DefinitiveInk

The Huffington Post picked up a story from the AP that Google Maps has reverted their New Orleans imagery to pre-Katrina photos. This does seem to be the case and I'd love to know why.

A great summary of Assignment Zero

In my post about  Social Media Club I gave a very brief summary of Assignment Zero. Rachel Clark who was also at the meeting has written a great description of the project. For some reason my comments and trackbacks were set to none on my post and it was very kind of Jason to send some traffic my way from SocialMediaClub.com.

Transparency and then some

I was reading good article in Wired this morning about transparency this morning. And by interesting coincidence one of the journalists involved in the story was accidentally sent his file by a PR company. this had led to some rather interesting posts.
Tech Crunch has the story.
Fred Voglestein, the Wired Contributing Editor who was sent his file, blogs about it here.
His file can be downloaded here.
Chris Anderson blogs about it here.
And the President of Waggener Edstrom here.

I don't think there is anything nefarious about the fact that the PR agency had a dossier. It is interesting that it is so long, and now public. Chris Anderson's thoughts on how he was handled and led to the story by the PR agency are also a great read interesting. The timing of this is just amazing (unless of course it isn't an accident) and serves to reinforce some of the points of the story.

Readers of mine in the physical world might be interested to know that there is a Virtual World's Conference going on in the physical world (at least what we think is the physical world) of NYC. At the very least it is always interesting to read the lineup and attendee lists. I heard about this last night at Social Media Club as two very real looking out-of-towners attending the conference stopped by the meeting.

Assignment Zero at the NYC Social Media Club

Assignment Zero a project by Jay Rosen along with Wired, was the subject of tonight's Social Media Club meeting. I like Social Media Club. Founded by Howard Greenstein, one of the founders of the old WWWAC, and a fixture in the NYC digital scene Howard has assembled some great people to help like Jason Chervokas of @NY fame. The SMC has already spread to several cities and it is really interesting to watch Howard put together the organization.

It's taken me several decades to embrace my inner geek so I really like the title. Going to the meetings is like joining the science or chess club in High School. I never joined one, and in fact I'm not sure if my high school had one, so this is like making up for past wrongs. Since my job is in many ways to bring different forms of social media to iVillage it is also a good place to go to think about new things. Meetings are interesting and at each the subjects seem to always come back to reputation, trust, and the wisdom of crowds.

The Pro/Am connections that Assignment Zero is playing with, are very interesting. It is more structured and accountable than a wiki yet reaching towards open source unlike traditional journalism.  The HuffPo announced a political crowd-sourced project with newsassignment.net, the parent site of Assignment Zero, and soon up is Newsvine. I'm going to follow this and perhaps contribute.

Important video from The Onion, the most trusted news source around

Prince Andrew's daughter Princes Eugenie is on myspace.

ValleyWag's chart of the current online video universe

While at times it feels like I'm working in an episode of 30 Rock the NewCo which comes on the heels of the announcement of Break This is really interesting.

Article to read - Web 2.0 over and out another persuassive article about interoperability. (via TechMeme)

Crowdsourcing document discovery

Interesting thing going on over at Talking Points Memo's TPMmuckracker site. They are asking for help in poring through the latest "document dump" from the Justice Department. Readers are asked to go through the documents now online at the DOJ site as .pdfs and then post comments on the TPM site. They have issued a naming convention to keep the whole thing manageable. 

I love this. A friend of mine was working on a project, that never came to pass for the ACLU that was going to do something similar.

I would have loved the opportunity to do something similar when Ron Suskind and I built the site for his book the The Price of Loyalty. We put up a selection of documents from Sec. O'Neill's hard drive and contemplated doing a "dump" that would have made policy wonks very happy but were prevented by several factors from doing so. Perhaps one day we will revisit it or at the very least turn on comments.

Interesting Paid Content coverage of Magazine 2.0 in Germany where the consensus seems to be "there is no profit in going digital."

Two moving documentaries about the human spirit - one in the theaters one much shorter and online

The other night B and I saw The Cats of Mirikatani at Cinema Village. In a nutshell it is the story of a filmmaker who right after 9/11 took in an 80 year old homeless Japanese artist who haunted the streets of Soho.  As the aptly named Jeanette Catsoulis wrote in her review of the movie in the NYT, "The title may suggest a wildlife documentary, but "''The Cats of Mirikitani'' is entirely, vibrantly human."" This movie is the definition of a mitzvah but the filmmaker's act of kindness isn't the focus of the film just an underlying current as the movie touches on the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII,  post 9/11 reactions, healing, art, and forgiveness. It is amazing.

A much shorter documentary (7 minutes long) is a video segment of a young woman who knows she is going to develop Huntington's disease. She spends her day working on the Huntington's ward at Cardinal Cooke and spends time caring for her cousin who suffers from it. As her aunt says in the video, "she has moxie". I have no idea what I would do if I were in her shoes and her spirit, at least what we see on film, is inspiring.

Marketing Sherpa article about Zagat's 2.0 efforts (available until 3/23/07 still sub only but growing.

What artists see and what the rest of us see or how to fit a sketch of a tree onto a piece of paper

Following up yesterday's post about George Brett's privates and eyetracking for good page design is this article from Cognitive Daily, part of Seed's network of blogs, about how artists and others look at objects. Which is the artist and which the psychologist?

Via Snarkmarket which I got to via a Kottke.org post. Happy Birthday Jason 9 years!

Two "Online Spin" articles about social networking.

• The future of social networking interoperability, open ID etc
• On iVillage's chance of success with social networking - this in reaction to the Ad Age article
  • Some nice points :

...the question I keep coming back to is this: Does a content-rich portal like iVillage guarantee the formation of sustainable online community? To date, the answer is a resounding no. In order to understand what’s ailing iVillage and every other content producer, search engine or portal attempting to grow a social networking community around their online traffic, one has to understand two rules: 1. Using content to create community and using community to create content are two extremely different beasts. 2. Creating community for the purpose of monetization first doesn’t work in the long run (unless you think you can beat the gods at chess).

and a great quote about building prairies fromCompeting on the Edge (a book I'm going to order)

“Assembly doesn’t work, or at least not for a prairie. A prairie is something that grows. It has to start small. It has pieces that interact and build on each other. Once it is ‘up and running,’ the prairie works as a complex system that is dependent on the intricate interaction of all the components of the system. A prairie cannot be brought to life with on ‘abracadabra,’ one wave of the magic wand.”

Better design through eyetracking with Jakob Nielson

"Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed....adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site."

This and other interesting facts can be found in an article about eyetracking and effective news design in the OJR. (via Tech Meme)

An old Sesame Street song to start the day

Ad age on cracking local search

My favorite SEO

My friend and soon to be ex-colleague is mentioned in this article as one of the top in-house SEO talents. I wholeheartedly agree. Sadly she is leaving iVillage for Rodale in a bit.

who visits political blogs, survey results

Blog Poll - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog:Story and graphic on who is visiting political blogs.

Also add that yesterday the NYT ran a tag cloud in the print version of the sports section to help bracket selection for the NCAA.