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

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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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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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.

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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.”

“Author” versus “Cellphone Author” reminds me of: “Bloggers” versus “journalists.”

Why I find it interesting: The tools of information production hugely influence the aesthetics and form of information:

“[The five cellphone novels are] mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”

It’s fascinating to watch storytelling techniques develop for different technologies. Could it be that plot and character development are tied to a printing press?

Via IHT (my employer).

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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
5. Art Wolinsky
6. Mindy McAdams
7. Tom Schroeppel (who wrote the great “Bare Bones” book)
8. four docs (thanks, Craig Duff)

Update: downloadsquad did a more thorough review of the software here. If you don’t want to follow the link, here’s the graf I found most interesting:

Each prompter session is limited to 2000 characters and requires you to be running MS Internet Explorer 5.0 or above and MS Windows XP, 2000, or 2003 to work properly. We tested it out using Firefox on a Mac and only ran into problems using the mirror and full-screen mode. CuePrompter also seemed to have some minor issue translating apostrophes. One thing that definitely makes CuePrompter different than regular prompters however is you have no way to really control the prompter once its started beyond simple starting and stopping, so once you start CuePrompter you better be ready to go.

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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 each post:

1. MediaBistro “And Moe also noted how much journos like to drink.”
2. Suchandrika “Print is withering, and it won’t ever fully die, but the change from one system to another will be a protracted process, and probably fairly painful.”
3. Steve Outing “A joke for we media geeks.”
4. My Musings 2.0 “If that’s not reason enough to change, I hope the declining stock shares, tumbleweed infested newsrooms and a distrusting, stimulation hungry audience provide the news media with a much-needed catalyst.”
5. Eaves “You know things are bad when even the Simpsons are making fun of you. It means your (impending) death has permeated the popular culture.”
6. Print CEO From the comments: “Yet as one door closes a new one opens.”
   
7. Your World Today “Yet, most advertisers (specially in Halifax) still utilize print mediums as the main vehicle for their commercial messages.”
8. Media Biz “Now that’s probably a bit harsh.”
9. Rex Hammock “…it’s a rather amusing few seconds.”

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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 Persai.

I’d like to see Idio track the Web sites I visit and build a musical profile from the pattern. It’s a dream that brings questions of privacy — a huge challenge to the Web’s evolution — to the fore:

1. Who will receive information about me and what will they do with it?
2. How much do I want others to know about my online behavior (seems to be a shifting spectrum of permissions, where certain classifications of people get certain types of access, so far)?

Continue after the break to see an example of an embedded Idio mag. Warning: Music will play automatically.

(more…)

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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.”

There is a lot of room to provide other types of information to users of this service. I wonder if Outside.in will partner with MizPee.

Opportunities this presents

Web sites as niche-knowledge service providers helping their customers solve specific problems will continue to proliferate and present opportunities for journalists to:

1. Edit, verify and enhance user-submitted information
2. Provide original, related information, and summaries and links of related, extant information

But that will work only if journalists start thinking of themselves as providers of journalistic services, not just providers of stories (though that manner of organizing information is a service), to any number of customers (not just readers/viewers/listeners) seeking to work with information.

Yeah, not so romantic: “Hey, where’s my pee profile?!?!?” the editor roared.

But it’s not entirely silly.

New information customers

Niche service sites create a task-oriented customers who may need more than tools to accomplish a goal — they may need (and need it fast) the information enabling them to accomplish their task in the best way possible.

That’s valuable data. Who’s providing it?

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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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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, highly informed and demanding audiences.
3. More specialized information providers eventually meet the demand, but there is a long period of interview rejections (”Potholejournalist dot what? Audience of 500? Go away. I’m busy talking to citystreets.com or city.com.”) 
4. Extremely knowledgeable generalists who can aggregate and make individual, consumer-specific sense of an incredible array of specialized information in order to make life-enhancing decisions (for example, reduce the conclusions of 1,000 scientific studies to what I should eat for breakfast) grow in demand. Hire a personal journalist, anyone?
5. The power of a mass of people united by common information fragments.  
6. Effecting change on a mass scale becomes more difficult, but specific, niche problems get solved more quickly. 
7. Life is good; life is bad.

