Kamis, 21 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Knight-backed Peepol.TV aims to be a social network for live video

Posted: 20 Jun 2012 12:30 PM PDT

When student protestors took to the streets of Santiago last year, Felipe Heusser watched as the press covered the darkest side of that movement, seeming to ignore the kiss-ins and superhero costumes.

To give his fellow Chileans an unfiltered view, Heusser attached an iPhone to a balloon and sent it high above the streets, transmitting live video. Within an hour that feed had attracted 10,000 viewers, he said. “What’s even greater is we saw the mainstream media begin to embed the content we created in their own websites,” he said.

This serendipitous act of balloon journalism, along with many others, inspired the idea for Peepol.TV, a newly minted Knight News Challenge winner. Heusser will get $360,000 to build a social network for live citizen video, what one external reviewer described as “a channel guide for the entire Internet” — tagged, mapped, and searchable. Heusser’s co-founder is developer Jeff Warren, whose Public Laboratory has pioneered balloon and kite mapping. Independent designer Chris Rogers is also joining the project.

The team plans to build a smartphone app that ties in to the Peepol.TV network. Warren said they want to consider all the needs of a typical user; for example, if you’re an Occupy Wall Street protestor, you’ll want to be able to download an archive of the video if a cop seizes your device. You’ll want an app that launches fast and sips on battery juice for reliability in the field.

“An open-source, nonprofit-backed project, as opposed to a company doing this for profit exclusively — we’re thinking about these use cases that aren’t necessarily the No. 1 business decision,” Warren said.

Peepol.TV mockup

After Heusser’s balloon idea first took off, so to speak, public interest waned. The aerial pictures were pretty but not very informational, “basically a bunch of dots of people several meters below,” Heusser said. So he and his colleagues at Ciudadano Inteligente, a Chilean NGO he founded, started working the ground, interviewing protestors on camera while simultaneously managing the bunches of balloons overhead. Heusser — like nearly all of this year’s Knight News Challenge winners — is not a journalist by training, but he had developed a sophisticated little newsgathering operation on the fly.

“We’ve been talking about it like an anchorperson,” Warren said. “There’s people out in the field shooting film, and then there’s an anchor person weaving together a story and presenting it to an audience, switching between videos.” The Peepol.TV team wants to build software that can let anchors create television-style broadcasts. They want to build Instagram-style filters to the video and music via SoundCloud’s APIs.

Heusser sees Peepol.TV being used in sporting events, concerts, traffic, or any place where lots of people are gathered for a common purpose. He wants to “democratize access to live content,” making it easy for someone to find out what’s happening nearby or to start shooting on a moment’s notice when news breaks. The problem with video streaming today, the reason so few people do it, he said, is “they don’t have the certainty that someone will see it.” People tweet, he said, because they know people will read that tweet. That’s why he thinks it’s important that Peepol.TV has social features like profiles, followers, and notifications. People need to know they have an audience.

It’s an ambitious undertaking that will be challenged, in part, by the limitations and variations of consumer hardware. Heusser said he would like to launch a product in a year. An early prototype of the software is live now, but there isn’t much to look at yet.

From social-media soap operas to magic orbs: 22 future-of-news hacks you’ve never seen before

Posted: 20 Jun 2012 11:55 AM PDT

Imagine a news article presented in the form of Choose Your Own Adventure. Or a virtual soap opera powered by the life events of your Facebook news feed. Or a widget that lets you edit the home page of any major news site. These are ideas that reimagine the future of news and information.

At this year’s MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, two back-to-back presentations I saw more ideas in 10 minutes than I’ve covered in a year. Dan Schultz, a recent MIT Media Lab grad, and Dan Sinker, head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, presented ideas ranging from real to fanciful. (Schultz managed to get through 18 in 4.5 minutes.) To watch the presentations, skip to about 1:07:10 in the video above.

The Knight Foundation awarded grants to more thought-out projects that will unfold over the course of 18 months. Here’s a look at some decidedly less developed projects, roughly categorized by their status. (I give credit to the inventors wherever possible; if I missed anyone, say so in the comments.)

