I won’t lie. I’m a huge Twitter nerd. I can’t help it. It’s the beginning and ending of my social media day. It’s also a fount of untapped potential.

At some point, my hope is that Twitter realizes that it could be so much more than a social media platform of status updates. With the right tech, it could be a powerful project management platform. Hear me out.

Sure. Twitter’s the premier place for staying on top of what is happening in your industry. Your network. Etc. No question.

With Twitter lists, you can segment like crazy. Don’t think I don’t. Because I do. Like crazy.

Twitter can also be a great way to track projects.

Right now, I have my various project leaders in the field tweeting at me with their various project updates. Every major metric, benchmark, innovation, story about their work – they tweet at me. Rather than email. Big email saver. I get an alert. But I can keep that on my Twitter connect page, rather than my inbox. And because Twitter limits to 140 characters, it pushes them to link to web pages of context rather than writing voluminous emails.

I set up an IFTTT recipe so that every time I favorite a tweet, it goes right into a Google Drive spreadsheet for archiving, categorizing and tracking.

Why is this awesome? It means the people I oversee leading projects in the field are not just updating me, but updating the world, spreading their thinking, and amplifying their influence. I’m, in turn, amplifying their influence as I retweet their tweets, and then feeding, by favoriting, their successes into a spreadsheet that I can parse into my various project trackers. In short, I’m killing two birds with one stone – socializing their awesomeness and tracking it. Two clicks. Retweet. Favorite. Two birds.

Now, imagine extending Twitter further, with these additional features integrated into a single project dashboard:

Project Timeline – Twitter comes with a timestamp. So, why not build a timeline tool for visualizing tweets over a defined period, perhaps with certain predefined project-related tags. Embed these visualizations in web pages. Visualize the progression of a project. Its impact. Its story.

Project Reporting – Storify is a great start for creating simple drag and drop reports from Twitter. In fact, it’s (surprisingly) one of the few Twitter apps that offers a fluid drag and drop approach to managing content. Drag and drop is something I want in almost any web-based project dashboard, and Storify has it. If Storify ever envisions itself this way, and offers more robust and customizable features for creating project reports – with the whole screen used much like a standard web page, and not just vertical stories – it could have a real head start on a lot of the social media-oriented players out there. Embeddable, of course.

CRM and Social Network Analysis – I know, I know, there are apps out there that do this. But not built into Twitter, and notbuilt into these other features. With such features, one could manage and understand engagement all in one place. Also, analytics (oddly absent from Twitter) would be a nice feature. And, being able to actually analyze and visualize on Twitter what happens in Twitterland when something is tweeted.

Calendar and Gantt Chart – What is a project management dashboard without calendar integration? With people out there in the field (or the office) tweeting updates of scheduled events and project benchmarks, it would be easy to click a button to add it to a calendar (like I currently do with Outlook when someone emails me about a future event). With reminders, of course. And Gantt charts. With reminders. We’re heading toward amazing here.

File Collaboration and Storage – Maybe Twitter doesn’t need to create its own collaborative document software, as Google has that pretty well covered. If we really want to push this vision, and give it public and private-facing components, it’s not that big a leap. Someone tweets a link to a doc, you drag, drop, tag, edit, store, whatever.

Project Overview – Since we’re talking dashboards, drag and drop, and public-/private-facing components, let’s make it easy to create a front page that is easily customized to show project highlights and key aggregated metrics that can be clicked through to access deeper content and context. Now, make a version that’s public, and one that’s private.

The direction Twitter seems headed, I can’t imagine it going this route. Twitter’s view of itself seems stuck on it as a constant stream of useful and useless information, often of consciousness, with a few basic, customizable tracking features, and a large store of data to which it aims to stick advertising. Secondarily, it angles toward conversational, having somewhat improved those features over the years. It certainly doesn’t smell of project management-oriented intent.

Facebook doesn’t seem to be heading down this path, either. Yet, so many of the leading project management solutions out there have adopted a “social” revolution of their own, and now look a heck of a lot like Facebook. Which is fine. Except that they are trying to bake social into project management, rather than project management into social.

