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INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web To

INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web Tools

Narrative + investigative: tips from IRE 2012, Part 1 At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, after a Phoenix reporter died in a car bomb while covering the mob, is usually considered an investigative-only playground, but narrative writers can learn a lot from these journalists’ techniques and resources. When might a narrative writer need investigative skills? A few possible scenarios: • When developing a character’s timeline and activities beyond the basic backgrounding • When navigating precarious relationships with sources • When organizing large and potentially complicated amounts of material • When gathering data and documents that might provide storytelling context – geopolitical, financial, etc. We asked This Land correspondent Kiera Feldman to cover the conference with an eye for material that might be particularly useful in narrative. She netted a range of ideas, tips and resources. Today, in Part 1, she covers areas including documents and data, online research and source relationships. Check back tomorrow for Part 2, “Writing the Investigative Story,” with best practices from Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times and Steve Fainaru of ESPN.

ITA Software is proud to introduce Needlebase™, a revolutionary platform for acquiring, integrating, cleansing, analyzing and publishing data on the web.  Using Needlebase through a web browser, without programmers or DBAs, your data team can easily: acquire data from multiple sources:  A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needlebase uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needlebase's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map.  Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Needlebase dramatically reduces the time, cost, and expertise needed to build and maintain comprehensive databases of practically anything. Read on to learn more about Needlebase's capabilities and our early adopters' success stories, or watch our tutorial videos. Then sign up to get started!

International Dataset Search View View Source Description:  The TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog (IOGDC) is a linked data application based on metadata scraped from an increasing number of international dataset catalog websites publishing a rich variety of government data. Metadata extracted from these catalog websites is automatically converted to RDF linked data and re-published via the TWC LOGD SPAQRL endpoint and made available for download. The TWC IOGDC demo site features an efficient, reconfigurable faceted browser with search capabilities offering a compelling demonstration of the value of a common metadata model for open government dataset catalogs. We believe that the vocabulary choices demonstrated by IOGDC highlights the potential for useful linked data applications to be created from open government catalogs and will encourage the adoption of such a standard worldwide. Warning: This demo will crash IE7 and IE8. Contributor: Eric Rozell Contributor: Jinguang Zheng Contributor: Yongmei Shi Live Demo:  http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search Notes: This is an experimental demo and some queries may take longer time to response (30 ~60 seconds). Please referesh this page if the demo is not loaded. Our metadata model can be accessed here . Procedure to getting and publishing metadata is described here . The RDF dump of the datasets can be downloaded here. Welcome to S2S! International OGD Catalog Search (searching 736,578 datasets)

How to use APIs from Twitter, Google & Facebook to find data, ideas by Katharine Jarmul Published Aug. 8, 2011 1:27 pm Updated Aug. 9, 2011 12:02 am As more and more journalists are finding, APIs are a great way to get data for your Web applications and projects. An API, or application programming interface, enables software programs to communicate with one another. (Chrys Wu wrote a helpful intro here.) To give you a better understanding of how they can help you, I’ve outlined some of the best APIs for finding content and explained how you can use open-source programming tools to glean information from them.

Shorenstein Center paper argues for collaboration in investigative reporting Thursday, June 2, 2011 Sandy Rowe, former editor of The Oregonian, and Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center fall 2010 and spring 2011. Photograph by Martha Stewart Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School Contact: Janell Simsjanell_sims@harvard.eduhttp://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/index.html Media organizations may be able to perform their watchdog roles more effectively working together than apart. That is one conclusion in a new paper, “Partners of Necessity: The Case for Collaboration in Local Investigative Reporting,” authored by Sandy Rowe, former editor of Portland’s The Oregonian. The paper is based on interviews and research that Rowe conducted while serving as a Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Rowe’s research examines the theory underpinning collaborative work and shows emerging models of collaboration that can lead to more robust investigative and accountability reporting in local and regional markets. “Growing evidence suggests that collaborations and partnerships between new and established news organizations, universities and foundations may be the overlooked key for investigative journalism to thrive at the local and state levels,” Rowe writes. “These partnerships, variously and often loosely organized, can share responsibility for content creation, generate wider distribution of stories and spread the substantial cost of accountability journalism.” Rowe was editor of The Oregonian from 1993 until January 2010. Under her leadership, the newspaper won five Pulitzer Prizes including the Gold Medal for Public Service. Rowe chairs the Board of Visitors of The Knight Fellowships at Stanford University and is a board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists. From 1984 until April 1993, Rowe was executive editor and vice president of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Virginian-Pilot won the Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting under her leadership. Rowe’s year-long fellowship at the Shorenstein Center was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Read the full paper on the Shorenstein Center’s website.

