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In response to the devastating aftermath of the twin earthquakes (on January 12 and then on January 20) in Haiti, Crisis Commons has come to serve as a key forum for the coordination of professional volunteers in the development of rapid solutions to the diverse array of information-based challenges facing the aid effort.

Crisis Commons volunteers are drawn from experts in the fields of geospatial mapping, software development, graphic design,  language translation, NGO and government work, and general logistics.

Teams collaborate most intensively and perhaps productively at live meetings called “Crisis Camps”, which have met and will be meeting in cities across North and South America, from New York to Los Angeles, and from Bogota to Ottawa.

Projects resulting from Crisis Camps include a Creole-to-English mobile app, and a platform enabling the sharing of resources between relief organizations called the We Have, We Need Exchange.

Many other projects have been conceived and are in development.  View the full project list here.

In order to learn more about becoming a collaborator on a Crisis Camp Haiti project, click here.

Through a very elegant blend of rental data from Netflix and Google Maps, the New York Times continues to improve on the infographic with a very interesting interactive feature called "A Peek Into Netflix Queues", which it published on January 10.

The Netflix maps drew me in for about 30 minutes, as I clicked from film to film, watching as the density of rentals for each was represented in shades of red within each zipcode in the Metro DC region.  For rental distributions that may confirm some common assumptions, look no further than "Frost/Nixon" and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop".

One commenter on Metafilter went so far as to say that the feature could be used by people (snobs?) as a tool for selecting neighborhoods in which to consider living.  ("Hm, the schools are good and the neighborhood is safe.  But do we really want to stand in line at the grocery store with a bunch of people who sat through ‘Bride Wars’?")

The Times has mapped 12 major metro regions.  Take a look at it here.

David Meerman Scott was one of the first names I came across when I started this whole social media adventure.

At the time I was writing white papers and press releases for the launch of a new web site. This was something I had never done before, and I found the whole experience rather boring. If I was bored, then what I was writing had to be even worse.

There had to be a better way of doing this.

So, doing a quick search on marketing and PR I came across something called The Gobbledygook Manifesto. Immediately the light bulb went on, and  I connected with what David was trying say  – that things had changed.

“The web has transformed the rules, and you must transform your marketing to make the most of the Web-enabled market place of ideas.”

Recently, I received a copy of David’s revised edition of, The New Rules of Marketing & PR. I don’t read a lot of books on marketing, but this is a must have.

David’s book does a great job describing the old school marketing mentality, and why it was forced to change.  He stresses that companies, organizations, and people need to become creators of content. More importantly, that the content must have value to  the audience who now have significant influence on the success of a marketing campaign.

Having read many of David’s publications, I was pleased to discover new information in this revised edition. The big value is the case studies. David provides real life examples that cover just about any facet of business and niche. Including:

• Why Zemoga gives flip cams to all their employees and customers.
• The importance of a company blog, and why companies need to interact within the blogging community.
• How CollectSPACE leveraged the importance of participating in community forums. (Notice I said participating, not promoting)
• Why Wikis shouldn’t be overlooked.
• What Conrete5 learned by providing their software for free.
• How Mignon Fogarty’s podcasts helped sell her book.
• Why groundbreaking, industry standard, and cutting-edge are words you should avoid in your press release.
• That Search Engine Optimization isn’t just about keywords.
• How the National Community Church has embraced the social web to reach thousands of people.
• The new rules for finding a job.

“You can trigger a World Wide Rave, too – just create something valuable that people want to share, and make it easy for them to do so.”

A big thank you to David Meerman Scott for sending me a copy of his book, and for including the story on how I found my job here with The Bivings Group.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR provides a solid foundation for people who are having difficulty getting their heads around the social web. From CEOs to the entrepreneurs, anyone reading this book will come away with something they didn’t know before. It’s a great read and I highly recommend snagging a copy.

Two panels here at The Bivings Group have pored over more than 50 submissions from fantastic non-profit organizations all over the Washington, D.C. area and narrowed our search down to six finalists.