It is not a bad idea to lure people into your platform by making it more like something else they are used to. What might be a better idea is to build your platform around one they are already using.

I could be talking about doing this to Facebook, instead of Twitter. The thing is, while Facebook is the #1 website in much of the world, far exceeding Twitter’s adoption, average Facebook users think of it as a place where they talk to their friends, not the rest of the world. Twitter, on the other hand, is almost entirely used openly, to the rest of the world.

(I think it also needs to be said: when people hide their tweets, it looks… odd, at best, and nefarious, at worst.)

Openness, however, might not work for everyone. We’re still not at the point where profit-oriented companies readily share the preponderance of their data, business intelligence, process, bumps and bruises, and so on (though, I’m starting to think that day will come, that money will be made by those who act completely counter to the tradition of companies to hoard and hide, and that those who get there first, and do it right, will inevitably win).

Nonprofits, meanwhile, are still quite fearful that openness will kill their funding. Fortunately, in their case, we are starting to see a shift to open up thanks to foundation pressure. It’s also hard not to look hypocritical when trumpeting open data and hoarding one’s own.

Especially when we consider that everything is data. Or potential data. Every step we take. Every move we make.

Sure, one could easily ask: am I taking the fun out of Twitter? Could be. Unless people are cautious not to overdo it with meta info in their 140 characters meant to trigger feeds into project dashboards.

Based on what I’ve done with Twitter so far, I’d say I’m taking the boring out of project management.

Photo 1: Courtesy of admiriam.

Photo 2: Courtesy of djc.

Photo 3: Courtesy of russellmcneil.

I don’t go to South By Southwest’s (SXSW) Interactive Festival necessarily to see journalism innovation. I go for ideas to bring to journalism.

Of course, I found exciting journalism innovations happening at this year’s SXSW. This might be the year that sensor-driven journalism finally hits the mainstream, thanks to it showing up in multiple panels, like What Do Sensors Mean for News, Society & Science? and Sensoring the News: Detector-Driven Journalism. We might also see maker culture and new hardware for news come of age in journalism, if this year’s strong showing for building your own hardware is any indication. Maker sessions for journalism may have been limited to NewsBots, but I expect we will see many more next year.

What I look for are new ways to solve problems of improving people’s access to quality information and engaging them into the news ecosystem in journalism contexts most innovators at SXSW may not think about. These are people with limited, if any, access to apps in their languages, education in advanced uses of technology for analysis and distribution, and hardware SXSW attendees might take for granted.

Here are some of the apps I found interesting, with ideas for how they can apply to journalism:

Plotter

Finally, a mobile social network for sharing maps. The key here is that it syncs with other social media, like Facebook. So, one can easily crowdsource location recommendations. What if you were reporting a story, and you weren’t sure where to go? People on Facebook can point the way. Journalists could created curated maps to enhance the story. Imagine being able to upload data collected at X/Y coordinates, data sets associated with a location or photos and videos to geolocate content. I immediately think of Knight Fellow Gustavo Faleiros’s online map of environmental data of the Amazon Rainforest, and his plan to engage citizen reporting to feed into it and to advance the way it drives distribution of data and stories.

Koozoo

Imagine UStream plus location. With a smartphone, users can show what’s happening right now in a particular location. Koozoo’s demo video focuses on tourist and entertainment attractions. But, what if this were used as a news tool to show what’s happening right now as a government crumbles or a corporation is devastating the environment that is home to indigenous people? Can this tell and personalize stories we might not otherwise see, in ways other apps designed around social sharing rather than location might not? What if this combined with Plotter?

OneTok

This enables adding voice recognition controls to smartphone apps. It makes me think of all those out there who cannot read, like the rural and tribal people served by the mobile news service CGNet Swara in India. I’m sure they will inevitably be reached by a smartphone. I can’t imagine, however, that literacy will entirely precede smartphone adoption among these populations, which means being able to direct a phone by speaking into it could be the key to unlocking its power. Assuming they target local languages.

