Apple’s acquisition this past week of app search company Chomp, for a reported $50 million, brought the importance of app discovery to the forefront and validated the need for the industry to pay close attention to this critical part of the app ecosystem.

Better app search within the App Store will offer developers some hope that the top 25 lists will not be the only sure route to being a successful app. But Apple’s acquisition of Chomp only begins to address the broader needs of consumers and developers.

Apps are becoming an integral part of our everyday lives. With over 900,000(2) apps
available across gaming to fitness, travel to dining, and everything in-between, there
is no shortage of options for consumers. With a constantly growing catalog of apps,
the issue is not whether there’s an app for that, but, more importantly, how can a
consumer find the right app for their particular needs and interests.

Apps are the foundation of the smartphone economy. Apple is counting down to 25
billion app downloads and Android recently broke 10 billion. By 2015 downloads
are expected surpass 182 billion. Smartphone penetration in the U.S. is already
approaching 60%, but global penetration, at less than 15%, has a lot of growth
left.

In fact, nearly 600 million smartphones will be shipped this year. Demand
for apps is nowhere near its peak, and the ability to easily find apps relevant to a
consumers interests and needs is going to be paramount going forward.

As the CEO of AppTap, an app discovery company focused on addressing the needs
of consumers and app developers, we’re constantly hearing from consumers who
are struggling to find apps that they want (or are unaware that they even exist)
and are frustrated at having to spend time slogging through the entire app catalog.

Likewise, app developers lack the tools to reach their target audience and are
unable to buy their way to the highly coveted top 25 lists.

Solving app discovery requires a comprehensive approach. An improved search
experience in the app stores is important, but we believe it only addresses an aspect
of the problem and misses out on some underlying needs and opportunities that we
think are important to solving app discovery and fostering a healthy app ecosystem.

Here are a few points that we believe are important when it comes to a
comprehensive solution to app discovery:

1. App discovery should not be limited to the app stores. It should be
everywhere. Consumers don’t want app stores to be the only way they
can find apps. App discovery should be as pervasive and integral a part of
our online experience as web search and related content links on the web.
AppTap enables any site, service or app to integrate app recommendations,
search and social discovery right into their core user experience.

2. Use context to cut through the clutter of apps and save consumers time
by recommending apps related to their interests. Millions of consumers
read content, share news and use services that reflect their interests and
needs. A USAToday user reading an article about Rome in the travel section
is likely to be interested in apps about travel in Italy. AppTap enables
contextually relevant app recommendations to be embedded in any article,
site or service, introducing consumers to the right app at the right time.

3. App developers need tools to find the right customer for their apps.
With nearly one million apps available, rising to the top can be a daunting
and very expensive task. App developers need tools to get their apps in front
of the right users, in the right context. This increases the chances of an app
developer acquiring an active user who will both drive their in-app business
models and grow viral awareness of their app.

AppTap is enabling consumers to easily discover, find, buy and share apps that are
relevant to them right on their favorite web and mobile properties. We’re helping
app developers get their apps in the hands of the right users. And, we’re helping
media companies, carriers and other companies with direct consumer relationships
play a meaningful role in app discovery for their users.

Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will undoubtedly continue to invest in
improving their own app stores. But in order to truly address app discovery, they
should embrace a broader view that goes beyond search and their own app stores.

Big media, carriers and consumer services companies should also play a meaningful
role in app discovery. Consumers want help filtering through the flood of apps and
they will reward the companies that do that with renewed loyalty and business.

The first is NewsIT, a crowd-powered news service, which was one of the winners of the We Media PitchIt seed investment challenge earlier this year in Miami. (Stay tuned everyone – Pitch 2011 details and entry info will be announced soon).

The other is Ringio, a slick virtual PBX service with built-in CRM. Ringio works out of WeSpace, the co-working studio we opened in Reston, Virginia, this past summer. Good luck Melinda and Sam! (aka CNCPundit and @samaparicio.

