Kino International

“Schmap’s series of digital travel guides integrates dynamic maps with useful background reading, suggested tours, photos from the traveling public and reviews by local correspondents (for sights and attractions, hotels, restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, galleries, museums and more) to profile 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.”

I’d seen Schmap before, but was recently contacted by managing editor Emma Williams, about one of the photos I took in Berlin this summer. Apparently, they are releasing a new edition of their Berlin map and my photo of the Kino International had been spotted on Flickr.

I marveled at the wacky online world and consented, of course.

City of Memory

This is such a beautiful package.

“City of Memory is an online community map of personal stories and memories organized on a physical geographical map of New York City.”

People can add their own stories, including video, audio and photos.

The project is “Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Rockefeller Foundation.”

For the last month or so I’ve been taking a really in-depth look at the Google Maps API. Partly out of my own curiosity, and partly as an individual project for the online capstone course at UF.

I’ve learned some really cool things along the way. How to work with information flowing between a viewer and the server, for instance. I’ve also learned more about javascript and PHP.

One bad thing though: Google Maps tend to fail when you need to plot more than 200 locations. Ken Schwencke and I found this out when we tried to plot over 800 Gainesville restaurants with their inspection reports from an XML file. We’re still looking for a solution. (We’ve basically parsed a CSV file with python and gotten it to feed into an XML file which is being fed into the map…now I’m hungry.)

We wanted to integrate restaurant reviews using the Yelp API, but the requests are restricted to only 20 businesses, so we’re working on our own review backend.

For my class project, I’m building a map with multiple layers, like crime, alcohol licenses, and restaurant inspections, that can be toggled to show only the information a viewer wants to see. Or all of it at once. It’ll be on a small scale, just as a proof of concept. But still pretty cool.

Every semester the board of The Independent Florida Alligator accepts applications for editor, print managing editor and online managing editor (formerly managing editor for new media). All current editors have to re-apply.

So today was the board meeting, and having welcomed a new editor and print managing editor, I moved to the other side of the table for my own interview. Happily, I was voted in again. And the board approved changing the title from “new media” to “online.”

The Alligator doesn’t publish during school breaks, so there won’t be many changes to the site until January. But today I launched a map of gas prices in Gainesville, accompanied by the 10 cheapest gas stations in town. Super cool, cause I’ve been trying for half the semester to do that.

I spend a lot of time hanging out with my professors and some really cool grad students. It sounds weird, but they are my greatest resources for stuff like, “What’s the best video camera that you can pull stills off of?”, “Why isn’t [insert reference to code here] working?” and other questions.

On Friday, the topic of conversation, while 2 out of the four of us ate lunch, turned to the j-school curriculum. Currently, there are 4 online journalism courses: a CSS/HTML course, an introduction to multimedia course, a Flash course and the capstone, Applied Interactive Newspapers.

Here’s the problem: the CSS/HTML course is required for the Flash course. The intro to multimedia course is not required at all. Given how turned off a lot of students can be by the idea of programming, shouldn’t a) the beginner’s multimedia class be offered first (its a 4000-level class, the other is a 3000) and b) that course be required?

With people like Rob Curley and Howard Owens complaining about close-minded graduates, journalism students need to be exposed to the mindset behind online journalism. This course takes a brief look at many aspects of online journalism, plus the students learn Soundslides, Google Maps, blogging and audio.

I’m just sayin’.

with Adrian Holovaty! This is the highlight for me, since my background is more programming and I’m defenitely a huge geek. Seeing Adrian speak was the deciding factor in coming to SND.

How to take data and make it efficient in terms of how the hypertext is laid out. Example: Wikipedia = Serendipity

Journalists are essentially collectors of data.

Rant #1 No serendipity in online journalism. Bullshit!
Data browseability: people want it and expect it. (IMDB, Amazon.com)

Serendipity increases stickiness and usefulness.

