Will Sullivan

"Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose. You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps spark lots of great work." - Will Sullivan

"I regret to inform you that BeatBlogging.Org’s funding will be running out in about two months.... BeatBlogging.Org will not, however, be disappearing. There is still work to be done and innovation to be chronicled. BeatBlogging.Org is too strong of a brand to let die. Unless a journalism non-profit or university steps up to bring BeatBlogging.Org in house, this project will most likely be going volunteer only. If it is the latter, I’ll obviously have a new day job, and if that is the case, I’ll need assistance in carrying out BeatBlogging.Org’s mission. I’m asking for all of you to help me brainstorm what to do next with BeatBlogging.Org and the best way to move forward. Collectively we can figure out how to not only have BeatBlogging.Org survive but also thrive." - Will Sullivan

"The Reporters' Center launched Monday with about 35 instructional videos from professional journalists on how to handle a range of reporting challenges, including: understanding privacy issues (and staying out of jail), shooting video with your cell phone, fact-checking assertions, conducting a good interview and covering a humanitarian crisis safely. YouTube wants to use the Reporters' Center to develop collaboration between citizen reporters and large news organizations -- to "more effectively report on news and have that content amplified on a bigger platform," said Steve Grove, the site's head of politics and news. " - Will Sullivan

"Yet, about a year ago, Microsoft promised something new, with the launch of its multi-touch computing table, Surface. No keyboard, no mouse—just a table with a screen. Developers quickly realized that designing for Surface is more than an exercise in coding—serious consideration has to be given to constructing a coherent user interface for a device that completely forgoes the standard mode of input that has been in use for almost half a century. From an interface perspective, touch- and multi-touch-based implementations like the Microsoft Surface are still very much in their infancy. While there are many things the device does well, there are still a number of curious design quirks that make developing an entirely touch-dependant UI challenging. With an increasing number of developers worldwide gaining access to Surface in recent months, a much clearer picture is forming of what the future may hold for Surface and similar technologies." - Will Sullivan

"Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed. No, Posner does not work for the Associated Press (which also has some strange ideas on linking). He is (normally) considered to be one of the great legal minds of our time. Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee. He is someone who should know better." - Will Sullivan

"Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. But Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world. A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia’s page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping." - Will Sullivan

"—People between the ages of 12 and 17 spend 11 hours, 32 minutes a month online—way below the average of 29 hours and 15 minutes. —Teens spend 35 percent less time watching videos on the web than those aged 25 to 34. —Teens are watching six percent more TV than they did five years ago, with cable pulling them away from broadcast" - Will Sullivan

"It’s not about how sexy-looking your site is. It’s not about having the absolute latest display technology. It’s about how you engage readers with conversations and with ways of interacting with news staffers and with each other. It’s about projecting personality — showing that behind the stories, the columns, the blogs, there are real people living in your town, sharing your concerns and your joys." - Will Sullivan

"Last week I attended the Multimedia Immersion in Las Vegas and found it to be just what I needed. Creativity was encouraged and rules were made and then broken. Seth Gitner and Will Sullivan really put together a quality workshop and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn multimedia. " \m/ (Via prof gitner) - Will Sullivan

"We in the traditional media … must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value. That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful. It means truly exploiting real expertise. It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand. It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them. Working against them would be crazy." - Will Sullivan

"The real problem is the way that we as journalists manage information, because that determines so much else: the kinds of stories we’re able to envision and construct, the amount of context we’re able to bring to bear in a short amount of time and our ability to connect the dots. In general, and this is my scientific conclusion, we suck at managing information. That’s nothing new, you might say, and you’d be right. But what has changed is that a lot of the people and institutions we cover are now getting smarter about this stuff, and are using better tools to help them manage information. From tracking crime to measuring customer loyalty, the sophisticated use of information is a crucial factor in many modern activities. Us? We’re still knocking rocks around hoping to generate a spark." - Will Sullivan

