Citizen Journalism

 
Fascninating article in SF Chronicle by Vanessa Hua about new modes of journalism, especially those that involve “citizens” or those who might otherwise be readers.

“Citizen journalism is attracting attention not only because it engages consumers of information in new ways, but also because much of the content comes cheap, or free, in an industry faced with declining readerships, less advertising and cost cutting.” [click here for full text]

Data360 is headed in this direction. In the long term, we hope to become a trusted source for people to get regular data-driven graphical information about topics of importance to them.

See also an article about Ohmy News, a website based in Korea that largely depends upon “citizens” for content.

OhmyNews publishes about 150 stories each day, up to a third of which come from the professional staff and the rest from citizens. Readers can offer instant feedback online and monetary tips. The site attracts up to 800,000 unique visitors and up to 2 million page views a day. [click here for full text]

Why did we build Data360?

This photo is the best answer I can give:

Indexed

No data, but on the mark and lots of fun.  Check it out.

http://indexed.blogspot.com/ 

Marshall Poe Interview

Marshall Poe, one of our Editorial Board members, was interviewed recently by Paul DiPerna of Blau Exchange. (Marshall’s photo is the top photo above; the photo below is of Peter Blau, one of the 20th century’s most influential sociologists who passed away in 2002 and after whom Paul DiPerna’s current project is named. Click here to check out the fascinating story of Peter Blau.) Marshall talks about trends on the web and the book he is working on, prospectively titled “Everyone Knows Everything.” The interview, like so much of Marshall’s work, is fascinating and thought-provoking. See below the section of the interview regarding Data360. Click here to see the full interview.

Data360 is a serious data aggregation and presentation site. Its aim is to be the “dashboard for a democratic society.” Data360 contains serious historical and contemporary data of every kind—on the economy, military, politics, society, culture and so on. It’s what you need to know, data-wise, to be an informed citizen. The site also has a big user-generated component insofar as it allows users to contribute serious data to the site and share them with others.Data360 was started by Tom Paper, a broad-minded consultant in SF who saw the need to quickly and telegraphically present the “big picture” to his clients and, by extension, his fellow citizens. Tom believes, correctly I think, that a central repository for important, serious data will raise what we might call the ‘collective intelligence’ of both business and the nation.That’s the point of Data360—to make us all better decision makers. I met Tom through a friend. Once I heard his vision for Data360 I was sold and I’ve been contributing to the project ever since. I plan to continue to do so as the site grows.

Read/Write Web

We are also mentioned today in a post written by, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, the creators of Many-Eyes, the IBM data visualization project.

We think that social data analysis is a lively area right now and we are not the only ones exploring this space – two other sites of note are Swivel and Data360. Each of the 3 sites has a different emphasis, but what we have in common is a belief that the web enables a new, social kind of data analysis; a type of statistical thinking that is both playful and serious.

MyDigiMedia on Data360

We received a nice review this morning by Amy Webb, who is a “strategic, digital product and business consultant to online media companies and other organizations.”

I will comment more shortly, but suffice it to say that I think that Amy really gets what we are trying to do with Data360.

Tom’s hoping to collaborate with journalists, academics, businesses and others to build civilization reports that can be shared and discussed with anyone who’s online. (Course, that’ll mean incorporating Web 2.0 article tools to enable visitors to share, blog, tag, email and rank the information…but I’m sure site enhancements are also in the works.)

I love, love, love this geek-meets-granola approach to data.