On entrepreneurship – Page 14

Cobblestone: a WordPress-plugin and local Crunchbase Knight application

Image of Old City Philadelphia cobblestone courtesy of Flickr user IceNineJon.

In the future, this project leads to:

Open source platform for other regionally-grouped niche sites to come together.
Community-edited profiles of local focus and meaning (i.e. city government lobbyists, community associations presidents and other leaders who might otherwise remain anonymous)
A cross-platform tool that can go beyond WordPress and work with meta data from other CMS.
Membership model based on support of an entire local news collaborative network.
Ad network integration, further connecting disparate niche sites
This will connect and encourage collaboration between other and future content providers in Philadelphia.

Niche news sites need to be brought together to strengthen the future of journalism.

Last year, we at Technically Philly started that hunt with a Knight News Challenge application for News Inkubator, a business services hub and incubation space for independent news startups. We didn’t make the cut, but we have taken to bootstrapping the concept by starting with an advertising network.

Today is the 2010 Knight News Challenge grant deadline, and we’ve continued that focus.

We took time to learn that our News Inkubator proposal was too broad and focused on trying to find smaller, more actionable steps, particularly ones that could work with other larger investment.

In doing so, we’re introducing Cobblestone, a proposed tagging WordPress plugin that will feed a searchable, dynamically updated, mobile-friendly directory platform homepage with content from various partners.

See our Knight application here.

Though we think it has real monetary value — considering it is based on a Technically Philly directory aimed at a membership model — this is a decidedly more editorial-first focus. Get the niche sites together, and we can build revenue together.

Perhaps the first question we expect to be asked: why is this different than Google alerts and RSS feeds?

Cobblestone gives tag-specific and cross-partner content some place to live. Once the alerts of Bill Green or the feeds from each of the partner sites pass in time, they are lost. This creates a true homepage.

Below, see our application, which you can also see here:

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News roundups: own your niche, learn and link when starting any content creation

Bison-Roundup — It's a roundup: Cowboys and pickup trucks push the herd of buffalo across Lame Johnny Road during Monday morning's Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park on Monday. (Kristina Barker/Journal staff)

This fall, I started doing something on the Back on My Feet blog that should probably be the first step of every community news site ever: a weekly aggregated roundup of existing news on homelessness.

It’s something I advocate to any content creator in which I am involved.

A primary rule of anyone with mission today is to share content related to that mission, as you probably can pretty easily beat bigger media on issues relevant to your work.

But the specific virtue of a simple roundup can be profound. It follows any number of rules of the web today.

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Someone else is doing a better job of tracking community news sites

About a year ago, I hadn’t come across a good list of someone trying to track all of the community news sites worth covering. So I did so myself.

I only recently come across someone doing a much better job of it, so I’ll leave it to her.

For the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Michele McLellan has dug in and created four main and seven overall categories for the always growing list of community sites.

It’s interesting to watch these numbers swell. Below, check out her categories and follow links to her lists.

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Newsworks: WHYY online news brand launching means a lot to these legacies

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A lot of legacies over at WHYY are going to be forged with whatever comes out of Newsworks, the online news re-branding and redevelopment initiative from Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate that I first wrote about back in April.

In short, NewsWorks, which had its official launch last Monday, Nov. 15, is WHYY’s new online news brand, serving as home to its existing journalism, in addition to (A) new columns, (B) calls for community contributions and (C) a trial hyperlocal push in northwest Philadelphia.

It’s a big bold swing and at least four years in the making.

Indeed, where Newsworks is a year or two from now will mean a great deal to the entire news ecosystem of Philadelphia, at least. Some of those people who come to mind:

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What the Knight News Challenge could learn from ABC’s ‘Shark Tank’

The Knight News Challenge is once again alive.

The deadline for applications in the fifth annual media innovation pitch series from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is, as deadlines tend to do, rapidly approaching: Dec. 1.

It was only back in June that the recipients of the 2010 Knight News Challenge grants were announced, for which you can see commentary from the Nieman Journalism Lab here.

In other news, ABC this fall announced that outspoken billionaire and Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban and comedian Jeff Foxworthy would be joining a handful of venture capitalists on the second season of made-for-TV, speed investment pitch reality show “Shark Tank.”