Apiphany

This enables organizations to create and host application programming interfaces (API) for their products in a cloud-based. In light of Knight Fellow Justin Arenstein’s presentation at SXSW  – in which he said that media companies should think of their news as an API – perhaps this is a solution that could make it easier to turn news into an API.

Vyclone

Anything that engages “the crowd” into the creation of content catches my eye. Vyclone does this by syncing together any video shot and uploaded by people, as long as the videos were shot within a certain proximity (i.e. at the same event) and that their start or end times overlap. The app does the rest for you, stitching them together, offering many different angles of the same chronological moment. Try it, it’s fascinating. And could make video journalism much more four dimensional.

Ghostery

Use this to track, and block, all of the ways in which companies track your web browsing. Try it. It’s eerie. But powerful, if security or privacy is important to you.

Par Works and Second Surface

I’ve been looking for ways to attach data to points in the world, and these augmented-reality apps might solve that. Picture having to report on a goverment-funded hospital, flashing your smartphone, and seeing data sets and investigative reporting associated with that hospital. Save time as the information you need finds you.

Flitto

When you reach 100,000 followers on Twitter, this service will offer crowdsourced translation of your tweets. On the surface, this feels like a way of amplifying those with a voice – like a majority political leader or a brand, like Coca-Cola – over the voiceless. Yet, I am intrigued that they have found a threshold for crowd translation at 100K. If one can push a following to that level, perhaps it could solve all sorts of translation challenges to enable new populations of people access to information.

MindMeld and Charlie

Speaking of information finding you, MindMeld listens in on conversations you have using an iPad, and delivers a dashboard of content it finds on the Internet based on the topics you discuss. I could imagine it getting overwhelming, and having difficulty with complex concepts or jargon. But anything that helps deepen topical and contextual understanding on the fly, particular involving tech, could be powerful for journalists on tight deadlines. Charlie digs through social media on people with whom you are going to meet to prepare you with their latest news.

Author’s note: An edited version of this originally appeared on IJNet. The one posted here is unexpurgated, unmitigated and unsaturated. Image courtesy of Vyclone.

Media have only scratched the surface in assessing their value to the world. To better understand and deliver that value, we need to improve how we measure the true impact of journalism. Analysis technologies have never been more abundant and accessible, and can almost do what we need, but better tools are needed.

Certainly, there is tech-based impact measurement already happening in the form of Web analytics, social mentions and related metrics. There are dashboards to let us watch it all in one place. But these measure impact on attention. The model and technology are still very nascent for measuring impact on behavior and policy beyond the website, the TV program, the mobile app.

Automating impact measurement, therefore, would be powerful.

Imagine it. Journalists and media showcasing their impact, building trust in audiences, as they see clearly who has the best information available and who makes a difference, rather than having to rely merely on belief or reputation. In turn, this could push journalists and media to think and measure more comprehensively, backed by data, about their value to the world.

This is a repost. Read my full post at IJNet.

Author’s Note:  See, I have been writing. Just not here.

Here are my tweets of apps, observations and interactions at SXSW Interactive 2013. In chronologic order.

]]> http://adventuresinmediadevelopment.com/storify-sxsw-interactive-2013/feed/ 0 http://adventuresinmediadevelopment.com/life-saved-tech-podcasts-baby/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://adventuresinmediadevelopment.com/life-saved-tech-podcasts-baby/#comments Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:43:36 +0000 bencolmery4 http://adventuresinmediadevelopment.com/?p=1619

These days, I’m depending heavily on tech podcasts to stay current. I figured I’d list some of my new favorites here.

My big dive into tech podcasts is really a means of survival. It turns out that having a baby disrupts everything. Who knew? Well, that includes disrupting the time I have to devote attention to things I can read, click and touch.

I have a bunch of sites and social media that have long kept me current, and I have a ton of web apps saved on my iPad and iPhone for just this reason. But, thanks to baby, I don’t have quite the same amount of time. Baby means I’m often having to divert attention to her from whatever it is I’m doing. My brain, as fragmented as it is from the constant disruption of real-time alerts, notifications, emails, rings, etc., still really doesn’t like multitasking every 2-3 minutes, as the effects of the next toy wear off. And while 2013′s tech is pretty amazing, it’s still pretty hard to actually do two things at once, especially when it requires the use of one’s eyes.