Ask questions, raise issues, arrange meet-ups, provide feedback, or note key findings for innovation from the conference. Just bring your iPad and download the Disruptathon app. Or use an iTouch that Disruptathon founder Pete Erickson will provide you at the conference.

TRDC is all about creativity, connections and the latest technology. It’s about participation, too. The Disruptathon platform is just one way we’ll capture ideas and examples from everyone, including TR’s group of Digital da Vincis.

Panels and Powerpoints are for the Digital Dinosaurs. Join us for creative conversation, striking show-and-tell and cool connections on Monday, June 14 at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm. Check out the latest on the program and watch the video.

Register today.

Oh!magination, a new app from our friends at KvJ & Company, let’s people capture, share, discover and delight in ideas. You can get a free download by attending TRDC at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm on Monday, June 14.

Oh!magination joins us as the official app for ideation at TRDC. A playful, interactive application for ideas, you’ll get a chance to use it as you’re inspired. Rich Brandisi, the COO of KvJ & Company will be on hand to talk about opportunities for innovation in mobile-social computing, as well as show off Oh! during the app throwdown at TRDC.

Check out the program, watch the video, and by all means register today.

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We saw awe-inspiring work, a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet and its period of technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievement. Old-school publishers such as Popular Science, Zagat and Thomson Reuters rediscovered their game with sharp-shooting apps aimed at connected audiences. NPR and ESPN enhanced experiences that were already compelling online. There were untethered virtuosos, too, such as Electric Literature, the Ghost in the Machine (under development) collaboration, and soloist Rob Kelley’s BeatPad. We’ll revisit and follow the development of their apps in subsequent posts, examining the qualities that make them successful.

More critically, we saw, heard and felt a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet, the Web and its culture-bending technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievements. In just four weeks since the launch of Apple’s iPad, a flurry of applications has been released to expand engagement, enhance understanding and extend meaning and utility.

Design-driven innovation from a fresh, creative class of developers has delivered a whole new mind for experiencing a world gone digital — high concept, high touch connections that enable us to cope with our unrelenting craving for transcendence.

Finally, we have devices and a number of very good starts that deliver abundance with an aesthetic imperative, as well as a new and better way of organizing things: the new order or order.

Yet, initial responses to our questions were cautious and meek: It is early. We don’t really know. Where’s the money?

Where’s the money?
As a way out of ingenuity, the last response is the first one cited. “Where’s the money?” is the mantra of the unimaginative. A circular question, it is an excuse for inertia, a business plan for standing still. Again. The question is almost as pathetic as its cousin — the position that we won’t invest in an online or mobile strategy until we are certain it works. Good luck with that one.

We weren’t surprised that some who participated in Tabula Rasa, and some who covered it, could not or would not get their minds around the theme of the event: innovation in the emerging Conceptual Age. Mea culpa, we invited discussion at a where’s-the-money session called Good Apple, Bad Apple / Good Business, Bad Business. Given both the dissension over “paid models” and the noisy discourse surrounding it, the topic is a requirement on the conference circuit. Not even a fresh take could take us out of the weeds.

We thought our friend Merrill Brown, the former Editor-In-Chief of MSNBC who’s been dealing with the issue for a coupla decades and currently promotes a freemium model for publishers (some content free, some paid), summed it up rather well: “Putting up a pay wall does not solve your business problem,” said Brown. “Publishers who think they can put their magazine on an iPad and make a lot of money are making a significant mistake.”

We love surprises … almost as much as provocation. Jeff Jarvis didn’t disappoint. We showed the stunning TIME magazine app — high concept, high touch, and only $4.99 issue. The Buzzmachine turned buzz killer:

“I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,” said a skeptical Jarvis., “The ego of it was unabashedly awful.” On his blog he writes: “It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.”

