And speaking of filters …

Google Releases Universal Search for Gmail, Docs and Sites I won’t be happy until it can find my keys and documentation of my that December 2003 expense report that accounting still hasn’t pushed through.

The future of UI Is VUI the new GUI?

Verizon Plans to Bring Live TV Streaming to the iPad The future of news is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

FINDING THE MEDIATED CITY Durn, there’s a lot of words in this post. But whatever a mediated city is, I think journalists need to be at the center of creating it.

Auto-Tweeting Your Way to Spamsville Yup. Twitter’s about conversation. Not something you automate.

Broadcast Viewer Average Age: 51 Is it the device or the content that young folks don’t like?

The Web is not dead, but many wish it so
Too many words for me to sound them all out, but Steve Yelvington looks like he might have smart thoughts about the inflammatory Wired article.

It’s still about the journalism, not the CMS I will be so glad when people feel like they no longer have to build their own CMS. Can’t everyone just use Drupal, the most awesomest CMS that is way better than anything else and is used by all the cool kids? The partisanship just has to stop.

The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners Quickly saw a line that I might turn into a t-shirt for class. “Google before you ask.”

Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 2 I’m generally skeptical of anything in a box. They are usually operated with a turnkey and are bought at a one-stop-shop. But Statline’s good people. And the Good Lord knows we need more transparency at the state level.

Gannett Goes Hyperlocal With HighSchoolSports.net Wanna oust your local incumbent news organization? Publish a database of local crime, gossip about the schools and the scores and video from high school sports.

A fresh look at reporting skills Looks like Mindy McAdams has a good conversation going over at her blog. Need to stop in and check it out.

And finally a handful of posts that always draw my attention — ones that start with a number or an interrogative:

5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

5 Questions with John Byrne of BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Now, C-Change Media

10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience

NPR Listening By The Numbers—And The Platform

How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Pay Walls

But I do want to bring you another attempt at headlines I’ve culled from my tech/social filters… and yet still don’t have time to read. Mashable and Romenesko still caught my eye the most this morning, but TechPresident and the PBS/Knight Foundation MediaShift IdeaLab (or whatever that very good site should be called) also added some variety to the mix.

So, without further ado. I filter these to you. Please filter them back to me.

15 Sites That Were Before Their Time GREAT reminder that what seems crazy today is often just ahead of its time…. and that a good idea doesn’t guarantee success… and that what’s hot today may soon be Friendster.

Evernote.com I haven’t tried it. But want to. Any tips?

Yahoo Mail Comes to the iPad, HTML5-Style If I were hiring a designer today, I’d want her to be pretty darn good with HTML 5. Am I right about that? Also, I need to know more about the idea of local caching with HTML 5. After all, for text updates you don’t really need to be always jacked in to the Internet. You just need to connect when you want to send or receive new information.

Share and Track the Story of Any Object with Printable QR Codes The “Internet of Things” and QR codes fascinate me. Wondering how/whether journalists should help “things” tell relevant and memorable stories to humans.

The Chrome Web Store Is Coming, and Google Has Big Plans for It Dear editors, if you would today like to watch your newsroom developers flip out walk over to their workspace this morning and ask them to stop work on the iPad app and start working on the Chrome Web Store App. … Then go over and tell your publisher that the Google Chrome Web will give you 95 percent of the revenue from selling your app, rather than Apple’s 70 percent. Please Twitpic the scene and share it with us, won’t you?

Why Facebook and Apple Will Win the Q&A War and Meet Swingly, This Year’s “It” Search Startup [INVITES] I wasn’t even aware that there was a ‘Q&A War’ being waged. But I’m glad to hear there is. Unfortunately, I suspect most news organizations aren’t winning this war that they should be. Durn it if the smart/crazy question isn’t one of the only tools that really differentiates professional reporters from hobbyists and advocates. I’d love to see a news organization develop a news FAQ site (SEO magic)… but with the purpose of helping their readers ask more precise and more probing questions of each other.

Journalist’s Resource: New site to help journalism educators Haven’t yet checked out Harvard’s new site. What are the highlights?

Groupon-ing is relatively low-risk for magazine publishers, but… Groupon strikes me as a great idea for news publishers. For me (and I think for lots of folks, especially young people), news is no good unless it’s a shared experience. I need other people in my geographic or behavioral community to be informed as well. I’d push hard to get a group-rate on a subscription — especially if the news service was optimized for mobile and social.

