I've spent the past couple weeks participating in the Mozilla Knight Journalism Challenge, and trying my best to make others aware of the challenges :)
The submission phase of the MoJo challenges have closed, and the voting phase has begun. Below you'll find my four entries, with quick descriptions. If you are interested and like any of my entries, i encourage you to create a drumbeat account (you can login with google or twitter etc), and vote for the ones you like.
The voting phase for MoJo will display a random four entries to voters to review and vote for (if they so choose). The MoJo challenges themselves are divided into three sections: Unlocking Video, Beyond Comment Threads, Open Web's Killer Apps
Here are my submissions:
Text-based Adventures for Journalism? Many have complained that print journalism has not substantively changed, regardless of distribution medium, and point to games as the engaging medium of the modern era. We can harken back to the original interactive game, text-based adventures, and gain inspiration for how Journalism can innovate. Long form articles don't provide users with any opportunity to interact. Interaction is left to comment threads and social media. If instead we implement articles as a container of paragraphs/facts/memes that represent a path through a topic, a user can direct themselves through a topic with an article as a touchstone or guide. Users control their experience but editorial control is still preserved.
Why isn't there a visual web scraper builder? There are plenty of tools to help explore HTML structures, such as firebug, webkit's inspector, and now tools like Hackasaurus's X-Ray Goggles, which allow users to click around a page and get a selector back for an element. The next logical step would be to allow users to do something with selected elements. Why not let them specify data templates to traverse pages and extract data?
An app (which i dub Punditree), which computes the affinity between a talk show host and their guest. Sure we can accuse talk shows, hosts and guests of political bias and agenda-mongering, but can we quantify it? Of course we can! The same sorts of social networking tools that facebook and many others are built on can be applied to appearances on talk shows and elsewhere. Who's more bi-partisan, David Brooks or Michelle Bachmann? Well, which one of them shows up on more 'left-leaning' talk shows? Which one of them does more red-meat interviews with Glenn Beck?
"Where were you when" should be a (real-world) event based content submission system. Its goal would be to allow users to record oral histories of events (whether those events are significant just to a few people or something with world-wide effects). Key to it's functionality is to collect content around these sign posts marking world events, and the ability for users interest in a subject to solicit histories from their friends via social media.