Josh Quittner, TIME’s editor-at-large and one of the creative forces behind its iPad app, gave it back to Jarvis in a blog post called “And the horse you rode in on.”

“Jarvis, a former Time Inc.-er, can be forgiven for the disgruntled, I-hate-my-ex-wife tone that creeps into his rhetoric, whenever he discusses his former employer. It’s tiresome, dude, and intellectually dishonest given that you’re still stumping for your Google book.” 

Turns out the dispute was not about the money, but a little about the distribution of media bundles, a little about concerns that Apple and its partners are attempting to control the “open” web and kill the link econony (Google), and more than a little about Jarvis and Quittner.

Can we turn the page, please?

The Meaning Model
Enough cautious and meek. We need some bold. Why not look at economic issues with the same creativity and integrity as we do conceptual ones? The current “where’s the money” debate is framed by rules developed for the economies and societies, factories and mass production, of the Industrial Age. Forward-thinking enterprises adapted to the atomization and proliferation of content in the Information Age. Now we enter the Conceptual Age with a universe of creators. The new currency is meaning. Off the top, how many business plans can you conceive for a meaning model? Maybe a hundred for, say, anyone?

From Tabula Rasa, we put that first word on the blank slate: meaning. As we reconsider what it means to be human, we’re discovering new metaphors for storytelling, creating new ways to engage, connecting with a world of friends and information, and designing innovations that will guide our lives and shape our universe on almost any device.

Where’s the money?

We’ll answer the question with a better one: Where’s the love, y’all? We put that one to music (Black-Eyed Peas with Justin Timberlake) and video when we started we this crusade back in ought-three. If you don’t know the answer to “Where’s the Love?” by now, you’ll never get the one that asks “where’s the money.”

This is one of those moments – an important shift in digital culture that will be old news, obvious to everyone, a few years from now. There’s an electrifying crackle in the air as digital creatives, businesses, investors and visionaries collide in a mad dash to define the future around the next big thing. Not even the old masters of the universe can stop it. Their hands are slipping off the controls.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I may lead them.

Sorry. Your people are leading the way in this universe.

Journey to the Conceptual Age
It’s not just the iPad, it’s the promise of a more personal, more creative, more fulfilling, more inspiring and more beautiful digital experience. It’s the promise of something more human, more wonderful. It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It’s the next PC, the next smartphone, the next printing press. It’s all of that – in a simple, mobile shiny-new-thing powered by something entirely new to media: human touch. Gigs and hard drives fade into the cloud, replaced by pictures and words and shapes and sounds we can mold like clay. That’s magic. The result isn’t merely something hard and shiny that resembles a notepad. It’s something old, deep and rare: pure joy.

Over the next weeks we’ll continue our journey to the Conceptual Age. We’ll stop at the guideposts along the way, showcasing innovative examples of work defining the creative moment. We’ll conduct activities that show where the moment is leading. And we’ll identify the qualities of design-driven innovation that will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

To get started, we have five questions ….

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Samsung’s W960 mobile phone, released in South Korea in March, delivers 3-D video content that can be viewed without special glasses and can be manipulated by turning and twisting the device.

Years before there was the iPhone or the iPad, we saw applications and utilities on mobile devices in South Korea and Japan before there was an app for that here. Which is to say reimagined by Apple.

Now get ready for a three-def physics that could alter Apple’s’ gravity. Technology developed by Julien Flack, CTO of Dynamic Digital Depth, could be built into many mobile devices within the next two years. Flack has spent more than decade converting 2-D content into 3-D in real-time, solving the the problem: the need for special glasses that deliver a separate image to each eye. You can climb inside Flack’s multi-dimensional brain at a Technology Review video

The remaining problem: a shortage of content for the three-def experience. For now, the technology best handles animated, computer-generated content. Thus the current sweet spot: games that simulate 3-D spaces. Just as games are driving adoption of 3-D television screens, they are likely to lead to new interfaces and applications — augmented reality. That could get very interesting across a range of content.