Tech podcasts, thankfully, make it possible to play with baby AND keep an ear on what’s happening out there in a world that is moving so quickly. And, I aim to be the sort of parent that also SEES his child grow, so audio is key.

I’ve long been a fan of Tunein Radio for podcasts. I love that I can listen to live radio or shows on demand. On demand is a big part of my content consumption, because life is only getting harder to schedule with a little scrabbling attention grabber to contend with when I commence my second job – parenthood – in the morning and after my first job (or is it really my second, now?). Though, my fandom of this app has dropped a bit since they began running ads in front of shows, which would be fine if it didn’t mess up the app’s ability to hold my place in shows when I leave the app for extended periods.

I find myself using Apple’s Podcasts app a lot now. I, frankly, think people have been overly harsh to this app, rating it 1.5 stars. I’ve been pretty happy with it. I think it is more visually engaging than Tunein. Plus, I’m a big fan of being able to fast forward 30 seconds, and of the reel to reel (gimmicky, sure, but it’s also got a playful quirkiness about it. Or something.).

And any Podcast app MUST have a sleep timer. There’s a lot of falling asleep to podcasts. Parenting = tiring. Nice that both of these apps have a sleep timer.

Anyway, on to the podcasts:

• Lifehacker – Man, was I happy when I found there was a Podcast of this. Lifehacker bends my mind to new places more than others, because it doesn’t just report what everyone else is reporting. It actually looks at the world and tackles its problems and opportunities.
• This Developer’s Life – More of this, please. The podcast itself, and this type. It’s easy to run an unstructured and rambly show that rattles off tech news, and makes fun of Ballmer. But, what’s really interesting is to dive deep into what life is like with technology. Experience itself. Examination. I get more out of this style, because it helps me think about tech.
• All About Android – Okay, I’ve only listened to a bit. My opinion is still up in the air. But, since Android is THE platform in the developing world, and my work focuses heavily on where mobile tech is going in the developing world, this is proving pretty helpful. I’m open to other’s suggestions.
• This Week in Tech – Since I mentioned their Android podcast, makes sense that I listen to this, too, right? Okay, I just started this, too. A bit long and rambly, at times. Still, I can actually stand to listen to the hosts (many I haven’t included here have obnoxious hosts), and they seem to hit the big notes of what’s happening.
• Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology – I really like that I can get short bursts of focused opinions on single apps and tools. I don’t always have an hour. And he makes it easy to pick out which podcasts I’m interested in by titling each episode well (a big complaint I have about many tech podcasts is that their episode names are vague, and appear to assume I’m going to listen to every episode, regardless, which I won’t, because I have a baby and I’m always short on time, so I am extremely selective).

That list isn’t exhaustive. And since I’m really still getting started in the tech podcast world, it’s likely to change. But change is the only constant, right? I’m always taking suggestions.

This makes me wonder how much of the podcast market is comprised of parents who need to have their eyes and hands attending to children, leaving audio the only way for them to consume, and how many creators of tech analysis content are basically leaving money and audience on the table by not getting into the podcast game. Because a lot of my favorite sources of tech news don’t do audio.

Should they?

Author’s note: I wrote this on my iPad using my new Kensington Keyfolio Pro 2 keyboard case. So far, very happy with this keyboard. I feel like I can actually blog on the go with only my iPad in tow. This will be key when I’m as SXSWi 2013.

It’s time to finally get citizen journalism right.

The problem with “citizen journalism” is that it insults professional, paid, rigorously trained, working journalists to equate them with people who often have only a modicum of training, or none at all. It also encourages news organizations to think citizens can be a cheaper alternative to professional journalists, which could degrade the quality of journalism. This, in turn, puts the citizen journalists in an awkward economic position, as some organizations believe they should not be paid. And unpaid content contributors are considered by many to be exploited.

