I've moved

I migrated my blog recently to http://cyoungworks.com, so this blog is now inactive and collecting cyberdust. Please visit my new site!

Geotagging stories and delivery

Imagine being in an unfamiliar city. As you move around, your cell phone beeps, and delivers stories from local media outlets about places or events physically close to you. You could select certain types of stories you're receptive to getting, like restaurant reviews, crime stories, real estate, etc. Something like this is already happening in Canada: http://ow.ly/10jvj
Metro, a free daily, partnered with Foursquare, a location-based social networking software that you use on your cell phone.
I think in the relatively near future all news outlets will offer this service. It shouldn't be hard to program it into the content management systems we use. I wonder if standards will be reached on which software subscribers would use to get the content. Will everyone adopt some augmented reality app? Will it be open source with an API so a variety of Foursquare-like apps can be used?
Shouldn't be too hard to deliver advertising along with the content... I bet start-ups will just syndicate AP copy or other wire copy and beat the traditional media companies to the punch, again.

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Virginia governor's race and the Google blast

I haven't come across other stories on the 'Net localizing the impact of technology on state or local political races, so I wrote one here, for the RTD, called "Online ads in Va. gubernatorial race ‘set the standard’"

Basically a lot of campaign consultants said that Virginia's governor's race was the first time we saw every candidate use online advertising in an integrated, focused way. Politics in Virginia is huge and there's a ton of voices out there, which you can see by the volume of political blogs, Facebook interactions with Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds' fan pages, and money pumped into online ads.

Both candidates for governor used a Google network blast to saturate the web with their faces right before people headed to the polls, Deeds in the democratic primary and McDonnell in the general election.

They won.

So is that a winning strategy? Maybe, maybe not.
One consultant told me that when you're ahead, you might as well spend a few tens of thousands of $$ to brand your guy online in a final push. I didn't really get to this in the story but at least it's a start.

Targeting us: political ads source lists

This article by Kate Kaye of Clickz looks at voter files, the lists of potential voters that campaigns keep. In the online world, a campaign can target likely voters or some demographic group with ads that drive the viewer to donate or vote. The methods of compiling a robust list use traditional public sources like secretaries of state, Kaye says, but also include behavioral clues from web searches and online keywords. Interesting....

The Political Ad Practice Insiders Want to Keep Secret - ClickZ

Facebooking their way into the Governor's mansion

My print contribution to our news coverage of the 2009 race for Virginia governor. Just like in every official poll, Bob McDonnell was beating Creigh Deeds on social media sites:

Gubernatorial campaigns rely on social media | Richmond Times-Dispatch

Preview:

As the two men campaigning for Virginia governor make last-minute sound bites to get out the vote on Tuesday, the virtual cocktail parties they host on their Facebook fan pages have exploded in activity.

Both campaigns have rolled out Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos and other social media tools to reach voters over the course of the race, in addition to their primary Web sites....

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Q-What do you call the obituary pages of the newspaper?

A- subscriber countdown

That was a joke tweeted live during the Online News Association convention this past weekend in San Francisco. Great time.

One small note- I saw this guy David LaFontaine talk at ONA, he has a nice recurring summary of news about the state of the industry on his blog like this.

I may actually download this mp3 of Clay Shirky in a talk on accountability journalism in the age of newspaper's steady decline

Obama video

Some breaking news video I shot election night 2008:



I had caught a cold that day, after hanging out at several voting stations, a victory party for the newly elected mayor of Richmond, and this late-breaking news. Thousands of college students spontaneously took to the streets after Barack Obama won the election. There was such energy in the crowd, I've never seen anything like it. Had to shot/edit this one fast to cap off a 13 or 14 hour day.

Homeless soccer team

No, the team isn't looking for a place to play. The players in the Richmond Rebels are all homeless themselves. They're part of a national league called Street Soccer USA. This is what they look like and what they do.

Video: "never give up"

I recently did a video story on a high school senior with cerebral palsy who beat the odds and did what few can do: graduate with a regular diploma and go to a four-year college. Thomas Allen's remarkable personality showed through the reverence of everyone who knew him.

Interesting report on podcasts and consumers

This archived audio/slide presentation with PDF is very interesting, it gives some numbers on usage of downloadable media by consumers. It's by Edison Research.
Just skimming it, I was struck that 57 % of Americans haven't heard of podcasting. That's based off a phone survey done this January of 1858 random Americans. And 22 percent of people have listened to at least one podcast in their lives. The presenter, Edison's Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Tom Webster, said this number was an indication that podcasting has hit the mainstream. To me one out of five people is not mainstream, but maybe I need a lesson in relativity.
Anyway, the slides are very interesting and I'll try to take an hour, maybe at lunch breaks at my desk, to listen in.

Map mashups

I'd really like to see mashups of public-interest databases with mobile devices with mapping and geolocating. For instance, you've got the standard state sex offender databases online.

This application has wanted sex offenders with mug shots and info on each person, including a Google map where the person lives. Now what's needed, (and this may be out there but I don't have an iPhone or Blackberry to test it,) is a iPhone app that determines the user's location, queries the sex offender database, and displays "hits" of sex offenders within a given distance of the user's iPhone.

It's about taking databases and making them useful to people. By itself, the sex offender Web site is nice, but I'm guessing a parent would actually pay money for getting that intelligence in a user-friendly medium.

