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Here's a link to Alf Hermida's blog post on the latest stats.

Go to Google Groups: Rebel Knight News

Hey All Knighters,

It's Jenna. I posted the power point and the presentation (which is about halfway finished) on Google groups. Please look through and see what you think. We scrapped a lot of what we originally were using in the power point that I e-mailed last week to Lauren and Charlotte Anne because it was not very "presentable." Tell us what you think. The blank slides are for the mockups of the corresponding slides before. But there should be some photos on other slides. The last four slides need some new photos, but I could be wrong. And I ran out of great words on the speech document. I will work some more tomorrow. But if anyone wants to add to it, please do so. Thanks guys, talk to you all soon;)

Jenna

Leave it to Idaho

Hey all,

I really wanted to appologize for not being on the chat tonight. My parents network crashed last night (blue screen of death) and we have been trying to get it up all day with no luck until now. I also do not have a great connection on my cellular phone because I am in the mountains in a new area and they don't have a tower yet. I am available now thru wednesday if you need to get ahold of me the best way is to email me and then when i go into town I can call you also. Please let me know anything that I may be able to do to help! Can't wait to see you all in 4 days!

Link-o-rama from our chat last night

Okie dokie, here we go.
Last night I mentioned a bunch of things to check out. Here's the collection all in one neat tidy package.

1) This is the Online Journalism Review (OJR) article by Mike Orren, the guy who started Pegasus. You need to read this to see why something worked well there. I thought the bit about 75% of his traffic coming from data was very interesting:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070117orren/
For those not at last night's chat, Pegasus, in Dallas, got bought last week by Seattle-based Fisher Communications. Link to that here. You can message Mike through my Facebook friends. He is a good guy and should reply within hours.

2) More good resources in this online only book. Some very good stuff that is applicable to your idea in Chapter 4:

Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive
A digital literacy guide for the information age

3) Also, I commend to you a Page One story in the NYTimes today (props to my husband who found it first). This piece is about geomapping, and you should be aware of what is out there even if that's not exactly what your idea is trying to do. Here's the link.

With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: July 27, 2007

New tools are allowing people with minimal skills to do what only professional mapmakers were able to do before.

What are we trying to accomplish?

I promised to get you several links and I will do that, but first need to point to this fabulous part of a Q&A about crowdsourcing and citizen journalism with Jay Rosen (PressThink, NYU). Here's the link to the full interview, but I highlighted the important part below in red and in bold -- think about this for your presentation:

Rosen: Your Wikipedia example is critically important. Here's why. I am on the Wikipedia advisory board, and in the spring I had coffee with Jimmy Wales when he was in town. I asked him why did Wikipedia work when the odds are that most things don't work, and he said something very important, although its significance escaped me at the time. People come to Wikipedia not knowing how it works, but they do know how a regular, 'ol encyclopedia works and so the "leap" to knowing what a free online encyclopedia would be like is not that great. This prior knowledge is critical to a system's viability because is constrains users and points them in the logical directions. How much did it cost Wikipedia to put that common understanding into each contributor's head? Zero! They already knew it. Explaining the way it works takes all of six words: "The online encyclopedia anyone can edit." With 6,000 words we did not get clarity on what a crowdsourced investigation asked of participants because there was no common image to start with, nothing comparable to "encyclopedia, right!..."

Pixel Art

above image by eboy.

So for the more zoomed in views were thinking that maybe we can switch to pixel art. There is already a huge community of people online creating and showing it so it shouldnt be too hard to get it done once the site would actually get launched- if ever. Theres even some social networking websites based on it like Cyworld and Habbo Hotel.

So check out of this stuff me and Hepi came across today.

Love Pixel

Quick Honey

Eboy

And an About.com Entry about creating Pixel Art.

The type of art we choose isnt all that important but I think this can give us and the audience a better idea of how it might look once completed at the zoomed in levels. We would not of course be creating th whole city but just neighborhoods and mostly the more important buildings would be detailed like the nodes we were talking about. Nodes = Buildings or landmarks that are clickable and take to you content directly or to content portals.

-Rob and Hepi

[edit]
I found an Isometric map of Washington DC thats pretty similar what were going for at their Tourism website. I think we can use this as an example.

Stuff to think about for our project...

