NowPublic Blog

Erica Smith, a combo journalist and designer with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, informs us of the ongoing hollowing out of American newspapers on her blog, ‘Paper Cuts’ (1 vote for most clever blog name this year). As evidenced in a Google Map mashup, there have been upwards of 3,020 documented journalism jobs cut so far this year, already passing 2007’s last 7 month high water mark of @ 2,000.

http://graphicdesignr.net/papercuts/

I have spoken to countless people recently who are deeply concerned about this issue.  If you are in Ottawa this is something you should attend.  The viability of a robust media and vibrant internet are at stake.  Please spread the word and if you’re in the area go and make your disapproval known.

Plans are emerging for a net neutrality rally on Parliament Hill on Tuesday, April 29th.  Rocky Gaudrault, the CEO of TekSavvy, is the driving force behind the rally.  It comes as the CRTC considers the CAIP complaint on Bell’s throttling actions.

Source: michaelgeist.ca via mtippett

NowPublic

Tags: Bell | Media | Ottawa | abattoir | actions | Caip | CRTC | delayed | demonstration | Digg | driving | Innovation | Journalism | Michael Geist | net neutrality | Newsfeeder | Parliament | Permits | rally | Rocky Gaudrault | Slashdot | Tech & Biz | TekSavvy | throttling | tuesday

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 21 /PRNewswire/ — NowPublic.com (http://www.nowpublic.com/), the world’s largest participatory news network, today announced a key partnership enabling consumers to quickly and easily send photos and videos to NowPublic from their mobile phones using ShoZu, the market’s leading provider of mobile social media services. Effective immediately, ShoZu will include NowPublic as a destination option on its phone application and in its website catalog of destination sites.

The ShoZu service ships pre-installed on select Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson handsets and is available as a free download to more than 340 additional models.

“With today’s mobile devices, everyone has the power of the press,” said Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic. “NowPublic’s integration with ShoZu makes it that much easier for our community members to share their photos and videos as news happens. It also gives users the ability to submit content to all of their social communities and email addresses from a single screen on the handset, providing added value for NowPublic contributors.”

“NowPublic is a textbook example of the need to transfer images from your camera phone without waiting to get to a computer. You capture news on the spot, and you need to post it immediately,” said Mark Bole, ShoZu’s CEO. “This partnership equips NowPublic community members with a fast, user-friendly and reliable solution for mobile-to-Web connectivity.”

The ShoZu service allows users to upload photos, videos and text such as status updates, comments and tweets directly from their mobile devices to more than three dozen social media sites ranging from Facebook to YouTube, Flickr, Google Blogger, Twitter and beyond with a click. Users can mass-publish any photo or video to multiple communities and/or email addresses simultaneously, without the time and expense of creating and paying for multiple messages.

ShoZu also uniquely enables users to send video clips of up to 10 minutes in length; add tags, titles and descriptions from their mobile devices; and upload the photos of their choice at either full or blog-quality resolution. In addition, ShoZu is the only service in its class that can send friends’ photostreams, status changes and social network invites directly to the handset on request, eliminating the need to open a mobile browser or navigate to various sites to find friends’ latest postings or update social profiles on the go.

About NowPublic

NowPublic.com is a crowd-sourced, participatory news network that mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world. In its short history, the company has become the largest news organization of its kind with contributing reporters in over 5,500 cities and 160 countries. The Guardian has named NowPublic.com one of the top five most useful news sites on the Web and Time Magazine named it one of the Top 50 Websites for 2007. The company has received funding from Rho Ventures, Rho Canada, Brightspark, GrowthWorks and members of the New York Angels.

About ShoZu

ShoZu is the leading provider of mobile social media services that connect mobile consumers with their online social networks, personal blogs, photo storage sites and other Web 2.0 properties from the handset. The company’s patented technology provides fast, easy, one-click uploads of photos and video clips from the mobile to the Web, full-resolution photo and video delivery without compression, an emerging suite of services that push content to the phone, the ability to work in the background even if a connection is dropped, and other unique features that simplify and enhance the user experience, plus a mobile advertising service that provides non-intrusive and behaviorally targeted ad delivery. The multi-award winning company was founded in 2000 and has formed partnerships with some of the leading players in the mobile ecosystem, including Motorola and Samsung. For more information, visit www.ShoZu.com/AboutUs.

Contacts: For NowPublic.com: For ShoZu: Chris Macowski Heather Kelly The Morris + King Company S&S Public Relations 212-561-7459 719-634-8274 chris.macowski@morris-king.com heather@sspr.com Website: http://www.nowpublic.com/
Website: http://www.ShoZu.com/AboutUs/

Source: sev.prnewswire.com via mtippett

NowPublic

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We’re introducing a comprehensive member ranking system on NowPublic. Essentially it’s a way to identify the most active and effective newshounds on the site.Your stats – number of stories, comments, “good stuffs” etc.- will be counted and compared with other members to create an extensive leaderboard. Each action on the site will be weighted differently in determining scores (hint: the most influential stats are stories, comments, good stuffs, and front page stories). Details will be tweaked as we go along, and we’ll be looking for feedback to improve it. Let us know your thoughts in the forum once you’ve checked it out. 

The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram wrote about Twitter’s news breaking success today as well. If you don’t read Mathew’s blog it’s worth checking out for a Canadian perspective on technology. Here’s what Mathew had to say today:

“Like many others, I woke up this morning to news of a disaster in China: a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in the southwest, with thousands of people either dead or injured. Unlike some, I didn’t get the news from the radio or TV — I got it from Twitter, a group-chat/instant messaging client that has been gaining in popularity as a real-time news application. Much like the forest fires in California last fall and other recent news events, Twitter became one of the main sources of on-the-ground reporting — even before CNN started picking up what was happening, and with more personal detail. According to Search Engine Land, Twitter even beat the U.S. Geological Survey, which tracks quake readings.