Triple def TVs, which hit stores after this year’s Consumers Electronics Show, require glasses. Phones may provide a better experience. 3-D displays work by directing light to deliver different versions of an image directly to each of a viewer’s eyes. The effect works best over a narrow range of viewing angles, so it is not well suited to television or cinema screens — the places where we’ve first experienced 3-D. But phones are generally used by one person at a time and are easily held at the optimum angle. That’s why mobile multimedia devices may bring 3-D into the mainstream

In addition to Dynamic Digital Depth, based in Santa clara, other companies working on the mobile 3-D experience include 3M in St. Paul, Nintendo in Kyoto, Nvidia in Santa Clara, and N4D in Atlanta.

As usual, Apple’s marketing has been masterful, right down to putting the iPad into the hands of eight influential reviewers. The fortunate few seem to like it, which is good for them (it is hard not to like cool gifts) and very good for Apple. If you care, Gizmodo has a good take, a comparison chart and links to the Elite Eight.

The rest of the world readies for a gold rush. What company doesn’t have a alchemist developing an iPad app that transforms their content into gold? Or a developer claiming to be Merlin?

The iPad may be the next, great gadget you can’t afford to ignore, but it would be a mistake to think it has the chemistry that changes the qualities of base metals, that it contains the magic elixir of longevity, or that it imparts some infinite and ultimate wisdom to those who hold it in their hands. Drop the sucker and the glass case will break.

Time to get real.

We won’t make the mistake of considering the iPad simply as a gizmo to be loved or loathed by gadgeteers, techies, cool-seekers, opportunists and pundits. We see mass adoption as the next wave of sophisticated, mobile computing platforms and advanced social networks. As mobile phones fundamentally changed the way people communicate, this year’s burst of tablet computing leads to the Internet of Everything Everywhere by the end of this decade, the Device Decade.

tabula rasa [ tab-yuh-luh rah-suh ] lat., clean slate.
The mind before it receives impressions gained from experience

WE’RE CONVENING TABULA RASA to stir innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as to make sense of significant forces that are converging on an informed, alway-on society. We’ve identified a few: the aforementioned Digital Decade, which spreads mobile computing and 10 billion devices throughout the world; and the tablet “burst,” which will likely last a year or two.

Here are some other issues on our agenda:

– Design-driven innovation. DIY and WYSIWYG innovation. The emergence of a new, visual language for seeing the world and communicating among its citizens.
– Publishing and broadcasting imperatives. Can devices fill traditional media’s looming and expanding revenue gap?
– Social entrepreneurship. Apps for companies, nonprofits, NGOs, community organizations and everyday citizens to engage.
– The Mobile-Social Society. How will continuing improvements in mobile communications platforms impact the social structures supporting commerce, finance, governance, health, the environment, transportation, entertainment, science, media and technology.
– Cool-seeking experiences. Techno Laggards and Massive Passives want to share the cool. Meet the huge, new world of connected customers.
– Boys with toys. The tech revolution and app development is skewed by the boys. What that means.
– The future of context. Is there one? Devices, apps and algorythms continue to atomize news and information, separating them from context.
– Channels, controls and trust. Who owns and controls content in all forms, on all devices? Does old wine taste better in new bottles? Should we trust the new gods of media?

With your help, we’ll start to address these issues and report on them. Our colleague Brian Reich, who’s conceived our collaborative “We Think” innovation agenda, will coordinate the initiative for reports and discussion at Tabula Rasa NYC. Contact Brian at brian@littlemmedia.com to get involved

Almost forgot: At Tabula Rasa, you’ll see amazing work and get to meet the creative geniuses who are pioneering the content, design, technology and business of tablet computing. So join the fun on Thursday, April 29 in New York. Register here.

Our enthusiasm for the tablet comes from both sides of the brain, the creative as well as the practical (we’re talking about business). The Creative Class sees the possibilities: read Nick Carr, Pentagram, Joe Zeff and my post yesterday on experiential news design.

