Showing posts with label news. Show all posts

Aug 22, 2010

Starting Points Core Topics - Headlines Aug 22, 2010

Apr 12, 2010

News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

From the start, Internet users have taken for granted that the territory was both a free-for-all and a digital disguise, allowing them to revel in their power to address the world while keeping their identities concealed.

A New Yorker cartoon from 1993, during the Web’s infancy, with one mutt saying to another, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” became an emblem of that freedom. For years, it was the magazine’s most reproduced cartoon.

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

The Washington Post plans to revise its comments policy over the next several months, and one of the ideas under consideration is to give greater prominence to commenters using real names.

The New York Times, The Post and many other papers have moved in stages toward requiring that people register before posting comments, providing some information about themselves that is not shown onscreen.

The Huffington Post soon will announce changes, including ranking commenters based in part on how well other readers know and trust their writing.

“Anonymity is just the way things are done. It’s an accepted part of the Internet, but there’s no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments,” said Arianna Huffington, a founder of The Huffington Post. “I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.”

The Plain Dealer of Cleveland recently discovered that anonymous comments on its site, disparaging a local lawyer, were made using the e-mail address of a judge who was presiding over some of that lawyer’s cases.

That kind of proxy has been documented before; what was more unusual was that The Plain Dealer exposed the connection in an article. The judge, Shirley Strickland Saffold, denied sending the messages — her daughter took responsibility for some of them. And last week, the judge sued The Plain Dealer, claiming it had violated her privacy.

The paper acknowledged that it had broken with the tradition of allowing commenters to hide behind screen names, but it served notice that anonymity was a habit, not a guarantee. Susan Goldberg, The Plain Dealer’s editor, declined to comment for this article. But in an interview she gave to her own newspaper, she said that perhaps the paper should not have investigated the identity of the person who posted the comments, “but once we did, I don’t know how you can pretend you don’t know that information.”

Some prominent journalists weighed in on the episode, calling it evidence that news sites should do away with anonymous comments. Leonard Pitts Jr., a Miami Herald columnist, wrote recently that anonymity has made comment streams “havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety.”

No one doubts that there is a legitimate value in letting people express opinions that may get them in trouble at work, or may even offend their neighbors, without having to give their names, said William Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia’s journalism school.

“But a lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl, with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher,” he said. “People who might have something useful to say are less willing to participate in boards where the tomatoes are being thrown.”

He said news organizations were willing to reconsider anonymity in part because comment pages brought in little revenue; advertisers generally do not like to buy space next to opinions, especially incendiary ones.

The debate over anonymity is entwined with the question of giving more weight to comments from some readers than others, based in part on how highly other readers regard them. Some sites already use a version of this approach; Wikipedia users can earn increasing editing rights by gaining the trust of other editors, and when reviews are posted on Amazon.com, those displayed most prominently are those that readers have voted “most helpful” — and they are often written under real names.

Hal Straus, interactivity editor of The Washington Post, said, “We want to be able to establish user tiers, and display variations based on those tiers.” The system is still being planned, but he says it is likely that readers will be asked to rate comments, and that people’s comments will be ranked in part based on the trust those users have earned from other readers — an approach much like the one The Huffington Post is set to adopt. Another criterion could be whether they use their real names.

But experience has shown that when users help rank things online, sites may have to guard against a concerted campaign by a small group of people voting one way and skewing the results.

A popular feature on The Wall Street Journal’s site lets readers decide whether they want to see only those comments posted by subscribers, on the theory that the most dedicated readers might make for a more serious conversation.

A few news organizations, including The Times, have someone review every comment before it goes online, to weed out personal attacks and bigoted comments. Some sites and prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, simply do not allow comments.

Some news sites review comments after they are posted, but most say they do not have the resources to do routine policing. Many sites allow readers to flag objectionable comments for removal, and make some effort to block comments from people who have repeatedly violated the site’s standards.

If commenters were asked to provide their real names for display online, some would no doubt give false identities, and verifying them would be too labor-intensive to be realistic. But news executives say that merely making the demand for a name and an e-mail address would weed out much of the most offensive commentary.

Several industry executives cited a more fundamental force working in favor of identifying commenters. Through blogging and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, millions of people have grown accustomed to posting their opinions — to say nothing of personal details — with their names attached, for all to see. Adapting the Facebook model, some news sites allow readers to post a picture along with a comment, another step away from anonymity.

“There is a younger generation that doesn’t feel the same need for privacy,” Ms. Huffington said. “Many people, when you give them other choices, they choose not to be anonymous.”

Apr 1, 2010

The Rising Stars of Gossip Blogs - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBase

By ALEX WILLIAMS

IT had all the elements for the perfect tabloid gossip item — a clash between star financial journalists, big egos and a surprise ouster that had Wall Street buzzing: Henry Blodget, the well-known disgraced-analyst-turned-financial-pundit and co-founder of the much-read blog, The Business Insider, stunned the financial community last week by firing John Carney, the star managing editor of the site’s Clusterstock blog, reportedly because of philosophical differences over the site’s coverage.

The news, which was quickly picked up by the Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, who subsequently sparked an online spat of his own with Mr. Blodget, did not break in a gossip column like The New York Post’s Page Six or in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which in a previous era might have owned this story. Rather, the scoop came from a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer.