==>Read the rest of my post at IJNet (and subscribe to IJNet, because it is awesome).

Also, if this looks familiar, it’s because it is a streamlined and hopefully clearer version of my earlier post here titled, “It’s time to finally get citizen journalism right“.

Voice technology has tremendous potential for engaging citizens in news.

That was the thinking behind the meeting – called Turn Up the Volume: Bringing Voice to Mobile Citizen Journalism – which the International Center for Journalists organized this month at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. We brought together a diverse group of journalists, technologists and media entrepreneurs from around the world to look for the best models for using voice technology to engage citizens in news – and to identify needed improvements to the technology.

==>This is a repost. Read the rest of my post at IJNet (and subscribe to IJNet, because it is awesome).

It’s time to stop calling it citizen journalism.

That was one of the big takeaways from the meeting on mobile citizen journalism I helped organize at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy this past week. The consensus was that we’ve all been calling it – citizen journalism – the wrong name all these years. It’s time for a rebrand. Or a rethink. That term just isn’t cutting it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this feeling. It’s bubbled up time and again the past few years. With many others chiming in periodically. No one seems to care for it, yet it’s still the industry term.

It offends professional, paid, rigorously trained, working journalists to describe people who often have a modicum of training, or none at all, as some kind of journalist. It also encourages news organizations to think citizens can be a cheaper alternative to professional journalists, which could degrade the quality of journalism. It puts the citizen journalists in an awkward economic position, as some organizations believe they should not be paid, while others that aren’t paid are considered to be exploited. It conflates being a mere source of information with being an aggregator, analyzer and filterer of information. It often mixes activism with objectivity in a way that puts both in conflict with the other. The more one thinks about it, the messier the term gets.

So, as we were selecting projects to plan at Bellagio, we elevated “Rebrand Citizen Journalism” to priority status.

Now was the perfect time, with all of these brilliant citizen media leaders from around the world in the same room. We could map something out, go back home, implement, and begin changing the way people think about citizen journalism by giving it a whole new name, and so on.

The problem we quickly ran into was, “If not ‘citizen journalist’, what do we call these people?” A lot of terms were thrown around, and none of them stuck. They all worked in certain contexts, but they didn’t fly as an all-encompassing rebrand.

One of my favorites came from Harry Surjadi of Indonesia. He’s launching networks of citizens across Indonesia to monitor implementation of REDD+ projects, engaging them with news media, and empowering these people to become conduits of information in their communities. He calls them “Information Brokers”, though he is certainly teaching them journalism. Which works, as it evokes the image of what they are. But, I don’t think it captures what we’ve been calling citizen journalism, as a whole.

Ultimately, we didn’t take on the rebrand. It was clear that to do so would require the full attention of a whole meeting of the minds

over many days. One project by one group wouldn’t cut it. And with all of these doers in the room, we gravitated toward projects that were more tangible.

The morning of the last day, something clicked in my head. We were past all the programming, so there wasn’t time to raise it with the group. But, I bounced it off a few people, and they were on board.

Here’s the problem with the term “citizen journalist” and the goal of rebranding it. We’re thinking about it all wrong. We’re trying todefine a group of people that is so varied, nebulous, internally disparate, scattered across so many different contexts, ranging in skills and personal objectives, and a bunch of other ways to say they aren’t any one thing. Ascribing a single term to all of this is to force them all into a single box, when no single box can fit. And that is why no better term works or has stuck. We try to define them as some variation of a journalist, when their role is fundamentally different – even in today’s media landscape – from that of a journalist.

It’s understandable. The definers grew up in a world of people called journalists whose role was to gather and parse through information, and send it to a news organization that then broadcasts it to the world. If you look at it on such simple terms, sure, “citizen journalist” works.

The problem is, it’s a gross oversimplification. It’s the worst of all terms, except for all other terms that have been tried. In fact, it is looking at the equation from the completely wrong perspective.

We shouldn’t rebrand citizen journalism, we should rethink journalism. Rather than defining citizen journalists, we should define the platform or marketplace as something that necessarily includes broadening citizen voices.

