A beat blog starts to tweet
Check out Pharmalot Starts To Tweet -- one of the other newspaper blogs in our beat blogging experiment (the one we're doing with DISD) is using Twitter to get out the word.
Google News is in your neighborhood
My best hire ever, and former colleague, Danny Sanchez, has this take on Google's recent upgrade to deliver more targeted local news:
*Tap* *Tap* Is this thing on? — WE MUST START GEOCODING STORIES. Google is starting to do it. EveryBlock is already doing it really well. Topix sorta does it. A few others are doing it too. Groups of engineers have already written scrapes that scan the text of news stories. They’ve written algorithms that detect and process addresses for geocoding. Let’s not re-hash the whole newspapers-are-always-falling-behind speech; just get moving already.
I hear you, Danny. Been shouting it myself for the last couple years. But turn the mike up, because I worry that the people who need to know don't.
Palm Beach Post creates Breaking News Department
...designed to serve the Web first and print later. Read about it here.
"Live News Cameras" online
A former colleague of mine in the Bay Area, Andrew Finlayson, (he's ND at Fox in Chicago now) pinged me tonight to let me know about a beta site they threw together just in the last 3 weeks.
http://www.livenewscameras.com/
It's basically a page with live streams from all their Fox TV video feeds around the country... and in the upper right he's got one staffer with a simple webcam sitting at her computer screen telling anyone who is watching which stream is 'hot' right now. She just called out to us that if we clicked on the Washington 2 feed, for instance, we'd see Hillary right now as she comes out to talk live. And I did, and I watched Hillary's speech in a window in the middle.
This is a terrific concept. Here's how Andrew described it for me:
We are aggregating all the live feeds we can get on this day. We think of this as an experiment on many levels. Is the platform stable, will the audience like it, will they come back, does unfiltered news work, can we help moderate it with a light hand, can we find more news sources to point to, does the concept expand, what does it say about democracy and the future of journalism if we can start streaming every kind of news event…politics, weather, business, etc.
A colleague did most of the programming, we sort of glued together different ideas and we thought Super Tuesday would be the perfect day to try it out.
And they did it in 3 weeks.
MySpace will get widgets like facebook
From Danny Sanchez:
"MySpace today unveiled a developer platform designed to facilitate the creation of third-party apps for MySpace, ala Facebook applications."
URL: MySpace unveils developer platform
As I've said on other posts, widgets are a way of distributing our news through social networks. We aren't doing that yet, but we need to start -- soon.