A Tool with a Game September 12, 2007
Posted by Brian in announcements, ideas, interactivity, mashups, software.add a comment
In case anyone didn’t know, the latest version of Google Earth comes with an easter egg: a flight simulator.
This is, of course, way above our abilities to integrate a “game” within a wonderful tool, but it’s just something to look at.
My understanding of the project before seeing Jeff’s art September 5, 2007
Posted by rebeccaperez in ideas, mashups, participatory journalism.add a comment
this sounds really cool, but until I have something that I can look
> at I may be a bit confused. So this is a potential app that allows
> people to contribute local knowledge wikki style, interface with other
> people like facebook, except they aren’t “friends,” but people you have
> collaborated with, ability to upload all kinds of content to be used by
> the news site or other users, and the ability to communicate with the
> journalists in realtime chat rooms. Did I forget or change anything?
> This is so potentially massive I’m having a hard time envisioning a
> news site being able to run all of these apps. Do the papers have the
> option to take off some of the features? I love all of the features
> and I think this would be a great boon to citizen journalism and
> localism, I’m just concerned about trying to do too much. Let me know
> what you think. Doing too much was a problem with K-State’s project,
> among others, I’m afraid that this has the potential to have the same
> problem. Just a thought.
Mash it. August 28, 2007
Posted by Jeff in ideas, mashups.add a comment
Okay… so here’s my idea.
It’s like facebook but for citizens and journalists to collaborate – complete with tools to make a unique and complete story. If something big happens, the sponsoring organization can submit a story idea and all of the people involved can submit different sorts of content. Videographers and photographers (no matter how amateur they are) can submit their own photos and videos. If there’s a geographic element to it, points can be plotted on a map, or the map could be shaded to indicate specific areas. Users can also submit audio or video quotes of their own opinions on what is happening. Heck, even GAMES could be added!
In essence, it’s a collaborative atmosphere allowing users to submit all kinds of content to a story, and having it all combined in a pretty, multilayered package.
Brian’s Mash-ups. August 28, 2007
Posted by Brian in ideas, mashups.1 comment so far
For my mash-up, I believe I want layers in most of the ways we’ve suggested so far. So this would be our hyper-zoom, Rob’s related stories widget, and <plug>my visual categorization</plug> of stories.
To fit our germ, I believe that this provides people with (a) the multiple layers of a story so that they can see how it relates to them, (b) the way that the story relates to others within the area and (c) within their planet. This kind of reminds me of an essay I did on Hamlet. The artists who make the media we have want to stir something in us. In Hamlet, Shakespeare created a character that allowed readers to “rest on”, that is, emote and grieve and connect at a distance. You go through the troubles without actually going through the torture. If people can see how they’re connected to the world, while still being an individual, then I think we’ve done our job.
Jenna’s Mashup August 28, 2007
Posted by msjennabird in ideas, mashups.add a comment
Okay, so as I was diligently reading through each and every one of our ideas and I noticed that most of them could be strung together some how. I noticed that most of them were co-dependent ideas, and needed a little support, and that got me to thinking about what we could do to strengthen some of these really innovative, fun, interesting ideas.
Layers. Not everyone used this word, but it was underlying in most of the ideas and I think that it’s a concept that we could market to the ONA and use some of the ideas that everyone has come up with and more to build an idea around the concept – the concept being layers. I’m not talking about building a website based on just our ideas as layers, but presenting layers as a valid, interactive, and web-friendly, organizational tool for online news sites. The ideas that we decide to use in order to display the concept would be merely for explanatory purposes only. But since we have some really cool ideas to use (that by the way are innovative as well), this would not be a hard concept or idea to pull off. I don’t know if I make sense or not, but below I’m going to list the ideas that I thought we could sue to execute the layer concept.
Jonathan: Storybuilder & Central database in crisis
Lauren: News games
Rob: Collaboration portal
Kristin: Mythbusters (with a little tweaking)
Philip: Custom topic stories
Brian: Venn diagram/Theme
Rebecca: Obits idea
Jeff: “Democratic newspaper”
Jenna: Construction zones idea
I might be missing some ideas, but I think I got the ones that jumped out as good ideas to build into the concept. Maybe I’m way off base, but I just felt that going with just one of our ideas or a bunch glued together isn’t necessarily wise, we need an actual concept . . . function that is really innovative as well. Best of luck;) Talk to ya later;)
Jenna
Google Going for the Gooold August 21, 2007
Posted by Brian in data display, mashups, software, statistics, tools.add a comment
People want to know how they’re connected. But we don’t have a clear-cut means of doing so yet.
Google is developing a social network aggregator. (This, of course, means that social sites existing as walled-gardens would be out of the loop. I wonder how many will open up after this?) Google wants to be the main provider of a social graph (a big visualization of how everyone is connected). Google also realizes that “[p]eople are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site, but also: Developing ‘Social Applications’ is too much work.”
The man who founded LiveJournal left for Google, and he has some ideas for the social graph himself:
- Open-source software for such graphing
- Decentralization of information for such graphing
- Right-after-sign-up addition of “old information” to new network
- Syncing multiple sites for a user
- Not to replace _____
And has anyone heard of FOAF, the Friend of a Friend Project? It’s going to try to show how you’re related to everyone else, which sounds like XFN, the XML Friends Network, which links people by metadata.
Maps! August 18, 2007
Posted by Rob Ponte in competition, hyper-local, interactivity, maps, mashups, tools.2 comments
Some updates.
1. There is a blog of mostly historical Strange Maps. Some are pretty interesting although probably not terribly useful. I found this handy map of where single males and females live (and I need to get my ass east).
[cut by Jeff due to images...] (more…)
Some Google Toys and Crowdsourcing August 16, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, interactivity, mashups.2 comments
Two new Google services are Google Base and Google Mashup Editor (which is a closed beta right now. I signed up and received the invite rather quickly, though.) They’re not really anything new, but we should know what’s on the table already. It’s embarrassing to be the fifth person with pasta salad, eh?
Base is like a more diverse Flickr: upload files and tag them. The key here is that the items, whether already online or not, are added to Google’s servers. People could search for an XML file, and if the content and tags are right, they could find yours. Not so revolutionary.
Google Mashup Editor is their version of Yahoo! Pipes or Microsoft’s PopFly. The three seem to cater to different crowds: GME gets the coders, Pipes gets programmers (because of its roots in UNIX) and more general people, and PopFly gets a more general population still. It took 6 lines of code to add a list (an XML file, really) of people and their locations and a map with those places mapped. I’ll toy with it this weekend and try to see what people use it for.
Google put these out somewhat silently, I think, but word-of-mouth and other viral advertisement does the job for them.
(Does anyone know if it’s better to be quit-ish about releases versus loud and proud?)
Regarding crowdsourcing, Google will pay you $10 to take pictures of shops in your area, along with gathering some data about its operations, presumably to use it on their maps. What a way to get those especially small towns.
Map map map map! August 15, 2007
Posted by Jeff in maps, mashups, tools.add a comment
Judy’s Book – Shopping Deals displayed on a map
Source for heatmaps used on CraigStats – unfortunately, these heatmaps layers don’t seem to scroll well with the gMap… it’s like it has to completely load again.
Overlaid layers – with tutorial
Facebook opening up feeds August 15, 2007
Posted by Brian in competition, interactivity, mashups.add a comment
Facebook is opening up its feeds. They’ll initially be available as RSS, but who knows what afterwards.
I sense mashup-madness (like a Google map with friends’ updates, with multiple layers based on whatever category the user chooses) and more uber-ness that our project must be to circumvent such bittersweet decisions.
