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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.