As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Tools and Techniques of Consumption”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)
Chapter 2: Tools/techniques of Consumption
2009
Keeping Track of Government Web Page Changes
Nice: ProPublica is launching ChangeTracker — “an experimental new tool that watches pages on whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov so you don’t have to. When the White House adds or deletes anything— say a blog post, or executive order—ChangeTracker will let you know.” more…
2008
Wikipedia as Vital Breaking News Source
Take a look at today’s Wikipedia entry on today’s Mumbai terrorist attacks — a comprehensive and valuable addition to the breaking news we’re getting from TV and other sources. There are two fundamental elements to note: the rapid updating and the long list of links at the bottom. more…
Exposing Front Groups’ Online Manipulations
Nice. Consumer Reports and the Center for Media and Democracy have created Full Frontal Scrutiny more…
reddit’s New Features; and an Amazing Request for Free Labor
There are plenty of reasons to wonder about citizen media’s business model. One, which I’ve talked about many times here and elsewhere, is the tendency of site owners to rely on free labor. The method goes roughly this way: “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.” more…
2007
Transcripts of Congressional Hearings Available in More Timely Way
Slowly but surely, the opaque nature of governing is becoming a bit more transparent. more…
More About New Kinds of Online Debates
While they’d include audio, video and other media, they would exist primarily in the more traditional form of text, which is still by far the best for exploring serious issues in serious ways. Questions would be posed by candidates to each other, as well as by journalists and the public. But an answer would not be the end of that round; in fact, it would only be the beginning. more…
Using Tech to Improve Political Debates
On Thursday night, most of the Democratic presidential candidates will travel to Las Vegas for the latest in this election cycle’s “debates.” The quotes around that word are deliberate, because political debates are stuck in a world of television sound bites, after-the-fact spin, and almost blatant contempt for voters. more…
Bringing the New York Times’ Cornucopia to All
Dave Winer has been exploring a superb news resource, exploring the depth and breadth of the New York Times‘ data-stream. The most traditional of news organizations is opening up, including its archives,in ways that could be truly revolutionary in the news business — and Dave is leading the way toward a new way of seeing a core part of our history and current knowledge.
more…
Big News in Citizen Media: MSNBC Buys Newsvine
The news that MSNBC has bought Newsvine is a very big deal in the new media world. MSNBC.com has done a lot of excellent online journalism over the years, and pulling Newsvine under its wing make perfect sense. more…
Help Investigate Slippery Congressional Favors:
What we all uncover could play a role in next year’s elections — or it should. Spread the word. more…
News Consumption by Voting
The St. Petersburg Times and its corporate cousin Congressional Quarterly are going to test politicians’ statements for, um, truth. more…
Google Now Officially Competing with Newspapers; So is AP
The most interesting part of this deal is that the Associated Press is one of Google’s news providers. Yet the AP is owned by the news organizations. more…
Help Us Learn Who’s Editing Wikipedia
Wired News, in “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign,” cites an intriguing new software tool called Wikipedia Scanner more…
Net Video Player Nearing Prime Time
The Participatory Culture Foundation has posted the latest pre-release (0.9.8) version of Miro, its renamed Internet multimedia player. The application is getting quite polished and useful. more…
Mining U.K. News Coverage: A Great New Site
Check out Newspapers 2.0: OPML file for British newspaper RSS feeds at Martin Belam’s CurryBetDotNet for a fantastic way to aggregate and search news. more…
Globalization Buzz: Monitoring the Conversation
Andrew Leonard takes a look at the World Bank’s remarkable BuzzMonitor project more…
Researching Businesses Via the Web
Check out this Tutorial, “a step-by-step process for finding free company and industry information on the World Wide Web.” I looked through it and it’s quite good. more…
“Human-powered Search” Paying Humans
Jason Calacanis, who calls his new venture Mahalo “human-powered search,” says the company will pay freelance searchers a fee for links the site accepts. He says he hopes for hundreds or thousands of people in this part-time capacity. more…
Bringing Public Works to the Public
Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose have created public.resource.org, a new nonprofit more…
Asking Questions of Public Figures
A startup in the U.K. called Yoosk has created a space for regular folks to ask public figures questions. more…
Gaming a Popularity-based News Site
This reveals a flaw in the current system, not necessarily a flaw in the overall concept. But until we can combine reputation — in all its permutations — with popularity, sites like Digg and Newsvine will be missing the mark. more…
Shifting Sands of Media
Mark Glaser, in “Netflix Return::What We Lose (and Gain) Without Video Stores,” ponders the pluses and minuses of the demise of local video stores. more…
Bakersfield’s Pothole Map
For the past several years, in every talk I’ve given about what traditional journalism organizations could do to involve communities in the reporting, I’ve suggested a “Pothole Map” — a mashup where citizens post the location of street potholes. more…
Reminder: Search is Not Just Google
For proof, see The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines at the Read-Write Web.
