Plenty of sites start out by asking for contributions. Everyblock doesn’t. Its first mission is to make data that’s already floating around the internet and locked in government file cabinets available and easy to access.
Tips for getting data:
Be nice: People will help you out if you’re polite. Duh.
Governments should focus on services: Making mashups and analyzing data is our job. The government’s job is to solve problems and serve its citizens.
Plot cities/agencies against each other: Tell New York what Chicago is providing. Let one agency know that their bureaucratic rivals are way more open and cooperative. It really does work.
2: The more local it gets, the more effort it takes; but the reward is bigger
Every city has different ways of managing data, and there are no national databases for things like building permits, restaurant inspections or even crime (San Francisco, for example, only specifies a zip code).
Private sites like Flickr, Yelp and others have APIs that work anywhere. A photo in San Francisco is the same as a photo in Chicago.
But it’s worth doing the work, Holovaty says. No one else is aggregating this much information on such a focused area.
3: Embrace hypertext: “Be of the web, not just on the web”
One question to ask when building a site like Everyblock or Chicago Crime: “Will my site work without maps?”
All this makes information easy to find, and easy to share.
4: Move beyond points
Some news applies to a whole neighborhood. Sometimes to a street. Sometimes a block.
When news affects an area, show an area, not a point. This is a bit trickier, technically, but data is more meaningful when it’s applied the right way. If information is only as specific as a city, your map doesn’t need to zoom down to street level. Keep it where it’s relevant.
5: Roll your own maps
Google maps are designed for getting directions. They include one-way streets, bus stops and BART stations. Plus, Google (or Yahoo, Microsoft, etc) decides how they look.
As Holovaty says: You wouldn’t make your corporate website with some generic Wordpress template. Why do that with your maps? Here’s how Everyblock made its maps.
Also notable: Everyblock takes out names to protect privacy. “We don’t want to make people Google-able.”
On how Everyblock will make money: “We have no freakin’ idea. We might go for another grant. We might go VC. We might magically dream up a business model.”
The last question is especially noteworthy: How do you get boundary data?
“We’ve had good luck with governments,” Holovaty said. And that’s a bigger thing than most people realize. American locations geocode pretty well. Try making a Google map in China, and you’ll find yourself staring at a sparsely populated satellite image with no streets and little searchable beyond major cites. And that’s an improvement.
It is possible to get street-level data in China, but only if you read Chinese. Go to ditu.google.com and you’ll see what I mean. Here’s what Xi’an looks like in Ditu, and here it is in English.
And never have I felt more like I owned my blog than after having put the damn thing back together piece by piece.
The whole mess started when I tried to upgrade last week. Since I switched from Blogger to Wordpress in March 2007, I’d been using a version somewhere in the 2.1.x range. It’s been outdated for, oh, a year or so. Upgrading was never much of a priority because everything mostly worked, and my minor theme tweaking was enough.
I did use a separate WP2.3.x install for my portfolio site. It turns out native tagging is sweet, and those tags might not disappear when someone comments (ahem, ultimate tag warrior, not so ultimate, ahem). And when I saw screen shots of the latest version, 2.5.1, I decided it was time.
So, I proceeded to tear down what I had. And then I couldn’t get it back up.
The problem, as far as I can tell, stemmed from my old Techmania theme, which as you can see (feed readers, this would be a good time to click through) is gone for good. I was tired of it anyway.
So I’m back up and running. Expect more posts in the near future. And expect me to continue bouncing (virtually) between China and new media.
Stay tuned.
(Last note: I’m still not set on a new theme, so the look and feel around here might change. Feel free to suggest something new. I like green, and cleaner is better, but beyond that I’m open.)
Just got this message from the American consulate in Shenyang:
Any large-scale public event such as the upcoming Olympic Games may present an attractive target for terrorists. There is a heightened risk that extremist groups will conduct terrorist acts within China in the near future. In light of these security concerns, U.S. citizens traveling in China are advised to use caution and to be alert to their surroundings at all times, including at hotels, in restaurants, on public transportation and where there are demonstrations and other large-scale public gatherings. Consistent with our standard advice, American citizens are urged to avoid the areas of demonstrations.
In accordance with these security concerns, Chinese authorities have increased security in China’s airports during recent months. For example, Chinese airport authorities recently implemented tighter restrictions on taking liquids, aerosols, or gels aboard flights in carry-on baggage. Such restrictions may apply to food, cosmetics, toiletries and medicine. Travelers should contact their air carrier before their flight to determine the precise regulation in place.
American citizens are strongly encouraged to maintain a high level of vigilance, be aware of local events, and take the appropriate steps to bolster their personal security. For additional information, please refer to “A Safe Trip Abroad found at travel.state.gov.
Stephen Hadley is the National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush. He was Condoleeza Rice’s number two in Bush’s first term, before Rice moved to State.