This is a link to an article Adrian Holovaty (she worked at Lawrence World Journal online with Rob Curley) wrote in response to newspapers going web. It's full of great answers to questions one might pose as a traditional journalist, and includes some great pointers we should keep in mind while we design our web product...

JK
http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307

More CJ Stuff

The New York Times launched it's City Room last week. It's more of a blog but I think it allows readers to submit stories and comment on everything. Check it out, it is kind of cool. We might use it to consider the type of hyperlocal content we want to publish with our project. They had a video introduction up there but I can't seem to find it now.

And as some of us know, OhMyNews held a conference in Korea about CitJ on the weekend. Might want to check out some of the keynotes and hear what people are talking about for the future of CitJ and online journalism in general. Lots of neat stuff to check out from the OMNI Forum.

And thats it!

rob

Community Journalism roundup

A bunch of people who are a lot smarter than I am have weighed in about the future of community journalism/citizen journalism in light of the demise of Backfence.com. I'll try to give you a guide to some of the most thoughtful pieces that I have run across. I urge you to meander through this and "click on through," sideways and otherwise to the places these folk suggest, so you get more facets of the picture.
One of the first roundups of the Backfence.com situation came from Paul Farhi of the Washington Post. Here is a link to Paul's piece.
One of the most recent pieces comes from the always thoughtful Steve Yelvington, who also, thoughtfully rounds up all of the other blogs who posted on this. Check out his post, Learning from Backfence.
While you're there, you should be sure to click through to the other links, which are to some very provocative posts. They made me think ...
And then you should check out the Facebook group, Exploding Newsrooms, where the Wall has a post from none other than Backfence founder Mark Potts, who weighs in on the situation.
that's all for now ...

More Flash training guide

Here's another good place to go for honing multimedia skills -- UC Berkeley and USC Annenberg in combo with our good friends at Knight put this puppy together.
In their own words:

This site is sponsored by Knight New Media Center, which offers workshops to mid-career journalists to enhance their expertise and multimedia skills. The center is a partnership of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

Flash Tutorial

If you need to do some learnin'.

http://www.entheosweb.com/Flash/

And if you need flash, ask me how today! And so can you!

-Rob

The Final Idea

In your face interface/News Views/City Window/My View/Our Town(working title)
An interface designed for online publications to use in order to provide news and community involvement in an interactive and hyper local format.

Idea: A panoramic computer graphic based view of a user's city/town that allows the user to get their news. It would be like getting the news by looking out of a window. Through the use of icons/symbols, the city's landscape reveals headlines. As the user navigates throughout the city and into specific communities, they will be able to view stories and interact with the rest of the community by posting bulletins and keeping other members of the community informed about local events. The user will be able to become a part of the story.
Content will be generated both by users, and from the town's proffesional journalists. The plan is for two overlays to exist: one for citizen journalism and another for staff-written journalism.
"In Your Face Interface" will not only allow people to acquire information but will also enable the exploration and discovery of the city through hidden easter eggs and games. For example, at night there will be stars in the sky and if you click on the astrological sign you will receive your horoscope.
The site is interactive, entertaining and informative. The image of the city itself will provide a sense of the current conditions of the city. If it is raining outside, it will be raining on the site. Airplanes will fly by as if the site is living. People will enjoy exploring the site and seeing not only news updates, but community involvement as well. The site can still be sponsored by advertisers on billboards throughout the city. In order to give the interface a much more interactive feel, the site will be comprised of computer graphics/animation. This may also attract a younger audience as well as adults.

Collaborative Portal
This will be an element of the interface which creates an environment where people can work on stories together. Users can provide different elements (pictures, videos, text) to a single story which will be rated or commented on by the community and then posted to the front page or inside different pertaining overlays. This element should meld seamlessly into our inteface and be reachable through most screens. This would also facilitate new sources to come forward on new stories and add to a developing story though comments or other interactions. Moderation of user based content would come with the ability to "blam" bad or incorrect articles from appearing on the site and elevate better stories to a correct place on the main site, similar to Newground's method.

Reasons Why "In Your Face Interface" Will Work:
1.) As media consumers, people want to know what stories will impact them the most. This service will deliver that information to users in an innovative, efficient and stimulating interface.
2.) Users would be able to see what news stories will impact them the most, due to their geographic proximity. The website would strengthen neighborly bonds through heightened community awarness.
3.) Through navigating the city's landscape the user will become engaged in the news.
4.) The "news" will consist of more than just hard news stories...but will keep a community tied together with what's news to them.

