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Yep, I’m moving the works to Flying Flashlight. Newsroomnext-ish posts will go into their own category; the feed for that category is here. The feed for the new site.

I had a much longer description of this prepared, but a server error ate it.

EveryBlock, from ChicagoCrime.org’s Adrian Holovaty and crew, fishes local info ponds and databases to create a new standard for the required depth of neighborhood news/information aggregation providers.

Why I like it

1. Making raw data made much more accessible is good journalism.
2. It finds and beautifully displays info from government reports (good source material for deeper stories), an aspect which competitors are failing to execute.
3. It finds geo-relevant news articles.
4. It knows the names of neighborhoods.

Opportunity:

• Machines will dominate the aggregation of hyperlocal news and information, but they can’t provide analysis or judgments of information quality, except through user-generated ranking systems with questionable results due to participation levels and voter intent.
• Info like this creates a need for info that indicates the significance or deeper meaning of EveryBlock’s headlines.

My new hyperlocal news service I’ll use to track Albuquerque while living in Hong Kong is now made up of:

1. EveryBlock (well, once it reaches Albuquerque)
2. Outside.in
3. Yourstreet.com
4. Upcoming.org

More reads on hyperlocal:

1. Hyperlocal.org: Berlin blog “investigating in emerging hyperlocal concepts and their economical, social and cultural impact.”
2. Wired: “Dispatches from the hyperlocal future“
3. ReadWriteWeb: “The rise of hyperlocal information“
4. BuzzMachine: “Towns are hyperlocal social networks with data (people that is)” with interesting excerpt: “I now believe that he who figures out how to help people organize themselves — letting them connect with each other and with what they all know — will end up with news, listings, reviews, data, gossip, and more as byproducts.”

And finally, a video of the moment, a new hyperridiculous service I’d like to provide. Today’s pick is the “herding cats” commercial, a classic:

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Rather than having 50 million sacks into which you must stuff your data (from personal information to media and more), DataPortability wants the framework for one big sack that brave Web travelers can carry with them wherever they digitally go.

If/once such a structure takes hold on a mass scale, figuring out how to make money in a Web-is-your-Web-site environment will be even more pressing.

So how do we get away from an attention-capturing-and-retaining-and-selling business model?

Show me a newspaper.com information services division. I know I would like the service of transparent information verification, especially as people use data of all types to maintain and enhance their identities.

Would someone buy a “This data verified by newpaper.com information services” stamp?

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

(via influx insights)

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After being reminded of Ira Glass’ series on storytelling by MultimediaShooter, I felt inspired to create a static page of videos featuring tips and techniques from Glass and others. Up top, you’ll see the tutorials link.

If you know of other great video tutorials, let me know in the comments and I’ll aggregate, though I’m sure a little looking would bring up many similar collections of wisdom.

What: Five of the 10 best-selling novels last year in Japan were originally cellphone novels.

Freaking out:

“Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.”

“A...

With more and more sites getting video crazy, CuePrompter makes it easier for your budding, struggling-with-a-stand-up Web stars to talk to the camera (via eHub). You’ll need a Web connection.

For an offline version, check out Prompt, which is available for Mac and PC.

Video news lessons and resources used for this post:

1. Bill Myers Online
2. CNNfyi.com
3. A cached document from Adobe
4. Cyber College...

The idea that the print newspaper business faces doom made it to “The Simpsons.” Gawker has a clip.

I looked for it on YouTube, but it was removed for copyright infringement.

Found the clip on Dailymotion:

I wonder if Nelson read “$23B zapped in news stock value” by Alan Mutter.

Others who mentioned the episode and a quote from ea...

Tell Idio your musical likes, and it builds your personal music magazine.

The results don’t excite me as much as the method: Drop in a bit of info about yourself, and out spits media matching (well, trying to match) your interests.

It toys with the concept of information finding us and adds a touch of design and style to the results.

I wrote about being hunted by information when I came across

Founded by veterans of the mobile industry, MizPee provides user reviews and locations of toilets (news you can use) in numerous cities.

Once you’ve settled upon your spot, you can use the same site to browse product deals (let’s call it consumer news) in the area.

MizPee is one of several inventions of YoJo Mobile, which describes itself as a “a pioneer in targeted location-based services.”

The...

To steal from BBC beta home:

1. Giving control to the customers: Make the display of your news site customizable. Make sections draggable-droppable, expandable/hideable. Especially cool: Use “+” and “-” to add or remove a headline from the list. Some folks already do this using your RSS feeds, but this is a way to serve people uninterested in Netvibes, iGoogle or any other service that pulls information to one location to replace the eventually disappearing activity of chasing information in many locations.
2. Evolve your story tips: The 3 headlines with pics that change upon mouse-over are an efficient, visual way to get me inside the site.
3. Visual: Use subtle variations in background color to indicate shifts in topic areas.

