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    Kick Ass News Apps! — projects to inspire journos

    To introduce ourselves and our skills to the Trib newsroom, Joe and I showed off some news applications we love, and that we hope will inspire the journalists here to think about telling their stories in new ways online.

    For the folks who missed the show, here’s a quick rundown of what we talked about. (I am sad to say that there is no way to serve refreshments through the web, so to get the full experience, you’ll have to get your own punch and pie.)

    PolitiFact’s Obameter

    Politifact's Obameter

    Reporters and editors from the [St. Petersburg Times] fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups and rate them on our Truth-O-Meter. We’re also tracking more than 500 of Barack Obama’s campaign promises and are rating their progress on our new Obameter.

    • Brian sez: It hits the sweet spot between software and old-school reporting. Hacker journalism at its best.
    • Joe sez: Demonstrates the power of the web to provide context over time beyond each day’s story.


    Tampa Bay Mug Shots

    Tampa Bay Mug Shots

    Our goal is to provide a complete profile for individuals booked into jail in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee and Pasco counties. A complete profile on Mug Shots constitutes: name, photograph, booking ID, height, weight, age, gender, eye color, birth date, booking date and booking charge.

    • Brian sez: It’s tabloid, trashy stuff in a great-looking package. Pretty hot for a system that shows off public records.
    • Joe sez: I’m not sure how I really feel about this app, but it is a great example of making bulk data accessible to the general public.


    ChangeTracker

    ChangeTracker

    ChangeTracker watches the White House’s web site so you don’t have to. Whenever a page on whitehouse.gov changes, we’ll let you know — via E-mail, Twitter, or RSS.

    • Brian sez: This is my project, so I’m partial, but… It’s a simple concept with many interesting uses — as both a reporting tool, and as a publishing device. Plus, it’s free and dead-easy to set up your own.
    • Joe sez: Tools like this protect us from the risk of information going down the “memory hole.”


    Filibusted

    Filibusted

    Some senators like to filibuster and keep the majority from having their way. You might think they’re heroes. Or jackasses. Either way, they’re worth keeping track of.

    • Brian sez: It’s tightly focused site that does a great job explaining an issue that most folks don’t understand.
    • Joe sez: This one was a winner in Sunlight’s Apps for America contest. It would be easy for us to tap into the same data about legislators, bills, and votes that feed this one.


    Represent and Repsheet

    Repsheet

    RepSheet lets you…

    • look up your elected representatives…
    • see the political zones you live in…
    • and track news about your reps.

    • Brian sez: The Times’ Represent and Windy Citizen’s loving rip-off, Repsheet, are, like Filibusted, tightly focused and explain something most folks don’t understand — in this case, the overlapping districts of representation. And they give you an easy way to follow news on what your reps are up to. Kinda hard to believe how difficult this was before, eh?
    • Joe sez: With the amount of information on the web, we need more tools like these that help people focus on what matters most to them.


    Investigate your MP’s expenses

    Investigate your MP's expenses

    Join us in digging through the documents of MPs’ expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP’s expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing.

    • Brian sez: How would *you* search through a half million pages? And the UI is wonderfully simple.
    • Joe sez: This app does a great job of keeping on the story while it’s current. Its release is an attention-grabber and can help the Guardian investigate the data even if the public’s participation is minimal or inaccurate. This Nieman Labs article provides some good lessons learned from Simon Willison, the application developer.


    Many Eyes: Word tree and US Gov’t Expenses chart

    Many Eyes: Word tree

    Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.

    • Brian sez: Many Eyes is a fun kit of visualization tools that are easy for anyone to populate with data and embed in a story. They’ve got maps, charts, word trees and all sorts of other neat toys to play with.
    • Joe sez: Not only are these tools a great way to provide basic data visualization, but most of them also provide readers with the ability to explore different views of the data.