Image via CrunchBase

Surfing the Web after business hours one evening, Mr. Kamer ran across speculation about Mr. Carney’s job status on a Twitter post by Gawker Media’s owner, Nick Denton. After 90 minutes of phone calls to sources within the financial journalism subculture, Mr. Kamer nailed down the item and posted it on the Voice site.

The lines between “reporter” and “blogger,” “gossip” and “news” have blurred almost beyond distinction. No longer is blogging something that marginalized editorial wannabes do from home, in a bathrobe, because they haven’t found a “real” job. Blogging now is a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence and an actual paycheck. As more gossip action in a variety of fields moves online, young writers who might have hungrily chased an editorial assistant job at Condé Nast a few years ago now move to New York with the dream of making it as a blogger — either launching their own blog into the big time, à la Perez Hilton, or getting snapped up by a prominent blog network like Gawker Media or MediaBistro.

And although the better-known newspaper gossip columnists still churn along, among them Richard Johnson and Cindy Adams of The New York Post, and George Rush and Joanna Molloy of The New York Daily News, much of the action has moved online, with the up-and-coming players having little in common with legendary predecessors like Walter Winchell and Liz Smith. While Ms. Smith, 87 and still active, toiled in journalism for nearly 30 years before getting her own by-lined column (working first, among other things, as a typist, proofreader and radio producer), some of the newest notables in gossip are still in their 20s and only a few years removed from the days when they blogged from their college dorm rooms about fraternity hazing mishaps and the quality of the cafeteria food.

The following are profiles of nine emerging gossip bloggers, whose names came up in interviews with influential blog entrepreneurs, fellow bloggers and other journalists as potential future stars of the online world. The list, by no means exhaustive, represents a cross-section of New Yorkers covering varied beats — entertainment, fashion, real estate, finance —for a variety of prominent blog networks. Some, like Sara Polsky of Curbed and Lilit Marcus of The Gloss, are relatively new to the business, but recently installed in a position of prominence by Web star-makers like Lockhart Steele, who runs Curbed and Eater, or Elizabeth Spiers, a founder of Gawker in 2002 who has introduced a number of successful blogs since then. Others, like Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com, are popular niche players who are quickly crossing into the mainstream.

ERIN CARLSON: Editor, Crushable

If you’re starting a high-profile blog in the already saturated, and fiercely competitive, celebrity-gossip category, you had better have an edge. And Elizabeth Spiers, who debuted Crushable last month for the Canadian company b5media, says she has a plan to differentiate her new blog from the competition, including heavyweights like Perez Hilton, who happens to have been a roommate years ago, and new sites like Bonnie Fuller’s Hollywood Life. Go young.

Crushable, run by the 29-year-old Ms. Carlson, a former Associated Press entertainment reporter, seeks to leave the bulk of the Brangelina coverage to the other guys and focus more on a Teen Vogue-ish 15-to-25-year-old female market. So look out for more news on more hunky young stars like Matt Bomer of “White Collar” and Cory Monteith of “Glee,” as well as tweens like Lourdes Leon, Madonna’s 13-year-old fashion designer daughter.

Ms. Carlson seems well-pedigreed for her job. At The Associated Press, she reported the story of the $14 million sale of photos of the Brad-Angelina twins, and last year, the story of Sean Penn’s split from his wife, Robin Wright Penn.

NOTABLE SCOOP: Reported this week that the rumored relationship between Rob Kardashian and Angela Simmons, which some gossips had speculated was a Kardashian family publicity stunt, was real, according to a source.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: None yet. It’s early.

TOMMYE FITZPATRICK: Editor, Fashionologie

Short indeed is the list of fashion influencers whose journey to that tent in Bryant Park took a detour through a biomedical-engineering course load at Duke University. But that’s what Ms. Fitzpatrick, now 25, was mired in when she started Fashionologie in her dorm room in 2005 as a kind of study break. In five years, she has managed to distance herself from the infinite number of would-be Anna Wintours blogging from their bedrooms and actually made the industry insiders take notice. Fashionologie now attracts 1.5 million page-views a month, and has seen a 45 percent increase in visits over the last year, according to Ms. Fitzpatrick, and is being linked to established fashion sites like Refinery29 and The Cut at New York Magazine.

While primarily a news aggregator and style curator, as opposed to a gotcha-style gossip columnist, Ms. Fitzpatrick, is driving traffic while providing plenty of original content of late. In competition with rival sites like Fashionista, she reports from the front lines at the shows in Paris, London and Milan, and interviews designers like Alexander Wang and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy. She routinely mines online fashion forums for tips, sources and insider arcana (when Vogue’s André Leon Talley joined Twitter, you read about it in Fashionologie).

NOTABLE SCOOP: She recently reported that Alexander McQueen had done final fittings on a substantial part of his fall collection before his death.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Posted one item recently describing a Twitter account supposedly belonging to Anna Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer. But when she noticed that it linked to one purporting to be be her mother’s, which had only one tweet (“those poseurs got to stop”), she determined it to be bogus and quickly removed the item.

FOSTER KAMER: Staff writer, The Village Voice news blog, Runnin’ Scared

Mr. Kamer may cite The Village Voice’s co-founder, Norman Mailer, as a personal inspiration, but online he comes off a bit like a Wi-Fi era hybrid of J. J. Hunsecker and H. L. Mencken, delivering missives on the news media, politics and New York culture in an acerbic, knowing tone — even by Gawker alumni standards —sometimes at lengths that call to mind Op-Ed essays more than gossip items. The former weekend editor at Gawker and assistant editor at BlackBook.com, he seems to know everyone and everything about the tight-knit — some might say incestuous — New York online-gossip subculture. The big figures in that subculture consider Mr. Kamer a rising force. “He’s supremely talented,” said Mr. Steele, when asked his opinion on which rising stars to focus on for this article. “He qualifies as a must-include.”

