"future of news" entries

Four short links: 10 July 2013

Four short links: 10 July 2013

Technical Bitcoin, Tracking News Flow, Science Advice, and Gov Web Sites

  1. 6 Technical Things I Learned About Bitcoin (Rusty Russell) — Anonymity is hard, but I was surprised to see blockchain.info’s page about my donation to Unfilter correctly geolocated to my home town! Perhaps it’s a fluke, but I was taken aback by how clear it was. Interesting collection of technical observations about the workings of Bitcoin.
  2. NIFTY: News Information Flow Tracking, Yay! — watch how news stories mutate and change over time. (via Stijn Debrouwere
  3. EO Wilson’s Advice for Future Scientists (NPR) — the ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper. (via Courtney Johnston)
  4. Healthcare.gov New Web Model for Government (The Atlantic) — The new site has been built in public for months, iteratively created on Github using cutting edge open-source technologies. Healthcare.gov is the rarest of birds: a next-generation website that also happens to be a .gov.
Four short links: 16 October 2012

Four short links: 16 October 2012

News App, Data Wrangler, Responsive Previews, and Accountable Algorithms

  1. cir.ca — news app for iPhone, which lets you track updates and further news on a given story. (via Andy Baio)
  2. DataWrangler (Stanford) — an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation. Spend less time formatting and more time analyzing your data. From the Stanford Visualization Group.
  3. Responsivator — see how websites look at different screen sizes.
  4. Accountable Algorithms (Ed Felten) — When we talk about making an algorithmic public process open, we mean two separate things. First, we want transparency: the public knows what the algorithm is. Second, we want the execution of the algorithm to be accountable: the public can check to make sure that the algorithm was executed correctly in a particular case. Transparency is addressed by traditional open government principles; but accountability is different.
Four short links: 2 August 2012

Four short links: 2 August 2012

Creative Business, News Design, Google Earth Glitches, and Data Distortion

  1. Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both SidesYou guys need to stop thinking like gatekeepers. You need to do it for the sake of your own survival. Because all of us comedians after watching Louis CK revolutionize sitcoms and comedy recordings and live tours. And listening to “WTF With Marc Maron” and “Comedy Bang! Bang!” and watching the growth of the UCB Theatre on two coasts and seeing careers being made on Twitter and Youtube. Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. (via Jim Stogdill)
  2. Headliner — interesting Guardian experiment with headlines and presentation. As always, reading the BERG designers’ notes are just as interesting as the product itself. E.g., how they used computer vision to find faces and zoom in on them to make articles more attractive to browsing readers.
  3. Google Earth Glitches — where 3d maps and aerial imagery don’t match up. (via Beta Knowledge)
  4. Campbell’s LawThe more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (via New York Times)

Publishing News: HTML5 may be winning the war against apps

Publisher moves lean toward HTML5, MIT students present news reporting solutions, and Penguin and Macmillan respond to the DOJ.

Some are sticking with apps, but many publishers are choosing HTML5-based solutions; students at MIT have solutions for news; and Penguin and Macmillan tell the DOJ they weren't involved in price fixing.

Civic media competition attracts a new generation of change agents

A global conversation with finalists in Ashoka's civic media innovation competition.

Finalists in the Ashoka Foundation's civic media competition offered honest and perceptive observations about the role of civic media in the expanding information ecosystem.