Groupware Incorporation

Sup Groupies,

So I saw this speech on the research channel about groupware and how it hasn't changed much since the 60's and how prime it is for innovation (or just implementation). So I started thinking maybe we should incorporate some collaborative aspects into our final project. Maybe we can try to make it all about collaboration between users?

So what I'm thinking is having the main front page like we talked about before that shows stories using overlays and portrays data geographically and all that. Behind that you can pop up a content portal, like at the Newgrounds Flash Portal (which is not their main page), that would show the latest stories, pictures, data, videos and such uploaded as independent stories. There would also be columns for top rated, award winning (we could give out daily awards if theres enough people using it, for ex. top daily views), weekly top 20, monthly , etc. Parallel to that (and this is the innovative part) there would be a collaboration portal. Here you could post stories that you are not quite finished with or that you need pictures for or that you want some input on before you post. You could also post pictures up if your a photographer for people to use with their stories or data visualizations for other projects. There would also be a forum of some sort (not necessarily linear) where you can discuss story ideas and figure out who will get what roles in putting together a story or a feature (with multiple stories) and give you a place to stay in contact throughout the process. All of this could be connected to the main pages as well so that if I'm checking out the Henderson view and looking at the posted local stories, I could click on an overlay that shows stories in progress and lets me comment if I think something is incorrect or if I have better info or personal experience with the topic. This could also work as a way of connecting sources with reporters before the article is finalized, or after.

*I should have checked before but wikinews does appear to have a collaboration tab which functions the same as the discussion tab on wikipedia. To basically talk about articles, which is not exactly what I was talking about.

Anyways, lemme know what you think, we can talk about it tonight.

-Rob

Feedback for Members of Group E

to philip.andrews
show details
Jul 2
I am giving feedback to you becuase each group is suppose to I like all of the ideas that your group came up with. I am numbering them according to the order you have place the ideas in.1. I think this idea is a good one, however it seems as if it is too close to flicka where people post pictures I mean it is original in a sense considering you want to place coordinates. 2. This idea is good too, but can't you check out news and history from the archives on the website? I am a little confused on what you want to do here, I like the idea of including photos from photbucket.3. This is cool considering everything is starting to turn virtual I like this idea of having a video game aspect with the news and quiz included. This would definetly attract the younger generation. 4. This I think would kind of be hard to place on a phone, but with the new Iphone I am sure it could be done. 5. I think this is a great Idea to put news on social sites have you seen the new ads thewy place on facebook of apartments to rent and so forth check it out its in the corner of the paghe as soon as you log on.

I am giving feedback to you becuase each group is suppose to I like all of the ideas that your group came up with. I am numbering them according to the order you have place the ideas in.

1. I think this idea is a good one, however it seems as if it is too close to flicka where people post pictures I mean it is original in a sense considering you want to place coordinates.
2. This idea is good too, but can't you check out news and history from the archives on the website? I am a little confused on what you want to do here, I like the idea of including photos from photbucket.
3. This is cool considering everything is starting to turn virtual I like this idea of having a video game aspect with the news and quiz included. This would definetly attract the younger generation.
4. This I think would kind of be hard to place on a phone, but with the new Iphone I am sure it could be done.
5. I think this is a great Idea to put news on social sites have you seen the new ads thewy place on facebook of apartments to rent and so forth check it out its in the corner of the paghe as soon as you log on.




to kbosman1
show details
Jul 2
I am giving you feedback on your ideas because we are suppose to do that I am placing them in the order that you put them.I think all of your ideas were well thought out and that the one I am impressed with the most is the Health clinic guide. I really think that is an important issue and most people will pay attention to it.


I am giving you feedback on your ideas because we are suppose to do that I am placing them in the order that you put them.