Mr. Kamer, who started at The Voice last month, wasted little time afflicting the comfortable. An off-color wisecrack about James Dolan in a recent item about the media mogul’s rumored purchase of the Gothamist blog may have cost his paper more than $20,000 in advertising revenue; the IFC Center, a Dolan property, recently pulled a $400-a-week ad from The Voice, Mr. Kamer claimed in his blog. The square-off inspired Gawker’s Adrian Chen to joke in a recent item that his former colleague “has been busily blogging the Village Voice to financial ruin.”

It might be a reasonable price to pay for alternative weekly if Mr. Kamer can help The Voice, struggling for an identity along with most alternative weeklies in the Internet era, end up with its biggest gossip must-read since James Ledbetter in the ’90s.

NOTABLE SCOOP: The John Carney story.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: At Gawker, he ran an item about a University of Minnesota journalism professor excoriating the traditional news organizations for ignoring the Jon and Kate Gosselin story. The story, picked up from The Huffington Post, turned out to be a satirical piece written by the humorist Andy Borowitz.

STEVE KRAKAUER: Television editor, Mediaite.com

No one thought the world needed another media gossip site when Dan Abrams, a former general manager of MSNBC, started Mediaite.com last July. But at least he brought in a credentialed team — including the well-known media blogger Rachel Sklar — to help him elbow his way into a crowded market. At 26, Mr. Krakauer is not only the site’s youngest editor, but also a seasoned reporter in his own right. He honed his skills as an assistant editor at MediaBistro’s influential TVNewser site, which became an industry staple under former editor Brian Stelter, now a New York Times media reporter.

He is already starting to break a steady stream of scoops, like his posts that reported that ABC was planning a major layoff in February, or the story last October that Fox News’s 3 a.m. show was getting better ratings than CNN’s 8 p.m. primetime show — a fact that Fox later worked into an advertising campaign. Some in the news media are starting to take notice. Last year, Rush Limbaugh quoted Mr. Krakauer’s TVNewser podcast with Terry Moran, the co-anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” in his radio show. The Hollywood site The Wrap listed him along with Ryan Seacrest and The Los Angeles Times media reporter, Joe Flint, on its list of “50 TV Insiders to Follow Right Now” on Twitter last fall.

NOTABLE SCOOP: His post in February about the NBC cafeteria’s fried chicken menu in honor of Black History Month had Wanda Sykes joking about it on Jay Leno that night.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Last August, reported that Fox News’s Twitter account had been hacked and littered with nasty comments about Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly — a juicy scoop, except that the account was a hoax.

BESS LEVIN: Editor, Dealbreaker

Success is often just being in the right place at the right time. So it was perhaps fortuitous that Bess Levin’s former co-editor at this sharp-fanged financial gossip site, John Carney, left it for Ms. Levin to run solo in the fall of 2008, just as blood was starting to flow on Wall Street. Since then, Ms. Levin has elbowed her way into an exclusive and still heavily male club, becoming a must-read not only for $250,000-a-year-bonus investment bank drones wondering which boss’s head is about to roll, but also among the corner-office types themselves. Financial powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, as well as hedge fund managers like Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, have been known to visit the site.

In February, Dealbreaker was named one of the 10 best Wall Street blogs by The Wall Street Journal’s David Weidner, who wrote that “Dealbreaker is full of Wall Street snark and has a potty mouth to boot.” Of the 10, Ms. Levin’s was only one of two written by a woman (though a few are anonymous), and certainly the only one by a woman who was 25 and never worked on the Street.

NOTABLE SCOOP: After BusinessWeek published a profile of Mr. Cohen in 2003 that referred to, but did not show, party invitations that his wife sent out of the prominent but discreet hedge-fund manager dressed up in a king costume, the invitations entered into Wall Street lore, sight unseen. Ms. Levin finally dug up an image of the regal invitation and ran it last November.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Published an “unfounded rumor” that a major hedge fund’s prime brokers were threatening liquidation at the height of the financial mess in late 2008. It turns out the rumor was indeed “unfounded,” so she quickly removed it under pressure.

LILIT MARCUS: Editor, The Gloss

The Gloss, a fashion and beauty site that also focuses on career, dating, women’s issues and culture, is another new site in the growing b5 media stable that was overseen by Elizabeth Spiers, a challenge of sorts to Jezebel.com. Ms. Marcus, 27, is its highly regarded editor. Before taking over at Jewcy.com, an irreverent blog about Jewish issues and culture, in 2008, Ms. Marcus founded SaveTheAssistants.com, a forum that gave beleaguered assistants a place to sound off anonymously about their jerk bosses, like the one who stole a book from his assistant and gave it to his girlfriend. The site grew out of her grueling experience as an administrative assistant for a media company.