New: World Health Organization (WHO) Releases Database on Nutrition, Obesity and Physical Activity (NOPA) Posted on June 5, 2011 by Gary D. Price From a WHO Announcement: The NOPA database has been created in close collaboration with health ministries and with support from the European Commission. It includes details on more than 300 national and sub-national policies that address nutrition, physical activity or obesity. Most of these policy documents have been developed in the past six years and refer to lifestyle trends such as the increasing consumption of industrially produced foods high in fat and sugar and declining physical activity. Physical inactivity and poor nutrition are considered to be risk factors to many non-communicable diseases, such as heart diseases and stroke, diabetes, cancer, and mental health disorders. The measurable indicators for policy development have been identified and monitored at the national level in accordance with the commitments made through the European Charter on Counteracting Obesity and the WHO European Action Plan for Food and Nutrition Policy 2007–2012. As an example of these commitments, the Nutrition, Obesity and Physical Activity Database shows that 28 Member States have stated that they plan to take action on physical activity in the school setting, 11 plan to address the adequate labeling of food products and 9 plan to deal with appropriate food marketing practices. Direct to NOPA Database

Europeana Linked Open Data The data.europeana.eu pilot is part of Europeana's ongoing effort of making its metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana providers, via standard Web technologies, enrich this metadata and give this enriched metadata back to the providers. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable discovery of semantically related resources, as, say, when two artworks are created by artists who are related to each other. The data is represented in the Europeana Data Model (EDM) and the described resources are addressable and dereferencable by their URIs - for instance, http://data.europeana.eu/item/09404/C3C50BD0958EE18ECE1B8F93780DC84D8273664F leads either to an HTML page on the Europeana portal for the object it identifies or to raw, machine-processable data on this object. Disclaimer: data.europeana.eu is currently in pilot stage, and can thus be changed at any moment! Your feedback is more than welcome, and may lead to updates in the prototype service. What's in here for you? data.europeana.eu currently contains metadata on 3.5 million texts, images, videos and sounds gathered by Europeana. These objects come from content providers who have reacted early and positively to Europeana's initiative of promoting more open data and new data exchange agreements. These collections come from 10 direct Europeana providers encompassing around 300 cultural institutions from 17 countries. They cover a great variety of heritage objects, such as this 18th-century view of a German landscape from the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, or Neil Robson's memories of the herring business from the Tyne and Wear Archives & Museums. For more information, see our datasets page.

Capturing human rights data in Analyzer Human rights groups collect data containing details of human right abuses from various sources, including medical records, newspaper articles, witness testimonies, letters, interviews, and official reports and documents. Analyzer can be used to capture this data for analysis. Data is coded according to the "Who did what to whom" model and entered into the capture set of Analyzer. Data about the source of the information is entered in the source tab, shown in Figure 1. (Note: the data in the figures shown here, unless otherwise indicated, are from a sample, not an actual, dataset.)

Sort the signal from the noise Newsbeat tracks the activity of every page you publish in real time, from the top performers to the diamond in the rough. But we don’t just show you everything, we show you what’s important. Our algorithms forecast the expected path of each story and alert you to unusual activity you might otherwise miss, so you always know what to act on, when it matters most.

The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats Using Benford's law, forensic statisticians can spot suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, and estimate the chances figures have been tampered with

The results were fun. Greece – whose economy has tanked – showed the largest and most suspicious deviation from Benford's law of any country in the euro.