    Names, Lists, Photos, Stories - California’s War Dead

    Names, Lists, Photos, Stories - California’s War Dead

    Military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2001-Present

    • Brian sez: It’s a simple application that uses data to tell a story from many angles. If you’re a parent, maybe you want to see how many kids the soldiers had, or maybe you want to explore based on where they were from. Simple, but powerful stuff.
    • Joe sez: By collecting information about all of the dead, the Times creates a richer story center around which they can also aggregate their original coverage.


    Know thy Congressman

    Know thy Congressman

    “KTC” is a bookmarklet that displays an abundance of political and biographical information about current members of the Senate and House of Representatives.

    • Brian sez: It’s a totally novel tool, a great use of public data, and incredibly useful. Plus, they probably coded it in a weekend. Love it in every way.
    • Joe sez: Another great example of how the web makes it so much more possible to provide background and context for stories.


    Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America

    Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America

    Yesterday I quickly put together my own Walmart growth video using Modest Maps. It has the usual mapping features - panning and zooming - while you watch Walmart spread like wildfire. It starts out slow with the first location in Arkansas in 1962 and then spreads vast in a hurry.

    • Brian sez: Eye candy, for sure, but damn tasty eye candy.
    • Joe sez: Visualization across space and time tells parts of the story better than words possibly could.

    Posted by on Tuesday, June 23, 2009, at 6:18 pm — 7 comments Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

    ONA09 un-conference session proposal: The craft of making software — Anyone interested?

    UPDATE — The folks at ONA have announced that they’ll provide rooms for un-conference talks! Woot! But if there’s more need than space, it’ll be up to a vote, so *please* get there early and vote me up! Hope to see you there!

    The schedule for ONA09 is jam-packed with shiny stuff — social networks, mobile tech, they’ve even got Leo and Ev! Great. But the reality is that Twitter will not save the news, just like chrome rims can’t save General Motors.

    We can talk about technologies, tools and innovators all weekend long, but it won’t help if news organizations don’t understand the basic principles of software development. So, if anyone out there is interested, I’d like to arrange an un-conference to talk about some un-shiny, boring-ass shit: software development methodologies.

    Topics of import we might address:

    • Version control
    • Task and defect tracking
    • Goals, use cases and designing with your audience in mind
    • Working iteratively and being agile

    Code is not something you can slap up like wallpaper. Making software is a craft. It requires discipline and skills far beyond a superficial awareness of the technologies available. At every moment of the process, from conception to release, there are right and wrong ways to make software.

    Imagine a news organization with only writers, and no editors. They might manage to crank out some successful stories, but without editorial controls, the failure rate would be astronomical. From what I’ve learned in my (admittedly brief) time in this industry, this is the state of software development at newspapers — it’s failure-ridden, amateurish and ad-hoc.

    Let’s do it the right way

    Over the years, lots of clever people have studied the craft of software development, and come up with battle-tested tools, best-practices and processes to reduce the failure rate and better-ensure success. I learned a thing or two about these methods in my previous life, and would love to share.

    So, I’d like to set up an un-conference session. We’ll get a room and a projector and talk process. Who’s interested in attending? What topics would you like to see addressed? Would anybody else like to present?

    (If there’s no response, I’ll shut up and go back to work — but if I’ve convinced you, please leave a comment. No comments, no un-conference.)

    Posted by on Tuesday, June 2, 2009, at 1:56 pm — 8 comments Tagged , , , .

    Old friends! Ripoffs! Hateful comments! — A media blitz roundup

    Invisible airwaves, crackle with life…

    I don’t write about it much here, but I love the radio. NPR is my primary daily news source. So, I was totally geeked when Here and Now asked me to be on their program. And through the magic of editing, I think I managed to sound pretty alright!

    (You know how, when someone gets under your skin, but you’re so worked up all you can say is “Oh yeah? Well, your momma!”? And then later, when the moment is gone forever, your brain catches up and comes up with all sorts of erudite, polysyllabic arguments? Radio is like that.)

    Best part about the radio bit? All the old friends who emailed me after they heard the program, including one of my favorite high school English teachers. Dunno if/when the web will have that kind of reach. Love.