To improve BBC beta home:

1. Add “most read,” “most e-mailed” and “most linked-to” blocks.
2. Make the section blocks draggable from the Web browser to my desktop, creating an instant niche news widget that requires no browser launch.
3. Kill the Flash clock, though it may entertain some customers. It’s unnecessary.
4. Don’t go halfway. Make every component customizable. Some pieces, such as the directory above the footer, the header area, and the big pic, fail to offer tweakability.
5. Work on the article detail level before you work on the home page. That’s where search traffic goes (and roughly 30% of all traffic?). Yes, those readers are less loyal customers, but that also means they have the most untapped potential for additional interaction with your site.
6. Prepare for the day when your home page no longer matters (followed by sections, followed by article detail level). Journalists, employed collectively or individually, are becoming information wire services for content aggregators and editors outside and inside the newsroom.

Reporters, your city editor is going to be one of many customers in the future.
Via UX Mag

Update

Peek at the BBC’s 15 Web prinicples (check out slides 18, 22, 41 and 48):

Via annahavana.blogspot.com

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Hazy, fumbling vision of the future #9,321:  

1. A single journalism organization covering many topics in a general fashion splits into many smaller journalism organizations, each specializing in a single topic and covering it in depth.
2. Information holders in positions of power receive interview requests not from tens of general journalism organization but from hundreds or thousands serving small, h...

1. Sign up for Persai, a “news aggregator specific to your interests” that will “find new content relevant to that interest and recommend it to you. Recommendations are based entirely on content; other users’ feedback has no bearing.”
2. Read Persai blog post explaining the service.
3. See Persai tracking Facebook news; see Persai tracking Apple news.

Trend indicated:

1. As machines get smarter and privac...

A lazy man’s work: the MoFuse mobile version of newsroomnext.

Go ahead, make your own (after you get up from that nap) at MoFuse.

Pay $6 a month and you keep the ad revenue.

I know I’ve read about a million other Web site services doing the same thing, but I can’t recall…wait, let me check my Google bookmarks using GMarks (an awesome add-on for Firefox)…ah:

1. FeedRaider | FeedRaidernewsroomnext...

Though I enjoyed Bill Richards’ vision of a profitable e-paper newspaper (via E-media Tidbits), the deeper issue was not discussed: flesh-eating extraterrestrials.

Let me explain.

If a newspaper’s content is compelling or useful enough, people will buy it no matter what format it comes in.

Making a digital viewing experience more comfortable by putting a newspaper on a screen you can roll up will ...

Problem: You have a usable interview but the talking head threatens you with boredom.

Solution: Find your b-roll on YouTube using iDesktop.tv, which adds an amazing interface on top of YouTube’s content. Look in the lower left-hand corner. See that down arrow? Click on it. Then choose what format you want your b-roll in. Import to your video editor of choice. Add the audio.

Imagine: Another compan...

With some creative use of your Web cam, Seesmic might provide another means of quick info updates from breaking-news scenes. Webware reviewed it.

Here’s a part of the service’s description that indicates the Web is becoming your Web site, my favorite song:

Users can link their Seesmic account to a Twitter account, if they have one, and every time they create a video a link (with the title) will au...

Vidmetrix, like TubeMogul, enables multi-site uploading for your video via one interface (via makeuseof.com).

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The challenge for librarians (from PVLD Director’s Blog found via Everything is Miscellaneous):

• A fundamental shortcoming of the library catalog is that it doesn’t (and as currently designed can’t) know the why for any given search.
• The folks at Bibliocommons understand this dilemma and are finding real, practical ways to harness social networking concepts to transform the catalog into a place wh...

1. The Web is like Canada
2. The Web is like life, where good and evil co-exist
3. In the great sea of human knowledge, the Web is like a coastal swamp - shallow and chaotic, full of debris and rotting matter, and often stagnant and murky, if nonetheless always crowded and busy with life
4. …the Web is like the Tower of Babel, except that the builders have adopted a super simple pidgin language to communica...

Information experience micro-culture is my somewhat academic attempt to create a term encapsulating the rituals, behaviors, expectations and experiences involving humans and our interactions with information, which includes the concept of story, one way of many (and one of my favorite ways) to organize data.

Why this is important: To make long-term, effective decisions about serving information cu...

If a disaster strikes in your city, why not go beyond Twittering like KPBS and add 8 other micro blogging services to your network of news-nugget displays? Because it takes too long to update that many sites?

Nein, non y no! Not with HelloTxt.com.

Here are the supported micro blog services:

1. tumblr.
2. twitter
3. jaiku
4. Pownce
5. Meemi (Italian)
6. frazr (French, German)
7. beemood
8. yappd
9. gozub (Spanish)...

Creating embeddable, audio versions of stories with Web-based software
A drama in 5 acts

1. Read Emily Chang’s mention of vozMe.
2. Play with vozMe and plug in some Shakespeare.
3. Use Emily Chang to track down a free way to host an MP3 on an external site and play it with an embeddable player.
4. Use BoomMP3 to embed the most passionate reading of Shakespeare ever to request an audience with you...

Google grabs a patent for producing printed publications from Web content [via Dan Blank, Online Journalism Blog and TechCrunch].

This puts a damper on the idea that journalism organizations could chase after a Web tool allowing customers to assemble news and information into custom books that could be printed, much like many recipe sites allow brave chefs to assemble their own cookbooks. But Google doing the grunt work doesn’t mean revenue opportuni...