Innovation Incubator

This story seems relevant to our project:
href="http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070730073936.n84arl87&show_article=1">http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070730073936.n84arl87&show_article=1

I found this passage to be pretty interesting:

"Uses for the money will include ways to reward people that upload stories or images, and developing a system to "geo-locate" contributors so they can be found if they are in range of developments deemed newsworthy.

"We are moving to geo-locating people so we can do some cool stuff," Brody said.

"For example, if there is a bomb in a subway station in London or a virus breaks out in Google's cafeteria and media can't get their fast enough we can identify people on the scene already and get their content," Brody said.

Contributors own stories they post on NowPublic, which does not pay for submissions.

"This is really going to help us start compensating those folks," said Brody."

So, in essence, wouldn't the natural evolution of this make NowPublic a brand of "normal" media, in which journalists are paid to cover certain geographies or topics? It kind of seems like what some traditional media outlets, like CNN.com, etc., are trying to do, just coming at it from the other direction, with the same ultimate goal in mind.

I have to say, some of the other teams' blogs really are helpful. Charlotte-Anne at the All-Knighters blog posted this tidbit from an interview with Jay Rosen about how Assignment Zero ended up working out.

Rosen: Your Wikipedia example is critically important. Here's why. I am on the Wikipedia advisory board, and in the spring I had coffee with Jimmy Wales when he was in town. I asked him why did Wikipedia work when the odds are that most things don't work, and he said something very important, although its significance escaped me at the time. People come to Wikipedia not knowing how it works, but they do know how a regular, 'ol encyclopedia works and so the "leap" to knowing what a free online encyclopedia would be like is not that great. This prior knowledge is critical to a system's viability because is constrains users and points them in the logical directions. How much did it cost Wikipedia to put that common understanding into each contributor's head? Zero! They already knew it. Explaining the way it works takes all of six words: "The online encyclopedia anyone can edit." With 6,000 words we did not get clarity on what a crowdsourced investigation asked of participants because there was no common image to start with, nothing comparable to "encyclopedia, right!..."

I think we pass the bar on part of the simplicity of explanation (even though we've been having problems explaining it). I think we just might be over thinking it. Essentially, it's consuming news and writing letters/emails. People understand both of those things, so the leap to directly tying them together shouldn't be too big.

Wired's got a good in-depth report on how (and why) corporations are blowing money on Second Life.

The Internet will eventually be full of such 3-D environments; Second Life might even be one of them. But in the meantime, it's just slurping up corporate dollars and delivering little in return.

The article is also worth reading for its discussion of why Second Life's architecture will hold it back from being what everyone wants it to be.

That big Google Maps article is online now too for those who missed it in the print edition.

From the New York Times: "...online map development has been going strong for the past two years, and recent developments have trumped several of the ideas that students working on the 'Innovation Incubator' project -- an Ithaca College-based online journalism think tank -- have come up with."

I found some great material to use during the presentation. Amy Gahran at Poynter Online ran a great column last year about the importance of linking to full text copies of legislation. Her argument was:

The reason we report on the legislative process is to empower citizens to more easily follow what their government is doing. That makes it easier for citizens to get involved in the legislative process.

She also had a follow up column with some reaction.

Also, yet another map/wiki idea in action: Placeopedia. I'm increasingly happy that Brian had the balls intelligence to challenge that idea.

Here are some quotes from a Reuters article about the CNN/YouTube debate:

The 39 questions posed by ordinary citizens highlighted "the role new media is playing in politics and everything else in society," he added.

Phil Noble, founder of PoliticsOnline.com, said the format would get more people engaged in the political process and give politicians a better chance to connect with the voters.

Clearly what we're presenting is different, but I think it does highlight the belief that people should be finding new ways to use the Internet to interact with their politicians and that news organizations can help people do that.

Google announced a couple of days ago that its competition to do 3D models of college campuses was over and released its list of seven winners. You can get the 3D layer from the official competition site.

More than 4,000 buildings were submitted.

I was in Borders today using their drinking fountain and I browsed through their magazines. I picked up the Columbia Journalism Review, which had a story about Second Life journalism in it. I read the first bit -- talking about how sweet a SL journalist's virtual outfit was -- and then put it back, figuring I'd get the rest online, absorb it and have some scathing comment to make about it on this blog. However, the article is unavailable on their website. Weird. Anyhow, what I want to say is this: An article exists in CJR about SL that you might want to read; a half-pitcher of margaritas packed more of a punch than I thought it would.

Power to the people. Write your Congressperson. Have we thought of a better name than BetterLetter?

An interesting New York Times story I just read about how YouTube and CNN are letting users upload questions to presidential candidates via video. I think we're on the right track with our project, and it's an important one, no doubt about it.

I was looking for interesting examples of successful letter writing campaigns and found this story from last month (I'm kind of surprised I missed this when it was in the news cycle).

Japan has rechristened the island of Iwo Jima, site of one of World War II's most horrific battles, with its pre-war name in an attempt to rectify a misnomer proliferated for a half-century by such movies as Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima."

...

The change was championed by surviving islanders evacuated during the war, who wanted to reclaim an identity they said had been hijacked.

American maps will not rename the island.