Information is costly to manipulate and retrieve. By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact than raw information. We have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world. They help build in our mind an idea. And that’s what true narratives do. They don’t just paint pictures they build structures in our mind upon which logic is built.

As we work on DocumentCloud, we're constantly building pieces of infrastructure that could be useful for other organizations that work with similar kinds of data. We're releasing as we go by extracting useful components as standalone open source projects. Please follow our work if you're interested in what lies under the hood.

I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. This includes the journalistic mainstay of “reporting” — because information not published is information not known — but my definition is intentionally much broader than that. To succeed, this young discipline will need to draw heavily from social science, computer science, public communications, cognitive psychology and other fields, as well as the traditional values and practices of the journalism profession.

Lives are not actually lived in arcs, and where they are, you can be certain that there is either a wannabe novelist or a political agenda lurking in the mental shallows.

"Creating a rumor on the Internet is a cost-free form of entertainment.  During the communication process, the truth is often beaten out by the lies.   Rumors often coincide intentionally or unintentionally with certain of emotions.  This is one way in which the bad currency eliminates the good currency on the Internet."

The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment. The project was developed by Google in collaboration with two of the country's leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies - aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents.

Intends to be a dynamic digital library which will understand user queries in the context of a specific discipline, look for content in a domain alien to that discipline and return the results presented in a way useful and comprehensive to the user.

Chris Anderson comes up with a half-baked idea, has basically no data to support it, and yet other people - smart people, with real jobs and things to do - actually spend their time following up these idle daydreams; acting as his research assistants.

ABC News is getting roundly criticized about the way it produced the Obama-Clinton debates yesterday. It’s was so bad, there are over 12,000 comments on the ABC News site related to the debate. A sample:

I am disgusted with ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson. The “Debate” was nothing more than tabloid journalism. It was a disgrace. There were two hours to ask questions that would showcase the candidates’ policies and approaches to some of “THE” toughest challenges this country has ever faced and you chose to spend most of the time on nonsense. From snipers to Jeremiah Wright to lapel pins. Do you think that’s what we care about? ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson you owe Americans a profound apology for this wasted opportunity and their sensationalism of non issues.

This appears to be more than typical “astroturfing.” These are folks who actually took the time to write angry grafs like the above, rather than simply pressing a “vote” button.
Perhaps more to the point was this from Will Bunch from the Philly Daily News:

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Touche.

Discourse DB is a new kind of site: a database that uses the power and ease-of-use of wiki technology to collect the opinions of the world's journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues.

The immigration debate in Congress appeared just once as a top-ten story on Reddit, and not at all on Digg and Del.icio.us. The only story with any real traction on the user-generated sites was the release of the Apple iPhone.

uclick is the largest packager and distributor of comics and word games on the Web.

We gather stories of all shapes and sizes from countless perspectives around the world, and then present them in a rich browseable landscape, helping you make connections you never knew existed.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists is a professional association concerned with promoting the interests of staff, freelance and student editorial cartoonists in the United States.

"Networked journalism" is a more nuanced notion than "citizens journalism" in that it doesn't insist on a strict distinction between professional and amateur. The emphasis instead is on a productive blurring of that boundary through collaboration and dist

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.

"...the notion of quantifying a community’s potential bias is nothing short of remarkable."

Lih can link to Esshay's messages, in the context in which they were made, to build his case.

Cofax is a Web-based text and multimedia content management system (CMS). It was designed to simplify the presentation of newspapers on the Web and to expedite real-time Web publication.

Drawing on more than 80 interviews with key figures in the media, FRONTLINE examines the challenges facing the mainstream news media, and the media's reaction.

Bloggers and other citizen journalists have access to Avisen.dk's homepage. Pros and amateurs compete for top positions in the 'most read' and 'most debated' sections.

ByLine is designed to help players learn to think like journalists about science and society.

Short list of academic journals focusing on media work.

This call invites submissions for a special issue on ‘Convergence Culture’: the worldwide emergence of increasingly collaborative practices between media producers and consumers.

The MBA RSS Edited Feeds project is intended to create feeds from member blogs by subject, geography, both - or events.

Fake news graphic creator.

NewsCloud is an open source media platform for citizen journalism and the social news network.

Atlas allows publishers – national chains, hyperlocal news sites and bloggers – to add interactive maps to their stories in seconds.

The Media Tracker is a searchable, online database that allows anyone to learn who owns the broadcast, cable and newspaper outlets serving any community in the United States.

The purpose of this survey was to learn how people rate news stories, and to develop reliable online review tools for NewsTrust's news rating service.

NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust."

Research interests include the development of open content and collaborative efforts in journalism.

The washingtonpost.com political team has collected and categorized dozens of political ads according to a wide array of criteria, such as the ad's music, issues mentioned, ad characters, and common visual cues and cliches.

