We Media’s Witnesses: Everything you thought you knew about the news has changed.

The 800 reporters from the world’s news organizations who descended upon Blacksburg, Va., on April 16, 2007, to cover the shootings of students at Virginia Tech quickly discovered an inconvenient truth. Though remote, Blacksburg was hardly isolated. Students, educators and citizens reported the horrific events first-hand through long-established digital and social networks. The news reached […]

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Mark Your Calendar

Come to THE festival for innovators and creators of the connected society. Plan on it: Feb. 26-28, 2008, Miami. Registration coming in October. Speaker, sponsor or program ideas? Drop us a note (andrew AT ifocos DOT org). [flv:/video/wemediamiami-an.flv http://ifocos.org/video/video_holder_358.jpg 358 239]

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What would you do to improve the world through media?

What keeps you up at night? What brilliant ideas or conundrums woud you like to pursue with others who share a passion for innovation in a world connected by digital communications networks? If you could collaborate with smart people representing a variety of professional experiences and perspectives – and put them to work on a […]

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Search Working Group is … Working

Thanks to the members of the iFOCOS Search Working Group who gathered for a kickoff meeting last week (April 24, 2007) in Santa Clara, California (and thanks to Neil Budde and crew at Yahoo! for hosting the meeting). Thanks, as well, to Dabble founder Mary Hodder, who couldn’t make it to the meeting but will […]

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Make better search; then get people to use it

Oren Michels is CEO of Mashery. My closest cousin had cancer surgery yesterday. Based on what we (her close family and friends) have learned, this is the sort of cancer you really, really don’t want. Of course, we don’t know that for sure. After all, when we first got the preliminary diagnosis a couple weeks […]

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Connected to the news by a generation of wired witnesses

Unaware of a shooting in a dormitory that left two people dead, Virginia Tech graduate student Jamal al Barghouti headed across campus to meet with his advisor. Nearing Norris Hall he ran into police, guns drawn, rushing inside. As al Barghouti took cover, he pulled out his Nokia camera-phone and started recording. Then came the […]

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Beyond search: discovery

A couple of recent sketches and "what ifs" by designers offer a counterpoint – or should I say, complement – to our Search Working Group conversation about better search: what about better web sites? Imagine if Amazon depended on customers searching generic search engines to find books and merchandise they wanted to purchase. People do […]

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The limiting factor for knowledge diffusion is people’s time

Jeff Given is the IT Operations Manager for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This post is a pre-cursor to the iFOCOS Search Working Group meeting on April 24th, 2007. About OSTI – OSTI’s mission is to collect and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) for the U.S. […]

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Podtech’s quick take on what’s missing from local news

Topix.net  sponsored Podtech.net to produce a "man on the street" video, asking a few ordinary people (and a few not-so-ordinary media insiders, like webware.com editor Rafe Needleman, KQED Executive Director of News Raul Ramirez and craigslist founder Craig Newmark): "What’s missing from local news?" They also posed the question to a few people at this […]

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Nachison on PBS NewsHour – April 18-2007

iFOCOS President Andrew Nachison appeared on the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday, April 18, 2007. He discussed the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shooting – and how the digital media witnesses and others used to tell the story reflects the rise of We Media. Real Audio | Download MP3 “The story is unfolding all around us. […]

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iFOCOS Search Working Group Launches

The discussion at We Media Miami on next-generation search concepts, chaired by Jim Kennedy of The Associated Press, was both vibrant and inconclusive. So we’re going further. We’ve launched the iFOCOS Search Working Group. The group will hold its kickoff meeting April 24, 2007, in Santa Clara, California – using meeting space generously provided by […]

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Search, while dominant, is not very good

Jim Kennedy is VP of Strategy for The Associated Press. He is also a member of the iFOCOS Search Working Group, which is holding its first meeting April 24, 2007, and of the iFOCOS Advisory Board. Over the past six years, the online function of search has become the dominant content entry point for digital […]

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Before Web 2.0, a little Web 101

A friend at a relatively large media corporation recently asked me to evaluate one of that company’s newspaper web sites. I removed any references to the specific paper/company not so much because I’m avoiding picking on them, but because most of the things I list I’ve seen elsewhere and I want more people at more […]

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