Our take is that smart publishers can reap rewards by investing in new channels for storytelling, advertising and, dare we say, content you can charge for. But few have expressed either understanding, leadership or the required commitment to fill the blank slate of content that the expanding flood of tablets and other mobile devices afford. The creative class is apt to beat them to the future.

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The original messiah machine: the Mac Plus. Introduced in 1986, this little beauty brought a revolution in publication design. It came standard with 1 MB of  RAM in an all-in-one, beige case wrapped around a 9-inch monochrome display. It was the first Mac to come with a built in SCSI port for an external Hard Drive.

The Plus was the computer that brought desktop publishing within reach of almost everyone. The revolutionary WYSIWYG interface enabled fast, professional management of text and images, as well as the creation of simple charts and graphs. Costing about $2700, most design and graphics departments could afford just one. But they came with the signatures of Jobs, Woz and the rest of the Apple design team on the inside of the plastic shell. Iterations of The Plus brought the capacity to design and publish entirely on the computer.

The Plus was also the computer where designers and journalists discovered online networking. Before the Net exploded as open and global platform, communicators connected their Pluses to to PressLink. The database and computer bulletin board service, a subsidiary of Knight Ridder, enabled access, transmissions and downloads of small files of news text, photos, images and graphics. PressLink also served as proprietary network for collaboration and communication.

Now for visionaries. You can’t marvel at the tablets, eReaders and mobile screens that will dazzle the future of communications without nodding to Roger Fidler. A seminal figure in digital publishing, he developed a prophetic prototype for a news tablet in 1994. Roger was among the few to understand the convergence of technology, communications, design and mobility. He developed devices for moving news beyond print in the early 1990s. Now some publishers think those devices are the salvation for newspapers.

Matt Mansfield has written a splendid profile of Roger on the Society for News Design site.

Time to look forward again. It’s noon and the Apple unveiling is five hours away.

Ushahidi, which was named a “Game Changer” at last year’s conference, is utilizing digital mapmaking technology and social media to map and verify vital information in Haiti. Ushahidi plots key information on a Google map of Haiti: makeshift hospitals, locations of survivors and people still trapped and reports of unstable bridges. The map helps rescue workers locate and track of survivors, as well navigate the dangerous landscape of destruction.

The Extraordinaries, one of two winners at the Pitch It! Competition at last year’s conference, applies facial-recognition technology to finding missing people in Haiti. Since we first posted about them last week, our friends at The Extraordinaries have worked around the clock with the State Department on a coordinated technology effort to support relief efforts in Haiti. From its Earthquake Support Center, accessible by computer and the mobile Internet, The Extraordinaries’ facial recognition technology enables relief workers and family members to match faces of missing persons to images from news reports across the Internet.

“We’ve had over 31,000 image tags submitted by thousands of people, in three days,” founder Jacob Colker told us. “ We’ve also had over 640 searches queried by families looking for missing loved ones. NBC, ABC, CNN have all run stories about our efforts.” Watch the videos.

The project has also spawned a stream of information from users in the Extraordinaries growing social network of volunteers.

From a situation room at Tufts University, ten Ushahidi volunteers are working 24/7 finding, evaluating and posting relevant information on digital maps. The maps are categorized for emergencies, threats, logistics, and missing people.

Information submitted to the site via outside users are checked by the volunteers to ensure legitimacy (posts designate whether information is verified on unverified). Patrick Meier, Ushahidi’s humanitarian response and crisis mapping specialist, told the MIT Technology Review that the process could be automated in the future by the group’s Swift River platform, a predictive tagging, program that will try to cross-validate crowd-sourced information by comparing reports from texts, Twitter, news feeds, YouTube and other sources.

