iMapFlickr offers a fast approach to mapmaking if you geocode your Flickr images. Just enter a Flickr ID, user URL or even the e-mail address you use for Flickr and iMapFlickr will generate a Google map tagged with photo locations. The tool allows you to choose from your photo sets and offers some convenient customization options for the embedding the map elsewhere. Map dimensions, picture sizes and tag icons can all be adjusted.

iMapFlickr doesn’t show support for Flickr groups yet, but there is already potential here for journalistic collaborations. As long as photos are public, one can create maps from another user’s collection. So, one collaborator could upload pictures to her Flickr account and others could customize and embed the maps from that account without directly accessing it.

Take note that geotags have their own privacy levels on Flickr and the location data must be shared publicly for iMapFlickr to work. Check out this video if you’re unsure how to geotag Flickr photos. Also, maps may be tricky on WordPress due to iframes. Fixes are explained here.

The example shot is made from sockeyed‘s set of the Vancouver Bicycle Music Festival.

If you’re near Boston next Friday, consider attending the new Online Media Legal Network’s Spring Conference: Journalism’s Digital Transition. Great lineup, important topics.

MobileActive.org is a go to place for info on cell phone usage and tools. In 2009, MobileActive received a Knight News Challenge grant to build the Mobile Media Toolkit, a database of tools and how-to guides for those using mobile phones for social change.

Part of this toolkit is a directory of mobile phone statistics that functions as something like a CIA factbook for mobile. Selecting a country, one can see mobile costs, saturation amongst the population and regional providers. For example, I can see that around 41% of Chinese citizens use mobile phones and they pay about 1 US cent on average for an SMS (as of 2007-2008). This is helpful data as one decides how to develop applications for different regions of the world.

As well, MobileActive offers a database of mobile phone applications, case studies and how-to guides. These range in purpose from citizen media to advocacy and are extremely fresh with most additions occurring in 2009-2010.

Finally, MobileActive’s sense of purpose emerges in its news about global uses of mobile. Recent articles tell stories about a 20-village news network in rural India and anonymous cell phone videos from Iran. Katrin Verclas, MobileActive’s co-founder, expresses the heart behind the project in this video:

Readability is a worthwhile browser application if you want to focus you’re attention on a site’s text and winnow out the advertising and widget chaff. It’s pretty straightforward. Add the bookmarklet here to your browser’s bookmarks and click it when you want signal without the noise. The application will pull the text from the page and display it in a typographically-friendly format. Here’s an example of the most recent Mediactive post:

I’m interested to hear who finds this helpful and who doesn’t. So, send feedback. My only qualm at this point is long form articles without imagery can cause me to start to glaze over a bit. I think the Internet has ruined me for traditional books and lengthy text without immediate distraction nearby.

Politico, the website devoted to all things political, almost certainly got pwned by scam artists Friday when it posted an unverified memo — a probable hoax — about health care. It’s an embarrassment for journalists who fall for fakery, but these kinds of things do happen.

What doesn’t usually happen is how Politico dealt with its inadequate journalism. And the case brought back memories of another, more significant mess: the “Rathergate” affair of 2004; more on that below.

It’s obvious, if you read the non mea culpa posted by Political’s White House editor, Craig Gordon, that his organization didn’t check the memo’s authenticity before putting it online, and only pulled it down after Democrats complained. But instead simply apologizing forthrightly, he basically said a) Politico now couldn’t verify anything about the memo’s authenticity; b) but it seemed real (as if that’s an excuse; c) and besides, the Democrats were probably doing what the memo said they were doing anyway.

Then comes his conclusion, a howler for a journalist:

“In the end, POLITICO followed an old rule-of-thumb in journalism in taking down the memo: when in doubt, leave it out. By day’s end, it was still impossible to tell exactly what’s the real story behind the memo. But in the next few months, when Democrats try to pass a multi-billion-dollar ‘doc fix,’ maybe that will shed a little light on the Democrats’ real intentions.”

Except that “leave it out” is not synonymous with “publish it and then take it down if we learn later that we can’t verify its authenticity” — or is this the news standard for news organizations boasting a co-founder who serves on the Pulitzer Prize governing board?

The standard Politico has applied here, is, of course, “truthiness”: Because they want it to be true, it’s close enough.

To be more fair to Politico than the publication may deserve, the memo seemed to many others like something some Democratic aide, somewhere in Washington, might have written, perhaps as a draft. This helps explain why so many journalists took the bait and became part of the vast spin machine that so defines our nation’s political press.

As Talking Points Memo’s Christina Bellantoni reports, the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder had the honor to apologize for posting without checking. The Hill, a publication with apparently more traditional principles, got the memo but decided not to run it at all.

