Constitutional Law

The Five Biggest Barriers to Online Participation -- and What to Do About Them

Posted on October 18, 2008
Team Crunchberry -- so-called because we're thinking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of a large Quaker Oats cereal factory responsible for the nickname "City of the Five Smells" -- has emerged from its ideation process with a core idea and a target audience...

Microblogging Tools for your Newsroom

Posted on October 16, 2008
I thought about ReportingOn for more than a year before the public beta launched on October 1; I turned the idea over in my head, scrawled back-of-a-napkin sketches, and built several HTML prototypes before I ever got close to building something with dynamic code...

Student innovation team explores needs of young adults

Posted on October 13, 2008
The Crunchberry Project -- the innovation class that includes the first two Knight News Challenge programmer-journalists -- is moving forward rapidly. The six journalism master's students involved in the project started out exploring "conversations around news...

A Key Game Design Debate in The Beanstockd Game

Posted on October 13, 2008
Last week, we spoke at length with 42 Entertainment founder Elan Lee, who managed to break down in 10 minutes concepts that we had derived over the course of many months of debate. Over a year ago as we pieced together our game conceptually, much of our time was spent scrutinizing the specifics of the game: the interface, the rules, and the rewards...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Interactive Literacy

Posted on October 13, 2008
What does it mean to be truly literate with new media? Certainly, it means more than the ability to send email and browse websites. Recent commentaries on new media literacy have emphasized the importance of the ability to analyze media critically and the ability to participate actively in online communities...

The IncluderEpisode 4Phone + USB = Brilliant

Posted on October 12, 2008
Ricardo submitted a brilliant idea for Google's 10 to the 100th competition.  The idea is to get mobile phone manufacturers to add a USB Host Interface to fairly cheap GPRS mobile phones, so they can control peripherals, such as cheap PC Keyboards, flash drives, etc, and more expensive devices like printers, where the cost is shared among many people in a village, business, school, medical centre, etc...

Can the Internet have a heart?

Posted on October 11, 2008
I attended a conference on "Online Giving Marketplaces" at Stanford University this past week, which was a great gathering of online donation, volunteer, and social matchmaking sites like Kiva.org and GlobalGiving. The kind of organizations that are doing in the social service sector what sites like Prosper...

Printcasting Prototype Video

Posted on October 10, 2008
As I mentioned in my last post, Printcasting is finally beginning to take shape. We're very excited to have a working prototype that performs the very basic tasks: pulling in RSS feeds, flowing feeds into print templates, and placing targeted self-serve ads...

Finding Political Sleazemongers

Posted on October 09, 2008
I have invited researchers at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media to participate in an effort to blow the whistle on groups who are falsely presenting themselves as "ordinary bloggers," but instead are paid to spread false information about candidates during the 2008 campaign in viral internet campaigns to influence voters...

One Week of ReportingOn, International Style

Posted on October 08, 2008
One week after launching ReportingOn in a public beta that's helping me prioritize features and fix bugs in my programming, there is one big surprise: The large international turnout. The Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking media blogosphere appears to be truly excited about the idea of Twitter para periodistas, even as I try to differentiate from Twitter as fast as I can...

A Talk with the Creator of Drupal

Posted on October 08, 2008
Here at the IdeaLab, we've been hearing a lot over the past year about Drupal, the open source content management system that is now powering tens of thousands of websites, including Ourmedia, The Onion, Sony Music artists (I really like myplay...

If you're too old for Oregon Trail, why would you play an educational computer game? (Gaming Incentives)

Posted on October 08, 2008
Yesterday during my bi-weekly "sarah palin" "snl" google search, I stumbled upon The Political Machine Express, a downloadable version of the popular PC game The Political Machine 2008 in which, "players take on the role of campaign manager for a US Presidential candidate...

The IncluderEpisode 3The Chain of Angels

Posted on October 07, 2008
The Includer is a tool for a solitary thinker.  When we center our world on the solitary thinker, then we'll all be one, in life and death, in our evergrowth - our choice to grow forever, to live forever. Let's connect the scattered dots. David Ellison-Bey and I are still up...

Medill student innovators -- including "programmer-journalists" -- focus on conversations around news

Posted on October 05, 2008
It's been almost a year and a half since a grant from the Knight Foundation allowed the Medill School to offer journalism master's program scholarships to experienced programmer-developers. Since then, on this Web site, I've been documenting the experience of the first two "programmer-journalists...

Denver Open Media Close to Selecting Beta Sites

Posted on October 05, 2008
In just over a month, the 6 organizations who will participate in the first round of the Open Media Beta process will be selected, cooperating with Denver Open Media to implement and develop the set of Drupal Modules that will help automate workflows, engage users in more control of the station, increase your online presence, and take the next step in cooperating as a true network of locally-focused, user-driven community media centers...