The site, which she later spun off into a book, attracted attention on National Public Radio and CNN.com, which compared the tales on the site with those on “The Office”: “Bosses like Michael Scott do exist and employees have to deal with them every day,” the article reported. “The good news is they don’t have to commiserate alone.” Even though Ms. Marcus has never named the company that inspired the site, its management still threatens to sue her, she said. “There’s a saying where I come from: ‘if they’re shooting at you, you’re doing something right,” the North Carolina-bred Ms. Marcus said. “I think about that a lot as a gossip writer.”

While Ms. Marcus and Ms. Spiers acknowledge the inevitable Jezebel comparisons, they also bristle. The site, which focuses on fashion and beauty as much as the latest from the feminist writer Cynthia Ozick, aims to be lighter, Ms. Spiers said. “The Gloss is more playful, it’s funnier,” she said of her site, which relies heavily on fashion and beauty as well as stories about bigger women’s issues. “Jezebel is more Ms. Magazine. The Gloss is not a humor site, but humor is one of its key components.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: A recent Gloss item about tensions between Tinsley Mortimer and her sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer, was picked up by Page Six.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: It’s early, and no major strike-throughs yet, although the site did take some heat from fashion bloggers for not doing more to get the other side on a recent post about an alleged sexual overture by the photographer Terry Richardson toward one of his models.

FRED MWANGAGUHUNGA: Founder, MediaTakeOut.com

A Columbia Law-educated former corporate lawyer from Hollis, Queens, whose previous professional apogee was founding a high-end laundry and dry-cleaning service, Mr. Mwangaguhunga came to blogging in his third decade of life, a little late to qualify as a prodigy. But that doesn’t seem to have held him back. In four years, his site, which focuses on the urban culture industries, now attracts a following of five million unique visitors a month; traffic grew by 125 percent last year alone. His items are routinely picked up by sites like TMZ.com, enhancing his reputation — which he is perfectly happy to encourage — as the Matt Drudge of African-American entertainment.

And lately, mainstream journalists and sites are starting to pay a lot more attention. Mediaite.com, the media gossip blog, called him one of the top online blog editors of 2009 and explaining: “The site, which covers black celebrity gossip, boasts an enormous readership and regularly breaks big stories. To wit: they called Lady Gaga’s decision to pull out of Kanye West’s tour a day before it was reported elsewhere, and — if this can be called a scoop — they were the first to run the infamous nude Rihanna pictures.” Meanwhile, the site’s first post about Chris Brown’s assault on his former girlfriend attracted 100,000 hits in its first few minutes, Mr. Mwangaguhunga said.

Last year, The New York Beacon, a newspaper that focuses on African-American issues, praised his “significant reach in the vastly ignored urban community.” And Mr. Mwangaguhunga himself seems supremely confident about his site’s future: “If done properly, I don’t see any reason why MediaTakeOut can’t be as popular as TMZ.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: That news about Lady Gaga.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Announced the birth of the N.F.L. player Vince Young’s daughter, before paternity tests showed that the child was not his.

MAUREEN O’CONNOR: Weekend and night editor, Gawker

Talk about coming of age in the Internet era. Ms. O’Connor, 25, has never had a journalism job that even remotely involved a print product, having started at Princeton blogging for the IvyGate, a popular gossip blog about the Ivy League. “Our bread and butter was the scandals and follies of Ivy League students and faculty — hazing bloopers, secret societies, campus controversies,” said Ms. O’Connor, who tracked campus stories like that of Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who stirred a national controversy with her hoax project supposedly involving aborted fetuses, during her time there.

After graduation, Ms. O’Connor landed a job at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast as a home-page editor, and then, in November, started as weekend editor for Gawker, the Nick Denton site that has been the launch pad for nearly a whole generation of blogosphere stars, including Choire Sicha and Jessica Coen, who served the online managing editor for New York Magazine before recently returning to Jezebel, a Gawker Media blog.

Ms. O’Connor is off to a strong start at Gawker. Her lengthy obituary of the heiress Casey Johnson — “among the first celebutantes to decamp to Hollywood in search of 21C fame,” she wrote — attracted 100,000 hits in January.

NOTABLE SCOOP: In January, she began an “investigation” into the White House budget director Peter Orszag’s hair — a rug or a barber’s misfire, you be the judge — that became a fleeting Internet meme in its own right.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Took Fox News to task over a typo in a chyron (a term for the graphics at the bottom of a TV screen) identifying former the Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth as a “congresswoman.” Too bad Ms. O’Connor misspelled the word chyron in the post.

SARA POLSKY: Editor, Curbed

Curbed, the real-estate blog that attracts two million page views a month, is a something of an addiction for many in a town that is (still) addicted to real estate, even after the crash. Ms. Polsky, 24, is its newest voice, an understudy to longtime editor Joey Arak and Lockhart Steele, the site’s founder, who is one of the most influential blog personalities in town, and thus a star-maker of sorts. Ms. Polsky, whose prior experience consisted of a year as an editorial assistant at Real Deal magazine, is up against stiff competition. The field is dominated locally by older, established real estate professionals, like Jonathan Miller of the Matrix, who is the head of a major appraisal company,; and Douglas Heddings of TrueGotham, a long-time broker. Even Jonathan Butler of chief competitor Brownstoner used to run a hedge fund. The big rivals are generally “written by people who are in the industry,” she said. “They can write about how brokers work, or what the statistics say. We have more of a laypersons’ approach.” But unlike bloggers of old, this Harvard graduate is not above old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, like the time she trekked out to Greenpoint in November to watch a developer silence the gavel at a major auction of new condominium units when early sales on units priced up to $599,000 started selling in the $200,000s. Like the best bloggers, Mr. Steele said, “she’s got the jaundiced eye, that I’m always looking for, but it’s not knee-jerk negativity.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: Polsky posted an item about the townhouse in TriBeCa that was once designated by John and Yoko’s as the “embassy” for their conceptual country of Nutopia, hitting the market for $3.25 million; the item got picked up by Beatles fan sites around the world.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: No whoppers, but mistakes happen, like the recent item where she mistakenly identified the firm behind the renovation of the developer Adam Gordon’s Jane Street town house.