Remember, just a few years ago the journalism and political worlds went appropriately berserk when CBS’ 60 Minutes II team ran a story about George W. Bush’s “service” in the Air National Guard. The report was based, in part on memoranda that CBS not only couldn’t prove were authentic but which were at best highly questionable as to their authenticity. The journalism was awful; CBS and its people took a deserved hit to their reputations. Sadly — and I use that word partly because the journalists involved had long and outstanding records for doing great work — the people who made the mistakes held fast to the notion that they’d done nothing wrong.

It’s obvious, based on the verifiable record, that Bush got strings pulled to avoid Vietnam service and then all but ducked out on his duty. And it may turn out that some Democrat’s fingerprints are on the health care memo. In both cases, the journalism was lacking, and the journalists’ response even more so.

Politico is widely considered a new gold standard of political reporting. That worries me.

Last week I attended the Game Developers Conference and kept my eyes open for topics related to media literacy. Thoughts on media consumption and creation show up in the multitude of lectures, panels, bootcamps and roundtables dedicated to the study and creation of games. Here are some things I gleaned:

Serious Games Summit
Several interesting things came up at the Serious Games Summit, which is the session track for examining games used for purposes other than entertainment (not that entertainment isn’t a worthy goal itself). Here are the highlights:

• Soren Johnson contrasted game theme with mechanic in a talk titled “Theme is not meaning.” This is an important breakdown when it comes to games literacy as game mechanics tend to deliver the real meaning in a game. Johnson’s thesis was that a game’s window dressing was just that unless the mechanic matched. The Redistricting Game was offered of a solid example of matching theme with mechanic as the player is tasked with literally drawing new voting district lines to win needed votes. The discussion goes much deeper and Chris Dahlen writes more about the talk here.
• Borut Pfeifer has been working on a game about crowds in the Iranian Election. Named The Unconcerned, the game pulls the player through the streets of the Iranian election by putting her in the shoes of parents looking for their daughter. Pfeifer’s talk covered prototyping and the many iterations along the way to figuring out what played well. The biggest takeaway here concerns creation. Traditionally, creating media involved getting one’s ducks in a neat row before creation began. However, games and other digital media find success in testing and getting feedback on many rough drafts along the way. I’m going to hunt down some links for the best practices for iterative design for the Mediactive Tools section.
• While the talk strayed more into digital entrepreneurship, Jelena Godjevac presented a case study of Blossom, a game that places the player in the role of a small business owner. Blossom came out of Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I) as a game-based way of furthering local micro-business. They’re looking for new ideas for games that teach entrepreneurship and are teaming up with HP in a design contest. I’d love to see submissions related to digital media entrepreneurs, like starting a local news site or training citizen journalists.

Game Writers’ Roundtable
Several worthwhile tips came out of a roundtable of both professional and amateur game writers. Here are the ones that apply well to digital media creation.

• Show don’t tell – In an interactive environment, show a story before using words. Figure out what you can say with other forms of media. This applies to even something like blogs. Can you set your stage with a good photo or video? Does a link or a podcast say it better than you can?
• If you can’t tweet it, you shouldn’t write it – This came up in the context of dialogue and text in midst of play. The same could be applied to captions, explanations of mashups and even one’s YouTube video descriptions. There are excellent uses for long form, but if your creation is multimedia, don’t burden it with text. Err on the side of brevity.

Farmville
Social games were a hot topic at the GDC this year, both for the massive jump in people playing these games and for their lucrative nature. I sat in on a session with Mark Skaggs of Farmville where he explained the game’s development process. Farmville itself has been a bit of a phenomenon and a rather controversial one.

Most interesting for Mediactive’s purposes are the rapid creation and development of Farmville. According to Skaggs, the initial team was composed of less than ten people and was developed in five weeks. From the point of release, the game acquired about 1,000,000 new users per week, an above-expectations rate. This critical mass gave the team lots of data, which informed the design going forward. Skaggs explained “fun” as something hard to measure, while behavior could be tracked by clicks. When strawberries received a large number of clicks, the team created “Super Berries” and the resulting popularity nearly crashed the server. This is just one example, but every game action and click was evaluated for new direction in content.

I see a couple lessons here that apply to digital media:

1. Release quickly and design based on data and user feedback.
2. Data-driven design requires greater discussion when it comes to news. Lots of clicks can tell you if a story is popular, but a click can’t tell you if the reader was informed. As well, a click may tell a creator if people enjoy content, but not the impact of that content. For example, a reader may spend more clicks in a day on what celebrities are wearing, but one click given to a long form political story may have the greatest impact on a future vote.

Beyond what I’ve covered here. I ran into some interesting tools for media creation, which I’ll be testing and posting to the Tools page. Games and interactive environments are ripe for experimentation when it comes to new media and I’m excited to see what emerges over time.