It all starts with structure. Have a structured list of data (facts) like an Excel spreadsheet. Journalists take clean data and turn it into a story. Computer programs can’t read the story. News orgs have the infrastructure to collect data, edit and verify the data and get the data to people. But they don’t leverage the data!

Lesson #1 Structure your data
Everything has structure. Sports. Obits. Even photos: subject, photographer, where, when, camera, size, colors (Flickr)

After the structure, the easy part.

Lesson #2 Give your data “the treatment”
Example: crime data
Step 1: lists fields (date, time, type, address, location, arrests, case number)
Step 2: key concepts (what data is useful? date, time, type, address, location)
Step 3: make breakdowns (list all possible values for each field)
Step 4: make list pages (pages for each value in each field)
Step 5: detail pages (pages for each crime)

Things to note
- Permalinks for concepts (distinct URL) linkability/bookmarkability
- SEO
- Serendipity

Example sites: chicagocrime.org, Faces of the Fallen, Video Game Reviews, Mixed Messages.

Coverng elections is a serious design challenge: fairness, impartiality, dense content, BORING?! Designers can make the content interesting and visually appealing.

Paul Nelson, The virginia Pilot

- Work with ad vertising to ensure enough space
- Handle news based on value and not on previous coverage
- Get opinions from community (reaction pieces on debates, etc.)
- Create ways to make the good stuff stand out (local connections to issues, adwatch - are candidates telling the truth in ads?)
- At-a-glance info
- Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
- illustrations, graphics, multimedia, embed from YouTube etc.
_ reefers to Web site
_ prepare multiple fronts

Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe

- Cartoons for election campaigns: has to fill the same size rectangle 4-5 times a week.

Eilliott Malkin, information architect, New York Times interactive

- 2004 election coverage: infographic reefer, liva data from AP
- 2006 coverage: modular inforgraphics, came up with structure 6 months in advance: results page for each section
- 2007: blog caucus, full column infographics, live data, results by various categories
- 2008: homepage, politics section front, blogs, election guide (evergreen), topic pages via nyt navigation and google searches (SEO), timelines

Last night, while uploading the new student edition articles to the Alligator Web site, Brett Roegiers and I tossed together a Google map of all the locations mentioned in various articles, complete with driving directions. Ahhh, last minute media.

To create the map, I used the method described in Matt Waite’s post, “Why (some) journalists should learn (some) code.”

The most aggravating part was getting the latitude and longitude for each address, especially for places on campus that don’t really have addresses. I used a combination of GeoCoder and this Lat/Long Bookmarklet for Google Maps.

There has got to be a better way to grab lat/long. I know that it is possible to generate the locations through a Google Spreadsheet, and even generate the entire map this way, as well.

Does anyone know any other tricks?

Al Tompkins posted this great interview with David Simon, assistant city editor at The Frederick News-Post, about the Forgotten Soldiers project.

The project tells the stories of soldiers who have been unaccounted for in 5 wars.

The project began with a simple press release about an American Legion dinner to honor the county’s sole Vietnam War veteran who remains unaccounted for. He’s been featured in our paper a number of times, but we began wondering if veterans of other wars might be unaccounted for.

The interview is inspiring, and the project is very comprehensive, if a little disorganized.

The entire project includes maps, databases, articles, timelines, individual stories, a guestbook, AND a pretty big multimedia package.

Like most huge projects, there’s an organization problem. What do I click on first? Where do I start, where do I finish? How do I know if I’ve already read this part? Etc.

It makes me want to go digging around in public records and databases. I just need a topic to start with.

Google has some pretty interesting search capabilities under way:

• Keyboard shortcuts
• Left-hand search navigation
• Right-hand contextual search navigation

and my personal favorite - timeline and map views.

For searches related to people, events and places, Google can create timelines and maps of the results. You would be able to see search results in chronological order or as points on a map.

Imagine searching for a news term and being able to see all the information in context. That’s unbelievably cool.