You know how you get the geotagging for photos? You take a photo, you upload it to Flickr, smack some geo-tagging on it and there you go. You have a great visual representation of all the photo’s
So this is a great example of a Web2.0. But why stop there? My little mind went a-running. How often has it occured to you, you have no idea where a story is, or you want to get the news most relevant to your neighbourhood. Introducing…
Newsmaps
So what was my idea here? Well, basically just as it says there.
Journalist:
- A journalist uploads an article to go through the publishing workflow.
- They see a little GoogleMap that they scroll through to find the spot that the article references, like a sporting event, crime scene, car crash, wedding, awards ceremony, etc etc.
- The click a little pin button to locate the item.
- All this is recorded in the meta-data of the article.
News viewer:
- On the home page, a viewer zooms in to say Cape Town.
- Viewer then sees a bunch of pins that locate different news stories.
- A bunch of check boxes on the side let you pick if you want to see the different sections like Sport, Arts, Crime, etc.
Mitchell and I quickly did a few sketches and jotted some ideas down. Easy. A viewer can now see any stories directly around them, so if they want to get hyper-local content they can do this through zooming down to city level, suburb level and even street level (room level for the siblings?). This wouldn’t be difficult to create. It’s really just tagging the stories you have already. So it’s a matter of creating a new table field in your Upload Content section, and the rest happens through the RSS feed and GoogleMaps API. Why hasn’t this been done before? So now the research starts. As Tyler Reed mentioned in his podcast, everything has been done before. The main thing now is to get your execution right. Let’s go through my research process. I have saved my entire browsing history through my Del.icio.us account, which is open for you to check out, but i’ll be going through the entire process here. First, I Googled for “Geo Tagging news articles newspaper mashup” and whatever other strings I could think of.
The results returned were mostly for Flickr and photo tagging. Something that makes sense seeing that you get cameras with Geotagging ability. But remember, I’m not thinking of Photo-mashups, these there are many of. I want to do a mashup with the articles. So ISO I head over to TechCrunch. They cover the Flickr mashup and will maybe have some info on other related sites that might do Article Geo-tagging. Hrm, not much info there, except maybe for someone in the comments mentioning Locr,
which has a pretty slick interface, but no real article tagging, and not as newsroom driven as I have in mind. At this stage I have a couple of tabs open, Webware (another great web resource), Mashable (which only covers Flickr really, and not much else on Geo-tagging) and of course Wikipedia (to tell me a bit more about Geo-tagging in general.) None really have what I want. See somethings that come close.
At this stage I come across Placeblogger. I think finally! My search is over! Someone has done it! But alas no, once again they don’t have the newsroom focus that I was thinking of. This needs to be a tool directed to news-houses like news24.com, Die Burger, IOL, New York Times, or any other big production house (I’d like to see The Onion doing this…). Placeblogger mainly focuses on gathering a bunch of blogs and tagging the location of the author rather than each single post. It also doesn’t have the map-centric view. You need to click through to view maps etc. It’s a bit of a mission. I want a single map that shows me the latest posts (I can select Day, Week, Month view etc).
On we trudge.
Newsmap! The name sounds good… my quest is over.
Unfortunatey not once again.. This mashup only has the keywords used in Google News and then mashes that up. I want a map dammit. Still a very cool concept and something that you can play with nicely.
Jackpot! And it’s local!
Some search directs me to the Muti news map! I make one or two clicks somewhere in America (I reckon there would be more stories), but no pins pop-up… Where are the pins? I want specific hyper-local pins that show me what’s happening in New York. But nothing…. our Web2.0 startup from South Africa let me down…
And then I find it…
This is exacty what I want… there’s everything in the Mashup I could want…
From SkyNews of all places!
Last month, Sky News added an interactive map to its website, featuring some of Britain’s most wanted fugitives from justice. One fugitive appearing on the site was swiftly identified and arrested following the launch of the site.Sky News’ online map was the first interactive Google Map created with NewsMap, a tool produced for “a few thousand pounds” by Puffbox, a consultancy in Newbury headed by former Sky News website staffer Simon Dickson.
My research ends here... But now that I have the keywords I can find similar sites… 
It seems as if the BBC has their own version of it, although the Puffbox one seems a lot more intuitive to use, and it has a pretty nifty interface (remember usability). 
Gothamist has a similar attempt at the idea, although they might also want to take a look at usability. It also looks like some articles aren’t covered. Take a look over at Simon Dickson’s blog to have better understanding of the Newsmap tool. So that’s my thought process behind getting research done for a new concept. It’s mighty sketchy at this stage, and it seems like it went pretty quickly. Luckily there are some great tools for finding out about new products and ideas on the web. Resources like Wikipedia, Mashable, Webware, Read/Write/Web and Techcrunch have made research ridiculously easy. And not to mention Google.
But now the question remains…
How long until a news company in South Africa adopts this Web2.0 approach to their news? It’s only a matter of time before all newsrooms will have this as standard. Web2.0 is not all about User Generated Content. It’s also about using different resources and more importantly opening your system and adopting open standards. Take a look at the Salesforce Googlemaps mashup. This is also where Enterprise2.0 becomes important. Taking existing data and meshing it in with other data to create new meaning and opportunities or make existing data easier to interpret.
Btw, the Newsmaps Mashup was launched on the 28th of June 2007, roundabout the same time that I had the idea for this. I have no idea if I saw this on a website somewhere, although I don’t recall it. I’m claiming the South African innovation approach, even if it was done before 
Technorati Tags: newsmap, web2.0, media2.0, googlemaps, mashup, geo tagging, newspaper, newsroom, digital, trends, innovation
ITCH has been one of my staple art magazines. I haven’t bought one in a while though(I haven’t bought many magazines in the past few months…), but this caught my eye. It seems like they are making the move into online! Great news! South Africa needs some kind of micro-publisher focused on the arts. Something like what