Submitted by Steve Hanson on Sun, 11/02/2008 – 7:20am
LINK: [link]
Denise Lockwood is like thousands of U.S. daily newspaper reporters — she fell
victim to staff reductions. But she’s not giving up reporting — she’s pursuing
her passion onlline.
Lockwood, an award-winning education and general-assignment reporter, is
looking for advice on how to start a non-profit online news and community site
Submitted by Maurreen Skowran on Fri, 10/10/2008 – 9:38amin
Thanks to Michelle Ferrier for the link to a list of “Eight Ways to Get Interactive Data on Your Site,” at:
In order from easiest to hardest:
Zoho Creator, http://creator.zoho.com/
Google Spreadsheets, http://docs.google.com/
Dabble DB, http://www.dabbledb.com/
Many Eyes, http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home — graphing
The Simile Project’s Exhibit, http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/
PHP (or any other scripting language), http://www.php.net/
More are listed in the comments.
Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 10/09/2008 – 7:33am
On MyTopiaCafe.com, I’m negotiating with a local coffee producer to
enhance the loyalty program we already share. Right now, users who
post 5 or more times get a coupon for $10 to buy coffee. I’d like to
develop a program for first-time posters and for more than 5 posts (in
some kind of increment).
Submitted by PeggyHolman on Sat, 06/28/2008 – 7:05am
What’s in it for you?
AmericanTowns.com has solicited placebloggers to provide hyperlocal
content to their national platform. Have you gotten a solicitation?
Have you considered it? Now, they’ve launched a new widget for their
calendar, which makes it easy for a placeblogger to add a calendar
sourced from AmericanTowns contributors. Would you use it? So What’s In
It For You?
So, I’m tracking down the chief of this outfit to find out, but want
to know — do you see competition, cooperation, or confusion with these
national platform/hyperlocal sites?
See press release info: AmericanTowns.com, the Web’s fastest growing site in the hyperlocal space, (www.americantowns.com)
is expanding the reach of its community event database content via a
new widget they are releasing today. As you know, useful hyperlocal
community information
(vs. just local news) is growing in appeal to local users and many
sites are looking to move that direction and to monetize that
experience via advertising.
Michelle Ferrier
Daytona Beach
Submitted by PeggyHolman on Wed, 06/04/2008 – 9:00am
My friend and colleague, Tom Atlee, founder of the The Co-Intelligence Institute, developed a map of stories entitled Whole System Learning and Evolution — and the New Journalism
that I think has great potential as a way of thinking about what is
required for both great stories and great story-telling organizations.
In the version below, I changed a few terms (e.g., “community” became
“connect” to create consistency of form) and I added four verbs (in
blue) that, framed as questions, I think could provide a tool for
assessing the likely effectiveness of a story or a news organization.
The questions that Tom’s model sparked for me:
• Does it inform? (a primary focus of traditional journalism)
• Does it engage? (a primary focus of the emerging social networking sites)
• Does it inspire? (almost virgin territory, but hinted at by the idea of “possibility journalism”)
• Does it activate? (also exciting terrain)