    “…part of a hegemonic institutional perspective that is glaringly…”

    Back online, my Hackers wanted! bit on O’Reilly Radar got a lot of attention, mostly hating on journalism and grumbling about needing a bachelors degree before pursuing a masters degree. But I’m hopeful that the message got through to a few programmers who want to make the world a better place.

    In retrospect, I should have probably explained the importance of journalism in a democratic society, and ceded that yes, journalism is mostly broken right now, but this is our opportunity to fix it. Hindsight. Le sigh. If you’re into it, check the comment threads on the original post, and the nerdy aggregators that picked it up:

    S’pose if you’re not pissing somebody off, you’re doing it wrong. Right?

    Rich Gordon, the fella who decided it was a good idea to bring coders to J-school, wrote a response on Idea Lab including an interview with my new boss, Digital Editor at the Chicago Tribune, Bill Adee.

    I even got ripped off completely by Tech Crunch, where fellow Medill alum Leena Rao summarized my post and completely failed to mention where she got the brilliant idea — eliciting 85 comments. Thanks for not linking!! Love!

    Posted by on Monday, May 18, 2009, at 11:32 am — no comments Tagged , , , , , , , , , .

    Mr. Wolfram, will you please show your work?

    Wolfram Alpha is gonna be pretty fucking neat. From the creators of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Research, the system proposes to be “an authoritative source for data” from the sciences, social science, finance, pop culture, and damn-near anything else that can be quantified and calculated. Ask it for the volume of your favorite lunar crater, expressed in wheels of parmesano reggiano, and it’ll run the numbers. Math, FTW!

    But as far as I can tell from Wolfram’s recent presentation at Harvard, Alpha will tell you the source of the data, and will sometimes show you an example formula for a type of calculation (how to figure the volume of a cylinder, etc.), but it will not show you the actual calculations necessary to arrive at the answer.

    Instead, we’re supposed to trust the system. Alpha’s code is so complex, says Wolfram, that it would be vastly inefficient for a mere human to read the steps. The more sensible approach is to “try to do the best QA that we can.” (QA = quality assurance, a.k.a. testing) And I’m certain that he’s right — that thing has got to be a bear to test.

    If your mother says she loves you, check it out

    The problem is, if I want to use Alpha’s answers in a news article, scientific paper, or anything else requiring an authoritative source, I need to know that it’s right. Unless we arrive at some kind of universal agreement among scientists, academics, mathematicians, and everyone else that Wolfram’s creation is always right, I can’t believe Alpha’s answers if I can’t test them.

    I’m baffled by this omission. Alpha can do extraordinarily complex work, but it wouldn’t pass high school physics. You’ve got to show your work! Scientists validate hypotheses by repeating experiments and comparing the results. “Trust me” is not an authoritative answer.

    “An authoritative source for data” is misleadingly simplistic. If it does what it’s supposed to, Alpha is more like “an authoritative source for quantitative thought” — the ultimate almanac, complete with a staff of uber-geeks from every field worth researching, backed by machines capable of turning around complex calculations in microseconds.

    It’s cool as hell.

    It’s a pocket calculator for *everything*.

    It’s the realization of Leibniz’s characteristica universalis.

    But is it correct? Only one way to tell. Mr. Wolfram, will you please show your work?

    Posted by on Saturday, May 9, 2009, at 2:12 pm — 2 comments

    Got a job

    Next week, my internship at ProPublica will end. The chance to work here was an extraordinarily lucky break, and I can say without reservation that this is the best job I’ve ever had. Never before have I worked with so many brilliant, interesting, and damn nice people.

    I love living in New York, and am disappointed to be leaving so soon. The Grand Army Plaza green market just turned from great to brilliant, and I only had my first, proper NYC pastrami on rye this week.

    So it’s somewhat bittersweet to announce that in a couple of weeks, I’ll be leaving NYC and returning to my adopted hometown, sunny Chicago, Illinois.

