Open the Future: Tuesday Topsight, August 26, 2008

Description

Lots of stuff, some of which I hope to get back to in more detail. • Crowd (Re)Sourcing: Spot.us is a new bottom-up journalism site with a novel funding model: community members pool their money to pay journalists to go after a particular topic. That story then shows up on the Spot.us site, and is pushed to various local media outlets as appropriate. This isn't a model for breaking-news journalism, but rather for the deeper investigative stuff that blogs tend not to cover so well, and traditional media seems to have largely given up on. Stories underway include the problematic role of ethanol in California (fully-funded), fact-checking San Francisco political claims (almost there), and the connection between SF Bay Area cement kilns and global warming. I'll give you one guess as to where Spot.us is headquartered. Here's the bigger drawback, though: it's not up yet. There's a blog, and a wiki, and even a Flickr stream of design ideas, but the real site, with real content, won't be up until the Fall. Worth bookmarking now, though. • Go North, Young Cow: Cattle, deer, and other grazing animals apparently tend to align themselves along a north-south axis when feeding. And the scientists who reported on this phenomenon, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used Google Earth to do their research. Dr Sabine Begall, from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, ...

Original URL

http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/08/tuesday_topsight_august_26_200.html

http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/08/tuesday_topsight_august_26_200.html