Defining citizen journalists as any one thing is to put them into a box rather engage them into the news ecosystem. It defines them as something definable, something boxable, when they absolutely aren’t. Also, it distinguishes them in some way from everyone else in the audience, as if only a subset of the audience should produce content, those dubbed “citizen journalist”.

Instead, let’s redefine journalism as a news and information ecosystem, in which the model is to engage people as active contributors and brokers for the single goal of uncovering truth, and understand that truth cannot only come from journalists, but from all sources engaged in the ecosystem. Let the advertisers that pay for journalism and media to see it however they want to. They will monetize and commodify this any way they can. The focus of news organizations should be building and driving the news ecosystem, which should see all people as an important part of the equation.

We’ve seen this past decade how the Web 2.0 world has changed journalism and media, as audiences have become content producers. It shattered economic models as information capital was no longer concentrated into the hands of the few. News organizations that have found innovative ways to engage citizens into the news flow have tended to benefit over those that remain stuck in old top-down models.

We already have proven prototypes of what I’m speaking about. The lines have already blurred between journalist and citizen. Why fight that by trying to define them. It’s done. Settled science. Clearly.

We also have technologies emerging for handling and making sense of large amounts of information, and separating the wheat from the chaff. Those technologies are not yet perfect, but they have opened a door of unprecedented scale. To not embrace this scale is to remain stuck in journalism’s past.

The difference, really, is one of perspective. Defining journalism and the news ecosystem in this way welcomes people in, and enables them to become stakeholders that are important to, and should be embedded within, the news process. It does not treat them as if they are some singular, defineable thing, which is really just an insult to people traditionally thought of as separate from the news organization. Payment structures aside, these people really aren’t separate. Not anymore. So, draw the lines at payment, if they must be drawn. Or better yet, find ways to pay those who add the most value (one of our projects from Bellagio, in fact, will do just that).

Think about all the models driving innovation today. Apple, and those adopting the Lean Startup approach, integrate their design / engineering / marketing departments to develop products. The open source movement allows anyone with a computer to contribute code. Hacker journalists now prosper in a world once made of hackers and journalists. Democracy itself is founded on the ethos that the whole is better off when the many parts each have a voice.

Innovation is largely about breaking down the definitions that separate us. That is so much more easily accomplished when we define the space, rather than those that make up that space. It is essentially what Apple, the open source movement, the hacker journalists, and democracy all did. And countless others. Defining individuals is how you create process, not innovation.

So, let’s create a space – a news and information ecosystem – where news organizations, journalists, politicians, business leaders, activists, city dwellers, rural dwellers, the technoadvanced and the technoconstrained, and other everyday people can engage in flows of news and information.

What this would look like is probably the subject of its own post. But, I can at least say, from my day job experience, this model transforms how news organizations do business in ways that tell a considerably more accurate story and builds audience, to boot, as people start to have a direct stake in the news. More and more, that even means building platforms and apps.

Here are a few good examples of the model from our Bellagio meeting:

• Uganda Speaks
• SeenReport
• Participatory radio in Africa
• Mi Panama Transparente (Okay, not from Bellagio, but still a good model)

Journalism is an effective approach for parsing through the noise to find truth, therefore those with journalism skills should take the lead in so doing. If parsing through the noise to find truth is what journalists are here to do, then creating an environment that maximizes that should be the goal.

That means creating spaces that democratize information flows (aka, brings more voices into the fold) and new systems that help the truth rise to the surface.

That means no longer seeing the audience as something outside.

And that means not defining citizens as citizen journalists. The term is exclusionary, thwarts innovation, and insults everyone in the process.

Photos 1-4: Bellagio, Italy, on Lake Como. Nice place to get some thinking done.

I’m not crazy about paywalls. Mainly because it vastly dilutes the concentration of quality searchable content on the Internet as a public good. Yeah, producing news isn’t free. But, it feels like there should be another workable business model that keeps content open.

I mean, if Google can turn advertisements into useful content, can’t news break away from the paywall mentality?

Okay, if it must be, maybe we could try something familiar that has worked quite well for something else – arcade games.

