Recently Frank Taylor blogged about a cool Google Earth trick that could be an intriguing visual online news tool: homemade street views.

The example he cites is from Taiwan, where developer Steven Ho lives. Taylor wrote:

“[Ho] has been waiting for signs Google would bring Street View to Taiwan, but finally couldn’t wait any longer. So, he spent a few days making his own Street View panoramas for National Taiwan University campus. It turns out March is the month when the Indian azalea bloom, so he decided to take his street view photos along the famous Royal Palm boulevard. Steven took the time to not only take 150 panoramas, but also process his KML [Keyhole markup language, which is to Google Earth what HTML is to Web browsers] so it looks and acts just like Google Earth’s Street View imagery. He also added in some 3D buildings for the campus and the palm trees.”

The result is impressive. If you have Google Earth installed (and I recommend upgrading to Google Earth 5.0, which was released in February), then download Ho’s Taiwan street view and open that file in Google Earth. After it zooms in on Taiwan, click on any of the camera icons to start your visual wandering of the campus.

If you don’t have Google Earth, here’s a video screencast of what the experience looks like:

This made me think: What if a news organization offered this kind of immersive experience related to a news story or ongoing topic?…

Google obviously can’t update its street view imagery too often — and even Google’s eyes can’t be everywhere (as the Taiwan project demonstrates). So what if news orgs, journalists, or bloggers rolled their own Google Earth street views to:

• Show the effects of a disaster such as a flood, hurricane, earthquake, or tornado. Or (on the bright side) the effects of a redevelopment project or environmental cleanup.
• Offer unique insight into the local environment: Culture, architecture, economy, etc.
• Walkthrough wayback machine. Overlay original current imagery with historic imagery from Google Earth (or elsewhere) to create a sense of transition from past to present.

It used to be that creating a Google Earth KML layer required a bit of a learning curve. Google’s Panoramio service makes that a bit easier — at least for very basic projects — by allowing you to upload photos and automating the KML generation process. You can also use Panoramio to enable photo browsing via Google Maps street view.

While many Google Earth developers are creating map layers related to current events (like the Fargo flood), there don’t as yet appear to be many mainstream news media projects involving Google Earth (aside from the New York Times and National Geographic).

Google, not surprisingly, generates a Google Earth map layer for Google News — which is a fascinating way to discover current news based on geography. To activate, go to the “layers” menu in the Google Earth sidebar, and expand the “gallery” to view the “Google News” layer.

Seems to me that Google Earth is a field ripe with engaging journalistic opportunity — especially considering the popular Google Earth iPhone application.

There’s a very active Google Earth community where you can find ideas and help. And the Ogle Earth blog by Stefan Greens is a great resource that “documents how Google Earth and other neogeographical tools are affecting geopolitics.” (Read: News value)

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

According to Nieman Lab, “Media Cloud is a massive data set of news — compiled from newspapers, other established news organizations, and blogs — and a set of tools for analyzing those data.

Here’s what Berkman’s Ethan Zuckerman had to say about Media Cloud:

Ethan Zuckerman on Media Cloud from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Some of the kinds of questions Media Cloud could eventually help answer:

• How do specific stories evolve over time? What path do they take when they travel among blogs, newspapers, cable TV, or other sources?
• What specific story topics won’t you hear about in [News Source X], at least compared to its competitors?
• When [News Source Y] writes about Sarah Palin [or Pakistan, or school vouchers], what’s the context of their discussion? What are the words and phrases they surround that topic with?”

The obvious use of this project is to compare coverage by different types of media. But I think a deeper purpose may be served here: By tracking patterns of words used in news stories and blog posts, Media Cloud may illuminate how context and influence shape public understanding — in other words, how media and news affect people and communities.

This is important, because news and media do not exist for their own sake. It seems to me that the more we learn about how people are affected by — and affect — media, the better we’ll be able to craft effective media for the future.

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Here’s what one of these tools can create:

cloud1

More about what Windy Citizen is doing on this front…

Blagojevitter: This page tracks, in real time, Twitter updates that include the terms blagojevich or fitzgerald. This page is a widget from Monittor, a free service that offers a fairly slick interface for custom Twitter tracking. Monittor widgets are slightly more complex to configure and install than ordinary widgets, but it’s not rocket science. (I actually hadn’t known about Monittor, so kudos to the WindyCitizen for putting it on my radar.)

Windy Citizen editor Brad Flora selects particularly important or interesting items from this widget to retweet via the WindyCitizen Twitter account. (Example from this morning.)

Blagojevich complaint word cloud: The graphic above was created with Wordle, a visualization tool that analyzes text and turns it into art. Here, the source text was the 78-page official complaint against the Illinois governor. In a word cloud, the biggest words appear most frequently in the source text. Even though word cloud images are static (not interactive, which is why I didn’t mention Wordle in my interactive visual tools session last week) this approach can provide insight into a document — even on a subconscious level. Plus, it’s attractive, intriguing, and fun.

