All entries tagged: activism
Knight News Challenge: Building a better toolkit for producing and sharing media on cell phones
Mobile was one of the big themes of this year’s Knight News Challenge; yesterday, we talked about the Kenyan mobile-crowdsourcing grantee Ushahidi. But it wasn’t the only cell-themed winner that promises to make spreading information in the developing world easier.
Katrin Verclas and her group MobileActive won a $200,000 grant to build new and better toolkits for the production and spread of media on cell phones. There are lots of tools already available, of course, but they’re spread haphazardly across phone types and cellular technologies — not to mention difficult to track down for a typical cell phone user, whatever her place in the world. With the Knight grant, they’ll assemble a database of what’s available and figure out what gaps need to be filled — for which phones, in which formats.
I talked with Katrin about her project, about the incredible pace of change in the mobile industry, and about how the current situation in Iran points to the potential of using diverse mobile technologies to create and share information.
Plus: augmented reality, Frank Gehry, and Indian Androids! Full transcript below. Keep reading »
Morning Links: January 13, 2009
— Lots of buzz about Emily Nussbaum’s cover story in the new issue of New York, about the new projects built by the journalist/programmer team at The New York Times. Original-Gawker Elizabeth Spiers is not impressed:
…are expectations for traditional media institutions so abysmally low that they should be roundly patted on the back for understanding the basics of web culture and implementing the corresponding applications?…when the Times invents the next Digg or YouTube — something that actually changes the way people consume and filter media, or at the very least the way in which media is produced — I’ll stomach 3,000 words about it. Until then, I don’t want to read an interminable piece about how web staffers at the NYT are actually doing their jobs, as if this were wildly unexpected.
I get her point, but the problem is that what the Times does in this area is really unusual for newspapers. I worry sometimes that we write too much about the NYT here, too, but it really feels like they’re some large-and-growing distance ahead of second-place in newspaper innovation online.
— When people talk about aggregator models for news, they always bring up Drudge, Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast. But I wonder why more attention doesn’t get paid to Daily Kos, which adds a strong editorial voice, an affection for activism, and a huge and involved community to the typical aggregation model. And Daily Kos seems to have more of a news-y feel than it used to — something I suspect will continue past Jan. 20. Their newish Congress Matters site is stuffed full of news. Founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga just announced 2008 revenues “easily broke $1 million” and allowed the site to have a paid staff of eight.