Like The Extraordinaries, Ushahidi has set up as social network, Crisis Mappers Net, which has become a communications channel for state departments, NGOs, and people in the technology and public health sectors. Ushahidi is also collaborating with Instedd’s GeoChat, another map-based communications platform working with the Emergency Information Services (EIS).

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I will remember where I was when I heard the news about Michael Jackson because it came for me in an unexpected place in an unexpected way.

I was practicing on the putting green prior to a golf tournament when a playing partner, a prominent orthopedic surgeon, received an alert from his Medscape professional network on the Blackberry that never leaves his side. “Michael Jackson is apparently dead,” he announced. “My colleagues are already speculating about what may have killed him. I’ll know more soon.

He texted two messages on his Blackberry, clipped the phone to his golf bag, then wrapped his million-dollar hands around the grip of a Scotty Cameron putter. Word about Jackson’s death circulated around the golf course faster than news of free drinks after a hole-in-one.

There was no rush to the clubhouse to see what the cable news channels were reporting. In fact, the networks weren’t reporting anything about Mr. Jackson’s death. That wouldn’t come for almost an hour. Rather, golfers pulled smartphones from their bags to call friends or colleagues, search for news alerts, or tweet a message to followers on Twitter. While they noticed that the broadband service was a bit slower than usual, they spread the word quickly and efficiency through email.

Not long ago, using these devices on the practice green would have been regarded as violations of etiquette in the hushed and polite environment of a golf club. But we should no longer be surprised by how and where people are informed about news these days. There is no longer such a thing as “an unexpected place” or “an unexpected way” or acceptable behavior for accessing news and information. The expectation now is that we know about it as soon as it happens wherever we happen to be. News spreads instantaneously, sometimes out of control, through personal news networks on the ubiquitous information devices that almost everyone has. Everyone is a node in the network that moves the story

An AP reporter told blogger Jeff Jarvis that she was riding on a bus when someone announced the news of Mr. Jackson’s death to the passengers. Everyone on the bus took out their smart phones and spread the news, she said. Everyone on the bus was a node, Jarvis observed, the bus the network.

It is not just the occasional mega story that resonates through the nodes and networks of the Web. “Twitter revolutions” broke out in Iran and Moldova in recent weeks. And thousands of unreported, small stories inform lives globally in the continual flow that occurs throughout our connected society.

You’d have to be a castaway on one of the few, remote islands not yet wired with broadband service to miss the story that has eclipsed all others on the Internet. At about 6 p.m. Thursday, June 25, about a half hour after TMZ.com reported Mr. Jackson’s death, traffic on news Web sites clocked in at an astounding 4.2 million visitors a minute, according to the Akamai, a company that maximizes the performance of leading sites.

Most news sites loaded slowly. S0me entertainment sites did not load at all. Even Google had trouble keeping up. Between 5:40 p.m. and 6:15 p.m. — before most major news organizations verified and reported Mr. Jackson’s death on their Internet sites and television broadcasts — visitors to Google News experienced difficulty accessing search results.

AIM, the instant messaging service operated by AOL, collapsed for about 40 minutes amid the attention of the Jackson story. The company called the day “a seminal moment in Internet history.” It said: “We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”

Historically, celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviors — searching, sharing and reacting to the news followed by online tributes. This has become the cultural way to mourn celebrities: catharsis by Internet. The death of Princess Diana was the first notable example.

On Twitter, thousands posted short messages about Mr. Jackson expressing disbelief, grief and remembrances. The number of tweets and retweets caused the site to load more slowly than usual as well as crash multiple times. “We saw more than double the normal tweets per second the moment the news broke,” said Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders.

By some estimates, references to Mr. Jackson accounted for about 25 per cent of all traffic on the Internet on the day of his death, exceeding the level of reporting on the violent aftermath of elections in Iran. Now, a study by the Pew Research Center has determined that coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death in the last week accounted for an astonishing 60% of all news coverage in the United States.