    The World’s Greatest Newspaper

    In June I’ll start my first full-time journalism gig, as the News Applications Editor at the Chicago Tribune. The team I’ll be leading will be a new one, composed of programmers and investigative journalists, and we’ll be building news applications in conjunction with the Trib’s fantastic investigative team.

    Specifically what we’ll make, I don’t know, but I anticipate building a wide variety of data-driven web applications to visualize data and present investigative stories online. (If only the PolitiFact crew hadn’t set the bar so high…)

    For the nerds in the audience

    What I do know is that we’ll be using Python, Django and lots of other open-source tools. Chicago has quietly become a very important place in the open-source world — the Second City is home to both Django and Ruby on Rails, the two hottest web frameworks — and I’m committed to making the Chicago Tribune a contributing member of the community.

    If you haven’t figured it out yet — I’m geeked. This’ll be fun.

    So, adios, City That Never Sleeps. The City That Works is calling me home.

    Posted by on Thursday, May 7, 2009, at 11:29 am — 22 comments Tagged , , , , , , , .

    Stock charts for everything else: Google Public Data

    Google rolled out a simple little feature today: enter “unemployment rate wayne county” and they’ll offer you a chart. Click it, and you’ll see the unemployment rate since 1990, and be able to add other counties to compare. It ain’t much, but it’s neat.

    Now, unemployment data *is* take-my-shirt-off-WOO-HOO-high-five thrilling, but this’ll get much more interesting if Google follows through (from the Official Google Blog):

    The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. … we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today’s launch is a first step in that direction.

    Tidy snippets of civic information, linkable and comparable, from all aspects of public data — that’s one damn cool almanac! More like Everyblock than Wikipedia. Data, but easier. Fucking linkable!

    Who’s gonna step up?

    From this day forward, any news story about unemployment must link to the chart, just like business stories link to stock charts. Anything less is a disservice to readers. It’s zero-effort, free, informative, and damn neat. Why the hell not?

    The future

    The sci-fi geek in me sees this as just one more step towards Google’s lofty mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It’s coming: All the data, one gesture away, on my cornea-screen. Oh, hell yes.

    Posted by on Tuesday, April 28, 2009, at 10:16 pm — 3 comments Tagged , , , , .

    Twitter lightning talk

    Wikipedia sez: “A Lightning Talk is a short presentation given at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks last only a few minutes and several will usually be delivered in a single period by different speakers.”

    This particular lightning talk was delivered to the ProPublica newsroom a couple weeks ago. To experience it best, open all the links in tabs, print the talk, then read through it and flip the tabs as quickly as possible. (Warning: may cause seizures.)

    What’s Twitter?

    Really, what’s Twitter?

    So it’s like a blog?

    …so, how does this all work?

    Replies, retweets and links, oh my!

    Searches, hashtags, and trends

    The Twitter website sucks

    • Desktop applications like Twhirl and TweetDeck make Twitter immediate. You use them to tweet and to see replies and search results, live, similar to how you’d use Gchat or AIM.

    I know kung fu.

    • Twitter can be like your own Headline News, but tuned to your
      interests. You can know, to the moment, what’s happening with people
      and topics you care about.
    • With a well-configured TweetDeck, you can hear the Internet hum.
    • We call this experience “ambient intimacy.”

    …Twitter for journalists

    Tweet your beat

    Ask for help

    Be aware

    Find a job

    • I tweeted two weeks ago that my friend wanted a job at Playboy. Jimmy Jellinek called her last week, and this morning she got the job. I’m not trying to take credit for this, but it really was all me.

    And remember, if you don’t tweet, they will.

    Some members called it a new age of transparency, a bold new frontier in democracy. But to view the hodgepodge of text messages sent from the House floor during the speech, it seemed as if Obama were presiding over a support group for adults with attention-deficit disorder.

    Further reading

    Posted by on Friday, March 27, 2009, at 2:25 pm — 1 comment Tagged , .

    Battlestar Galactica panel at the U.N. — Liveblogging tonight!

    BSG is coming to the United Nations, and I’ll be there. Woot!