Think what you want about China’s policy out west, where dissidents have clashed with police over religious freedom and national identity, where history can be confusing and complicated and politics even more so.
Just make sure you know what country you’re thinking about.
Hadley said two days later he favors “quiet diplomacy” with China. The Australian quotes him saying:
“If other countries are concerned about Tibet, they ought to do what we are doing through quiet diplomacy - send the message clearly to the Chinese that this is an opportunity with the whole world watching, to show they take into account and are determined to treat their citizens with dignity and respect. They would put pressure on the authorities quietly to meet with representatives of the Dalai Lama and use this as an opportunity to help resolve that situation.”
One has to wonder, just how quiet is this diplomacy?
George Stephanopoulos did western media no favors, either. Maybe he knows where Nepal is, but he didn’t show any sign of it, any more than Hadley.
People are already asking whether Western media gets China. I’m starting to wonder, does anybody know what’s going on? Anybody? Bueller?
“Do you feel western media is misinformed about China? If so, what source of information do you rely on when it comes to staying informed on China?”
Plenty of Chinese think so. A Sina.com petition has garnered 1.19 million protest signatures alleging, “Western media organisations such as CNN and BBC have churned out untrue and distorted reports of the event,” according to AFP (via CDT). China Daily chimes in with an editorial: Media must be objective.”
“If you go on acting like CNN, get out of China. Chinese people do not welcome you,†[the fax to Johnson's office] concluded. The writer signed off simply as “a Chinese person.”
Only one foreign journalist was actually in Lhasa when the riots broke out, James Miles of the Economist. He told the China Beat this:
The foreign media were almost entirely absent from Lhasa (a couple may have sneaked in under cover after the riots broke out but would have had limited access). Yet I have seen some very good reporting on what happened, notwithstanding the Chinese media’s nitpicking. Reporting in the official press, by contrast, while reasonably on the mark as far as the violence goes, has been highly misleading by failing to look at the bigger picture of unrest in Tibet and beyond, by not asking what might have caused this anger and by portraying this as the actions of a handful of people organised by the Dalai Lama’s “clique.” It wasn’t a handful, and I saw no evidence to suggest anything other than spontaneity.
Richard Spencer, from the Daily Telegraph, makes a similar point.
But explicitly - and in this they represent reality - government spokesmen do not want us to be “balanced”, and nor can we. We do of course quote government spokesmen, like Mr Zhang - and it makes them look absurd. But more than that, to “give both sides” means doing so with a level of engagement which the Chinese side is clearly determined not to allow. We cannot engage with the claims and counter-claims, often contradictory, coming out of officials and the state media.
A release through Xinhua says a policeman somewhere has been killed by rioters. We report this. But how easy is it coherently to quiz anyone about how, why and when this occurred? Will an eye-witness account be given? Will an honest assessment of injuries on both sides be given? When we ask, in what direction were the retaliatory shots fired, who was running where, do we get a response? There is no-one to give one. Phones are hung up. Spokesmen churn out one-liners, platitudes and what my old assistant used to call “nonsense-speak” which no-one believes. The government would rather not give us a narrative than give us one that we can pick at.
The pro-Tibet people, on the other hand, do answer their telephones (both the campaigns and the government). They engage in questioning. They differentiate between the claims of which they are certain, the claims they attribute to eye-witness reports, and the claims they say are second-hand and unverified. They seek to make what they say coherent and comprehensible.
They may not always be right, and to be sure they have an agenda, but the attempt to make sense at least wins some of our sympathy (though a surprising number of journalists remain suspicious of them).
Here’s my take: There isn’t nearly enough news coming out of China. What we get on this side of the Pacific is incomplete, often anecdotal, and for the most part written for an audience with little background on China.
The answer here is more news, more information, more voices. If China—its government and its people—want truly fair, factual reporting, the door is theirs to open.
For the past few days now, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Tibet. There isn’t much I can add, really. I’ve never been there, and what is worth saying has largely been said by people closer to the situation more knowledgeable about the complexities involved.
So I’ve been reading, and because the internet is social, I’ve been posting links to news from Western China on Twitter, Google, Del.icio.us and Facebook. I’ve compiled those links into one RSS feed, which should be available within mainland China, where the news sites themselves are blocked.
I can’t help feeling a twinge of regret at not being in China right now. But being in America has its advantages. Namely, I don’t need a proxy to get my news. And realistically, Dalian is not meaningfully closer to Tibet than California. I can probably get more information here than I could there, or at least I can get it faster.
Hopefully, the links I’ve posted will be useful for anyone trying to keep up with the news. As much as anyone who’s been in China a month knows how to get around the Great Firewall, it’s also true that searching for news using proxies can be mind-numbingly slow and endlessly frustrating. That’s what the Firewall does: It makes it just difficult enough that casual browsers will go someplace more harmonious.
