Constitutional Law

Laptops in the most disadvantaged areas of Uruguay

Posted on June 07, 2008
The following is a translation of a post by Rising Voices grantee and Plan Ceibal coordinator Pablo Flores, who details some of the upcoming challenges and opportunities as the OLPC project in Uruguay spreads to the capital city, Montevideo. If we look at how the next phases of expansion of Plan Ceibal (OLPC in Uruguay), it is apparent that we are about to face some new challenges...

On Organizing Media and Organizing a Conference

Posted on June 07, 2008
At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," held earlier this week in Minneapolis, every session meant horizontal communication: no one on a stage, a circle of chairs with the facilitator at the same level as anyone else. John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis...

Prison Diaries Show the Reality of Life Behind Bars in Jamaica

Posted on June 05, 2008
When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. "Murder capital of the world", sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S...

Killing Trees and the Future of News Online

Posted on June 04, 2008
Seth Godin on the news buiness versus the paper business: Jason wrote in to ask why I thought that the newspaper industry was in a Dip. In my book, I point out that with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the days of newspapers as we know them are clearly over...

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The first EveryBlock 'special report'

Posted on June 03, 2008
(Cross-posted to the EveryBlock Blog.) We've launched our first EveryBlock "special report" -- an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation "Operation Crooked Code." As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block...

Google News Layered in Google Earth

Posted on June 02, 2008
At the Where 2.0 conference in May, Google announced Google News would be now be accessible and located in Google Earth. As Brandon Badger, Product Manager noted in his Lat Long Blog entry The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser...

Give the Public Access to Public Records

Posted on May 29, 2008
I'm on an open API kick here at IdeaLab, so here's the second of three entries on the potential of application programming interface for news organizations. (I'll post a final video interview on Monday.) This is a way to give the public true access to public records...

Open-source Software

Posted on May 28, 2008
Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas)...

NY Times to Test Crowdsourcing Its Data

Posted on May 27, 2008
News about a potentially big deal in the newspaper industry broke just before the holiday weekend. No, not another story about a chain swallowing another chain, or news about the formation of yet another online advertising platform that's doomed to underperform...

Still seeking coders interested in journalism

Posted on May 26, 2008
It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications...

From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism

Posted on May 25, 2008
I recently began playing around with a new service called GeoGraffiti, which allows you to post or access voice notes or "markers" while at a specific physical location using any cell phone. I like the idea of localized, user generated information which GeoGraffiti is a platform for...

Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

Posted on May 24, 2008
Before I went home this summer I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Twedt, a reporter at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who teaches one of the few journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon. I told him about the Idealab and the user driven system I've been writing about here...

COLLABORATION WITH DISTILL

Posted on May 24, 2008
Finally I am able to post independetly, and after the semester is over I will have a chance to work more on the news project. As a matter of fact I already started working on it. I have an internship for the summer at the Johnson Simulation Center and I worked 3 days of this weeks on the news game...

Rising Voices at the Global Voices Summit 2008

Posted on May 23, 2008
What is the state of the global blogosphere? Where is participatory media growing the fastest? And where, for that matter, are new voices being restricted by state censorship? Is social media actually changing the electoral landscape in emerging democracies like Armenia, Kenya, and Venezuela? Has the promise of an international, barrier-free, multilingual conversation finally become reality? Most importantly, where do we go from here? How do we encourage dialog in times of heated international debate? How do we bring new voices from new communities into the universe of web 2...

What Does Popular Culture Have to Do With Civic Media?

Posted on May 23, 2008
The Center for Future Civic Media is collaborating with the MIT Communications Forum to host an ongoing series of conversations about media and civic engagement. This past term, we hosted two such exchanges --- "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," an exchange between University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge) and Harvard University law professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) and "Youth and Civic Engagement" with University of Washington political science professor Lance Bennett, actvist Alan Khazei (Be the Change), and our own Ingeborg Endter (formerly with the Computer Clubhouse project, now a key player at the Center for Future Civic Media...