Many observers believe this represents another turning point for the Web, a time when there was far more activity on the Web’s social networks than there was on traditional news outlets. As such, the numbers again demonstrate the extent to which news has become a cultural experience spread by and through social media.

Traditional media organizations now play a secondary, reactive role in the arc of stories in the new culture of news. But that role is significant. Pew’s News Interest Index conducted June 26-29 shows the public closely tracked the Jackson story on news outlets last week, though nearly two-in-three Americans say news organizations gave too much coverage to the story. Thirty percent said they followed Jackson stories very closely. A similar share (31%) say this was the story they followed more closely than any other

While all media platforms benefited from interest in Mr. Jackson’s death and career, traditional outlets fueled interest with retrospectives produced from rich video and news archives documenting a life captured in media. CNN and other cable networks reported higher than usual ratings, while the major television networks ran – and continue to run — prime time specials on the pop icon that garnered audiences of 5.5 million to 7.6 million viewers.

But compare that to the 4.2 million users a minute on the Internet at the peak of the story. While other media may have achieved one-time surges in viewership or readership, the Jackson story landed like an atomic bomb on the Internet and its social networks. The energy spread globally throughout the Web with content exploding into countless millions of atoms, each taking on a life of their own.

The story also validated the “long tail” theory of economics, which holds that information may have greater residual value in the long term than it has during its short-term peak. Word about Mr. Jackson’s death ignited a surge in music sales with the singer dominating iTunes rankings with seven sets, most more than a decade old, in the top 10.

Turning point or tipping point? We suggest it is more of the latter. While the numbers are unprecedented, the extent of Internet usage during the Jackson story is an abstraction of much larger forces that had been set in motion years earlier with the proliferation of personal, digital devices and the growth of digital, social networks enabled by these devices.

The sociology of this moment is far more significant than either technology or traffic. The activities of news and information consumers are now inextricably intertwined with the social behaviors of a culture that values real-time access, contributions, sharing and communicating through pervasive devices that are always on in almost everywhere. These behaviors are at the leading edge of change in communication as we know it.

This is We Media: the powerful force that now dominates how we know. We forecast the movement in 2002 with three defining principles:

1. The Digital Everything: All news and information will at some point need to be digital and mobile.

2. The Emergence of Social Networks: Informal networks or communities of people exchanging news, information and conversation will emerge as the principal means of learning and discovery. These networks will eclipse traditional, informed intermediaries and gatekeepers as the most-trusted trusted sources of information.

3. The Rise of the Individual. Individuals will exert unprecedented power. They will contribute to and participate in the creation of portable, immediate and continuously updated news, entertainment and information.

Our headline now, as it was then, is that ordinary citizens will set the agenda for news and information. Each of the We Media principles has been borne out repeatedly over the past seven years.

For news organizations, one turning point occurred in 2007 at Virginia Tech when students trapped in classrooms and dorms used a new service called Twitter to describe the horror and confusion of shootings around them.

“What we experienced about the horrific events in Blacksburg owes to a generation connected emotionally and technologically to its media,” we wrote in our report on media and the shootings at that time. “Everything you thought you knew about media has changed.”

Now we know it has changed again.

The significant learning is that We Media now reflects a dominant behavior for knowing on our society. Citizens rely first on the communications networks they take with them to access, share and contribute to the story, whatever the story may be. News today is social, a participatory activity.

That is a historic shift from an era when news was a function of a discrete institution built to gather, report, edit and distribute news. Today’s headlines about the exponential rise of digitally enabled networks and the fall of the curated news-enterprise are signs, social and economic, of the shift.

The Jackson Story legitimizes We Media as the principal, global connections network for news and information. The rush to social networks and online sources reflected well-documented preferences and consumption trends that validated our own research as well as that by Pew and many others. These preferences, now dominant, will only grow as more people connect throughout the world.

The shift creates an anomaly for news organizations. Just as the capacity and the authority of traditional news organizations to break and spread news declines, the need for traditional roles of accuracy, sense making, context, meaning and understanding are heightened.