The IncluderEpisode 2Year 2

Posted on October 03, 2008
Ricardo and I spoke by phone for ninety minutes about our laboratory's strategy for the Includer and making the most of limited Internet access in Africa. Thank you to our African participants - Samwel Kongere, Kennedy Owino, Fred Kayiwa, Peter Ongele, Kofi Thompson, James Njunge, William Wambura, Wendi Losha Bernadette, Joseph Runnel Lule, Betty Kyewa, Josephat Ndibalema and many more! - for giving our Minciu Sodas laboratory such great vitality around the world...

Why ReportingOn Launched on Django

Posted on October 03, 2008
First things first: ReportingOn is live, it's a public beta, and it's built in Django. Whoo-hoo! I have a long list of things to polish, add, tweak, revise, and rethink, but it was time to open the site up to users and let them help me figure it out...

Beanstockd in 500 words or less

Posted on September 30, 2008
If you haven't already read our mid-summer update (found here) I'll give you the abridged version. My name is Angela Antony, and my cofounder's name is Sandra Ekong. We were roommates at Harvard. Like most things hip and cutting edge, Beanstockd was born in Paris...

South African Seniors Speak: Age Demands Action

Posted on September 29, 2008
Originally published on Rising Voices. Which group is most affected by today's digital divide? The poor? Those who live in rural communities? The so-called Global South? Women? To a greater or lesser degree, they have all tended to benefit less from the advantages and opportunities afforded by the internet than, say, young men living in urban North America, Western Europe, and East Asia...

The IncluderEpisode 1Sisterhood

Posted on September 28, 2008
The Includer can't work simply as a device. We can write, but whose heart will leap to respond? We learn from Wendi Losha Bernadette of Actwid Kongadzem, a women's organization in Cameroon: We all wish to thank Janet for her wonderful contribution written out on our behalf which first read exactly as if she was writing from our minds eyes...

Framing the Candidates (Part Three): The Daily Show Parodies

Posted on September 28, 2008
Over the past two posts, I've suggested ways educators could use the campaign bio videos produced for the two national conventions as a way of encouraging civic literacy. I've suggested that they are powerful examples of the different ways that the parties "frame" their candidates and platforms...

Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?

Posted on September 28, 2008
Thanks to massive adoption of blogging and other do-it-yourself Web 2.0 tools like Twitter we have seen an explosion in citizen journalism in recent years. That goes without saying on a blog like this. But there is a related trend emerging which is perhaps not so apparent...

Framing the Candidates: The Vice Presidential Videos

Posted on September 26, 2008
Last time, I introduced George Lakoff's argument that the two major American political parties adopt different frames, based on images of parenthood and the family, for understanding the political process: the Strict Father paradigm associated with Republicans and the Nurturing Parent paradigm associated with the Democrats...

Innovations in Storytelling: Using Comics for Journalism

Posted on September 25, 2008
Over the summer, I saw an incredibly exciting piece of visual journalism over at USA TODAY. The production involved a mash-up of sorts between one of USA TODAY's most popular bloggers (Pop Candy), Twitter, some comic book artists, and a nifty bit of flash animation...

The IncluderEpisode 0Our Hero

Posted on September 25, 2008
My story is real, except for the Includer, which may yet some day be real as well. The Includer is a device for Africans or anybody to read and write emails and other texts stored on their USB flash drives. Once a week they might walk the three miles or so to their Internet cafe to upload their emails and download more...

U.S. Government Should Publish All Mortgages It Buys

Posted on September 24, 2008
It appears that the United States government is going to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages in an effort to prevent the collapse of the world's financial system. If they do, I'd like them to publish a list of all of the mortgages they purchase -- the loan number, the address of the property, the lender, the amount of the loan, the status of the loan, the plaintiffs and defendants in any associated foreclosure cases, and so on...

Wiki Our Next Segment

Posted on September 24, 2008
I was pretty sad when Radio Open Source went off the air, because I thought they were tugging at the loose threads of something interesting, and they never got to properly unravel it. Breaking news and reporters getting leads from the short message service Twitter are interesting phenomena but I don't think they can create the kind of community that you need to bring an audience into reporting...

Framing the Candidates: A Closer Look at Biography Videos

Posted on September 24, 2008
George Lakoff's book, Don't Think About an Elephant, has been one of the most influential arguments about the nature of American politics to emerge in recent years. Lakoff, a linguist, turned his attention to the "framing" of political discourse. If you want to look more closely at his argument, "A Man of His Words" is an online excerpt which pulls out most of the ideas that are going to interest us here...

Unconventional: How Mobile Reporting "Stuck it to the Man."

Posted on September 23, 2008
It's been a few weeks since our whirlwind of reporting from the political conventions, which has given me a bit of a chance to reflect on how it all went down. From celebrity-studded parties, to the tear gassing of protesters, to lots and lots of young voters, mobile reporting using new technologies was instrumental to our coverage...

New Liability Insurance Program for Bloggers

Posted on September 23, 2008
Here is a simple, but often ignored, truth: if you publish online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. It doesn't matter whether you are a professional journalist, hockey-mom, or an obscure blogger, if you post it, you'll need to be prepared for the legal consequences...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.