Ushahidi Builds Community with 3 L’s: Listen, Learn, and Leverage I can’t learn enough about Ushahidi. I’m coming back to this first-person-account whether you filter it back to me or not. Ushahidi is all the rage among new media funders and pontificators, but remains relatively unknown among U.S. journalists (pro and am). I fear that most people will eventually be introduced to it when something bad happens “because” of it — I fear the impending arrival of a moment in Ushahidi’s life akin to the Web’s “child-porn” Time magazine cover moment or Wikipedia’s “Arthur Schlesinger” moment.

Daily Kos, the Email Program Thirteen years later and I’m still waiting for a good place that tracks and reports on under-the-radar targeted phone/email/postal mail political messages.

Greene: CSU fosters love of print journalism What to say? What to say?

Increased mobile Internet access dims the ‘app revolution’ Am I crazy to argue that only half of the attractiveness of accessing the Net via phone is mobility? I’d argue that phones’ “instant-on” (and thus limited features) are at least as important in driving this trend. Dear manufacturers: What I want is a big screen, with a real keyboard that boots in under 15 seconds. And allows me to download about 150 MB/day. For $5 a month.

NC not featured on must-read Tweet list Dear homestate members of Congress: Twitter isn’t about talking. It’s about replying and asking. Do that and you’ll make the list. Or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.

Poll: 25% of Americans trust print news Look, trust is down almost across the board. The only institutions trusted by a majority of Americans are the military, small businesses and police. How can skeptical journalists get concerned if they’ve created a skeptical public? To me, here’s the most frightening sentence in the report: “Younger Americans also expressed more confidence than older Americans in several other institutions tested, including Congress, the medical system, and the criminal justice system, suggesting younger Americans are more confident in institutions in general.”

Facebook groups are ripe for the harvesting

When a bomb threat ousted The Daily Tar Heel staff from its office on deadline Sunday night, editor Allison Nichols turned to Twitter. Nothing new there, but check this out — she used Twitter to try to discredit a false rumor being spread on Facebook that there was a gunman loose on campus.

Nichols and her staff used social media not only to distribute news, but to monitor it. Because they were savvy at doing both she was able to let her audience know what to fear and what not to fear. That’s journalism.

Oddly enough, e-mail was the big loser Sunday night. The University sent out their alert only after their hand was forced by the DTH’s own breaking news alert. Neither, however, sent an email saying the coast was clear. And because I wasn’t monitoring social media on Sunday night, when I logged in to my email and went to the DTH Web site on Monday morning, I was left wondering whether the bomb scare was still developing.

So, Twitter beats Facebook beats e-mail. Ready? 1-2-3…

The only thing standing in the way of better collaboration had been the difficulty so far in matching the problems with the resources. We would need to create a Match.com of journalism innovation, I said, where newsroom leaders could submit RFPs and where educators could post the research and technical resources of their students.

So with 10 minutes left in the panel, I whipped open a Word document and projected it on the screen at the front of the room. I was ready to start brainstorming right there and begin making a quick list of research questions and innovation projects. Oh, the excitement of a panel discussion that would be more than just talk! The bridges that would be built!

But then we hit just one small snag. Of the hundred or so people in the room, about 90 percent were from the classroom. Somehow, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon in Washington, the Statler conference room at the Capital Hilton had transformed in to an ivory tower. We had built a bridge to nowhere.

Larry Dailey from the University of Nevada, Reno, made the good observation after the session that we probably had a marketing problem. We had the words “university” and “academia” in our panel title. We were competing against one called “Optimize and Monetize.” Not really a contest, is it?

All that said, we still had a great group of panelists I had the privilege of moderating. One panelist — Paul Volpe, the deputy politics editor at washingtonpost.com — made a dead-on observation that makes the homogeneity of the panel moot anyway. “Pitch me,” he told the journalism instructors in the room. He said he gets more proposals than he can handle every day from vendors who are trying to sell a product to The Washington Post. Some of them, he said, are attempting to solve a problem he didn’t even know he had until they made their pitch. If academics want to play a leading role in “research and development” for the news industry, he said we needed to be the ones to identify market needs and build the solutions. Journalists, whose days are more than full simply trying to deal with immediate publishing demands, don’t have time to ponder these things.

He make a good point. If universities want to be R&D shops, then we need to start being the places where services like Pluck or Inform or Apture are born. We need to be the places to create original sites like Slate or MediaStorm or Everyblock. Why not? In Chapel Hill alone we have incredible resources to foster and incubate these kinds of projects — resources like Carolina Launch Pad and the Carolina Challenge. Shoot, we have one of America’s best journalism schools at what The Princeton Review has called the most entrepreneurial university in the country.

