New Media Tools Go Beyond "Multimedia"
In addition to the text, video, and audio files that are the main components of "multimedia" content on most websites, there are a growing number of creative tools for displaying data in completely new ways. One of the earliest, WeFeelFine.org, which launched a couple years back, probably would not strike most media execs as worth a second look.
The site aims to take the emotional temperature of the planet by crawling blogs and other user-generated content from LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google. Based on keywords like "angry," or "lonely," or "frightened," the site sorts data into various formats, the most compelling of which is an exploding universe of multi-colored dots.
The user can click on a dot, and find, say, a blogger along the Gulf Cost this morning who is feeling "scared" about the damage Hurricane Gustav is inflicting outside. From a media standpoint, the most useful aspect of this site is that you can cut the data, by emotions, age, gender, location, time, and weather. For a non-profit venture, it really breaks a lot of new ground for creative ways to capture and express data for your user base.
A more recent effort, that I bookmarked several months ago, is Many Eyes, a site that allows you to upload data and then create an interactive "visualization" that can take a number of forms. Created by scientists at IBM, Many Eyes is an effort to marshall the collective wisdom of the crowd to discover new patterns in data sets.
The Internet and computer processing power has brought us far more access to far greater amounts of information than ever before, obviously. So much so that many people complain of "information overload," which makes them feel confused, alienated, overwhelmed. So, for a media company, this service could be applied to enjoin communities to explore local data, like crime statistics or demographic data, in order to involve its audience in uncovering new stories that would never get told by traditional journalistic methodologies.
Finally, there is EveryBlock.com, a service we've mentioned before. "We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas," the site explains. "We're a geographic filter -- a "news feed" for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block."
The reporter in me thinks of this as the ultimate "ambulance-chaser" device. It is yet another way to engage people in your community with the content they want and need to know. EveryBlock has the advantage of combining public records (like property records and crime reports) with news articles, blog posts, even photos from Flickr and postings from Craigslist and reviews from Yelp.
For daily newspaper sites, particularly, this service has a ton of potential.