I’ll be at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week and I’d like your suggestions on what to cover. Games and interactivity are a large part of contemporary media and the ability to both engage with and create within this rapidly-evolving medium become more important.

You can see the conference’s schedule here. Hot topics this year are social games, geolocation, smartphone applications and augmented reality. As well, something like the Serious Games summit examines the use of games for not purely entertainment reasons. So, if the GDC interests you, add suggestions for sessions or topics you’d like me to cover to the comments section.

I’m speaking next week at the Guardian’s “Changing Media Summit” conference in London, and answered a Q&A the media company has posted on the conference website. Reprinting here:

Which media companies, business and delivery models and platforms do you consider to be sustainable and which ones will go to the wall?

I’m not nearly smart enough to tell you which companies will survive. As a (very) small shareholder in the New York Times Co., and an angel investor in several online startups, I certainly hope they’ll be among the ones that last.

But some early outlines — emphasis on “early” — are beginning to emerge.

Media companies that persist in the industrial model of media, especially those reliant on advertising subsidies for content that has no basic relationship to what advertisers are trying to sell, are in the most jeopardy. Apart from the simple fact that advertising is being separated from content for excellent reasons, the industrial-age notion of distribution has been upended. Rather than creating content, and then publishing it on paper and putting it in trucks (or broadcasting via expensive towers or satellites), what we do now is create content and make it available; people come and get it. Only those media creators who understand the new dynamic have a chance at surviving the upheaval.

In the journalism sphere, I have no doubt whatever that we will replace the monopolies and oligopolies with a much more diverse and therefore more sustainable ecosystem. The enterprises will include for-profit and not-for-profit companies; and sole proprietorships and large businesses. The business models will range widely, and will be the winners from among the thousands of experiments now under way.

Those who can turn themselves into ecosystems in their own right — think Google, Twitter, etc. — will be major winners if they can become the center of ecosystems in which others innovate. When the Guardian and New York Times offer APIs to their media, they show they understand this imperative.

What does the global media industry ten years from now look like?

This will depend, in part, on how governments respond to the media and technology changes. If governments (urged on by law enforcement, big traditional media and especially back-facing copyright interests) restrict the ways we can use technology, we could easily see the Internet turned into a newer and only slightly more useful version of television.

If, on the other hand, governments allow technology and innovation to flower, we will see a media industry that dwarfs the current one in size, at least in terms of the number of people who are participating. All media will be social to one degree or another. Since information is increasingly a core feature of all products and services, media will be an even larger global industry.

What projects are you currently engaged in on a day to day basis and how are these helping to change the face of the media and technology industries?

I am spending my time on a variety of projects. The main one has been creating a digital media entrepreneurship program at Arizona State University in America, a project aimed at bringing an appreciation of the startup culture into the journalism curriculum. We believe students will be inventing many of their own jobs, and want to help them do so.

I’m also continuing my long-term work on citizen media and citizen journalism. In addition, I’ve invested in or co-founded several consumer Web companies, and have new projects in the wings. Finally, I’m finishing a new book called Mediactive, a challenge to those who create and consume media to take more responsibility for what they — and we — know.

Who do you admire in this space? Who’s inspiring you? Who’s pushing the boundaries and how?

I’m inspired by so many people that I have trouble naming just a few. But I’ll start with my students, and the students I’ve met at other campuses in America and around the world. I tell them I’m jealous of their opportunities, because they will invent the future of media and journalism.

Allow me to offer a tip of the hat to the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger. He is a leader of exceptional talent and vision.

And what can we expect from you at the Changing Media Summit 2010?

You can expect me to listen much more than I talk, though of course I’ll discuss the things I know best. I see this summit as a wonderful learning opportunity and aim to take full advantage.

After the Deadline is a WordPress plugin that adds proofreading functionality to the WordPress dashboard. Once added, the plugin will highlight grammar, style and spelling errors while you write posts. Similar to Word, errors are color coded by type and right-clicking will bring up suggestions for correction. It’s not 100% (it didn’t catch a there/their misuse I tested), but like any proofreading support, it should be a safeguard instead of a brain replacement. The plugin is only available for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The following video shows After the Deadline in action:

Note: After the Deadline is also available as a FireFox add-on.

NewsTrust gives its community tools to evaluate news stories. Users can add news articles they find, rating them by journalistic standards such as fairness, sourcing and depth. This format readily lends itself to teaching news literacy and evaluation. Recognizing this, NewsTrust offers a nice set of teacher guides.

The guides, aimed at high school and college-level students, are broken down between news and opinion. The teacher guide is broken down into a 45-minute lesson plan, while the student guide offers an example story and questions that zero in on qualities like facts and fairness. Additional activities are offered as well.

If you like the guides and want to go more in depth, NewsTrust offers an additional page of external educational resources geared toward news literacy.