ENTRIES TAGGED "crowdsourcing"
Publishing News: Crowdfunding, the new way to raise money for news
Crowdfunding the news, advice for publishers on surviving the digital frontier, and innovation in library e-lending.
Fundraising for news
GuardianWitness App
In a podcast interview with Ingram, Coleman described his journey into journalism, which started in 2004 with a domain name and a blog that, once he started writing about university news and politics, became one of the most-read outlets for university news and ended up landing him a job with Maclean’s magazine. He eventually returned to his home town to spend a summer working at the local newspaper, which didn’t do much on the web, opening up possibilities for Coleman. “My goal is to build a local news service, where the business model is sustainable for hiring a number of staff … to build a business model around journalism and then expand when I have a base that’s sustainable,” he told Ingram. You can read more about Coleman’s work in Ingram’s report and you can listen to Coleman’s interview in the podcast.
Interestingly, notorious hacktivist group Anonymous has done a very similar thing. Read more…
Publishing News: Trailblazing experiments in publishing
Experiments in serial writing, crowdsourcing and subscriptions. Also, the Internet's effect on copy culture and a bookmarklet for smart tweets.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention recently.
Practical applications of data in publishing
The second in a series looking at the major themes of this year's TOC conference.
Several overriding themes permeated this year’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The second in a series looking at five of the major themes, here we take a look at data in publishing — how publishers can benefit, practical applications, and innovative ways it can be used.
Open Question: Would you fund your favorite author?
A new service lets authors pitch ideas and collect funding from readers. Would you donate?
With the launch of the Unbound.co.uk publishing platform, readers can fund the books they want to read — and the startup launched with some pretty big-name authors. Would you fund the next book from your favorite author?
Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier
Essays by Brian McConnell of
World Wide Lexicon
and Ethan Zuckerman
of
Global Voices
describe the technical and cultural sides of developing communities of
volunteer translators.
World Wide Lexicon Toolbar changes the reading experience for the other 99% of web pages
World Wide Lexicon Toolbar meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any
browser that doesn't have it installed.
Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper
In many areas of publishing, there are enormous resources of free
online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly
and conveniently post their own observations. Since we are no longer
gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.
"Bite-Size Edits" from BookOven
Hugh McGuire's startup BookOven has opened up an alpha version of a project they're calling the Gutenberg Rally, an attempt to harness collective intelligence Mechanical-Turk style to proofread Project Gutenberg texts for typos and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors. In "divide and conquer" style, the system presents just one small snippet of text at a time (with some surrounding context),…
Amazon iPhone App Uses Crowdsourcing for Product IDs
Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog: The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program,…
News Roundup: The Crowdsourced Cat Book, Infinite Permutations of the Digital Book, EBay vs. Amazon (Round 2)
The Crowdsourced Cat Book Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog: The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours…