Rick Burnes' Blog

Google's Open Social

Mike Arrington: If they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.

Westerners

I'm back in Cambridge this morning after a great couple of days at the ONA conference in Toronto.

The highlight of my trip was time spent with Courtney Lowery and Matt Frank of NewWest.net.

I look up to those guys. Unlike most ONA types, they're balancing great local journalism with the urgency of an independent business.

Every news site and their corporate parent is trying new approaches to local news. But the New West folks are hungrier and humbler than anybody I know. They loose their jobs if the site doesn't work, so they think differently.

Listen to Rob Curley talk about the Louden Country Extra, and you're awed by the depth and quality of the site. It's like the Ritz serving up Sunday brunch. Endless richness.

Talk to Courtney and Matt, and you hear similar instances of excellent journalism. But you also hear stories of conferences, community meetings and reporters who can sell advertising space over urinals. This isn't the Ritz. It's a parent doing what it takes to put dinner on the table.

That kind of thinking excites me. There are no hangups about what should be done and what has been done. Just deep value for information, community and story-telling -- and a youthful willingness to try anything that might advance those values.

9Neighbors is a very different approach to local news in a very different community. Nevertheless, we emulate New West's bold, unfettered style.

A Hard Place

Andrew Blum: We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density.

For the Networked Journalism Summit

Earlier this week I went down to New York for the Networked Journalism Summit organized by David Cohn and Jeff Jarvis. In preparation for the event, David asked all the participants to answer a few questions about their work and background.

Here are the questions and my answers.

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

I’ve spent the last year and a half bootstrapping Faneuil Media, an online news startup. Initially, my partner Theo Burry and I focused on creating content for news sites using public data and open applications like Google Maps. Last year we broadened our scope with Atlas, a mapping tool that simplified map and data work for news sites.

Last week we launched our newest project, 9 Neighbors. 9 Neighbors is a local news filtering service for several Boston-area communities. The site uses social data — primarily relationships and browsing histories — to determine which bits of content are most useful to members of a community.

What are your goals?

We have two goals:
(1) To build a healthy, growing business.
(2) To make it easier to find quality, relevant information on a local (town and neighborhood) level.

Notable achievements?

The launch of 9 Neighbors is our most significant, concrete achievement. More broadly, we are proud to have enabled and been responsible for lots of online news experiments. Our mapping and and data projects on Boston.com, NYTimes.com and other sites were some of the first of their kind published on major news sites. Atlas, our mapping tool, made it possible for dozens of major newspapers and local news sites to begin experimenting with Google Maps and data. Our business has also been an important experiment, demonstrating one more approach to independent online news.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

We’ve learned that today it is very, very hard to build an independent business when your primary product is content. Content is abundant, and therefore cheap. Attention is scarce, and therefore valuable. This is why we’re now focusing on filtering tools, which help people use their valuable attention more efficiently.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

We’re earning money from advertising, right now primarily from our mapping tool, Atlas. In the future, we expect 9 Neighbors to generate additional advertising income.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

We just launched 9 Neighbors, so right now our focus is on getting feedback from users in our Boston communities, then iterating on the product. We’re also beginning to look at how we can partner with local publishers.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

I’m interested in speaking with people who are producing local content.

Dear Weather,

I don't know Rod Begbie, but he's a damn good Twitterer.

Consider these gems, posted over the last 24hrs or so:

Dear Weather, It's October. Please cool the fuck down. Yours sincerely, Sweaty Rod.

Public Service Announcement: ESPN Classic is running an American Gladiators marathon all day. You're welcome.

Coincidence of Words on a Page

Jeff Jarvis: We need new networks that identify and create new marketplaces for new value — greater value than the coincidence of words on a page, which Google sells.