Jan 16, 2010

ICT4Peace Inventorisation Wiki / Haiti Earthquake - January 2010

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. The ICT4Peace Foundation presents the following resources as those that contain, or in turn point to, resources including datasets, emergency numbers, helplines and updates, vital to aid efforts.

Information from the ground / Haiti

Twitter feeds

http://twitter.com/cnnbrk/haiti (from CNN / requires manual refresh)
http://spy.appspot.com/find/%23haiti?latest=100 (aggregation from a number of sites / works best on Firefox / automatic refresh)
Twitter lists: @NYTimes/haiti-earthquake; @BreakingNews/haiti-quake; @nprnews/haiti-earthquake;
Alertnet Haiti Earthquake Live blog (now archived, with text, audio, photos and video)

Citizen media (including on the ground reporting and updates)

Haiti earthquake and citizen media response

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake (refresh often for more updates and edits)

Google social media updates

Google’s own social media search, which is updated every second automatically)

News services

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456322.stm (live updates from the BBC)
YouTube video updates (for videos from news services and citizen journalism)
Google News aggregation of news updates on earthquake (refresh for updates)
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/haiti.quake/ (CNN special page to cover earthquake)

Local media websites (recommended by Google)

TNH, Le Nouvelliste, Radio Metropole Haiti, Radio Galaxie, Radio Ginen

Videos on the earthquake and its aftermath

A collection of videos on YouTube curated by Citizen Tube.

UN + Reliefweb

http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/minustah/index.shtml (MINUSTAH page)
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/doc106?OpenForm&rc=2&cc=hti (Latest updates from Haiti / response times slow on account of traffic)

Blog updates

Google blog search (refresh for updated blog posts, aggregated by Google)

Crisis Information Management (Actors & situation reports)

http://haiti.ushahidi.com (Ushahidi implementation has vital information up)
http://haiti-orgs.sahanafoundation.org/prod (Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal, which includes a list of NGOs on the ground)
http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:start (wiki to help set up Sahana in Haiti)
InSTEDD Situation Report 14 January 2010 (courtesy Ushahidi Situation Room. Direct download here as Word doc.)
InSTEDD Situation Report 15 January 2010 (courtesy Ushahidi Situation Room. Direct download here as Word doc.)

Crisis Information Management (Blogs by key actors)

http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake/ (Ushahidi’s efforts to respond to the earthquake)
Ushahidi Situation Room (linked to Ushahidi deployment in Haiti)
http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:start (wiki to help set up Sahana in Haiti)

Missing persons registries

Haitian Earthquake Registry (a site to share information about people you know who are affected by the Earthquake in Haiti)
Family News Network of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Haiti - Earthquake 2010 (available in French and English)
Haiti Situation Tracking Form by Google (available in French and English. This is now replaced by entry / initiative below.)
Person Finder by Google (updated with over 3,000 names at the time of writing)

DPKO Support for UN staff and families

DPKO Support Page for UN Staff in Haiti on Facebook
Twitter feed by DPKO on Haiti

Wikis for aggregation ground info and help

http://mobileactive.org/earthquake-haiti-how-you-can-help-and-learn-more (by MobileActive.org, well populated)
http://globalvoicesonline.org/specialcoverage/haiti-earthquake-2010/ (by the hugely respected Global Voices, updated regularly)

Mapping data / Imagery etc

http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake (set up by Crisis Commons)

Wikis for aggregation ground info and help

http://mobileactive.org/earthquake-haiti-how-you-can-help-and-learn-more (by MobileActive.org, well populated)
http://globalvoicesonline.org/specialcoverage/haiti-earthquake-2010/ (by the hugely respected Global Voices, updated regularly)

Mapping data / Imagery / GIS

Google Maps with post-earthquake satellite imagery overlays
Google Earth KML file, also with post-earthquake satellite imagery overlays
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake (set up by Crisis Commons)
Wikiproject Haiti (has a good list of GIS datasets on Haiti)
The UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) has produced a map identifying road and bridge obstacles in Port-au-Prince to support the international humanitarian relief effort in Haiti: Satellite-Identified IDP Concentrations, Road & Bridge Obstacles in Central Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Maps from Reliefweb on the crisis

Logistics and infrastructure

UN Logistics Cluster Haiti Earthquake Update webpage
Medical facilities (as of 15th January, information unconfirmed since media reports suggest many were hit bad by earthquake and have been rendered useless.)
OCHA Map of Haiti Quake Epicenter

Photos from Haiti

Photo collection from Doctors Without Borders
Large photo collection from the Denver News (contains graphic content)
Port au Prince destruction by the New York Times (excellent visualisation of pre and post earthquake imagery)

Ways to help

The ICT4Peace Foundation is, unless specifically noted, not in any way associated with or part of the initiatives mentioned below. We cannot therefore vouch for their work, but have pointed to reliable sources such as Google who have first flagged the initiatives.