I think all of your ideas were well thought out and that the one I am impressed with the most is the Health clinic guide. I really think that is an important issue and most people will pay attention to it.




to cfarr
show details
Jul 2
I know this is late due to much confusion, but we are suppose to give you some feedback on your ideas. I liked all of your ideas, I know that we are all still workign things out and ideas, so I just gave a little feedback, all of the ideas, we awesome. Good work. I numbered the


1.The first idea you have is very cool, but it seems as if it has already been done. I know you said that it is suppose to serve the community better, that could be a plus, but watch out for what is already out there.
2. This idea is pretty good, but it sounds like a tool that you could use on facebook, or myspace, I am not sure if that is where your group wants to use it or what exactly you all were thinking of.
3.I think this is a good idea to track and rate the doctors, but it could be biased.
4. would this site help people to write better? I am not too clear on this idea, but I like it too I am sure you all are still working it out.
5. I love this idea most I think that we should be allowed to see where government money is going especially with everything going on in society, I think many people of all age groups would defintetly use

Just in Case

If you have yet to comment on our top 5 and need to do so you may do it here.

1. Information overload
This is kind of based on a premise of what a Magazine might look like if it were completely made for the Internet and it was maybe 5 years in the future. Mostly evolution of current ideas that are already out there so this might not make a good project. Its also sort of based on a single website rather than a tool that many websites could use. Right now were thinking of having a main page that's completely focused on multimedia presentation of stories. So for instance, your page would simply consist of a wall of pictures that attempt to sum up the stories being presented. Hovering over pictures would give some more information and maybe cause it to animate or change a bit. Clicking on the image will start a sort of interactive slideshow and enlarge so you can see it better. The slideshows themselves would be arranged in linear fashion with a possible narrative track or text depending on the authors decision. Slides could be composed of pictures or visualized data (graphs and such) or 3D maps that you can spin and zoom of where the stories took place, pretty much anything that can be done visually. It would hopefully be better quality audio and picture resolution than youtube since it wouldn't have to deal with video. The source of content could include users and full commentary functions could be applied. So basically youtube for slideshows, it could also establish some kind of standard slideshow medium like .mpg for videos, and you could compile the slideshow though an online tool and record audio and such without leaving the website. Focus would obviously be toward documentary type presentations, could also serve as a repository for academic slideshows (not sure who else loves the Research Channel but it's surprisingly pretty cool [its just a bunch of academic slide shows]). Like I said, somewhat of an obvious step so it might not be appropriate for this project but it doesn't exist and I'd like to see it.

2. Facebook/ Myspace/ Social Network News Categorization System
We thoroughly discussed whether this would qualify as original or appropriate to the project. And we concluded- Maybe. This would not be a tool to help people present news or information in a different or new way but instead would simply function as a system of connecting people to news. Those connections themselves could be mapped and analyzed as a feature of the system or individual stories but on the whole this would function as a news acquisition tool. The focus would be on bringing relevant news to people who might not otherwise be interested. Most likely it would work kind of like google's adsense- and I think that google news uses a similar algorithm to hook people up with news- but would incorporate people and relationships into the equation. So it would take into account what kinds of things interest yourfriends or what they have read and liked or disliked and try to produce a communal sort of news page where you can discuss with friends certain stories or topics. Discussions would ideally be conducted among people you know or who are within your social (or academic/professional/etc) networks. So you wouldn't see all the comments that a story got(although you could probably have the option), but just those made within your community. In my experience people tend to be slightly more civilized and reasonable among friends andcolleagues than in a general anonymous forum.

3. Online Fact Checker/ Plagiarism Exposer/ Summarizing Compiler type tool thing
The main problem with this one is that it would be difficult to do. It would either rely on writers to break their stories into variable data types and quick summations or would require a very sophisticated language interpreter to do the same type of thing (which I dont think exists yet). The more difficult part would be analyzing contextualization, which might be easy for a person but impossible for a computer program. The tool itself would be a system that compares various stories from different sources and analyzes the differences in style and character or tone and more importantly tags and categorizes omissions or additions of individual facts or data. So, due to technology restraints this would rely on journalists themselves breaking their stories down into computable variables or an army of analyzers doing it for them. The end of the process might produce a veryconcise break down of stories and provide users with a lot of media analysis in the process. Of course, some stories might not be divisible in such a way. So this is still kind of a squishy idea that were still working on.

4. Locational News/In-Your-Face Interface updated*

So we are updating our Locational News idea to include our inteface idea thing which follows- for pictures scroll down through posts to appropriate thread.