YouTube Lauches New Citizen News Channel

Posted on May 22, 2008
This week YouTube announced it's very own citizen news channel, and assigned a news manager named Olivia Ma, to run it. You can apparently reach her at citizennews@youtube.com Just for fun, here is our own Dan Gillmor, talking on YouTube about how web censorship is affecting citizen journalism, posted prior to the launch of the YouTube Citizen news channel...

Any There at Where 2.0?

Posted on May 19, 2008
Where 2.0 happened May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot just south of the city. This annual event, now in its 4th year, is a strange mix of grassroots geo-enthusiasts and entrepreneurial geo-hackers. Where 2.0 is primarily a developer's conference, so the majority of time and certainly the focus was on tools and how they function and less on how these tools are being used...

Into the Budget Dungeon

Posted on May 19, 2008
Today, Gotham Gazette unveils the second of its news games: The Budget Maze. With challenges and a dash of humor, the game presents an entertaining way to educate New Yorkers about one of the eternal mysteries of policy and politics in the city: How the budget is determined...

Tandem to be powered by local communities

Posted on May 16, 2008
We are charging ahead with the Tandem Project, developed by a team of students this past year as part of the Innovation Incubator Project. Partnering with The Detroit News on the project, we hope for a launch in summer if we can get software issues handled...

Ceibal Jam! Developing Applications for the XO Laptop

Posted on May 14, 2008
An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux...

Knight Announces News Challenge Winners

Posted on May 14, 2008
Hello from sunny Las Vegas! I am here for the E&P Interactive Media Conference at the Rio Hotel, but also to welcome the next round of winners in the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge. These folks will soon be blogging here on Idea Lab, and it's quite a group of winners...

Can the classifieds be saved?

Posted on May 12, 2008
Steve Outing -- who's been trying to prod the newspaper industry to embrace its digital multidirectional future for the past decade -- asked me what the future holds for newspaper classifieds. He's behind the site ReinventingClassifieds.com, an initiative aimed at bringing experts together to revive newspaper classifieds by finding a new business model that's relevant in the Internet age...

Medill Grad Students Study Locative Journalism

Posted on May 12, 2008
At least once a day I ask myself how locative media can be used to more fully engage and connect folks to their communities. The question for this blog is a bit more focused: how can locative media and geo-localized content find form in the art and craft of journalism...

Sean Bell Illustrates Lines that Divide Us

Posted on May 12, 2008
Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict...

It's Not Just a Newspaper Problem; It's a Media Problem

Posted on May 12, 2008
This past week, the National Association of Music Retailers landed in San Francisco to hold their 50th annual convention. Never heard of them? Neither had I, until I responded to a random email pitch and decided to attend for a few hours. Essentially, NARM is a trade group that includes every piece of the music ecosystem, from artists and songwriters to retailers to record labels...

Connecting People, Content, and Community

Posted on May 11, 2008
One of the main goals of online information design is to present content in a way that allows users/readers to find what they want. Tagging, the digital extension of newspaper sections, is one technique used on just about every modern news website as a way to help users browse or search, but that isn't the only way it can be useful...

Adopt a competitive mindset and avoid marketing myopia

Posted on May 11, 2008
Adopting a Competitive mindset I've attended a few conferences and it appears to me that most folks in journalism hate advertising. Maybe that comes from seeing the last eight inches of their story end up on the composing room floor to make room for another two column by four-inch ad or just distrust of business...

Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers

Posted on May 08, 2008
Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create...

Driving Forward, Toyota Style

Posted on May 08, 2008
When Toyota first began to rise to prominence in this country, the company's cars were known as cheap, plasticky, not-to-be trusted imports. Now Toyota is on pace to unseat GM as the world's auto sales leader, and is regarded as one of the most innovative companies around...

Web developer: "Journalism is hard"

Posted on May 06, 2008
Today I'm publishing a guest post from Ryan Mark, one of the first two journalist-programmers attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship. Ryan is a 2004 graduate of Augustana College, where he earned a BA in computer science...

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