    From the Chicago Tribune:

    On March 17, there will be a “Battlestar” retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the show examined issues such as “human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith,” according to Sci Fi.

    The “Battlestar” contingent on the panel will consist of executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, as well as stars Mary McDonnell (who plays president Laura Roslin on the show) and Edward James Olmos (Admiral William Adama).

    UN representatives on the panel are Radhika Coomaraswamy, special representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict; Craig Mokhiber, deputy director of the New York office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Robert Orr, assistant secretary-general for policy planning, executive office of the Secretary-General.

    The panel will be moderated by “Battlestar” fan Whoopi Goldberg.

    Tune in at 7PM EDT for the play-by-play!

    Open the viewer in a new window.

    Posted by on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 2:23 pm — 2 comments Tagged , , .

    Feeds, tweets and APIs are the beginning. Will news orgs step up to augment reality?

    In her TED talk, Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech, Pattie Maes demos a system that creates interactive visual layers over the real world. The actual implementation, a tiny projector tied to a wearable computer that watches your fingers for input (using colored marker caps to identify fingertips!) is cheap, but not something you’d likely want to wear to the store.

    But imagine for a moment a similar system, one that detects more subtle gestures and does not physically project light onto the objects you’re manipulating. A device that annotates the real world and presents information about the person in front of you, the product you’re considering purchasing or the comparitive likelihood of catching a cab at this corner or the next block over.

    Map for driving by eszter
    Map for driving by eszter, based on MacGyver Tip: Heads up display with a reversed paper map from LifeHacker.

    I’ve blogged about this before, but Maes’ talk reminded me how important this technology will be. It *will* happen, and although there’s much work left to do in the end user interface (Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, and Counting Heads by David Marusek present brilliant visions of how they might work) the inputs to these systems are coming online today.

    Feeds, tweets and APIs aren’t just for the web

    Twitter, when paired with TweetDeck gives me an always-on, ambient awareness of events worldwide. Its like a tiny, quiet news radio, feeding me timely information on events I care about. When I’m at my desk, I can hear the Internet hum. Soon, that spatial restriction will be lifted.

    I already use Amazon from my phone’s web browser when I’m shopping, but the APIs are there to build new, better interfaces, that, as the Maes’ demos in her talk, can port Amazon ratings and everything else into the real world.

    The NYT’s and The Guardian’s new APIs are similarly useful, but present even richer information. Detailed, expert analysis of not just products, but news and events. (And surely Bittman’s recipe for Roast Chicken With Cumin, Honey and Orange would be handy to have on a heads-up display, at the grocery store, when cooking, and when you’re regaling friends with the elegant simplicity of roasting a whole bird.)

    Who’s building the future?

    Of the 1180 APIs cataloged at ProgrammableWeb, only 18 are categorized as “news”. If news orgs want to hang on to their last shred of credibility as the essential information providers of the last century, they’d best get on it.

    APIs are the future of information, and the content creators who adopt them will augment our reality.

    Posted by on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, at 9:35 am — 1 comment Tagged , , , , , , , , .

    ChangeTracker: Tracking changes at White House web sites so you don’t have to

    ChangeTracker is a little tool that updates an RSS feed, emails, and tweets when pages change at whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov. It’s also the first project of my internship at ProPublica! Woot!

    @changetracker on Twitter
    @changetracker on Twitter

    We put to together a bit of tricky internet plumbing and massaging of the tubes. ChangeTracker tweets, emails and feeds an RSS that links to pages at Versionista (a totally awesome tool, previously blogged about) that show left-right diffs of the page changed.

    versionista

    Versionista co-founder Peter Bray used Versionista to highlight position changes on Barack Obama’s campaign web site.

    And we’re giving away the code! So it’s dead-simple for anyone to copy our work and set up change trackers for any web site.

    Needless to say, it fills me with joy that I work at such a badass non-profit newsroom.

    Posted by on Thursday, February 19, 2009, at 12:16 pm — 4 comments