Working code! (Still beta, might break)

NewsQuest lets you plug in the URL of a news article and then scans the web for multiple articles about the same topic. The interface presents only the first paragraph and then two questions about what the user wants to learn more about. Then another paragraph, then two more questions. Think of it as “News Your Own Adventure.” (Schultz, Laurian Gridinoc, Chris Droukas, Erhardt Graeff)

Condition of Anonymity presents an almost poetic look at the reasons The New York Times grants anonymity to sources. The app scans articles for that seemingly ubiquitous phrase, “on condition of anonymity,” and grabs the text that immediately follows. So the list reads like this:

  • for fear of of affecting his current practice.
  • for fear of reprisals.
  • for rear of retaliation by the institute.
  • for no apparent reason.

You can click any word to see how frequently it appears in articles.

NewsDiffs tracks the evolution of web stories and highlights the differences over time. The app tracks articles from The New York Times, CNN, and Politico and downloads a new copy whenever a change is made — whether it’s a minor copy fix, a deletion, or a major reframing of the article. The inspiration for NewsDiffs came, in part, from an October 2011 New York Times story about the Occupy protests, in which the lead was recast in a way that appeared to shift blame from the cops to the protestors.

Surfbored screen shot

Surfbored is like television programmed by your friends. It grabs YouTube videos shared by your Twitter connections and plays them full-screen. Bored? Click to skip to the next video, Pandora-style, or choose to get something completely random. To paraphrase my stepdad: People don’t want to know what’s on TV, they want to know what else is on. —Brian Boyer, Kara Oehler, Mark Boas, James Burns, Corey Ford, Jesse Shapins

Outside Mappers Guild overlays Instagram photos on a map and allows you to categorize them by topic. You can create image-based datasets to tell local stories. For example, a news organization might map abandoned houses in a neighborhood hit hard by foreclosure. —Jessica Lord, Max Ogden

NewsJack is a browser tool that lets you “hijack the front page of any news website in the world using Mozilla’s Hackasaurus. You can just point, click, change a headline and publish to share across the social web.” —Schultz, Sasha Costanza-Chock

Projects with code written, probably happening

ThoughtBox is like Twitter, but you follow only yourself. “You contribute thoughts and observations, which are immediately hidden from sight. They are then sent back to you over hours, days, and years.” —Schultz

Meta Meta Project is an API of APIs in a friendly, web-based interfaced. “Developers won't need to be domain experts to do things like recognize names in text or identify words in photographs or videos.” —Schultz

ATTN-SPAN “watches C-SPAN because you don't. It weeds out the signal from the noise to find clips that are relevant to you. It then automatically embeds those clips into related news articles while you're reading.” —Schultz

“What happens when every surface has the ability to display information? Wall Paper tracks proximity to only display content where it is wanted. The screens know where you are standing, and you can navigate information by walking around.” —Schultz

GPF (Globally Personalized Forum) is a “community hub that allows content to appear in more than one place. Users get the benefits of shared identity and privacy without being cut off from the rest of the world.” —Schultz

Truth Goggles is an automated B.S. detector for the Internet, which I first covered here last year. “It highlights fact-checked phrases inline and guides you through the process of thinking about them more carefully. It’s not telling you what to think but reminding you when it’s most important to think.” —Schultz

Concepts or products that exist but would need to be hacked

Grace Woo’s invisible QR codes could be embedded in video. “QR TV uses this to create information and experiences around specific moments. Clip sharing and extra layers of content suddenly become simple,” Schultz said.

Droplet demo

Droplet is a “tangible interface” designed by MIT’s Robert Hemsley. It’s a copper orb that stores data and interfaces; place it on a touch screen to reveal all of the information inside. Schultz said he would like newspapers to experiment with this technology.

“Ambient displays take large datasets and summarize them in the corner of your eye,” Schultz said. “Ambiartist is a toolset to make it easy to create and display digital artwork that reflects what’s going on in cyberspace.”

Doable things that are just ideas now

“Siri and Wolfram Alpha have shown that specialized questions can create really compelling user experiences,” Schultz said. Poliri would tap into government datasets to let users ask questions about civic matters. For example: “Poliri, where does my senator stand on health care reform?” —Schultz

TierRaid is a community-edited ranking of news organizations, fashioned after competitive gaming. “What are the Tier 1 newspapers? What makes them different from Tier 2 newspapers? Experts weigh in, and novices learn.” —Schultz

JESS3's visualization of new global top-level domains

TLD® visualizes the landscape of new top-level domains (.lol, .radio, .boston) to show us which corporations own the Internet. —Schultz

Media Empire is a real-time strategy game that teaches you how to manage resources. In this game, you earn different resources by consuming specific types of information in the real world. —Schultz