…And, of course, Windy Citizen set up a Blagojevich blog.

Which other sites or services are using online media creatively to present news and commentary about this controversy? Please provide links and info in the comments below.

(NOTE: I originally published this on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits blog.)

Yeah, so what? Why should journalists and news organizations care about these tools? How can this help their communities, journalism, and (most critical right now) business opportunities? What’s in it for journos and news brands?

That’s what Meabh Ritchie, a reporter for the U.K. Press Gazette asked me to clarify. She’s writing a story on this, and I’ll link to it when it’s up in February 2009. The short answer is: This stuff is effective and (more importantly) FUN! — for journalists and news audiences.

But here’s the full version of my answer…

…By the way, the tools I demoed for the News21 educators were Gigapan, ManyEyes, Silobreaker, and the interactive/realtime graphics at Envirovote. UNC professor Don Wittekind demoed Flash games and calculators. Also, multimedia journalist and 10000 Words blogger Mark Luckie demoed Mapbuilder, Dipity, Intersquash, and Widgetbox.

Generally, I think the value of using interactive visual tools in sharing news, info, and journalism is that people don’t just think in words — so words often aren’t always the only or best way to tell a story. Furthermore, words, static graphics, and linear multimedia (audio or video that just plays) are almost NEVER the best way to encourage people to explore a story, so they can discover their own points of relevance and interest.

In short, interactive visual tools make news and info far more personal, compelling, and fun. And right now, news definitely could use a whole lot more fun — in its creation, content, and experience.

…Don’t kid yourself: There are valid, important reasons why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are kicking butt as news sources while newspapers are declining and dying. People need to laugh. Also, fun and humor are elegant, effective ways to layer context and insight onto information — and to just give people enough motivation to get interested and stay “tuned in.” The “eat your veggies” approach so common in the mainstream journalism mindset definitely has problems.

Oh, and speaking of interactive visual stuff, did you see Stephen Colbert’s Green Screen Challenge? Here’s the winning entry:

But I digress…

Used well, interactive visualizations inherently have far more potential to engage and involve people than passive “you just read/watch/listen to us” media. Plus, they tend to get people’s imagination and pattern-recognition abilities cranking.

Playing with visualization tools (especially applying them to data you think might yield a story) can help you find stories or angles. I regularly use ManyEyes to help me spot patterns or anomalies, particularly with data related to energy or the environment.

On the business side for ad-supported sites (or other sites where success is measured at least partly by traffic), visualization tools applied to news tend to “go viral,” attracting tons of inbound links, which boosts search visibility. Unlike most kinds of news content, this traffic tends to build, not decline, over time. This content also can be widgetized or made embeddable, providing a powerful teaser that gets people interested in your stories and then steers them back to your site for full coverage — or that at least promotes your news brand.

Finally, many great interactive visualization tools are free and easy to learn and use. They all take practice and have their quirks, but this stuff is not rocket science. You don’t need a programmer or even much money or time to make this work. Even an independent journalist working alone can make good use of them.

• Mark S. Luckie, the multimedia journalist behind the killer blog 10000words.net. He’s also associate producer for EW.com/Entertainment Weekly and former online producer for the Los Angeles Times and Contra Costa Times.
• Don Wittekind, assistant professor in the visual communication sequence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Our session is part of American Tapestry: Covering a Changing America” — an event at the Knight Digital Media Center for the leaders of the News21 project. The participants are mostly journalism educators who use this project to give new journalists multimedia experience. Our goal in this session is to show them cutting-edge and unusual tools to spark their — and their students’ — imaginations.

Here’s what we’ll cover…

First, I’ll talk about these tools:

• Gigapan: Amazingly interactive, detailed photographs you can really get into — and the community that makes and loves them. (More about Gigapan)
• ManyEyes: A free online library of tools from IBM that help you visually explore all kinds of data and information. You can share and embed your visualizations.(More about ManyEyes)
• Silobreaker: This Europe-based news aggregator uses semantic web technology, including visual interfaces, to make news more relevant and fun to explore — and thus, more compelling and useful. (More about Silobreaker)
• Envirovote: This Medill News21 project tracked the potential enviromental impact of the 2008 elections — in real time, while the elections were happening. Developer Brian Boyer says that building the visual aspects of this site took just a bit of HTML on top of Python/Django. “The coding for the chart graphics took just 10 minutes. Actually, calculating the percent green on the chart is harder than drawing it on screen! The code that creates the numbers took several hours.” More Envirovote info from Boyer and co-developer Ryan Mark.

