DocumentCloud is an index of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. Documents are contributed by journalists, researchers and archivists. Users will be able to search for documents by date, topic, person, location, etc. and will be able to do "document dives," collaboratively examining large sets of documents. Think of it as a card catalog for primary source documents. DocumentCloud is not meant to be a general document hosting service, like Scribd. the build a service that makes source documents easier to find and share regardless of where they are hosted. It is a complement to these services, and not a competitor. the goal is to make documents even easier to find on search engines. DocumentCloud will have information about documents and relations between them, for example what locations, people, or organizations a group of documents have in common. Conceived of by journalists working at ProPublica and The New York Times.
The site compresses all articles published on national newspaper websites, on BBC news, and Sky news online, into a series of numbers based on 15 character strings (using a hash function) and then stores them in a fast access database. When someone pastes in some text and clicks 'compare', the churn engine compresses the text entered and then searches for similar compressions (or 'common hashes'). If the engine finds any articles where the similarity is greater than 20%, then it suggests the article may be churn. Churnalism.com is powered off the back of the database of over three million compressed articles in journalisted.com.
The Community Information Toolkit will help community leaders like you harness the power of information to advance their goals for a better community. It offers a process and a simple, easy-to-use set of tools to help you take stock of your community’s news and information flow and take action to improve it. The tools are forms and surveys and reports.
This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read their latest case study: A Canadian Printer Leaves its Servers in Illinois. Thumbnail image for Cirrus_clouds2.jpgIn our last post on data journalism, we ran across a number of tools that would be helpful for anyone who is interested in how to make sense of data. The tools represent a renaissance in how we make sense of our information culture. They provide context and meaning to the often baffling world of big data. This is a snapshot of what is available. We are relying on the work done by Paul Bradshaw, whose blog is an excellent source about the new world of data journalism.
Great wideranging riff on analytics and nonprofit evaluation of methods: how do we know that blogging is good for our oragnization? -> how do we increase our traffic?
one of the largest set of links, updated regularly, to all aspects of communication; many political themes; a wide range of disciplinary approaches included; highly recommended
Oct 06, review of software potentially useful to students and teachers; overview useful for folks interested in thinking about Internet and education in new ways