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Suw: The Digital Economy Bill – set to ruin the very thing it purports to support
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Suw: Look at the pretty drawings! Nice round up of visualisation techniques.
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Suw: WiredUK takes a look at the paywall rhetoric and finds it lacking.
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Suw: Answer – No, not really. This blog post simplifies things to the point of inapplicability.
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Suw: Kevin Marks' list of words everyone needs to know to understand what's going on in the real-time web.
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Suw: Bill Gurley with a fascinating analysis of Google's map strategy and the ramifications not just for Tele Atlas and NavTeq, but GPS device mfrs like Garmin and TomTom, and GPS-enabled mobile phone mfrs.
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Kevin: This is very, very interesting. Ushahidi is a crowd-sourced reporting app that grew out of the election unrest in Kenya in early 2008. The project has brought on board Jon Gosier. He is the "founder of Appfrica Labs in Uganda, a Senior TED Fellow and a name well-known amongst the African technology and blogging crowd". He will be working on the Swift River project, which looks to use algorithmic and crowdsourcing methods to help verify crisis information.
Daily Archives: December 15, 2009
Ushahidi and Swift River: Crowdsourcing innovations from Africa
For all the promise of user-generated content and contributions, one of the biggest challenges for journalism organisations is that such projects can quickly become victims of their own success. As contributions increase, there comes a point when you simply can’t evaluate or verify them all.
One of the most interesting projects in 2008 in terms of crowdsourcing was Ushahidi. Meaning “testimony” in Swahili, the platform was first developed to help citizen journalists in Kenya gather reports of violence in the wake of the contested election of late 2007. Out of that first project, it’s now been used to crowdsource information, often during elections or crises, around the world.
What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.
Considering the challenge of gathering information during a chaotic event like the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, members of the Ushahidi developer community discussed how to meet the challenge of what they called a “hot flash event“.
It was that crisis that started two members of the Ushahidi dev community (Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla) thinking about what needs to be done when you have massive amounts of information flying around. We’re at that point where the barriers for any ordinary person sharing valuable tactical and strategic information openly is at hand. How do you ferret the good data from the bad?
They focused on the first three hours of a crisis. Any working journalist knows that often during fast moving news events false information is often reported as fact before being challenged. How do you increase the volume of sources while maintaining accuracy and also sifting through all of that information to find the information that is the most relevant and important?
Enter Swift River. The project is an “attempt to use both machine algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify incoming streams of information”. Scanning the project description, the Swift River application appears to allow people to create a bundle of RSS feeds, whether those feeds are users or hashtags on Twitter, blogs or mainstream media sources. Whoever creates the RSS bundle is the administrator, allowing them to add or delete sources. Users, referred to as sweepers, can then tag information or choose the bits of information in those RSS feeds that they ‘believe’. (I might quibble with the language. Belief isn’t verification.) Analysis is done of the links, and “veracity of links is computed”.
It’s a fascinating idea and a project that I will be watching. While Ushahidi is designed to crowdsource information and reports from people, Swift River is designed to ‘crowdsource the filter’ for reports across the several networks on the internet. For those of you interested, the project code is made available under the open-source MIT Licence.
One of the things that I really like about this project is that it’s drawing on talent and ideas from around the world, including some dynamic people I’ve had the good fortunte to meet. Last year when I was back in the US for the elections, I met Dave Troy of Twittervision fame who helped develop the an application to crowdsource reports of voting problems during the US elections last year, Twitter Vote Report. The project gained a lot of support including MTV’s Rock the Vote and National Public Radio. He has released the code for the Twitter Vote Report application on GitHub.
To help organise the Swift River project for Ushahidi, they have enlisted African tech investor, Jon Gosier of Appfrica Labs in Uganda. They have based Appfrica Labs loosely on Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. I interviewed Jon Gosier at TEDGlobal in Oxford this summer about a mobile phone search service in Uganda. He’s a Senior TED Fellow.
There are a lot of very interesting elements in this project. First off, they have highlighted a major issue with crowdsourced reporting: Current filters and methods of verification struggle as the amount of information increases. The issue is especially problematic in the chaotic hours after an event like the attacks in Mumbai.
I’m curious to see if there is a reputation system built into it. As they say, this works based on the participation of experts and non-experts. How do you gauge the expertise of a sweeper? And I don’t mean to imply as a journalist that I think that journalists are ‘experts’ by default. For instance, I know a lot about US politics but consider myself a novice when it comes to British politics.
It’s great to see people tackling these thorny issues and testing them in real world situations. I wonder if this type of filtering can also be used to surface and filter information for ongoing news stories and not just crises and breaking news. Filters are increasingly important as the volume of information increases. Building better filters is a noble and much needed task.
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Instapaper: Managing your ‘To Read’ list
I have this dreadfully bad habit of leaving lots of tabs open in my browser. Since the day Firefox introduced tabs, they have been my default way of “managing” large numbers of articles that I want to read. Whether someone has sent me a link by email or IM, or I spot something on Twitter, I’d open it up in a tab, glance at the headline and think, “Oh, I’ll read that later.” Then it would sit in my browser for weeks, sometimes months, whilst I did other stuff.
When Firefox grows to 60+ open tabs it becomes a bit of a resources pig and more often than not would crash horribly, maybe taking down the rest of the OS with it. I’d be forced to restart my Mac and when Firefox reopened I would feel compelled to reopen the 60 tabs that had caused it to crash in the first place. Sometimes I copy all URLs into a separate document and start afresh with an empty browser. I almost never go back to this list of URLs (which now goes back to 10th August 2006!).
I recently discovered Instapaper and now my workflow has totally changed. Instead of leaving tabs open, I open the article I want to read, save it to Instapaper, and close the tab. I can then read it either later on, in my browser, or I can read it on the Instapaper iPhone app. Once I’m done, I can archive the link, or I can share it on Tumbler, Twitter, Feedly, Google Reader, Facebook or via email. Instapaper also plays very nicely with Tweetie on the iPhone, so I can save links direct from my phone without having to star the Tweet and open it on my Mac later. The only thing I miss at the moment is that I can’t save links to Delicious, which is my current link storage facility.
It’s not often that an app revolutionises my reading in this way. RSS did it, years back. (If you’re curious, I use NetNewsWire which syncs to Google Reader and thence with Reeder on the iPhone – a fab combination.) But nothing has come close to changing how I consume non-RSS content until now.
The great thing is that I don’t feel the need to read everything that passes into view, but have a much more streamlined way of saving the link and assessing it later. And because Instapaper on the iPhone works offline, I can use some of that wasted time spent sitting on underground trains to flip through my articles. Win!
Just how gullible is the media?
Rather like our own Starsuckers, wherein the British media are shown not to give a fig about whether stories are true or not, Hungry Beast, a show on Australia’s ABC, recently put together their own hoax.
I don’t know if this shows that the media is gullible, or whether it just proves that they just don’t care whether what they print is true. If the former was true, we might stand a chance of turning things around. I think the latter is more on the money, which makes it a much more intractable problem.