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Trend indicated:

1. As machines get smarter and privacy concerns fade, the idea of regularly spending time to type into search engine boxes and making basic information-filtering decisions will be inefficient (I wrote about this here).
2. Our information experience will become more passive, like the pumping of our blood. RSS feeds (especially custom ones made through searches) already approach this.
3. If a machine can do a task, including information tasks, it will, so focus on what machines can’t do to establish your journalistic value. Yes, focus on creativity and analysis because the ability to make meaningful decisions with all of this data will still require a human.

Found via: Uncov.

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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
2. feedm8 | feedm8newsroomnext
3. echoditto labs | echodittonewsroomnext (this is the least robust option)

By “million” I meant three.

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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 not save newspapers.

Or put it this way: Serve me Christmas music on an LP, CD or MP3, and I’m still not going to be into it.

E-paper will not make the difference. Yes, it could reduce costs, and offer more sophisticated advertising services, but if you’re not aggregating an audience, you are of no use to an advertiser. The fun challenge is that the Web’s flexibility, power and interactivity makes it an incredibly difficult environment in which to aggregate consistently a significantly sized audience. (Then again, Attributor is providing the service to measure your content’s reach as an inadvertent network publication.)

Evolution must proceed in a way that reflects the changes in the value and utility of your information in a new and changing information environment.

How does a world of ubiquitous, inexpensively accessible, high quality (and low), shareable, inexpensively published, customizable and remixable information where you no longer control the audience (thus reducing and eventually destroying your ability to aggregate eyeballs on one presentation location, the current way value is created for advertisers) affect how and why you produce information in any format?

You are now one media choice of millions (billions? trillions?), all of them obtained with nothing more than a click.

In such a challenging environment, I think of the most basic question I can: Why do people want information and stories?

There are likely thousands of reasons for each person that change second to second, but to simplify, and because I recently saw “The Mist,” let’s choose one reason that encompasses many others: to explain the unknown.

Several of the characters in “The Mist” put forth different explanations for the mist enveloping their town and the irritating problem of people being torn apart inside it. Those explanations create a variety of benefits (and detriments), and are put to a variety of uses.

Today, people have inexpensive access to more explanations than they know what to do with. In such an environment, the explanations that will stand out are those of the best quality that also manage to communicate that they are of the best quality and that the best quality has value.

Imagine more and more journalists with a PhD in their subject area. To use “The Mist” analogy, imagine one of the characters had video footage and perhaps a scientific study of activities inside the mist. It’s superior information. It’s demonstrable. It’s valuable because it will reduce the likelihood of a tentacle tearing off your flesh.

How can news ensure I won’t be an alien’s lunch?

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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 company decides to do the same to your site. Your design and presentation, eventually, won’t matter. Your core content still will.

Lesson: The Web is a construction site where the building and rebuilding never stops. It is not a museum, a book or a movie. Prep your content for play, redistribution, re-presentation, alteration, enhancement and destruction. If your core content is good and popular enough, somebody will find ways to make it more useful to various audiences.

Gracias: AppScout

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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 automatically get posted to their Twitter feed. In future updates, Seesmic will also post to other services: email (see also EyeJot), blogs, Facebook, and YouTube. And you’ll be able to specify, for each video you create, which of those services get your post.

What we’re moving toward is one interface through which you can publish your content to every presentation site you maintain on the Web. Yes, I’ll sing it again: The Web is your Web site.

Publishing everywhere with one service is the most efficient model to reach the widest audience, so I can’t imagine someone would not fill the demand. I don’t know of this universal interface, yet, but a collection of services can provide it now.

One problem with publishing one bit of content across your network publication is that individual presentation sites have their own aesthetic. So a post that works well on your blog may fail on your Twitter page, or an article for your news site will sound pompous on your MySpace page.

It’s all about adapting to your audience’s information behavior, and it’s likely information workers will need to network with Twitterers (or Tumblrs, MySpacers, YouTubers, etc.) to optimize their content for the sites through which it is presented.

The end result of the Web becoming your Web site is that a content’s quality and ability to adapt to different information uses and presentation styles will weigh more and more heavily in the evaluation of its success.

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• 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 where people can slice the information based on their individual “whys” and then share that learning with others whose “whys” might be similar – the social catalog.
• We have traditionally seen helping people find relevant information as one of our key roles. … So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?