During such times, Twitter seems like a “crowd-sourced” reporting tool, much like what NowPublic.com of Vancouver has created but with cellphones and 140 character messages as the medium. In any disaster, one of the first things people look for is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Source: theglobeandmail.com

NowPublic

Tags: breaks | Tech & Biz | twitter

Twitterers the world over are changing the way news travels. Chinese microbloggers issued some of the first reports of the earthquake that hit the country last night. But the accounts tell the story from a perspective that is unlike anything you’ll see on the evening news.

@sixhat all is good around here. i think only people in high buildings felt it in shanghai. about 10 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to sixhat

[q url="http://twitter.com/nocas"]“@AlexBowman exactly. that was the only thing i could think of when i was coming out of my building. about 10 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to AlexBowman

@Chinkerfly i was on wuning road/dongxin road, near zhenping road metro station. on the 31st floor we felt it a lot. about 11 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to Chinkerfly

a lot of people on the parking lot of plaza 66. i guess they felt it too. about 11 hours ago from twitterrific

breathing normal again. feeling an earthquake on the 31st floor was not fun. about 11 hours ago from”

Source: twitter.com

@sixhat all is good around here. i think only people in high buildings felt it in shanghai. about 10 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to sixhat @AlexBowman exactly. that was the only thing i could think of when i was coming out of my building. about 10 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to AlexBowman @Chinkerfly i was on wuning road/dongxin road, near zhenping road metro station. on the 31st floor we felt it a lot. about 11 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to Chinkerfly a lot of people on the parking lot of plaza 66. i guess they felt it too. about 11 hours ago from twitterrific breathing normal again. feeling an earthquake on the 31st floor was not fun. about 11 hours ago from txt[/q]

@sixhat all is good around here. i think only people in high buildings felt it in shanghai. about 10 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to sixhat @AlexBowman exactly. that was the only thing i could think of when i was coming out of my building. about 10 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to AlexBowman @Chinkerfly i was on wuning road/dongxin road, near zhenping road metro station. on the 31st floor we felt it a lot. about 11 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to Chinkerfly a lot of people on the parking lot of plaza 66. i guess they felt it too. about 11 hours ago from twitterrific breathing normal again. feeling an earthquake on the 31st floor was not fun. about 11 hours ago from txt

Source: twitter.com

NowPublic

Tags: bruno | carlos | david | Figueiredo | Jos | Lopes | PEDRO | Rodrigues | santos | Serra | andre | Culture | Fonseca | JORGE | luis | Nuno | paulo | Ribeirinho | Tiago

10.18am PST: We have taken NowPublic offline temporarily to address some front-page routing issues… this shouldn’t take long. We apologize for the outage and shall get back online as soon as possible. 

The LA Time’s coverage of the Cyclone discusses NowPublic’s role:

Previous disasters have proved to be opportunities for “open-source” reporting, in which citizens post photographs, videos and written accounts that help broaden the perspective on a crisis. But the Myanmar cyclone has produced a paucity of such Internet accounts.

Nowpublic.com, which advertises its “Crowd Powered Media” and claims posts from as many as 20,000 individuals a month, has featured little original reporting from Myanmar this week.

Its accounts draw largely from mainstream news organizations and dispatches written by expatriate Burmese, although the site did feature a photograph and short report from an Italian traveling in the country when the disaster hit.

Michael Tippett, co-founder of Vancouver, Canada-based Nowpublic, said reports from the field probably have been stymied by several factors, including the low Internet penetration in Myanmar, the collapse of utilities in the storm and the fear of posting information that might anger the military government.

“I would say, under the circumstances, it’s amazing we got anything out of there,” Tippett said. “But do we have a fully transparent view? Not by a long shot. It’s definitely the kind of story we would like to get more coverage the next time.”

Source: latimes.com via mtippett

NowPublic

Tags: Canada | Cyclone | Myanmar | Vancouver | accounts | Citizen Report | dearth | disaster | Environment | EXPATRIATE | feature | information | internet | journalists | Michael Tippett | new-media | news | NowPublic | PHOTOGRAPH

Midnight at the Database Oasis

 

 

We will be taking the site offline for scheduled database maintenance. These repairs will be taking place tonight, May 8th, at midnight PST… the witching hour. This downtime will last for an hour, with a slight possibility of a longer outage in the event of unforeseen difficulties. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Traditional media companies that refuse to invest in the Internet and withdraw into old business models are destined to fade away, opening the door for entrepreneurs to take advantage of the lack of innovation.

That was the message from Merrill Brown, a media consultant and former editor in chief of MSNBC.com who was speaking this morning at the Drilling Down on Local conference in Seattle.

Brown said that there are some examples of media companies — citing Seattle’s Fisher Communications’ recent purchase of Pegasus News — that are thinking creatively about the Internet. But he said the “macro trend” does not point to much innovation coming from traditional media.

Brown is especially skeptical about television, saying the business models for the big networks and their affiliates will make it difficult to make the transition. “For my money, they are treading water,” he said.

Brown also addressed the failure of the hyperlocal news site Backfence.com, saying the stock options he holds as a former board member are worth less than a glass of water.

Source: blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com via mtippett

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Tags: fisher | Media | message | Purchase | Seattle | trend | wake | Advantage | affiliates | Business | citing | coming | communications | companies | conference | Consultant | creatively | destined | Drilling | editor | ENTREPRENEURS | examples | fade | Innovation | internet | INVEST | lack | macro | Merrill Brown | Models | needs | networks | news | NowPublic | opening | pegasus | Refuse | saying | skeptical | speaking | Tech & Biz | television | thinking | traditional | WITHDRAW