So I was thinking about the whole passive news feed thing again and I thought, how bout if I could just get my news by looking out the window? Like I get the weather? Well I dont have any windows with any kind of view so its not very useful to look out the window but what if there was a place I could go to and look at a virtual view from a really nice view and get all the information I need from that angle?

This is really more of an interface for delivering news than it is a way of reporting but I think it would be pretty cool. You would have the whole city out in front of you and by clicking on different elements of the picture, different overlays would pop up and give you the news on that aspect. Color coded arrows or something would pop up in different areas to clue you in on where a particular story happened. So instead of having a frantic front news page with every story crammed in and vying for your attention, you would initially just have a view of the city. Current weather conditions and time of day would be reflected on screen. If there was a major fire or something in town you would also be able to see the virtual fire plume. Planes and birds and helicopters would fly overhead. Freeways would reflect actual traffic, fireworks would crackle on holidays, flags would blow in the wind, etc. I would want the default screen to be something that can be left up like a screen saver or a second browser window, like for my second screen. Something pretty but also highly informative if I want it to be.

Hovering over different neighborhoods and clicking would bring up a similar miniature version of them but restricted by that areas borders, maybe a 3/4 angle to get more of the actual geography in. Similar arrow-news system and overlays would be used on the more local level as well. Clicking on actual stories would pop up the text and pictures with an option to have the stories read as audio. you should be able to browse and queue up a few stories to be read while your doing something else pretty easily. Maybe show the story's pictures as a slide show if you want to look over occasionally.

I think that this as an interface can work in combination with our other ideas. It doesn't solve the news gathering dilemma but I think it creates a cool place to show stories off. You could integrate citizen journalism as an overlay option or as the main method. Community pictures or videos can be integrated as well. Features can be done according to topic, but thats a whole nother issue I will possibly post up later. Lemme know if this fits our project parameters and what you think in general. I think that flash would work brilliantly but doing big flash programs is hardware intensive so maybe java would work better in this case. I'm also not sure I can learn enough of either within a month to actually make a working model of this. Also if anyone has seen ANYTHING like this lemme know. I know that the Rob Curley was doing something similar on his weather page by using the actual city as a backdrop but I think this goes way farther, in the same vein.

--original-->
News has always been categorized and distributed according to location. So were still figuring out the originality aspect of this idea but basically our idea is to bring it to a critical mass level and start to cover new types of stories with hyper local news and make it easier to aggregate.

So here's Hepi's original idea and how we interpreted it in our group. (Since I'm not sure I understand it myself yet)

News stories generated to you via your physical location (on your laptop, cell phone or pda). Kinda like Chicago crimes, but with news stories good and bad. It'd be useful for finding events, and knowing when certain things have happened and it could indicate the potential interest or impact stories in your proximity would have.

Not sure if it's possible anymore with all the privacy software out there, unless you type in your zipcode or something. I guess IP address can do it for you. Seems like it would be more of a feature though like at the side of the news page- here's what happened on your block- who got arrested, who sold a house, which restaurant is good, etc. could be a nice element in the whole interrelated content thing though.

I am intrigued by Hepi's idea of physical location news....I picture it being like a tour of a city with information each place you stop....could be great for tourists. If not, then it would be a great feature to add with the Flicker/Second Life (map with proximity news).

Sorry to toot my own horn, but I really like my first idea. The only thing is I think it maybe more of a cellphone/pda type application because of the GPS/tracking capabilities of these devices. However there could also be a database, that's accessible online, that people in their homes could use to check out the news in areas they are going (or just out of curiosity).

5. Mood simulator/ Storytelling graphic enhancer type thing
I'm a little confused on this one too! It was sort of last minute and I probably didn't catch all of it but here goes.
My explanation probably sounds very simplistic but basically it would be a program where the website would change its look and style according to the type of story. I think this is based on the the idea of how movies or pictures or text can set a mood where the story fits into and cues the viewer about what they should expect or what kind of environment they should imagine. So this would be way of changing the atmosphere or mood according to the story. It could be just simple colors or something more complex. I'll try to get more info on this idea since I'm not really sure about it but yeah, probably needs a lot of work.

Some cool Flash Stuff

So i think we've sort of generally decided on where we want to go, at least as far as look and interface. And we will probably use flash to build it. So heres some flash sites to check out and see whats being done with it and how we can make news more interesting with it. We might think about targeting kids but a lot of adults love this stuff too (like me) so feel free to post any cool flash websites or interfaces you find. Think about how to make news more interactive using flash and what kinds of easter eggs to throw in or how to reward people for exploring the site and creating content.