4 answers:

• Reinforcing the librarian’s role in developing the systems that underpin the social catalog.
• Providing a human interface to the digital world for those who need or want it – either through traditional tools such as the reference interview (whether conducted in person or online) or by providing training, coaching, and advice.
• Being one of the voices in the social web – sharing our knowledge through the creation of reviews, commentary, lists, etc. We will be just some voices among many, but as Beth Jefferson pointed out to me yesterday librarians should become among the most trusted of sources.
• Creating the programs and services that enhance the library’s role as a community hub. We should be the center of a rich network of physical and virtual connections within our communities, and the librarian can play a key role in building that network.

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And a few of mine to round out the list:

1. The Web is like pro wrestlers shopping for groceries for a family of 10 in 30 seconds or less through a narrow slit in the grocery store over which they wage a mighty battle.
2. The Web is like a vat of warm lemon yogurt filled with monkeys playing tag.
3. The Web is like trying to be romantic while on a date while you and the love of your life are sealed inside soundproof glass boxes on wheels being pushed around by other boxes on wheels.

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Why this is important: To make long-term, effective decisions about serving information customers, I need to understand changes beyond the myriad superficial ways of gathering and presenting information. That means tracking down changes in the existential value of information, the individual and group creation of meaning, and the construction of predictions from information.

It’s also important because it’s far easier to adapt proactively if you have concepts that describe the ground rules for a new information world instead of concepts describing superficial, discrete expressions of those ground rules.

Despite the petri-dish intimations, I added the “micro” modifier to communicate the narrowness of my definition. I am referring not to culture in general, but to a culture, or a cultural experience, defined by the experience of humans engaging information. If I were to do the same thing for a sport, it would be, for example, “Basketball game experience micro-culture,” and it would only analyze the experiences involving a basketball game.

The 3 changes in information experience micro-culture:

1. The rate of the transformation and repurposing of ideas has sped up to appear almost constant

With information becoming digital, it is far more easily, affordably and quickly transformed into other forms. This has always occurred, but far more slowly. But it’s not just an acceleration of one’s ability to read one text and create more text in reaction to it. Now we can transform ideas gleaned from one media type (text) into numerous media types (photos, video, audio or a combination). This idea occurred to me after reading about Photo2canvas in Ready Made magazine.

Implications of this:

• Attempting to imprison an audience in your one information type or one interpretation of information will fade as a means to make money.
• Information will become more like a river, not a stack of bricks. Information customers will shape their info into whatever format fits their needs at that moment. Using the metaphor, information customers will take that water and pour it into ice cube trays, glasses, dog dishes, plants or whatever makes sense at that moment.

2. Engaging with information is becoming less of an active, ritualistic event and more of a passive behavior, like breathing

This idea is nothing new, but here’s an example for clarity: The days of driving to the movie theater to watch a movie are fading. Or going to the theater to watch a play. Or sitting down with a Sunday newspaper. Or going to the library to perform research. Or going to a specific Web site and mucking around in somebody else’s navigation system. What’s holding up the abandonment of these rituals is the quality of the information experience. For example, regarding the movie example, it’s hard to beat a screen the size of your house with sound like a live orchestra.

Implications of this:

• Eventually, and depending on how privacy concerns play out, information will find us and quality will no longer be an issue.
• Physically (and this includes the physical nature of being forced to click through a Web site arranged by someone’s else preferences) exerting oneself to gather information will be inefficient and an inferior way to get the information one wants (unless you’re a gatherer of original information, such as a reporter).

3. The information world is moving toward a real-time representation of life. Yes, I mean a virtual world paralleling the real one.

The example of this is to watch TV news cover a disaster. It’s as close to real-time coverage as you can get. However, a human still remains to interpret, collate and communicate facts about that event, but the collation and communication tasks, I’m guessing, will be taken over by machines.

Implications of this:

• Value will move away from those who can supply basic data, and shift more to those who can supply the most useful interpretation of information to the correct customer at the correct time.
• Concepts that assign moral, ethical and decision-making values to interpretations will proliferate.

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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)

Once again, thanks to Emily Chang’s eHub.

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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 your eardrum.
5. Write a 5-act drama about the process for my blog.

boomp3.com

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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 opportunities will disappear; it just means they’ll be shared.

I expect the online tools for organizing information will eventually reach some kind of performance perfection and value will shift to the content.

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