The other two panelists are tackling the newsroom-classroom partnership from two different angles. Jay Rosen is getting ready to launch Studio 20 at New York University and Retha Hill is gearing up for her second year as director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.

Rosen said he was trying to shake the metaphor of j-school as boot camp and replace it with the metaphor of the studio theater — maybe like the one at Yale. “If you imagine yourselves that way, people will treat you that way,” he said.

Studio 20 aims to partner with a news organization around a specific project. That project will then get taken “in to the studio” and become an integrated part of the curriculum. In fact, it becomes the whole curriculum. Everything about the Studio 20 master’s degree program is centered around these projects. If the Studio had been up and running this year, for example, Rosen said they would have partnered perhaps with Talking Points Memo to do a project.

When the program gets up and running next year, it will have 15 master’s students and three instructors. Rosen also said the program would have visiting fellows from the profession who would help lead some of the projects.

Rosen’s suggestion for academics who want to make better connections to industry:

• Make a personal connection to a decision maker by teaching that person something. Become a one-on-one tutor demonstrating that your expertise can fill his or her need.
• Offer to build something for free for that decision maker’s news organization.

Hill’s program in Arizona is already up and working with clients such as Gannett and AZCentral.com. One of the products they’ve created is a Facebook application for the Arizona Republic’s coverage of high school sports.

Clients approach the New Media Innovation Lab, the students consult with the client and then provide a demo.

At ASU, the experience is extra-curricular. Hill pays her grad students $10.75 an hour and her undergrads $9.75 an hour. Each works about 20 hours a week in the lab. The students come not only from journalism, but engineering and finance as well. For each role in her lab, Hill said she has six or seven openings, with anywhere between 10 and 40 applicants for each role. One of the challenges, she said, was that some of the more experienced programmers and designers can easily make more money by taking their skills outside the university.

One thing that struck me is that while students in these programs are doing a great job creating products, there isn’t much time left for creating knowledge, for creating broader theories from the specifics of the project and engaging the research faculty to better understand the broader lessons about how or why a particular product works or fails.

Retha and Jay ARE building bridges. Paul Volpe has some great ideas about creating a place where students can train alongside newsroom veterans who want to re-train. And I see more and more examples of these kinds of partnerships every year.

So what if we didn’t get to create our database of newsroom client needs and academic resources yesterday. I’d like to do it here. You have a resource in your classroom, or a problem in your newsroom? Post it to the comments are here and we’ll keep the conversation going.

Thinking about what to say to these groups, I began to think about how important it is for each journalist who lives in a world of accuracy and accountability to personally venture in to the uncertain waters of online social networks and user-generated content. Among other things, it is a journalist’s job to give voice to the voiceless and to hold powerful people accountable. Wikipedia and Facebook are two places where the voiceless are stretching their vocal chords and where accountability is taking on new methods. If a journalist is to perform his or her job above a minimum standard of competence, it’s important to dive in to these worlds and understand how they work.

So your quiz for today is this:

* Do you know the technical forces at work that cause a racist screed to appear as one of the highest links on a Google search for “Martin Luther King”?

* Do you know how to use whois.net to find the owner of that racist site ?

* Could you explain how Twitter.com spread like wildfire the rumor of the death of Subway spokesman Jared Fogel? (And why it will be important for every political journalist to monitor the site on Nov. 3?)

* Could you use Wikipedia’s revision history to see who edited the Jared Fogel entry with the false rumor of his death? Could you explain why the page is (probably) accurate right now?

My point is this: people are using these tools to deceive your readers either through ignorance or malice. If professional journalists have any role in our society it is to see that truth wins the day. And that means it’s their job to know how social networks and user-generated content can be used for good AND evil.

So your assignment for the day is this: create a wikipedia entry for something or someone on your beat — something on which you are an expert source. Monitor the page to see how it fares with the crowd. Create a Facebook page and see if you can find a few people on your beat to “friend.”

Some may say that takes time away from real reporting. I say you won’t be able to do real reporting without these fundamental new media skills.

“Last fall, psychologist B. J. Fogg taught a class at Stanford University in which he assigned students to develop Facebook applications. During the 10 weeks of the class, 73 students developed applications such as Kiss Me, Oregon Trail, and Secret Admirer, that have since resulted in 25 million installs and, by the end of the class, were attracting about 1 million daily, active users. These applications have generated more than $500,000 in ad revenue since September. At least three companies were formed by students in the class.”

Sometimes I drone on about j-schools needing to be R&D shops for industry. This is what I’m talking about.

If you have other examples, please send them my way.