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    A News Mashup

    by Paul Lamb
    March 12, 2008

    The good folks at Netsquared in San Francisco are sponsoring a Mashup Challenge, designed to encourage civil society and social benefit organizations to submit innovative new ideas for Mashups) supporting social change.

    Of the 50 or so entries submitted so far, a number of them have a news angle that may be of interest to journalists and the larger media community.

    For example, a submission called Community News & Caring Map is aimed at allowing writers to know where their readers are geographically located. The idea being that if you know more about who your audience is, the better you can speak to them and provide more informed journalism. I like this idea…it makes sense intuitively. What I don’t understand is how such information can be gathered or shared in an opt-in fashion that doesn’t violate the privacy and anonymity of the reader.

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    Another listed contender is called NewsFlash: Mapping top stories in 200 plus countries. This one is already live, and allows you to pick top stories from around the globe from a colorful world map. The idea here is to encourage people to expand their news horizons through a graphically rich interface. I also get this one, as it is a one-stop-shopping and visually pleasant way to scan international headlines. It certainly gives you that “we are the world” feeling. The only thing I would say on the flip side is that it appears to be only a news aggregation tool, and doesn’t do anything to help identify quality journalism or determine the accuracy of stories being reported. But that’s a whole other issue…one tool at a time.

    My favorite idea submitted so far on the news front is called Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of post election violence in Kenya. This mashup intends to help document issues of violence and death not reported by the government, police or the mainstream press. The effort seeks to provide a graphical timeline of events, document specific cases, and ultimately provide pictures and information about unreported or underreported victims. This strikes me as a very practical and important tool, not to mention representing “citizen journalism” at its best.

    Had I the time or inclination, I would add my own entry to the bunch – called something like “All News Is Local”. My mashup would be a small widget that you can plop on any organization’s website or blog that streams locally relevant news with Twitter like headlines. By locally relevant I mean news that a particular nonprofit organization, business, or agency creates itself, ideally text, audio or video submitted on the fly by clients or staff of the organization or the public at large. Think of a kind of billboard that you drive by on the highway with different messages from individual cars as they go by. The benefit of this somewhat chaotic news distribution system is that it is VERY locally generated and relevant. And the widget hosting website or blog doesn’t have to manage the news…it’s dynamically generated and automatically submitted by anyone who wants to contribute. And in my perfect mashup world this widget is a money maker too! Small Google-like ads can appear in one corner of the widget box, and host sites can opt for mainstream (but zip-code relevant) news headlines/stories which they get paid to display. Everybody wins!!!

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    Crazy idea, you say? You’re probably right…so what’s YOUR idea to change this mashed up mixed up world?

    Tagged: mashup news challenge netsquared Compumentor media contest award map kenya

    2 responses to “A News Mashup”

    1. Hi Paul,

      Thanks for spreading the word about the NetSquared Mashup Challenge!

      Britt

      Britt Bravo
      Community Builder
      NetSquared • A Project of Tech Soup
      http://www.netsquared.org
      [email protected]

    2. Hi Paul,

      I saw that you were writing about the Netsquared Mashup challenge and I wanted to share a little bit about our Mashup Challenge entry: Assetmap.org/uganda. You can read more at http://www.assetmap.org/uganda

      The question behind the project is this: with peace on the horizon after 20 years of war in northern Uganda, and the big NGOs soon heading off to other war zones, who is going to support community organizations and northern Ugandan civil society as it transitions to peace time?

      By mapping information about ongoing community-led philanthropic partnerships in northern Uganda, assetmap.org/uganda helps American citizens aggregate their resources to support post-conflict transformation.

      We hope to facilitate collaboration among American donors and volunteers by providing a digital tool that:

      •maps project locations so you know who’s working where
      •tags information about the specific issues projects and organizations seek to address
      •links tagged and mapped projects to the facebook and LinkedIn profiles of participating donors or volunteers

      If you’re interested in supporting us, please visit and vote for us here:
      http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/assetmap-org-uganda

      Thanks!

      Nathaniel Whittemore
      Director, Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement
      http://www.mycge.org
      globalengagement at gmail

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