"A Brussels court has ruled in favour of a group of Belgian newspapers which argued that the site, which lists links to news stories from around the world, used material without their consent, and ordered that the articles be taken down."

Apparently the group is also pursuing Yahoo! as well for their news service.

Here's the article.

News War Documentary

"In a four-and-a-half-hour special, News War, FRONTLINE examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today and how the press has reacted in turn."

Starts tonight (2/13) on PBS.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! have recently launched a new service: Pipes. It is an new kind of news/data aggregator. I haven't use it too much yet, so I don't know to much about it, but from what I have read it seems promising: http://pipes.yahoo.com/