Google Crisis Response on Haiti lists a number of aid agencies that have set up helplines and ways to deliver aid.
The Lede by the New York Times on how to contribute to aid.
Aidwatch publishes the following ways to help:
1. Philanthropy Action Advice for Donors to Haiti
2. Chris Blattman suggests Haiti Partners
3. Tyler Cowen and many others recommend Paul Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health
4. GlobalGiving has a list of 20 organizations already working in Haiti and has set up a Relief Fund for Haiti Earthquake
Donate using Apple iTunes (only confirmed for those in the US)

Aug 26, 2009

Magma: A Billboard Hot 100 for Online Video

August 25th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

Online video is a giant sea of mostly unfiltered content. There were 11.2 billion video streams in July in the US alone. That’s a ton of video.

So how do you go about finding the best video the web has to offer? You can just watch the popular listings on YouTube, but you’re going to get a lot of Fred and Phillip DeFranco. Some companies have launched their own solutions, including eGuders (media expert recommendations) and Reddit.tv (browse top videos on Reddit).

But now the founder of RocketBoom has launched his own solution: Mag.ma, a video aggregator and rating algorithm that acts like the Billboard Hot 100 of online video.

Hop onto the website and it’s immediately apparent what you should do: watch videos. The system takes videos from YouTube (), Hulu (), Vimeo (), TED, and more. Each of the videos are ranked in terms of “hotness” on a scale of 1 to 11. All of this is done in a column-based interface to show where Magma is finding top videos.

Magma also offers users the chance to interact with the Magma charts, either by adding videos (there’s a bookmarklet to help) or by signing up and personalizing your account and channel list.

Magma helps solve a difficult problem – oversaturation of video – with a clever solution and does it with a clean but content-rich interface. It takes into account social sharing on Twitter (), Facebook (), and elsewhere to rank videos. So far, we’re impressed and look forward to hearing more about this new service.

Jul 30, 2009

Getting the Full 360 on Silobreaker

by Gary Price

Searching for news is a task both information professionals and the users we train are doing all of the time using one of many news search databases.

One powerful news search database I like a lot gets very little attention, and I think that needs to change.
The resource I’m talking about is Silobreaker. It’s been online for several years and aggregates content from more than 10,000 news sites, blogs, and multimedia sources.

Best of all, access to this London- and Stockholm-based news search tool is free. While not perfect (what is?), it’s a search tool you will want to know about.

Silobreaker is powerful due to its advanced search interface located next to the primary search box, which enables you to limit in a number of ways including by source, content type, date, etc. Even more important are the many additional resources not found on most other news search engines, providing options that can help make sense of the news. They provide not only links to news results but also useful intelligence.

Take a look on the charts and tables located on the right side of the homepage and you’ll see what I’m talking about. All of these features are also searchable via the links found directly above the main search box.

Notice the drop-down menu from the search box that appears as you enter your search terms. If the term(what Silobreaker calls an 'entity') is in the database, you’ll see it here. It can help you focus your search even before you click.

Just because a search topic doesn’t have a drop down option does not mean it isn’t searchable on Silobreaker. However, results -- like on any news search tool -- may vary. Here’s an example of a search results page for an entity not in the database.

With that understood, Silobreaker is most powerful with entities in their database. They even ask for help in identifying new entities and sources. Look for the link at the very top of any page.

At the top of the homepage, you’ll spot a hyperlink labeled '360° search'. This is the default search option. Here’s the resulting 360 search on General Motors.

Note the brief company information available at the top left of the page including a link to a Silobreaker fact sheet about GM.

This service also works for searches about people. For example, Barack Obama. Again, you’ll see brief bio info along with other information. Click the bio link and you’ll receive a full bio about the President gleaned from Silobreaker sources. Very useful. All of this is in addition to the news stories that the database provides.

The next search option at the top of the search box is called 'Network' and it graphically displays how people or topics in the database relate to other people and/or topics in the full database. This is an interactive tool. Cursor over any of the boxes and you’ll see what the relationship is via a text snippet. Here’s the 'Network' page for Global Warming.

Option number three is labeled 'Hot Spots'. Here you’ll find a map that gives an idea of where the underlying stories are about. Again using Barack Obama as the search topic, take a look at this Hot Spot map.

You'll notice lots of content about the Middle East. Obama is heading their today (6/3/2009).

The 'Trends' option gives you a graphical look at how much attention topic or person is getting in the press over a period of time. Here’s the trends page for U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.

OK, that was a lot to take in. Let’s review using a 360° degree search for Gordon Brown.

Note the main search results like you would find with any news search tool. The entities located below each article are clickable.

On the right side of the page take note of the following:

Video search results (if available)
'In focus' (people, places, events related to Brown (clickable)
'Content volume' for searches about Gordon Brown broken down by source type
A 'Network' graph that identifies and shows relationships
'Hot Spots' that illustrate where the news is coming from (clickable)
A 'Trends' graph that illustrates the amount of content about Prime Minister Brown versus other people in the news.

Finally, while Silobreaker offers many options the learning curve does not take a long time. It’s actually quite fun. You’ll be up and running in no time. Pages on the site also provide more help if needed.

Jun 26, 2009

Canada Asia News Service, June 26, 2009

Editorials

THE ECONOMIST, London: Taiwan's President and China

AFP: Indonesia Radio Becomes Voice for Tolerance

By Jerome Rivet

JAKARTA (AFP), June 26 — A young radio news agency in Indonesia is attracting fans and international recognition for programming that eschews "infotainment" and focuses on hard issues like human rights and corruption.

Founded 10 years ago after the fall of the Suharto dictatorship, KBR-68H is making the most of the liberalisation of Indonesia's media to spread values of free speech and religious tolerance across the huge archipelago.

The country's only independent national news agency now has a network of more than 600 local radio affiliates and an audience of more than 18 million people in almost all corners of the mainly Muslim country.

Co-founder and managing director Santoso said that in the era of Facebook and Twitter, old-fashioned radio was still the "cheapest and most flexible" way to reach a wide audience.

"Our goal is to expand our network to Indonesia's remote areas such as central Papua, Sumba island or Maluku. It will encourage citizen participation and strengthen democracy," he said.

As Indonesia is broken up into thousands of islands, the best way in KBR's view to reach listeners is to offer ready-made programming to community radio stations in each region.

"We send eight hours of programmes per day -- news bulletins, reports and a lot of interactive talk shows," production director Heri Hendratmoko said.

The subscription fee can be as low as 10 dollars a month. The subject matter is serious: human rights, corruption, economic development, deforestation, religious tolerance, women's health.

"These are the key themes for a country like Indonesia, which is in the process of democratisation," Santoso said.

And in a country where the airwaves are swamped every day with giddy celebrity stories, KBR stands apart.

"We refuse to do 'infotainment' -- light news -- like most of the commercial radio and television stations," Hendratmoko said.

"It is very important in today's Indonesia to make in-depth reports and discuss issues such as deforestation or local corruption."

Wanting to be faithful to the activist spirit in which KBR was founded, the station's journalists are not afraid to get their hands dirty in the pursuit of balanced news.

Eric Mahaley, owner of KBR-affiliate DMS Radio in Ambon, said the network won respect for its reporting of bloody fighting between Muslims and Christians in the area between 2002 and 2004.

"During the Muslim-Christian sectarian conflict, the radio owned by Christians and Muslims was a voice of tolerance and dialogue," he said.

"From 2002 to 2004, we broadcasted appeals launched by kids to stop the conflict. I think this played a significant role in raising awareness of the local people."

Sometimes its broadcasts upset vested interests such as illegal loggers or religious extremists, but KBR is able to fall back on its right to free speech which is well established in post-Suharto Indonesia.

It also works with government ministries on community service programming, for example to explain the latest economic reforms or to promote maternal health.

"In remote areas of Papua or Nusa Tenggara, radio is the only media available. There is no electricity, so almost no TV, and newspapers are not delivered," Hendratmoko said.

Where electricity is scarce, the radio network has worked with aid agencies to build solar-energy or microhydro generators to run community radios, he said.

Employing 100 people at its head office in Jakarta, KBR has diversified in recent years.

It has launched Green Radio, specialising in environmental issues, a video service with the Tempo Group for local television and an international service which is picked up by around 50 stations from Nepal to Australia.

In recognition of its hard work, KBR won the 2008-2009 King Baudouin International Development Prize in Belgium on May 19 this year, worth some 150,000 euros (209,000 dollars).

Presented every two years since 1980, the prize recognises contributions to the development of southern hemisphere countries or to links between developing and industrialised countries.

Jun 10, 2009

Wikipedia Articles Appear in Google News Results

Mashable, Ben Parr, June 9 - Google News has built a strong reputation on its ability to quickly find, sort and deliver news information and sources. It takes information from news websites like CNN and Reuters, newspapers like The New York Times, and news blogs like Mashable (

). This provides you with a broad overview of the news.

Wikipedia (), on the other hand, is the world’s largest collection of collaboratively-edited information online. Because the articles are built by the hands of so many users, Wikipedia articles can quickly become comprehensive, detail-rich, and filled with sources and info on major news stories and events. Google () apparently sees great value in that information. So much so, in fact, that Wikipedia articles are starting to appear in Google News results.

While Wikipedia ranks highly in standard Google results, they have never appeared in Google News until now. After all, Wikipedia isn’t a news organization. Yet an article from CNN may provide you with a headline and a few paragraphs of information, but not provide the background and depth that a Wikipedia article can have. If you’re looking for the background on Tienamen Square or the Air France tragedy, you’re likely to find all you need there.

Image Credit: Nieman Lab

Google recently told the Nieman Journalism Lab of Harvard University that they’re currently experimenting with displaying Wikipedia articles as a reference and complement to current events news. That means that you might not see the links yet, and Google could end the experiment and remove Wikipedia results at anytime. Yet it seems that Google has an affinity for the community collaboration model, and we’d be surprised if Google doesn’t continue the integration after it collects enough data.

Are Wikipedia articles better sources of information than credible news sources? No, but they’re not worse, either. Wikipedia articles are an aggregation of news information sources to build a comprehensive picture. And having that information available along with news results provides the user with a different option for finding the information he or she is seeking.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/09/wikipedia-google-news/

Jun 4, 2009

Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media

Mashable, Josh Catone, June 3 - In March of this year, National Public Radio (NPR) revealed that by the end of 2008, 23.6 million people were tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR's ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they've managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.

Compared to cable news, where most networks are shedding viewers, and newspapers, where circulation continues to plummet, NPR is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.

But what is NPR doing differently that's causing their listener numbers to swell? They basically have a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape where traditional methods of consumption (TV, radio, print) could be greatly marginalized in favor of digital distribution.

A Focus On Local

Though most people think of NPR as a radio station, it's actually a news gathering and production organization that sources and creates content for member stations (which are different than affiliates in that they're completely independent entities). According to new CEO Vivian Schiller, that means that NPR has a culture incredibly devoted to local coverage. "To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans' local coverage," she told mediabistro.com in April.

radio Focusing on local information is a very smart approach for two reasons. One, because as Schiller says, it fills a gap in coverage, and two, because many people feel that delivering and aggregating hyperlocal content will be an important part of the future of media. In 2007, Alex Iskold, the CEO of semantic web application company AdaptiveBlue, predicted the rise of hyperlocal information, indicating that extremely targeted local advertising could be the path forward for the ad industry.

"Despite globalization, hyperlocal information is very valuable both to people and advertisers. In the coming years, we will be seeing the rise of a new way to look at information - geography. Inspired by utility and the promise of hyperlocal advertising, startups are racing to build businesses that deliver highly relevant, local information to users," he wrote.

Earlier this week we noted here on Mashable just how much more useful information can be when it is locally relevant. So for NPR, going local is a way to reach disenfranchised listeners, provide more utility, and potentially offer greater value to advertisers when the ad market rebounds.

A Focus On Social Media

Another aspect of NPR's winning approach is their adoption of social media. Social media tools are changing the media landscape by allowing consumers to define what's worthy of attention. NPR hasn't sat idly by — they're one of the few mainstream media organizations that is leading the charge in social media channels. Their Twitter account has over 780,000 followers, making it one of the top 25 on the social network (and third among news organizations behind only the New York Times and CNN). Their Facebook Page has over 400,000 fans.

But NPR has embraced social media in more ways than just having an active presence on top social media channels. They've also put social media to work for them. In October of 2008, for example, NPR asked listeners to factcheck the US Vice Presidential debates and communicate findings via a Twitter () hashtag. And in February, NPR's social media strategist (@acarvin) talked about Twitter on air, including hundreds people tweeting back comments in the conversation. Their conclusion? Twitter lets us all share the media consumption experience together, and that's a very positive thing.

NPR doesn't stop at social networking, either — their social media efforts extend to podcasts (they have over 650), blogs (they publish almost 20), mobile apps, and even their own social network. NPR has been recognized for these efforts year after year with multiple Webby Awards.

Social media is helping NPR reach new audiences and connect better with the one they have (which, of course, helps with audience retention).

A Focus On Ubiquitous Access

Perhaps the most important aspect of NPR's approach to new media, is that they have an organizational level commitment to allowing listeners and readers to access their content on their own terms. Schiller, who prior to joining NPR at the start of this year was the SVP-GM of The New York Times web site, told mediabisto.com that NPR aims to bring people access to content "online, mobile, whatever people want, podcasts — you name it — so that you have that same sense of the NPR experience wherever you are. As far as NPR.org — sure, I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org."

mix-your-own-podcast-tool That's nothing new for Schiller, who at the Times led the charge to shut down their pay content service, TimesSelect, even though it was pulling in tens of millions of dollars. "Change is happening so fast in the media and the economy that you have to be able to say, 'Forget about what we did then — let's look at what makes sense now,'" she said, which is a very enlightened view for someone who holds a position of power in a mainstream media culture that has for so long been resistant to change.

The same sentiment is echoed by NPR's Senior SVP for News, Ellen Weiss. "We need to put NPR wherever the audience is, and that has to happen online and has to happen on the radio," she told PBS in January. And NPR has delivered.

In July of 2008, for example, the radio organization released a content API that allows developers to remix and reuse any content created by the network. That's led to interesting mash ups like NPRbackstory, which attempts to figure out the news behind trending topics by searching through NPR's archives.

More recently, NPR released a mix your own podcast tool, which gives listeners the ability to easily create their own programming schedule from the organization's audio archives. That, as Schiller and Weiss promised, is NPR at work allowing users to consume media on their own terms.

NPR's commitment to going to its audience rather than making its audience come to them is a smart strategic move. Schiller is convinced that walled gardens and pay walls just drive audiences to "lesser quality news content that is free." If that's true, NPR's blueprint is not only about attracting eyeballs (or in this case, ears), but creating an environment where quality reporting from trained journalists can continue to exist.

Not Everything Is Rosy

Unfortunately for NPR, even while their ratings soar, they have not been immune to the economic woes gripping most industries. They cut 7% of their daily news staff in December of 2008 and axed two underperforming shows. NPR faces a projected budget gap of $8 million in 2009, though that's better than 2008's $23 million shortfall.

Still, the future looks bright at NPR. Their 26.4 million weekly listeners are 11 times more than the daily circulation of USA Today, and greater than 9 times more than the prime time viewership of the #1 cable news channel in the US, Fox News. They have 860 local stations in their member network and operate 38 news bureaus around the world — 18 in foreign markets, which is greater than any other news gathering organization. NPR's amazing growth over the past 10 years prompted FastCompany magazine in March to call NPR the "most successful hybrid of old and new media," and wonder if NPR could be the savior of the news industry.

And they owe that success to the culture of open access and audience participation that they've cultivated over the past decade.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/03/npr/