Carstagram is a hands-free, car-mounted camera that takes pictures of what’s happening on the road and uploads them to Google Street View. Just point and shout. —Schultz

Distributary is a directory of Twitter lists about every imaginable topic. Users can rate and share the lists. “It breaks apart the social river into smaller, curated, streams.” —Schultz

Never gonna happen

SocOpera is the days of our lives. “Facebook has trained us all to get updates about our friends through text, but we know that video and animation can be really compelling. So with SocOpera you can take from your network a cast of characters wait a week and watch an episode unfold before your eyes.” —Schultz

Recovers.org builds a platform to structure data to improve local diaster relief

Posted: 20 Jun 2012 07:30 AM PDT

During an emergency, one of any community’s most important asset is information. And that’s at least as true in the period after an emergency. When a flood sweeps through the streets or a hurricane lands, the civil authorities take hold and charitable groups start relief efforts. But neighbors often have to organize themselves with whatever tools are available at hand.

Knight News Challenge winner Recovers.org is designed to “turn interest into useful aid,” Caitria O’Neill told me. O’Neill, her sister Morgan, and software engineer Alvin Liang are the team behind Recovers.org, an online tool that towns and cities can use to better direct the flow of people and resources it takes to organize in the crucial period after an emergency.

Recovers.org acts as a traffic cop, funneling donations and volunteers where they are needed most. But instead of focusing on the larger operators like the Red Cross, Recovers.org wants to help organize efforts on a smaller level — the people offering cooked meals, or an extra pickup truck. Recovers.org is trying to build a framework to help people during disasters by using existing systems, whether that’s Facebook or the local PTA. With its $340,000 award from Knight, Recovers.org will increase its staff, hiring both developers to build out the system and organizers to help communities with their disaster preparations.

Caitria O'Neill“The problem is these large aid organizations, it’s not in their mission to structure the…resources in an area, so that structure falls to the people in the areas who have no training and tools,” O’Neill told me.

When a disaster strikes — or even before, if it’s the semi-predictable kind, like a hurricane — Recovers.org offers a turn-key local site at yourtown.recovers.org. The site creates a giant database to help identify victims, organize volunteers, and filter appropriate aid. Recovers.org directs people with three simple choices: “I was affected,” “I want to volunteer,” and “I want to give.” That last part is very important, O’Neill said, because it provides another avenue for people looking to provide goods or money. And for people who’ve seen a disaster on the news and are feeling generous, having another place to donate can make a big difference, O’Neill said.

Using a web-based organizing tool could prove problematic for an area with limited electricity or no working Internet. But O’Neill said Recovers.org can be a way to deliver attention and donations from the outside world as police, fire, and government services do the immediate repair and recovery work. When that phase ends is when the damage is assessed and needs start being reported, O’Neill said.

“There’s a spike and interest comes globally and comes quickly,” she said. “But needs are reported slowly.”

It was Caitria and Morgan’s personal experience that led to the creation of Recovers.org. Last summer, a tornado hit their hometown, Monson, Mass., leaving a trail of damage throughout the region. While volunteering at a relief center, the sisters began using Facebook to help coordinate the response on a neighbor-to-neighbor level. So whether it was someone needing work gloves to clear out a house, or a guy with a chainsaw looking to donate his time, it all went on the Facebook page. As a communications tool, Facebook worked, but the sisters also quickly realized the value of building a database of volunteers, projects, needs, and donations. The information was not only valuable in coordinating the recovery, but also providing the town with data to pass on to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “There is an incredible sinking feeling when you’ve just sent out 2,000 volunteers and you can’t prove it,” she said.

The pair had no previous disaster relief experience (though Morgan is a trained EMT), but both have worked as community organizers. O’Neill said the underlying principle is the same: build systems to structure data to better direct people and resources. “We’re trying to give tools and give voice to that community network and allow them to publish hyperlocal information,” she said.

Since Recovers.org was officially launched, they’ve signed up several municipalities, including two hit by tornadoes in Texas. Cities and towns that launch a site after a disaster are done pro bono, but O’Neill said their business model is licensing the site software to communities. The News Challenge funding comes amid other good news for the Recovers.org team, having won a $10,000 award at the MIT Ideas Global Challenge and being named a finalist in the MassChallenge.

Image of Monson tornado damage from the Massachusetts National Guard used under a Creative Commons license.
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