Some cartoony examples. Our project should look neat and polished but still have some humor and irreverence sometimes i think. Sort of like a form of diversion but where you naturally get a lot of important news and info as well, presented in a cool interactive (and fun) way.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/

http://www.newgrounds.com/

http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/saladfingers.html -is awesome

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/flash-tub/index.php

I'll try to find some more relevant stuff later.

+
Not sure if it will use flash but its a cool concept done in a cool newish sort of way- check out the video intro. we should do something like this to introduce our project.

Encyclopedia of Life

rob

SMS feeds and more Facebook apps talk

Check out this story from the New York Times on text message news alerts about traffic:

Personal Traffic Alerts, With Made-to-Order Data

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Published: July 5, 2007

In the latest incarnation of traffic reporting, information is being sent using personalized text or voice messages to users’ cellphones or BlackBerrys, often at no charge.

Very interesting approach -- and it is not taking it as far as you folks have discussed in your ideas.

Also, I went over and joined The Exploding Newsroom on Facebook, a group that several of my friends are in. I found a link from there to a blog by a Philadelpia Inquirer reporter about newsy Facebook Apps. It sounds like they are channelling youse guys (that's how they tawk in Philly, trust me, I know). Here's a sample from that post:

What newsrooms or writers have developed Facebook apps that turn Facebook into a distribution channel for their work? Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic has a Facebook group, Atlantic Politics. Chris Cillizza has The Fix, a Facebook group for readers of his work for washingtonpost.com. TechCrunch offers a TechCrunch app that users can use to add to their profiles. Others?

Facebook's Exploding Newsroom group has a whole discussion on Facebook as a venue for news.
Worth checking out, I think ...
enuf for now ...

::Later addition: Yo Rob! There's a post in the Exploding Newsroom by someone else who's seriously into visualizing news: Serial Consign

Don't laugh...I was trying to blend...

1.) I was thinking that this idea could be implicated on Facebook, but it could also be a tool on a news site as well. The idea being that users/readers would vote on what they want news to be about...Each week/month/whatever users/readers would vote on the top 10 (or whatever number) images of the town/city/people and news stories would by written from the top 10. The images or video could be posted by users or professionals.

2.) Within Facebook or some social networking community there would be a central spot where members of thaeir specific community can post on a "clipboard" images, video, headlines, that will comprise that community's "news."
Mirrors those tag boards all over the university that post offers/requests for jobs, renters, events (Community Clipboard).

3.) Story Tracer or Story Web...I'll give you a visual at the actual meet up, it's kind of hard to put into words...

Link to Blogdex story...

Hey guys, this was sort of a neat article about weblogging and this new device called Blogdex. I thought it would be sort of inspirational and a hint to us that we're in the right direction...kinda cool, thought I would let everyone in on it. Talk to you tomorrow;) http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/07/45546 ~Jenna

Rob's In-Your-Face Interface

OK, lets hope these pictures work. Sorry too lazy to scan, my digital cam will have to do.




So I was thinking about the whole passive news feed thing again and I thought, how bout if I could just get my news by looking out the window? Like I get the weather? Well I dont have any windows with any kind of view so its not very useful to look out the window but what if there was a place I could go to and look at a virtual view from a really nice view and get all the information I need from that angle?

This is really more of an interface for delivering news than it is a way of reporting but I think it would be pretty cool. You would have the whole city out in front of you and by clicking on different elements of the picture, different overlays would pop up and give you the news on that aspect. Color coded arrows or something would pop up in different areas to clue you in on where a particular story happened. So instead of having a frantic front news page with every story crammed in and vying for your attention, you would initially just have a view of the city. Current weather conditions and time of day would be reflected on screen. If there was a major fire or something in town you would also be able to see the virtual fire plume. Planes and birds and helicopters would fly overhead. Freeways would reflect actual traffic, fireworks would crackle on holidays, flags would blow in the wind, etc. I would want the default screen to be something that can be left up like a screen saver or a second browser window, like for my second screen. Something pretty but also highly informative if I want it to be.

