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Columbia Journalism School Event – Forging an International Consensus on Development and Climate Change

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South Asian Journalists Association
The Earth Institute at Columbia University
The John Oakes Prize for Environmental Journalism

present a conversation with one of the world’s leading experts on the environment and climate change…

Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri
- received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which he leads)

- in July 2009 becomes director of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute

TALK & Q&A: “Saving the World: Forging an International Consensus on Development and Climate Change”

Tuesday, May 19
6:45-8 pm
Columbia Journalism School
Stabile Student Center (lobby floor)
116th St & Broadway (#1 train to 116th St stop)

Free and open to the public; no RSVP required
Free open wifi available

NOTE: A recording of the conversation will be webcast later in the week. Feel free to send questions for Dr. Pachauri to saja@columbia.edu (subject = Questions for Dr. Pachauri)

BIO: Dr Rajendra K. Pachauri received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007 Continue reading →

Building a Community News Blog Day 3

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Day 3.  Follow along as metaprinter.com founder and senior writer Robert Ivan builds a community news blog for Aberdeen Township New Jersey at NJcircles.com/AberdeenTownship.

Today I added pages for Services and Township Stats to help emphasize my focus on Aberdeen Township.  The services page lists and links to things like the police dept., municipal court, tax collector, planning, etc…  The township stats page aggregate information about the township in one location and links out for greater detail.

The idea is to get search engines associating targeted content to the site. I published two posts for this very reason and to start seeing what people are interested in.  Ideally I should be posting 5 quality post per day to build traffic and see what works. Continue reading →

New York Times Article Skimmer Prototype

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Grid Format User Interfaces All The Rage?

Navigating the home page of most newspaper websites stinks.  There are literally hundreds of links scattered about with very little thought toward user engagement and ease of use.  In the 14 years that most news sites have been in use, it still seems easier to navigate a printed newspaper than a news site.

Personally speaking, I can skim through an entire Wall Street Journal in about 5 minutes before going back and reading entire articles that interest me.  Try doing this on a news site and you will quickly realize that there is no seamless way to recreate the speed and effectiveness.  The New York Times article skimmer and others below attempt to solve this problem.

The New York Times is working on the new user interface prototype for their content called ‘article skimmer’.  Below is a screen shot of their Dining & Wine section in Article Skimmer. It’s a nice clean layout, good for scanning.

Continue reading →

Adrian Holovaty Puts Out A Call For Revenue Ideas

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Looking toward EveryBlock’s future -from holovaty.com

“…we’ve reached an interesting point in our project’s growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we’re open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That’s a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock’s philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?

We have a number of ideas for sustaining our project beyond a dependency on grants, like building a local advertising engine and/or selling hosted versions of the open-source software, but we’re sure there are other ways for EveryBlock to be a successful business. That brings me to the reason I’m posting this — we’re looking for ideas and partners who would be interested in helping us figure this out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, get in touch with me. I’m confident we’ll make something happen; it’s just a matter of how.”

How do I think EveryBlock can become economically sustainable?

1. Gannett or Advance Publications buys the services of the entire EveryBlock team to incorporate EveryBlock into their news sites.  Most importantly the team is tasked with creating logical, simple, cheap ad placement on news sites.   The Code remains open source.

2. Go the Firefox route and partner with Google to make their search the default search on EveryBlock. Make millions a year, remain open source.

3. Partner with Apple to to have Everyblock preloaded onto every iPhone and iPod.  This frees Apple up from using popular Google apps like Maps and Yahoo apps like Local. This make even more money when partnered with the applestore.

4. Go the WordPress route and offer consulting and other services.

5. If anyone knows how to make money online it is Amazon.com.  Maybe they can use EveryBlock for geo-tagging their products and services.

6. Make Weichert or some other huge realtor the default real estate search for EveryBlock.

7. Offer EveryBlock and EveryBlog (currently taken by drupal)  franchises to locals looking to get into publishing.

Lastly, I just want to mention that in its current iteration, Everyblock is extremely impersonal and that adding or partnering with content producers like blogs or news sites could add real value via increased community participation.

I’m sure there are others.  Share your ideas!