Hello, fellow Newspapers On Drupal group members, and thanks to Ken for the introduction. As he mentioned, Placeblogger, a Drupal based site I worked on -- with a LOT of help from Drupal shop Bryght -- won some Phase 2 funding from the John S and James L. Knight Foundation, which gives grants to organizations and projects that advance journalism.
The interesting thing about this funding:
- What gets created with the funding must go into the public domain.
- The goal of the foundation is to get tools into the hands of newspapers.
I think that's pretty exciting!
For my project, the fact that I'm on Drupal helps me meet both these goals. The project hasn't been completely nailed down yet, but it's likely that much of the funding will go towards creating Drupal modules -- and then using Placeblogger, the site, as a sort of proof-of-concept. I suspect that we'll spend a lot of time on location and Aggregator2, but at this moment we're not tied down to anything.
So help me do some thinking: if you had a little money to fund Drupal module development to aid newspapers, what would you tackle?
I would really like members of this group to consider themselves informal advisers to this project, and to benefit from it directly.
By the way, if you've got a good idea, you should look at newschallenge.org and consider applying for next year's Knight grants.
Comments
Great question, and thanks for asking!
Hello, Lisa,
First off, congratulations on your award --
Working on both aggregation and location would be pretty key, and there is some ongoing work that you've probably already seen but that I'll link to anyways: http://groups.drupal.org/node/3418 (for an overview of current aggregation options) and http://drupal.org/node/130942 (a proposal for an aggregation API) --
There is also some great work being done with geocoding, google maps, and the location module -- for an interesting proposal/an overview of where things currently stand, check out this thread: http://groups.drupal.org/node/4323, and the geo module: http://drupal.org/project/geo
Something else that could also be of interest/relevance (particularly when combined with improved aggregation/importing feeds as nodes) is OpenSearch -- this would allow people to set up a site that aggregates/categorizes feeds from other sites, and then generates rss feeds based on searches -- this would be very powerful in terms of sharing/remixing content -- see http://drupal.org/project/opensearch, http://drupal.org/project/opensearchclient and http://drupal.org/project/opensearch_aggregator
Anyways -- whether you go down any of these roads, or opt for something entirely different, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of this.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
That's an exciting project.
That's an exciting project. One thing on my wish list is integration between the ecommerce module and the ed-classifieds module.
Aggregation
</humility>I wrote that Aggregator API, and Aron Novaak will be coding it for Google Summer of Code.See http://groups.drupal.org/rss-aggregation and especially the work on Leech and SimpleFeed. The Aggregation module is interesting as well -- and allows an upgrade path from Aggregator 2 -- but there are some odd elements to the code, IMO.
I still work with print news, so I would also spend money on NewsML / NITF import, which is a topic that comes up in this group every few months.
I'd really like to spend Knight money on reversing the print-to-web workflow, so that editors and writers can write for the web and then push back to a print pagination system. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/3009 for example, a project that stalled because I had other things to do....
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
Geo module
Has anyone been following the conversation in the Mapping group about the End of the GMap macro/module and the birth of Geo module/API?
One of the Reynolds School of Journalism's grad students did a lot of Drupal related mapping work using PostGIS to move beyond push-pins to polygons. The idea being that news isn't specific to a point (latitude and longitude) or even a circle extending form that point, but "places" are larger areas.
I'd really like to see more geocoding and spacial database work done to allow news organizations to competing with the local new aggregators like Yahoo, Google, and Ask.... yes, Ask. I REALLY like Ask's "search in shape" feature on http://city.ask.com/. It seems like this could fit together well with the Yahoo Pipes/Aggregator work Ken demo'ed at OSCMS.
You mean like this?
RE: "Has anyone been following the conversation in the Mapping group" -- Like this?
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
OK... anyone other than
OK... anyone other than Bill.
Well, since my answer's already written...
..back when the Knight Foundation asked (-; here it is, my unsuccessful application:
http://pwgd.org/node/46
What I'd now call software with the possibility of all-to-all communication, a way of moderating massive amounts of messages without privileging any person or group as the moderator.
But below that in the stack I would like to see funded really good e-mail integration with Drupal, so that large numbers of e-mail can be sent into Drupal, automatically and democratically moderated, and sent out.
This may look at first quite far afield from Lisa's fantastic work at Placeblogger and the needs of newspaper sites. And it is! But to some extent, anytime you succeed in getting a lot of people producing content, you have to face the question of how its distribution is decided. And my bid to have a broad base of people able to make such choices (and not just us heavy web users á la Digg) is the democratic concept of random juries, alerted and able to make quick decisions about distribution (including geographic extent) by e-mail.
~ ben melançon
member, Agaric Design Collective
http://AgaricDesign.com - "Open Source Web Development"
~ In living, loving memory: http://melanconent.com/john-melancon-life ~
benjamin, agaric
additional tools
Hello, Lisa,
First,That's an exciting project.
I have always seen countless numbers of e-books and articles and everything else on the web. People advertising how YOU can make LOTS of money.
The most effective form to drive traffic to your site is by forum posting!
-classified ads
-Most search engines, including Google, use your link count to determine your search engine rankings. The more links pointing to your site, the higher your rankings will be
I'm looking forward to complete your project successfully.
sleepingbeauty
www.onlineweblibrary.com
money equals more money
I am very new to the site (minutes - not even hours) but I know newspapers react to revenue.
Developing modules that make money for the newspaper (business directory, e-commerce, etc) will get more attention from the top decision makers and allow more money to develop the content side of the business.
Online still only makes between 2% to 10% for many newspapers (dare I say most) but we ALL know, the web can and will generate allot more than print ever has or will - BUT - how?
Focusing on revenue generating modules is the key to the content modules.
Just my opinion. Sorry if this wasn't the place to post this - but if I had the money, that's where I would start [What kind of program will generate allot of money for my newspaper/site]