Hovering over different neighborhoods and clicking would bring up a similar miniature version of them but restricted by that areas borders, maybe a 3/4 angle to get more of the actual geography in. Similar arrow-news system and overlays would be used on the more local level as well. Clicking on actual stories would pop up the text and pictures with an option to have the stories read as audio. you should be able to browse and queue up a few stories to be read while your doing something else pretty easily. Maybe show the story's pictures as a slide show if you want to look over occasionally.

I think that this as an interface can work in combination with our other ideas. It doesn't solve the news gathering dilemma but I think it creates a cool place to show stories off. You could integrate citizen journalism as an overlay option or as the main method. Community pictures or videos can be integrated as well. Features can be done according to topic, but thats a whole nother issue I will possibly post up later. Lemme know if this fits our project parameters and what you think in general. I think that flash would work brilliantly but doing big flash programs is hardware intensive so maybe java would work better in this case. I'm also not sure I can learn enough of either within a month to actually make a working model of this. Also if anyone has seen ANYTHING like this lemme know. I know that the Rob Curley was doing something similar on his weather page by using the actual city as a backdrop but I think this goes way farther, in the same vein.

Another Idea

OK, so I was at a casino this morning (get the gamblin done early) and I noticed that a couple of slot machines had those LCDs above the game area and it was tuned to ESPN. So this got me thinking, what about a passive news feeder on the internet. I usually have my TV on when I'm browsing the internet on to listen to the local news or CNN or something so this wouldn't be a huge departure for a lot of people.

I was looking around for something similar and I found a Firefox add-on called Wizz RSS. It's bulky and requires your full attention to browse but it does pop up on the left panel area, where I usually just have my bookmarks. So I was thinking maybe an add-on that can pop out on the side bar and provide options to listen to a constant feed or choose stories individually or that analyzes what your currently looking at and pulls up related news articles. I would want something very passive like if I don't want to read the news it wouldn't interfere with what I'm doing but if it finds something it knows I would be interested in it would flash a green light or something. I also have dual monitors and I know a lot of people have wide screens now so we can also have something that takes up a little more room but doesn't require much input on your part to do its thing and provide the news.

Anyways, just a thought

Wizz RSS
BlogRover -similar but for blogs

Oh and heres a BBC article about using cell phones in Rome to alleviate traffic congestion, its got bus tracking too!

Beating Congestion with Mobiles

Rob

Potential Idea

While I was studying for a JOUR 101 test last week, I was reading about media standards and ratings. When it came to the internet, I found out that measuring the success of a website is a very difficult task. Some companies use page views to measure success, but these statistics have tended to be unreliable because of variables such as page refreshes, bots, etc. This subject was also discussed last semester in my JOUR 170 class. If we were to come up with an innovative solution to this problem I think we would have a product that generates a lot of demand. It's just an idea for an idea, but I want to see what you guys think about it...

Team A responses

Below are the 2 responses I received from Group A.... But before I get to that I wanted to post my understanding of the fact finder/error checker tool (idea 3), this is cut from my reply to the groups responses:

"But the way I interpreted the idea is that it
is a news website just like cnn or whatever, but when you click on a headline
to read a story you receive a story that is made up of all the information that
several credible news agencies have. Let me give you an example. During the
2002 Afghan war CNN quoted Pentagon officials who said that b-52s dropped
dozens of precision targeted bombs in the Tora Bora area in an attempt to flush
out Osama Bin Laden. At the same time the BBC reported the story but also added
in the detail that bombs had killed over 115 people in the village of Karma
Ado. Using the tool/website proposed in our idea, you would click on the
headline about the bombing and it would generate a story using the information
unique to CNN's report as well as the information unique to the BBC's report.
This would not only provide readers with all possible information about a story
but it would also provide you multiple perspectives on a story. "

do you guys think this expanded explanation gives a better sense of the idea?
Anyway, to the responses:

1st Response:

Information overload: You're right about how original/innovative and therefore project appropriate it is. Check out this site: http://www.zreportage.com/. It's like a photo essay/story, and reminds be a lot of your idea. One way to differentiate might be to add audio? I think one way which your idea differs, a strong point on your end, is the inclusion of more multimedia. The idea of commentary strengthens this project's idea of community/participatory journalism. I like the idea but a.) agree there are things too similar to it out there and b.) can tell you're not sold on it, which means it's going to be hard to sell to someone else.

