Constitutional Law

It's Got to be About More Than Just Getting from Point A to Point B

Posted on February 26, 2008
Phones use one of two methods to figure out where they are (and if you happen to be carrying it, where you are). The first is built-in gps. Nokia is leading the way with these smart phones, having announced four new phones earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress 2008, where 50,000 people (including keynote Robert Redford) gathered in Barcelona to talk all things mobile (but mostly about devices and less-than-innovative uses of these devices)...

How Do You Know When to Take Mobile Seriously?

Posted on February 25, 2008
How does mainstream media know when to take mobile seriously as a distribution platform? 1) When the New York Times unveils a mobile-to-PC application? The NYT's new ShiftD application you to move its content from one device to the other, insead of having to save and move them separately...

Journalists and technologists: an uneasy courtship

Posted on February 25, 2008
The first Computation + Journalism Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at Georgia Tech, is over. It's been widely covered in the blogosphere -- you'll find some of the most thoughtful reflections here and here and here and here. As I said before the panel I moderated (on "Advances in Newsgathering"), the event was truly remarkable...

Computation + Journalism Confab: Exciting, Disappointing and Confusing

Posted on February 25, 2008
Last week's Symposium on Computation & Journalism left me excited, disappointed and confused. It was hard not to be excited listening to all the technologists talking about the latest advances that will allow us to get news to once isolated people in Africa and India using mobile phones and other technology...

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What did you call me?

Posted on February 22, 2008
Marketing guru Seth Godin urges companies to start calling "potential customers" and "targets" instead citizens. He means this term to be inclusive of those who have a relationship with the marketer and those who do not and to bring about a mental shift toward respect and humility...

The Washington Post vs. washingtonpost.com

Posted on February 21, 2008
The Washington City Paper published an extensive profile of the online strategy used by The Washington Post. Called, "One Mission, Two Newsrooms," the piece details how the Post has built an entirely separate newsroom for the online staff across the river in Arlington, Va...

Crashing the E-Politics and E-Democracy Gates

Posted on February 21, 2008
My focus tends to be the "citizen" in citizen media. Over the last few years I've increasing found myself at conferences like Public Media and the Online News Association. I always feel a bit out of place, because despite the adoption of online interactivity in online news and media, I am still pretty much viewed as a "consumer...

Every Nonprofit Tries to Give People Information, Which is Power

Posted on February 20, 2008
At this year's SalesForce.com Foundation gathering, "Innovation for Nonprofit Success," the recurring theme was less the SalesForce software than the broader topic of the social web.  This is to SalesForce's credit; Suzanne DiBianca, cofounder and director of the Foundation, set the tone when she introduced Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, as the keynote speaker...

Right to Anonymity Under Attack

Posted on February 18, 2008
Anonymous communication online is becoming quite a theme here on Idea Lab. The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you're in the United States, right now you'll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China)...

Is Your Blog Login Secure?

Posted on February 18, 2008
Several News Challenge projects, including ours (the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker), feature blogs as a publishing tool. So consider this a friendly tip: If you or anyone who will be posting to your blog even occasionally uses net access of unknown or uncertain security (such as public wifi, or a hotel's network), make sure you use a secure login for posting to your blog...

Databases as Entry Points to Investigative Stories

Posted on February 18, 2008
If you want to know what the future of investigative reporting might look like online, check out what the Las Vegas Sun has done with its special section on Flight Delays . It's an interactive map and database on plane delays at McCarran Airport. You can check a particular flight, look at patterns in delays to other airports and find out how long it takes to go through security checkpoints at different gates at different times of the day...

Computation + Journalism = ?

Posted on February 17, 2008
When the Knight News Challenge awarded me (and the Medill School of Journalism) a grant to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, I thought teaching journalism to technologists was a pretty novel idea. But it turns out some faculty at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing were thinking along similar lines...

CMLP Legal Guide: Deciding Whether and How to be Anonymous

Posted on February 17, 2008
In light of Dan Schultz's excellent post entitled Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media, I've decided to focus my post this week on the legal and practical issues you should consider if you wish to engage in anonymous speech online...

BarCamps Without Borders: The Unconference Spreads Globally

Posted on February 17, 2008
OK, So you've got your own blog. You've started taking pictures and posting them online. But what's more, you've also trained some of your friends, family, and neighbors how to publish online. And, via the blogosphere, you've been able to get to know others in your city who you otherwise never would have met...

Super Tuesday Wrapup: the MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 & the live mobile to web experiment

Posted on February 17, 2008
"When I say that we all ought to collectively stand, bend over, and moon the rest of the media world, I really mean it. And it's too bad a few people had crappy times, but that's entirely the failure of this country to build the kind of communications infrastructure that Europeans and Koreans can't laugh at...

Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve

Posted on February 17, 2008
Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text...

Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media

Posted on February 15, 2008
So far I have avoided bringing up specific events and breaking stories here even when they might illustrate relevant uses of digital media. The reason for this is that I'm not really a reporter, but I've been watching something play out over the Internet and it is just too interesting to pass up...

Will There Be a Newsroom in the Future?

Posted on February 14, 2008
The nature of our project at Duke University, the Next Newsroom Project, is to try to design the "newsroom of the future." But the other day on our project site, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, started a discussion around the first, most obvious question we confronted: "Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?" You can view the various responses, and some relevant links that got posted there...

Open Media Publishing: One New Option

Posted on February 14, 2008
EngageMedia, an Australia-based open media organization that promotes social justice and environmental issues, has just released a major open source software package called Plumi. Based on the Plone content-management system, it's designed to let citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box...

Public Notices 4.0: Time to Upgrade Public Meetings

Posted on February 13, 2008
Over the years my work has brought me to Rome a few times. The Roman Forum as well as the Athenian Agora have always intrigued me as a model for envisioning online public spaces. Surrounding a public space you have major public and religious institutions, a commercial market in one corner, a place for public speeches, and in Roman Forums the "Albus" or a white notice board with public announcements written in black...

XO Laptop Turns Kids into Media Creators in Uruguay

Posted on February 12, 2008
"On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It's an amazing thing to watch--at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn't get to witness the miracle of birth every day...

NewsTools2008 to Bring Geeks and Journalists Together

Posted on February 11, 2008
One truism that has remained constant over the years is that journalists and technologists rarely cohabit the same physical plane. Even when they cross each other's path, they rarely speak each other's language. And yet, any great leap forward in the new media space requires great technology...

Place-Based Video Games Could Transform Education

Posted on February 11, 2008
After reading Paul Grabowicz's post Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games, I thought I'd chime in and riff off of that statement and ask: What is the value of video games in education, formal and informal, and in the delivery of information. Paul makes great point about who determines perspective...

Toward a Community Media Toolset

Posted on February 11, 2008
In the past three years, since I co-founded Ourmedia.org, a lot of would-be community publishers have asked me the same question, which more or less is this: How can I get a site up and running without investing a lot of time or resources into building a content management system and technology infrastructure from scratch? There's good news and bad news, I tell them...

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