more…
New View on News
It’s a very promising start to a useful service. If they get it right, they’ll be Google News done the right way. (Unfortunately, like Google News, they don’t tell you which publications they’re including in their database — bad policy.) more…
Placeblogger Launches
Great news. Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger, covering hyperlocal news sites around the nation. more…
2006
VoteGuide, Soft Launch
Our students at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Information have done an amazing job pulling together the beta version of VoteGuide: more…
Shining a Light on California Political Money
MAPLight.org “brings together information on campaign contributions and votes in the California legislature.” more…
Google’s Deep Past News Archive
Google’s latest foray into gathering information sounds promising. Its News Archive Search is described as an “easy way to search and explore historical archives.” more…
Deconstructing a Critique of Silicon Valley
Over at Slashdot, in a posting entitled “Places Rated, Skeptically,” the editors sorted through more than 500 comments about a previous item “suggesting that, after accounting for local price differences, the best-paid tech jobs aren’t in Silicon Valley or other areas well known for computer jobs, but rather in smaller cities around the country.” more…
Software Bug Thwarts Online Journalism Feature
Slate magazine has a nifty feature called “Hot Document,” in which the site posts documents, highlights key portions and then, with mouse-over popups, tells you the significance of the highlighted text. But there seems to be a Firefox bug preventing this from working properly, or a bug in the Slate page coding. more…
Campaign Information Resource Forming
From Jimmy Wales’ Mission Statement of the Central Campaign Wikia: more…
Newspaper Faces Tomorrow by Retreating
NY Times: Microsoft, NYT partner on newspaper software. Aiming to offer newspapers a new digital publishing alternative, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday touted a software program that tries to make publications easier to read on a computer screen.
Congresspedia and Sunlight
Take a look at Congresspedia, a new initiative to put our lawmakers under an appropriate microscope — a wiki where we can all add what we know to what is likely to become an essential resource. The site, created by the recently launched Sunlight Foundation, will have editors keeping an eye on the activity (and making sure the trolls don’t take over). more…
Digg Graduates Towards Slashdot
If you don’t read it already, Digg has been the hot site in finding the latest Internet buzz among techies. The social bookmarking site allows users to vote on what sites are hot by adding their “digg” vote to the raw list of contributions. However, it has always been hampered by a weak comments feature, replete with trolls and juveline insults. more…
You Know Finance? Help With a Glossary
The Reuters Financial Glossary “has been developed to give you quick and easy access to definitions of terms and concepts related to the financial markets. It is a community-created collaborative project, based upon a published book written and edited by Reuters Editorial staff. Now anyone can edit, build upon and add entries to the glossary to create a helpful source of information.” more…
CBC launched an ambitious project called Riding Talk with 308 moderated forums on its website — one for each riding in Canada. (A riding is the equivalent of an American voting precinct.) The idea was to allow people to talk about whatever political issues were important to them and their district — and to do it in a civil way.
Sanitizing the Past
Two items in current news are raising questions of how to preserve historical truths in a digital age. more…
Washington Post Still Not Getting It
In her new column, “The Firestorm Over My Column,” the Washington Post’s Ombudsman, Deborah Howell says, “So is it the relative anonymity of the Internet that emboldens e-mailers to conduct a public stoning? Is this the increasing political polarization of our country? I don’t know.” more…
Comments are Worth the Trouble
Jay Rosen’s Q&A with Brady, executive editor of the Washington Post’s online news operation, is a fascinating look into how one Big Media organization dealt with the inevitable trouble when it opened up its blog to comments.
more…
Company To Show Shoppers Blog Reviews
TechCrunch: Toshiba to Push Blog Reviews to Mobile Shoppers. There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product.
Still Looking for that Aha! Moment on OPML
John Palfrey, my new colleague, says he gets it now about OPML. I confess that I still don’t quite grasp its importance. I am, I further confess, dense about some things. Still working to understand it better… more…
Covering the Abramoffs, Citizen Style
The Center for Media and Democracy is looking for Citizen Journalists To Bust More Jack Abramoffs, and cites some digging that took place on the center’s valuable SourceWatch site, a wiki where people can add what they know about matters relating to PR, lobbying and other activities designed to move votes and money. more…
2005
What Blogosphere Says About NYT
Wow: The Annotated New York Times tracks blog mentions of individual NYT articles.
more…
NowPublic.com Launches
“NowPublic.com” says, “The news is now public,” and offers a platform for assigning, gathering and viewing news. It’s probably too ambitious, but I mean that as a compliment. more…
Hi Dan
I’m flattered Yoosk is on the list. More than two years on, we are still going and have received investment from the Channel 4’s public service publishing digital media fund, 4IP.
Here are some more case studies in case you need more information on how we now work in the filed of digital engagement with different UK government departments, media groups and Parliament.
http://www.scribd.com/TimH1
All the best with the book,
Tim