A diverse group of disaster responders, technologists, and community leaders will assemble in San Diego in August of 2006 for an event designed to simulate a truly complex disaster.

This call invites submissions for a special issue on ‘Convergence Culture’: the worldwide emergence of increasingly collaborative practices between media producers and consumers.

Be the first with the facts by trying some of these suggestions for uncovering news that others haven't.

Digital TV and the World is an on-going experiment in the use of small format digital cameras and laptop computers to report compelling stories of individual struggle from around the world.

Digital TV and the World is an initiative to create new styles of global reportage that take a close-up look at ordinary people and the issues they face.

Each poll or news article may become nothing more than flashpoint fights between radicals of every persuasion in which the quieter, more average voices get completely drowned out.

Readers have the opportunity to create their own interview clips opposite Post political reporter Dana Milbank.

Share your stories, your pictures, your videos wherever you see the I-Report logo. Weigh in on the blogs. Click your way through QuickVotes and more.

Is news happening in front of your eyes? Pull out your camera and I-Report it for CNN.

Online dystopian graphic novel starring a video blogger.

The Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards are a celebration of the very best in citizen journalism in the UK over the last 12 months.

Topix.net will also use its NewsRank(TM) technology to tag AP-originated content with the identity of the most geographically relevant member publication, for use on its own site, as well as providing that locality information back to the AP.

Using the OKN system, people in Africa, Asia and Latin America can create digital content in their own language, which is then exchanged with others through networks of existing community Access Points staffed by what OKN calls ‘Community Reporters’.

Minnesota Public Radio's participatory media effort.

A deal between 3 - with more than three million customers - and the broadcasters would provide editors with a vast array of clips from which to choose, treating citizen journalists almost like wire service reporters.

Analyzes changes in news organizations and journalistic routines that have emerged as a result of making online news for people who access the news online during their work day and at their work places.

The study found original reporting in just 5% of blog postings it reviewed.

You can insert your own "news article" into Google News, for thousands or millions to discover and read.

Discussion of how to formally represent the significance of news events to specific entities, for facilitating the machine processing of news.

Stories on graft just don't ring the clickthrough cash register. Neither do stories on politics in general. Or on wars or famines or other sorts of nasty business.

Professor Leonard focuses much of his research and teaching on the role of the press in society.

OhmyNews and Softbank signed a comprehensive investment contract valued at US$11million on February 22 after both parties agreed to form a strategic partnership in spreading citizen participatory journalism on the global stage.

FourDocs is the place to upload, watch and learn about documentary. Anyone can upload a FourDoc, it just has to be fact-based and 4minutes.

Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation.

Although the participants -- citizen journalists and commenters -- are essential, it's even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants.

The We Media Global Forum brings together the trailblazers of the connected society - the thinkers, innovators, investors, executives and activists seeking to tap the potential of digital networks connecting people everywhere.

A live debate by leading industry figures and representatives of the blogging community on the citizen journalism phenomenon.

Proposes several themes for the study of the blogosphere: economic influence, the convergence of sender/receiver roles, class and cultural representation, the constitution of digital identity and the limitations imposed by a digital divide.

The terms of the transaction imply a new kind of public, where... people do not so much consume the news as they "use" it in active search for what's going on, sometimes in collaboration with each other, or in support of the pros.

This report details the important considerations when exploring a collaborative effort between audience and traditional media organizations.

This article is designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media.

We believe content is most valuable when woven into the context of the web with tools like dynamic maps, shared photos, social tags, news feeds and user-generated data.

A premium on-demand broadband video service featuring live streams and access to CNN's archives.

The Internet allows us to see how news is made, as though we were walking through a factory tour, and we can compare the very similar results of a mass production system.

A new user-generated, interactive, multimedia content website in China. "The Chinese Ourmedia."

Journalism is changing more rapidly now than at any time in the past century, and this course will give a context to those changes and provide an overview of contemporary journalistic institutions.

In 2004-2005, the Communications Forum presented a series of three panels that examined media coverage of the U.S. presidential election.

Both consumers and professional photographers alike can then sell their photos at a price they set through Spy Media, which also offers media outlets the quickest route to the largest pool of uncensored news photos.

Uth TV wants to empower teens to become media producers.

Media, Technology and Society: a multi-disciplinary research project on the media landscape conducted for professionals engaged in strategies, research, thinking, education, policy and philanthropy related to the future of journalism and media.

Soundslides is a rapid production tool for still image and audio presentations.

The Echo Chamber Project is an open source, investigative documentary about the how the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq.

There is A LOT of potential for what kind of collaboration could happen if valid Final Cut Pro XML files could be generated by a web application like Drupal where hundreds of people could collaborate on one project.

Scoopt is soliciting pictures and videos from people with camera phones, and reselling them to mainstream media outlets.

We publish the most important news from the Web and the blogosphere based on the stories you link to most.