Social Network News Categorization System: To be honest, I don't understand this explanation of this project. Is it adding a "hard" news application to social networking sites? If so, this was one of my ideas, and I'm all for it. But I can't tell if this is what you're talking about or not. I like how you intend to gear it to the interests of you and your friends, and the fact that it has commentary. I'm not so sure, however, about only seeing the comments of people in your community. Isn't that almost censoring what you are seeing? And what about people who comment on story because they are in one community, but a friend can't what they were responding to because it was from a different community? Seems to me to be a lot of room for confusion. And can you be a member of more than one community (like you can join more than one Facebook network, for instance)?

Online fact check, etc tool: I guess my question for this one is the tool name didn't correspond with the explanation. I was imagining it as something that looked for plagiarism within papers (or even stories) and I know tons of those in the academic arena. But is this tool voice interpretation? So if a source gives a story to more than one journalist, or you get more than one story from the same source, you can tell if what they are saying is accurate. Kind of like the theory behind a lie detector test? I think there is too much responsibility on the journalist here. I guess that's my understanding, but again, correct me if I'm wrong.

Locational news: I like this idea. Like you say, news is already largely based on location, but this uses your actual location, not just where you originate from. What I mean by that is if you're on vacation, you might still tend to read your news from back home (especially with online newspapers) versus going in picking up the local paper. This is even more true if you're looking for the national news aspect. There isn't a lot of explanation here, so I don't have a lot of feedback, but I'm definitely in agreeance that it's more geared toward PDA/cell phone type devices. It's also something that has come up in several groups, which leads me to think there might be something like it out there.

Mood simulator: The explanation here says there would be more information to come on this since it wasn't fully developed, so I didn't know where that was at? I like the idea behind this a lot, and it is something that can be applied to more than once site, versus your project being totally devoted to a single site. I think this is a good idea because it is applicable with both hard news and entertainment-based news. And maybe this could go beyond news ... maybe it could actually be applied to your browser. On a MUCH MUCH more basic level, I was just thinking how Yahoo! tends to "accessorize" its home page with animations, etc. during holidays, seasons, etc.. Something to think about beyond the news front. I'd be interested to read what has been come up with if it's been further developed.

That's all for now. I hope this helps. Sorry if my lack of technological ability inhibited me from really delving into your ideas, but I'm definitely tried my best. You guys have some really creative ideas ... and some other groups haven't mentioned yet in my browsing, so you're on the track to originality and innovation.

2nd Response


1. First of all, I am very confused about this idea. Basically, instead
of video, it would be still photos of the event with a
narrator/reporter telling the story? Maybe I don’t fully understand
this idea, but I don’t think it’s terribly new or original. You also
have to ask yourself, what problem is this solving? To me, this is
already being done with traditional news and the only difference is
that it would be photos, instead of video, and the graphics (maps)
would be interactive.
2. This reminds me of a Facebook news application. I could see this
working if it were attached to a social networking site that’s already
got an established audience. As a stand-alone idea, I don’t know if it
would work very well. The idea of each person filtering the news so
they only got what they wanted is, in my opinion, where news needs to
go. People really only want to read what’s relevant to them.
3. It’s an interesting idea, but who is your audience? It may only
appeal to journalists and scholars. So this would be like taking 2
different stories about the same event, written by two different
papers, and doing like a side-by-side comparison of facts? Yeah, I’m
not sold on this one…
4. The idea of using RSS feeds to get local news on your cell phone or
any internet-accessible device is good. It pretty simple, it makes me
wonder if it’s being done already? My group had a sort of similar idea.
Again, this idea needs more development.
5. This idea is different. I don’t know how revolutionary it is, but it
would be a different way to communicate the news. It would make it a
little more cinematic and dramatic, but what problem is it really
solving? Are you trying to make the reader emotionally compelled to
read the story? If that’s the case, I wonder if the “straight facts”
type of writing that we do in news would vibe well with the “dramatic”
visual representation you are talking about?

I know this sounds pretty critical; I am just having a hard time
understanding your ideas. I think your group should narrow the focus of
these ideas and try to solve a particular problem, while still making
it compelling and relevant. Sounds easy, right? Good luck and I can’t
wait to hear what your group decides in August!