"YouTube has doubled the size of standard uploads for regular-Joe account holders to 2 GB from 1 GB. The company told us this afternoon the move was in order to accommodate users’ HD uploads. But despite the size increase, non-partner videos are still limited to 10 minutes in length." - Will Sullivan

Pornographers continue to fuel digital innovations! - Will Sullivan

"Now you can send bigger attachments in Gmail, as Google increased the maximum attachment size from 20 MB to 25 MB." - Will Sullivan

"The source of the recent flurry of AT&T tweets is Adam Savage of MythBusters fame, who tweets that for “a few hours of web surfing in Canada” he was charged a whopping $11,000. AT&T is apparently claiming that Savage managed to download 9 gigabytes in Canada using his USB data connection (which he calls “frakking impossible“). What’s worse, the customer service rep Savage was dealing with was apparently a bit loose with their decimal points, telling Savage that “data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb”. Read that again — there’s a couple orders of magnitude difference there." - Will Sullivan

Reportedly, Senator John McCain wants Predators to provide with uncensored Wi-Fi coverage to the people of Iran. I don't know if this is even technically possible, but its so preposterous and fantastically cool that I love the idea: During the Cold War, we provided the Polish people and dissidents with printing presses. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are the modern-day printing presses. They are the way to spread information and keep the hope of freedom alive amongst the Iranian people" - Will Sullivan

"Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more. Those statements mean what they say and not necessarily more. I am not arguing that newspapers and magazines and news services will die. No, just that they must change. I am not arguing that organisations that define themselves by issuing formal accreditations to professional journalists will disappear from the face of the earth. No, just that they must change their definition of what they are and what they do. ... I want people to think holistically. I need them to. More and more, we’re issuing a multimedia report to multimedia-savvy consumers who no longer make a distinction between information they receive from text and information they receive from images. They demand words and pictures to be blended because… well, because that’s the way the world is!" (Via Chrys Wu) - Will Sullivan

"News organizations do not need to fall in line behind sources such as TMZ when a report like Jackson's death breaks. The Twitterverse's been wrong about alleged celebrity deaths before. But in this situation, smart news organizations should acknowledge to their followers and readers that they know the report is out there and that people are talking about it, and report where the organization is with its own reporting. How hard would it be to tweet: "TMZ reports Jackson has died. We cannot confirm. Working on details"? Or "No confirmation on rumors about Jackson's death. We're in contact with authorities"?" - Will Sullivan

"# The Ann Arbor News, after 174 years, will close as a business. # Its successor, AnnArbor.com, will be a new Web site, built from the ground up (and therefore supplanting MLive, the current site which serves several Michigan cities with locally tailored editions). # The News's distinctive headquarters, designed by prolific Detroit-area architect Albert Kahn, will be sold. AnnArbor.com has already taken the ground and top floors in a downtown office building, annoying some by supplanting a popular coffee store. # All the staff is being dismissed. Reporters and editors, whose salaries averaged around $50,000 according to one discussion post, can reapply for the many fewer jobs in the new venture, but the pay scale is being dropped to the mid-$30,000 range for reporters. # The new publication is being called a "print product" not a newspaper. Hints are that the Thursday edition may be light, targeted to weekend planning, Sunday including longer news takeouts." - Will Sullivan

"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for." - Will Sullivan

"Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends. But where's the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop? To answer all these questions and more, we've assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!" - Will Sullivan

"Akamai said that traffic to news Web sites spiked around 6 p.m. Eastern, clocking in at one point at 4.2 million visitors per minute. During the rest of the day, the sites tracked by Akamai never exceeded 3 million visitors per minute." - Will Sullivan

"Today Printcasting (http://www.printcasting.com), a democratized publishing technology funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Bakersfield Californian, announced that it’s expanding service to more cities across the United States through partnerships. Among the new cities are Denver and Boulder, Colo.; Los Angeles, Calif.; and the San Francisco Bay area. New city-focused Printcasting sites are launching throughout the year in partnership with other local newspapers and organizations. The first partner is the targeted publishing group of MediaNews Group, which owns 54 daily newspapers in 11 states, including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News." - Will Sullivan