Despite being influenced by a popular Japanese program format and easily being among the most interesting reality TV shows I’ve ever seen, “Shark Tank” wasn’t the ratings success ABC may have wanted.

Popular or not, from when the show first debuted and even more so this year, I think there is plenty the Knight News Challenge should take from “Shark Tank.”

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‘Net neutrality’ future is about authority: Speaking at Philly NetSquared

Politics of the Social Web Philadelphia NetSquared panel on Wed. Nov. 10, 2010, including, from left: Rachel Colyer, Organizing and Communications Manager of the Media and Democracy Coalition; Bryan Mercer of the Media Mobilizing Project; Susan Gasson, Associate Professor of the iSchool at Drexel, and myself, representing Technically Philly. The event was live streamed, from which this screen shot was taken. About 20 people were in attendance at the American Friends Service Center.

Understanding the difference between the theoretical concept’s debate and the more practical policy conversation over authority is key to furthering the conversation on so-called ‘net neutrality.’

That was the central-most, on-going theme of my remarks on a panel that focused on the growing conversation about requiring, among other things, internet service providers to maintain equal access and speed to all portions of the internet.

My remarks came as one-fourth of a panel titled “Political Issues of the Social Web: Nurturing or strangling social web opportunities” and hosted byPhiladelphia NetSquared, a group that, as it describes itself, “gathers together nonprofits and activists, tech leaders and funders, and everyone who’s interested in using technology for social change.” Because its members include many nonprofit leaders, my role with Back on My Feet was noted, but my perspective was much more influenced by my Comcast coverage for Technically Philly.

The panel discussion, held last Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010 at the American Friends Service Center at 15th and Cherry streets in Center City Philadelphia, was part of Net Tuesdays, a free monthly event series from Philly NetSquared.

Though a discussion on the ‘Political Issues of the Social Web’ could have any number of directions — including, but certainly not limited to, the federal broadband stimulus initiatives and universal access broadband policy and a very powerful conversation about the meaning the social web has to democracy and revolution — our conversation, with some variation, focused more tightly on the very timely conversation on net neutrality.

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Digital camera: choosing a multimedia device for a nonprofit content creator

After my first asset analysis joining Back on My Feet in January, it was beyond the pale of question that we needed a camera that could get our organization content — photos and video — up and moving quickly.

I was looking for a camera that was the following:

More durable than the personal camera I had, enjoyed but kept having it fail on me
Better lens for clearer video zoom and photo quality
No more than $500 and preferably nearer to $200

Upon some research and inquiries, I recommended we spend more than $300 on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H20. Complimentary CNet review here.

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How to draft a media kit: lessons from Technically Philly

Almost two years ago, we at Technically Philly first launched our media kit.

We followed it up with advertising packages, which I think are more important once your product is a recognized brand in a community, but a media kit is important still.

After fielding a few questions of late from those interested in what is necessary to get started, I thought I’d answer here.

First, don’t forget: a media kit is meant to quickly, effectively inform and attract interested buyers into a media property, particularly one they may not know well.

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Patch is about as evil as Starbucks (and that’s less than you might want to believe)

Is Patch evil?

That was the wildly well-remembered question asked by Robert Hernandez at a lunch keynote panel during the Online News Association conference, which I was able to attend. Hernandez was asking Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, whose company owns hyperlocal news and information platform Patch and who was on stage with NPR President Vivian Schiller.

I’d say the answer is simple: it’s not.

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Online News Association conference 2010: OK, now let’s work together

Online journalism has seen advances editorially, technologically and, more recently and perhaps more importantly, in sustainability, but the industry has yet to efficiently mature its methods of replication, according to my experience last week at the 2010 Online Journalism Association conference.

In spring 2009, major conversations were still focusing on what direction anyone should be headed, as the inaugural BarCamp seemed to suggest, and by last spring, the BarCamp conversation had grown enough to have presenters narrowing onto funding. Last fall, Jeff Jarvis held the Hypercamp conference at CUNY which largely focused on business models for niche sites, and, at the beginning of the year, the William Penn Foundation was focused on create an editorial investment in local Philadelphia public affairs news.

ONA 2010, in Washington D.C., showed another march in the broad conversation of those interested in the future of news, seeming to correlate a connective maturation in those three issues of primacy — editorial, technology and business — but there felt like a lack of real shared and collaborative best practices.

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