#MozNewsLab week two: From consuming news to joining the conversation

Posted: August 1, 2011 | Author: Alex Samur | Filed under: MozNewsLab | Tags: #moznewslab | Leave a comment »

“What is this thing for? What does it do? How does it fit into people’s lives?”

- Jesse James Garrett

These are just a few of the questions participants are grappling with as they develop ideas for software to change journalism – both as an industry, and an experience. At the #MozNewsLab, our second round of speakers Chris Heilmann (HTML5 evangelist at Mozilla), John Resig (JQuery creator) and Jesse James Garrett (UX design pioneer) – excited us with the potential of HTML 5, schooled us in the principles user experience design and demonstrated to us a few different approaches to community building on the open web.

Tathagata Dasgupta provides an excellent visual synopsis of some of the themes that came out of the #MozNewsLab in week two.

The lectures inspired some thought-provoking – and very diverse – responses to these questions, including: why HTML5 alone can’t unify videos and the web, interface design trends, how programmers can help create a culture of coders and the role of gatekeepers in an ‘open ecosystem.’

They also motivated some to jump into the sandbox to get sketching and prototyping:

Inspired by Phil Gyford’s analysis of news sites (really interesting commentary on it here) Nicola Hughes takes a crack at bringing “friction, readability and finishability” to the news with “Big Picture.” In her video she explains how her project idea aims to help readers “engage, communicate and understand” the news sites they read.

Cody Shotwell hones in on many of the same shortcomings of online news that Nicola identifies. His “Streams” project invites users to personalize their experience of the news by having them following authors, topics, tags and other users.

Part wiki and part social network, Daniel Bello’s news app treats news as a conversation. On the one hand it helps journalists to organize and present additional information related with news stories, while also including readers in the conversation by sharing additional information. Daniel’s got an early demo of his app – take a look at how it works here.

How to sort through the overwhelming number of videos on sites like YouTube? Take a look at this intriguing solution: a dashboard that allows users to quickly scan through endless hours of footage to quickly locate what they need. With the abundance of video content available on the interwebs, this tool created by Juan Gonzalez shows a lot of promise.

Of course, it is not enough just to locate and organize content — in an increasingly data-saturated world, the key is to get data that is accurate. John Bell’s Re:Poste provides a crowd-sourced solution to this pressing problem. Re:Poste is a “citizen fact checker” made up of a network of “experts” who review, comment and critically examine stories produced online. Check out John’s sketches illustrating how his model works.