Another app would be a restaurant review database. I'd love to make one of these but don't quite know how yet. Say you're in an unfamiliar city and you're hungry. You take your iPhone or G1 or whatever and geolocate yourself with an app, then the app searches the local news outlet's database of unbiased restaurant reviews, letting you pick one by cuisine, rating, price, whatever. You could incorporate user reviews too thru google or yahoo or citysearch or the news outlet's own site. I see some programs out there but this is an opportunity for news outlets to get more mileage out of their own content, in a program that is optimized for mobile devices.

Now if only I could program...

Test Dabble DB - Swine Flu

This is a test-
an embedded map of Swine Flu lab-confirmed cases in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control.




The data is screen-scraped off the CDC swine flu Web site by Dabble DB and visualized in a Dabble DB page.

More Facebook apps but less Facebook?

Last week Facebook announced it's opening the stream to developers here.
The stream is the core experience of Facebook, giving users info on the activities of their friends. Every update, picture upload, photo tag, wall-to-wall exchange, status change, etc., is atomized and beamed to your homepage. It's sortable, I think, if you categorize your friends into groups.
Here is Mark Zuckerberg's blog post on the stream and latest redesign, which users invariably seem to hate.

Anyway, with Facebook's Open Stream API, developers can program new widgets and Web sites to allow people to see their Facebook content without logging into Facebook.

The NYTimes gives an imperfect analogy of a corner grocery store giving away all its merchandise to anybody to sell for themselves, in exchange for the extra foot traffic that would propel the store to the social nexus of the neighborhood.

Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop are two applications (using the cloud-computing-esque Adobe Air) that let people control their Facebook and Twitter info without logging into those sites every time. I haven't tried these two products because my five-year-old Powerbook doesn't work with Air. But over a million people use Seesmic alone, and these sites are gaining in popularity.

It will be very interesting if Facebook's "altruism" can make it money. As the Times writes:

And if the developers somehow find a profitable niche, that would pose another concern. These companies might actually end up inadvertently asphyxiating Facebook and Twitter, both currently unprofitable, by drawing users and advertisers away from those sites.

If you give the content away, such that customers come to expect it, doesn't that limit your options to charge later? Facebook is starting to do what the AP and news outlets already do - give access to their content for free. But I don't think the news outlets make money off this, or else media execs wouldn't complain about Google making money off ads on its Google News aggregator.

Maybe Facebook will succeed in this game, either through advertising or by becoming the ultimate one-stop shop for social networking on the Internet. If so, news outlets should take note and copy Facebook's success.

Egads Google does everything

Well, in addition to providing:

• the best search algorithm on the Internet for content, hands down, in text, pictures and video
  
• free email
• context-driven advertising
• aggregated news from over a thousand news outlets
  
• interactive mapping technology
• word processing and number crunching
• cloud computing
• personal syndication of any content you want
• photo-sharing communities
• API's to let developers harness Google's technology for their own uses
  
• and most of the above offered on mobile platforms in addition to desktop platforms
• not to mention free hosting of this very blog and thousands of others;

Google is introducing yet another interesting and free product: visualization of public data, vis a vis interactive graphs of unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census. So Google's taking publicly available data and visualizing it using technology from Trendalyzer, a firm it acquired two years ago.

To see one of the new graphs, and there's one for each county and many cities in the nation I'm pretty sure, just type "unemployment rate" and a city or county and state into Google's search box. The graph appears at the top of the search results. Pretty cool.

In its blog entry announcing the new feature, Google says: "We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations."

Sounds like Google is taking a cue straight from the mission statements of newspapers. Of course, this is something newspapers and their Web sites don't readily do. So it's only fitting Google is going to eat our lunch.

Test database

Click here to load this Caspio Bridge DataPage.

Can you charge for content?

A trio of big-name media execs think you can. This NYTimes article is a little vague on the details but that makes sense.

Journalism Online L.L.C., their company, will have an automated system for news outlet to charge for content. After reading a certain amount of a story, a teaser, the user is prompted to pay for more.

The names, straight from the story, are:

Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and the YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media.

This would only work, I imagine, if every news outlet in a given market area or reader demographic group only distributed through this company. Obviously if you could get an AP feed from Google or somewhere with the same info, that would negate the need to pay for access. So would a country-wide media conglomerate be allowed to exist? Isn't there an anti-trust problem here?

Visualization test

This is a test graph using Many Eyes, a social visualization site. Many Eyes lets you upload data and play with different ways of showing it via graphs, charts, maps, and eye-popping crazy variants of these. You can share them and discuss others' work on the site. It's free. The researchers at IBM, who run this Web site, tell me they have no plans to add advertising to the site. They do, however, use the site for their own research.

Below is a bar graph of high school graduation and dropout rates for all Virginia school districts. This uses data from the Virginia Dept. of Education web site, which has all sorts of stuff on it, organized pretty cleanly. I just pulled out the graduation and dropout rates.



I may use this on timesdispatch.com if I can get the right results. As far as I can tell Many Eyes works best on data sets with only two columns. It doesn't work so great if you have multiple variables or (what would be on excel) a pivot table. By that I mean it doesn't let you drill down through multiple sets of linked data very easily. Still, there are tons of possibilities for this, and you can't beat free.

Video: rat basketball

Well yes this post is just self-promotion, but who can resist rats of the sewer variety jumping through hoops with a little ball?
A video I did at the Science Museum of Virginia, the week before the Final Four: