Diablog

Informally called “MoJo,” the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership has been run as a challenge, the ultimate prize being a one-year paid fellowship in one of five news organizations: Al Jazeera English, the BBC, the Guardian, Boston.com, and Zeit Online.

We’ve been following the challenge from contest entries to its second phase, an online learning lab, where some 60 participants were selected on the basis of their proposal to take part in four weeks of intense lectures. At the end, they were required to pitch a software prototype designed to make news, well, better.

Through the learning lab, we heard from a super cast of web experts, like Chris Heilmann, one of the guys behind the HTML5 effort; Aza Raskin, the person responsible for Firefox’s tabbed browsing; and John Resig, who basically invented the jQuery JavaScript library; among other tech luminaries. (See the full lineup.)

stefanwehrmeyer:

I just released Mapnificent for 17 cities in the US and some other cities world wide (before Mapnificent was only available for Berlin and somehow for London night buses). You can watch a short video about what Mapnificent is and what it can do here. This post will explain how Mapnificent…

As Google moves closer to becoming a publicly traded company—which it has been resisting, but is being pushed toward by company law and regulations—it will increasingly shed activities that were launched as goodwill gestures because the costs of their operations reduces the company’s financial performance and will diminish the value of its stock when it is floated. Over time it will be harder for the firm to maintain the stance that it is not self-interested and motivated only by the opportunities to improve the lives of the public by providing access to all the world’s information.

The tentacles of its operations that have reached out into to many fields will increasingly be pulled back if they do not yield financial results. And fears that Google will rule the world will diminish. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other big players of the digital world all have limits, just as did the handful of firms that once controlled steel, oil, and shipping through cartels.

Themediabusiness.blogspot.com

Yes, the bicycle is a stunningly efficient machine of transportation, but in the city it is so much more. The bicycle is new vision for the blind man. It is a thrilling tool of communication, an experiential device for the beauty and the ills of the urban context. One cannot turn a blind eye on a bicycle - they must acknowledge their community, all of it.

Here lies the secret weapon of the urban renaissance.

You see, those of us fighting for our cities, we struggle because too few see the problems, and fewer understand the solutions. They are quite literally racing past the issue, too busy to see, too fast to comprehend.

when we use Facebook we no longer just view the ad; we become the ad. It’s a notion that disturbs some people, especially as Facebook continues to challenge social norms about privacy and use of personal data. Indeed, one reason advertisers love Facebook is that ads can be precisely targeted to specific audiences on the basis of their stated interests, location, “likes,” and much more. “A lot of data is being harvested and monetized by Facebook and its advertisers, but users have no idea,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of a nonprofit digital-marketing watchdog called the Center for Digital Democracy.

Zuckerberg believes that these new, more personal forms of marketing are the only way advertisers can adapt to the increasingly social nature of the Internet. On average, users spend more than six and a half hours a month on Facebook, significantly more time than they spend on other major sites—mostly because they are so engrossed in communicating with their friends. There’s an implicit contract in social media that people not be interrupted by commercial pitches, just as it would be inappropriate to start hawking Tupperware without warning at a dinner party, suggests Ted McConnell, a former longtime P&G marketing executive who’s now executive vice president of digital for the Advertising Research Foundation. This means the attention-­grabbing kind of image-based advertising that still dominates television, magazines, and even major websites could be an artifact of one-way broadcast media—which is to say, all media that preceded the Internet.

An industry initiative, lead by The New York Times, the AP and Getty Images, to surface deep data around news content including video, will be introduced in the Hearst newsroom this summer.  

This will be an initial phase, say Michael Dunn, CTO of Hearst Interactive in this interview with Beet.TV

More on these developments on Dunn’s site.

One of the key themes emerging from the study, as well as from earlier research into reading behavior, is that people in general and students in particular read in a variety of ways. Sometimes they immerse themselves in a text, reading without interruption. Sometimes they skim a text to get a quick sense of the content or the argument. Sometimes they search a text for a particular piece of information or a particular topic. Sometimes they skip back and forth between two or more sections of a text, making comparisons. And sometimes they take notes, make marginal annotations, or highlight passages as they read. Reading is, moreover, a deeply personal, highly idiosyncratic activity, subject to all kinds of individual quirks. Every reader is unique.

Because we’ve come to take printed books for granted, we tend to overlook their enormous flexibility as reading instruments.