About three paragraphs into the story I was writing on a the homecoming party for a squad of local Marines, my editor popped her head around the cubicle with a suggestion:
“Do you think you could take out the drinking and the swearing?” she asked. We were, she reminded me, a family newspaper. (Note: It’s been a couple years since I worked there.)
I’ve never figured out what that means, exactly, a “family newspaper.” We printed some grisly stuff: car and train wrecks, blood stains on sidewalk, skeletons of houses gutted by fire.
And marines are vulgar. Take away the drinking, swearing, crude talk of sex and how it relates to consuming a Jello-shot, and you have something more bland, less real. (My marine friends call this the Army). These men had just come back from their second tour in Iraq. Foul language was the least of their issues.
Pat Thornton sent me on this nostalgia trip with his post this morning, noting that Stars & Stripes grapples with the same issue:
My paper is willing to print “shit†in a story but only in certain editions. Our Mideast edition is keeping the word, while our editions in Europe and the Pacific are dropping it. The Web will not feature the word as well.
…
The expletive was left in the Mideast edition because it’s a theater of war. The feeling was that troops in combat have a different community standard than those living on base with their families.
As much as it is our job, as journalists, to promote civic and civil debate, to calm the passions of our readers with facts and with reason, to enlighten, we’re also in the business of saying it like it is.
China wouldn’t be my first guess of places American lawmakers would look for legislative ideas. But Mashable points to a proposed law in Kentucky that would make it illegal for websites to allow anonymous comments and fine site owners $500 for the first offense. Tim Couch, the state representative who sponsored the bill, says it’s necessary to fight “online bullying,” according to WTVQ in Lexington.
The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.
Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.
If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.
Sounds familiar, no? Couch’s reasoning is different, but this sounds awfully familiar to China’s old Real Name Registration rule for bloggers.
China, at least, could get away with trying blunt-instrument regulation of online speech. But Kentucky? Bit of a problem with the First Amendment there. Not to mention the problem of enforcing such a rule. As Mashable notes, much of this stems from suicides supposedly linked to MySpace, which is starting to sound like a newer and less bat-hungry version of Ozzy Osbourne.
This time around, in response to recent suicides on MySpace and other events taking place online that resulted supposedly from online, US lawmakers are willing to suspend the right to speak freely to apply a bandaid to the problems of American young ones’ self esteem. Understandably, when the irresponsible actions of a few lead to the death of a family member, immediate and decisive action is wanted to rectify the issue legally. Unfortunately, banning all anonymous commentary online is about like banning all gossip publications because Britney Spears became a bad mother due to overzealous paparazzi, or banning everything from pocket knives to nuclear arms because someone was mugged at the corner store.
As I mentioned, this debate has happened already. China toyed with it, then gave up. Maybe Couch would benefit from revisiting what Wang Xiaofeng wrote two years ago:
Insults and swearing did not start because of the Internet or blogs; libel started when people first started writing. Fraud and confidence tricks are ancient crimes, you can’t just blame them on the Internet. Is it possible that the real name system will solve all these problems? It’s like that old joke: if the eighth steamed bun is the one that makes you full, why bother eating the first seven?
You knew that, but it’s time we told you again. Death, disease, poverty that defies definition. It’s an old storyline. Sure, sometimes we need to be reminded how bleak things are, but at times, I find myself screaming at such a story: “SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THIS?”
Like today, though it really wasn’t about Africa.
Editor & Publisher added up circulation losses at newspapers across the country, finding, without much surprise, things are bad.
In just four years the top newspapers in the U.S. have collectively lost about 1.4 million copies in daily circulation, E&P has found. But since the reported numbers come out every six months, the overall decline for individual papers may not hit home for many. Each fall off is usually in the low- to mid-single digits — but it sure adds up.
Fair enough. Good to know. So what do we do about it? I have a few thoughts.
Make this everyone’s issue.
I didn’t think much about the business side of newspapers in college. I hated it. That’s what business managers were for. But the business has changed, and now we all need to get in on the discussion. It’s not up to publishers, editors, Sam Zell or Stanford to save us.
Figure out what we’re doing right. Do more of it.
E&P leaves a big chunk out of this story. Hint: It starts with www. Much as we’ve lost in paper, we’ve gained in web audience. More, even. I’m not Polly Anna-ish about this, but we do need to understand where we can grow and make the most of it.
When in doubt, think small.
Quit your bitching and fix something, anything. Make your life easier. Stop worrying about macroeconomic trends forecasting an impending downturn in the likelihood of further streamlining in corporate structure. Go gather some data and graph it on Swivel. Shoot some video of how said data effects people’s lives and upload it to YouTube/Brightcove/Blip.tv. Publish it using an open-source CMS.
Look, the business model went and changed. The print edition isn’t what it used to be, I get it. But it’s time to stop whining and start building something worthy of all the nostalgia we keep throwing at ink on paper.