We saw this in a surprising place: Wikipedia. Acting much like a traditional news organization would, editors at the online collaborative encyclopedia debated verifying Mr. Jackson’s death before allowing changes to his profile. Editors also fought with people making modifications to the profile before taking down the site to disallow the numerous reports of Mr. Jackson’s death. “Once again, he is not dead, just stop,” wrote one of the editors who deleted Jackson’s date of death.

Befitting his role in the culture, Mr. Jackson was among the first people to have an article on Wikipedia. It was created in Wikipedia’s first year, 2001, and has been edited more than 19,000 times, making it one of the most edited ever. In the course of only a few hours on June 25, there were 1.8 million visits to the Michael Jackson article, or about 1 percent of total Wikipedia traffic that entire day. On Friday, the total reached five million visits.

The arc of the Michael Jackson story demonstrates how journalists can play new roles in today’s news ecosystem. In addition to fulfilling tradition roles such as reporting, curating, vetting, adding context, correcting misinformation, they worked with social journalists to report on and distribute the contributions and comments of experts and everyday people. Piece by piece, the story comes together before our eyes, all in public.

We’ll be checking in here frequently, but here’s an update on new features, new relationships, and ways you can help spread the clicking.

___New Features____
*Mobile Web Version
Use
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optimized version.  We can’t wait to get your feedback.  There’s
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*Photo Gallery
Ever
wondered what’s going on across the world on SeeClickFix.  In addition
to the activity feeds, you can now review all photos published in our
Photo Gallery at http://www.seeclickfix.com/gallery.  I love it.

*Issues Page New Look with Facebook Share
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*Watch Area Landing Page

Similarly, each SeeFix watch area has a home page.  Let’s you know what’s going on nearby geographically.

*SeeClickFix for Your Site
Now it is even easier to build
SeeClickFix into your website with either an embeddable web widget or an
RSS feed.  Learn all about it at http://www.seeclickfix.com/widget.

*Feedback via Get Satisfaction
There
is now a SeeClickFix for SeeClickFix.  You can publicly post feedback
on the site and discuss it with other community members.  Watch for
the Feedback blue tab on the right-hand side of your browser.

___SeeClickFix News____
*Mayoral Candidate Endorsement
York, PA, has a Mayoral candidate who has embraced SeeClickFix see
http://blog.seeclickfix.com/2009/03/mayoral-candidate-in-york-pa-runs-with.html.

*Lot’s of Media Websites
SeeClickFix is a part of Boston Globe, New York Times and Philly.com
websites along with many others.  Check out the blog to learn more
details.

*Police and Crime Attention
In our home town, New Haven, we’re
seeing a lot of interaction between the police and the community around
drugs and traffic.  See
http://blog.seeclickfix.com/2009/03/heroin-dealer-busted-on-leads-from.html
and http://blog.seeclickfix.com/2009/03/operation-clickfix.html.

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At its global customers meeting in Barcelona this week, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) unveiled its next top-of-the-line smartphone, a slider with touch screen and keyboard that won’t hit store shelves until the middle of next year. The phone is supposed to be Nokia’s answer to the iPhone and Blackberry, which are eating into Nokia’s sales.

Analysts aren’t impressed with the new phone. But let’s ignore that and instead focus on the Finnish company’s optimism and worldview. The new N97 will retail for about USD $700. That’s before discounts and incentives typically offered by carriers, and it’s in line with other high-end phones. That’s a growing portion of the handset business. Reuters says Nokia doesn’t think the global economic slump will hurt sales. “Our target group, 200 to 300 million technology leaders, in all times buy devices they are interested in,” said Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s head of sales.

How big is your target market? Try this in your next business plan: 200 to 300 million technology leaders. Source: Nokia.

More:

• Reuters via Internet.com
• N97 review, photos and video from Engadget.