Perhaps we could make people pay a quarter up front and get a set number of stories. Maybe even three. After three, if you want more, you pay another quarter. And so on.

It works for arcade games, because a quarter costs virtually nothing, up front. And, chances are, you don’t last that long in the game, but just long enough to want to dump in another quarter when you lose your last life.

Couldn’t this work for news sites?

Sure, companies tried micropayments. But, these were usually much smaller payments, maybe just a few cents. I wonder if the problem was the price point. A few cents isn’t value. It almost trivializes the content. If it is just a few cents, why not just make it free. It seems silly to pay so little.

A quarter, on the other hand, is familiar. People have paid this before. Arcade games. Pay phones. Parking meters. Vending machines. Okay, often it takes a few quarters, but paying in quarters is familiar.

And quarters still hold value while not feeling like a lot of money to pump in one more.

If I pay a quarter, and get several stories, that second story feels more valuable than the first, and the third that much more. I mean, compared to a quarter for one story. Or even, the value of a third story in which I have had to pay even just a cent for each story.

I could be entirely wrong about this. I haven’t studied or tested it.

I have, however, played a childhood’s amount of arcade games, and I know how it feels to pump in quarters and get more lives.

Okay. News isn’t a video game. Still, there has been a lot of talk of employing game mechanics to news. Here’s a game mechanic I haven’t seen.

Certainly one could point out that arcades aren’t quite the big business they used to be, which is directly attributable to the market being flooded by game consoles, PCs, portable devices, and so on. The news business, too, has suffered from an explosion of competition that has collapsed traditional business models.

I’m not guaranteeing success here. I’m offering a model I haven’t quite seen that just might be worth an experiment or two.

Especially if one is willing to try variations. One quarter gets you three stories. Then, a second quarter gets you four. Or five.

Maybe you get points for stories accumulated.

Maybe you get prizes at point levels.

Maybe there are actual games that come after a second quarter. Or a third quarter? News games?

Maybe over time, you unlock levels. What levels? Be creative. What might you have that people want that you like to hold back? Tease them with? Maybe it’s the games? Maybe it’s the insider content you were going to put behind a traditional paywall?

We won’t know till someone tries. And at this point, those who experiment could well be those who will most likely survive the news game.

Author’s note: I wrote this using the iPhone WordPress app. First time. Kinda cool. Nice app. Simple. Definitely a different experience. Helps keep me succinct. Focused. Could be a boon to my blogging frequency. Now pay me a quarter, and you’ll get three more posts.

You come to a point, as a blogger, where your blog’s activity is, um, hurting, and you need to make sure people know your blog is not dead. I am at that point.

Sorry, world, I have just been busy with work and baby. And mostly baby. At least in my normal blogging hours. If there was some way I could transmit blog posts with my mind, there would be a river of posts washing over you on a frightening basis.

But, there have been plenty of media development happenings for me in between diaper changings, tummy time and laundry.

Went to the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. Maybe it wasn’t so satisfying for the journalists in the audience, but it was stupendous for the tech nerd in me. Besides, isn’t it incumbent upon the journalists to make sense of the tech and turn it into journalism?

Expend a blog post on the event at my day job soon.

I also recently led the data journalism table at the World Bank’s Development Data Challenge. It was an ideation on possible hacks utilizing World Bank open financial data along with other data sets. The winning ideas would be proposed to the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon the next day.

My idea for it, which was not selected by our group, was to build essentially a Banjo for data/docs. So, let’s say you were a journalist reporting on a hospital that received government funding. You go to the building to interview people, take photos, etc. As you approach it, your smartphone vibrates, notifying you of several documents (in this case, government contracts) and data sets that involve this hospital that have been geocoded in a way that your Banjo for data app can detect. Rather than having to find the data, the data find you. This could overcome the hassle of having to always be on the hunt, and to have to know exactly what you are looking for.

Also, something I never linked to here, was my SXSWi 2012 blog post I wrote for my day job. Enjoy.

Anyway, this blog isn’t dead. Just been busy. Promise.