…After that, Don Wittekind will cover immersive mulitmedia. He says: “True interactivity is unique to the Web. TV can’t do it. Print cant’ do it. Radio can’t do it. So if News21 is going to lead the way, we have to do it!

“Adobe Flash can do much more than slide shows and slick animations. Flash allows journalists with a little programming knowledge create immersive experiences that allow viewers to become part of the story. I’m pushing the concept of interactivity in the form of calculators and simulators. So the actual tool is Adobe Flash ActionScript, but my presentation will be about why we should be creating highly immersive projects.”

See Don’s examples.

…Then Mark Luckie will wrap up our demos with:

• Mapbuilder: Rapid mashup tool for Google Maps and Yahoo Maps
• Dipity: Interactive timeline tol that organizes updates from sites like YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, and 7500 news sites into “channels.”
• Intersquash: Tools for building iPhone-optimized sites
• Widgetbox: Popular widget directory and gallery. You don’t have to build everything yourself!

And in an age of information overload, the challenge for journalists is no longer just to provide more news content. Rather, our value lies in supporting relevance, insight, and (ultimately) meaning.

This is why, lately, I’ve been intrigued by Silobreaker. This Europe-based news aggregator site uses semantic web technology (Including visual interfaces) to make news more relevant — and thus, more compelling and useful.

This is pretty important because, since relevance has inherent value, it can be the basis of business models…

WHAT’S THE SEMANTIC WEB, AND WHY SHOULD JOURNOS CARE?

The semantic web is a set of technologies that help computers interpret meaning more like how humans do it. This can make various computer technologies (especially search) far more efficient and effective. It makes it easier for computers to get to the point in ways that people understand and value.

As this semantic web tutorial explains:

“The semantic web is not about links between web pages. It describes relationships between things (like A is a part of B, and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price).”

…Apply that logic to news, and you approach what most news consumers try to do, with varying degrees of success, in their own heads. News consumers constantly try to create meaning by “connecting the dots” between a dizzying array of often-conflicting stories from a multitude of venues — and then relate those patterns to their own lives and interests.

They do this in order to form opinions and make decisions — which from their perspective is the whole point of news!

WARNING: SILOBREAKER IS REALLY GEEKY

I’ll tell you up front: Silobreaker is geeky. Its user interface can be confusing and frustrating. It’s often not easy to understand what the site is saying, or why.

That said, it’s still well worth exploring — mainly because of its search tools. These visually portray the potential relevance of current news topics. This can prove valuable to journalists, as well as to analysts and regular people.

For instance, let’s say I’m a Hispanic parent who cares about my children’s future prospects — so I’m very interested in education, and what educational opportunities or pitfalls may affect my kids. I start my Silobreaker exploration of this topic by conducting a “360-degree search” for stories that connect these topics: Hispanics and education. This provides a fairly conventional news aggregator-style overview of air pollution-related news, superficially not too different from what you’d get from Google News.

But for more insight into what’s happening in this field, I glance at the right-hand sidebar. In the top chart there, “article volume,” I see that starting in early October coverage of this intersection of topics picked up sharply, but has since subsided somewhat (although not completely). This clues me in that this field heated up for a bit. That’s useful context if I haven’t been monitoring this field regularly.

Scrolling down further in the right sidebar, I see a box for “network search.” I double-click that box to display a large diagram showing how the issues I named, plus many others selected by Silobreaker as relevant, currently relate to each other in detail.

The network view allows me to literally see how issues connect. The value of this is serendipity potential. I notice that one of the related topics is “higher education” — and I have two teenagers, so that gets my attention.

I double-click the “higher education” node to make it the focus of this diagram. The resulting diagram shows me how topics, companies, people, organizations, and places currently relate to each other in this complex field. More importantly, clicking on a blue dot on any connecting line tells me why Silobreaker thinks those issues are connected (articles, blog posts, etc.)

I find the network search especially fascinating — even though, to be honest, I’m not quite clear on how it works or what it’s telling me. But I do know that it has helped me to better understand interrelationships and how they evolve — something that’s hard to get at just by reading conventional news stories. So it’s well worth spending a few minutes clicking on topics and playing with the sliders in Silobreaker’s network view. Allow the diagram to rearrange itself around your selections. See if you spot interesting relationships you hadn’t noticed before.

SO WHAT?

Silobreaker offers the most obvious potential for people who need news. But for news professionals, still greater value lies here in being able to spot possible stories and angles before they become obvious. If you know what interests your community, and can express that in keywords or topics, then Silobreaker can show you what’s happening now that might be relevant.

This kind of tool can help create and shape stories, as well as tell them.

Silobreaker offers other visually interesting tools worth exploring. Each offers some advantages and frustrations. Expect clunkiness and confusion, but also some Aha! moments. Think of this site as an early prototype for a news business based on relevance. Where could we go from here?

(NOTE: I originally published an earlier version of this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)