If you thought publishing online was a simple type and click operation, think again. Amy Webb of KnowledgeWebb has updated her popular visualization of the process from story seed to full bloom and then back to seed again. Her model for doing journalism justice in the digital age shows just how labor-intensive the process could be, how the devil is in the details, and what it takes to get it all right. How green is your thumb?

Given that real live imperfect human beings are still engaged in journalism, ideally software would help facilitate our use of best practices to fully integrate social media, search engine optimization, etc. Perhaps a content management system could prompt content producers with checklists, alerts and other tools to make sure we've covered all of the important steps along the way? Do you know of anything like this out there already? I personally would favor pop-up reminders such as "did you check all of your links first, bozo?..."  read more »

Usually this blog points the way to breath-taking, ground-breaking, mind-expanding, awe-inspiring innovation in the public media sphere. (At least, that's what I try to do.) But with temperatures in the East climbing toward triple digits, and with a heat emergency in effect, perhaps it’s a good time to journey north…super far, far north to Gwich’in territory in the Canadian Arctic. There, a volunteer-run radio station won't wow you with its high-tech fancy cross-platform production, but you might find it moving to hear (and see) quintessential community radio in action.

Check out this new documentary from National Film Board of Canada which profiles CBQM, a bare-bones station that plays a ton of country music and where residents play bingo over the air. In an icy hinterland where there's more wildlife than people, CBQM is a lifeline that connects a rural natives to their neighbors and their culture. It’s the kind of place where people call in to send messages to their friends over the air. Not song dedications, but stuff like, “Charlene, Debra wants you to come over for tea…”

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Today at 3:30 pm ET, PBS NewsHour is partnering with YouTube's Citizen Channel to give Americans a chance to ask tough questions of British Petroleum, the oil company largely responsible for the unprecedented environmental and economic catastrophe in the Gulf. Ray Suarez is interviewing Bob Dudley, the CEO of BP's "Gulf Coast Restoration." Viewers can start suggesting questions now, read ones already submitted, and give the ones you like best the thumbs up.  read more »

"Today's public media must do more to fully reflect the public's needs and personal welfare; do more to engage community members at the local level. America needs 'informed communities,' places where democratic values of openness, inclusion, participation, and empowerment thrive across all appropriate media. The practice of such a model ensures that communities are open, officials are accountable, and that the public is engaged."

This is the powerful and focused mission of the Public Media Corps (PMC), which launched this week in Washington, DC.

A project of the National Black Programming Consortium, the PMC has selected and trained 15 fellows to embed themselves in various organizations inside Washington, DC's African American and Latino communities. For six months, they will work in schools, libraries, museums, community centers, and a local public media stations, such as WPFW-FM, WEAA-FM, WETA-TV and WHUT-TV. During their residencies, PMC fellows will teach and engage people in multi-platform media-making to fast track their adoption of broadband internet.

Our country has a long tradition of creating "corps" to get young people involved in service work in communities across the country. While other corps aim to improve the quality of life on a local level, the Public Media Corps could have a broader, long-lasting impact: changing the face of public media to better reflect the real/New America.

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It's so exciting when a mainstream media outlet discovers MQ2! Budget Travel magazine just gave a hearty shout-out to Mapping Main Street in the "This Just In" column.

"There's a lot of political talk about the mood on Main Street. But what are these streets named Main really like and how much do they have in common? To find out, a team of radio producers and artists launched the multimedia project Mapping Main Street last summer and began enlisting collaborators."

One of those collaborators is Wisconsin photographer Amy Fichter who tells Budget Travel that she heard about Mapping Main Street on NPR and has been snapping shots and uploading them to the project's flickr site ever since.  read more »

This week is the Silverdocs film festival sponsored by the American Film Institute (AFI), Discovery Communications and CPB. Dubbed a "nonfiction nirvana" by Variety, Silverdocs celebrates documentary films and the people who make them.

Many of the films premiering here will wind up with theatrical release or will air on public television down the road.

Along with screenings of over 100 films by more than 20 thousand attendees, the 8th annual Silverdocs festival hosts an international documentary conference, where media makers are gathering to network and share their experiences creating and distributing powerful content across platforms. MQ2 is participating in two panels.   read more »

PRX has been named a winner of the prestigious Knight News Challenge, the global competition to support innovation at the intersection of journalism and technology. But the real winner here may be independent producers, whose ranks are swelling at the same time that sources of investment seem to be shrinking.

PRX successfully sold the Knight Foundation on the idea of building StoryMarket, a version of Spot.Us designed specifically for public radio. Spot.Us, a previous Knight News Challenge awardee, is a platform that enables journalists to crowd-fund their proposed projects. Individual reporters or collaborative teams post a pitch then launch a social networking campaign to attract donations to support their reporting. Some public radio types on the West Coast have tapped into Spot.Us, as I described in a previous blog post called Spot.Us: Show.Us the Money.  read more »

Got a super-cool video in the works? Or one you've finished that's languishing online, just waiting to be discovered? Here's your chance to go viral and garner the esteem of the art world.

YouTube has teamed up with the Guggenheim Museum for a juried contest to collect and honor the 200 most creative short videos uploaded to YouTube. Nominated works don't have to be brand new; they can be up to two years old. It is a "biennial" after all. But videos have to be less than 10 minutes long, so epics calling out for editing need not apply. The deadline to submit is July 31, 2010. Check out this cool video that explains all the details, coming in at exactly 2 minutes and 21 seconds:  read more »

There's a whole lotta buzz these days about cloud computing - how we're moving rapidly toward a time when all of our information and software applications are stored, shared and accessed online instead of on our personal computers.

The Pew Research Center's Project on Internet and American Life even included questions about cloud computing in its latest survey of attitudes about technology and the online world. 

Personally, I'm not fond of use of the term "cloud" as a metaphor in this case. Does anyone like cloudy minds or cloudy water? When I think of clouds, I think of nimbus, cirrus, cumulus. I think of evaporation, stormy weather, and acid rain. Even Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I don't think of data.

I've Looked at Clouds from Both Sides Now

I prefer to refer to clouds in the traditional sense...real puffy clouds up there in the real sky. Let me share two not-so-fluffy but very cool sources of atmospheric inspiration:  read more »

Exciting news to report: The New Yorker has published a post about In Verse, MQ2 grantee Lu Olkowski's powerful docu-poetry project. The piece appears on "Book Bench," The New Yorker book department's blog about literary life.

The post, by Danielle Blau, includes an interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, whose poetry is featured in the In Verse series called Women of Troy.

"I think it is important that these poems are about real people," says Somers-Willett. The poet describes how she first encountered these real-life characters through Brenda Ann Kenneally's photographs, and later met the women during a visit to the post-industrial city of Troy, New York.  read more »