Due to the heavy competition between all of the applicants and the excellent qualifications of our six finalists, we’ll need one more day of deliberations.

The final winner of the TBGives $10,000 web consulting prize will be notified and announced by close of business on Wednesday. Please check back!

During last year’s election cycle, I worked as the Online NewsHour’s associate editor for the Vote 2008 site, and while the site and show changed considerably during my year and a half there, bold revisions on the site today (and soon, the show) demonstrate an invigorated energy at the organization to keep up with new media during rocky times for traditional journalism.

In addition to a new design layout, some new site features include a new blog, written by both online and on-air employees, and the promotion of online video, something the site’s actually had for a long time but was never given its due prominence.

Of course, one of the most prominent features of the site and show is its new correspondent. Hari Sreenivasan, who comes to the NewsHour from years at CBS News, will be joining the on-air broadcast and working with the Online team to combine new media efforts.

Sreenivasan talked to The Bivings Group about the new site and the strategy behind its design.

… and about new social media and outreach efforts.

… and last, what other news outlets can learn from the redesign.

Blending the traditional program with Online efforts has not been an easy task. It took years to get the teams in the even in the same building, let alone the same work space.

Many of the new initiatives emerge due to pressure from dwindling sponsorship resources earlier in the year.

“Newspapers are thinning, and television has its own crisis,” show anchor Jim Lehrer said in an interview with the New York Times in May.

With the Online changes come revisions to the show format and a new name. Starting Monday, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” will officially become “The PBS NewsHour.”

All of these changes reflect a struggle within Public Broadcasting to find a place across all media spaces, promoting brand without losing purpose.

Lehrer told the New York Times in a more recent article, that he’s “’very concerned about serious journalism,’ and for longtime practitioners of the craft, ‘we damn well better get with it.’”

New media journalists around the globe face technological barriers and increasing dangers when reporting from within the boundaries of protective governments. A new site by Global Voices Advocacy maps and tracks journalists who have been threatened or arrested and aggregates the information into a robust map database with real-time statistics and details of each case.

The site, Threatened Voices, aims to raise awareness to the growing number of bloggers and other online journalists being persecuted across the world. While both traditional and new media reporters have faced recent danger, the site acknowledges the growing importance and number of online journalists in the global media.

“Online journalists and bloggers now represent 45% of all media workers in prison worldwide,” Global Voices says in a press release.

The captures of high profile journalists abducted in Iraq and North Korea have called attention to the dangers of the profession, while “the harshest consequence for many has been the politically motivated arrest of bloggers and online writers for their online and/or offline activities, in some tragic cases even leading to death,” Global Voices reports.

The site allows users to enter their own location and anecdotal details, drawing from the international community of journalists to fill the site’s map content.

Outside of the central map, other features of the site include statistics and analysis organized in a timeline or by country. The site lists China, Egypt and Iran as the top three countries, respectively, with the highest number of recorded cases of threatened or arrested bloggers.

Each case is tracked to record whether the blogger was threatened or arrested and if arrested, when and if they were released. Another aim of the site is to allow the online community to call attention to campaigns to free particular journalists.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the partners of the Threatened Voices project released a report in April on the 10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger.

Along with a thorough description of each country (at the time, Burma was listed at the top), the article quotes CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon, who emphasizes, “Freedom of expression groups, concerned governments, the online community, and technology companies need to come together to defend the rights of bloggers around the world.”

The site was also built in collaboration with the BBC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.

As you probably know by now, CNN launched a redesigned website yesterday.   While I like the look and feel, the thing that really strikes me about the new homepage is how little of it is devoted to news.  As you’ll see in the screen shot above, the far left column that I’ve highlighted in yellow is hard news while the rest of the page, which I have greyed out, is devoted to feature stories, ads and site features. 

As a frequent visitor, it seems to me that CNN site has been shifting for awhile towards feature stories/ lifestyle news and away from hard news.  With less than 1/3rd of the above the fold homepage devoted to national/world news, I think this new design is another big step in that direction.

In the past we have profiled the innovative work of people like Adrian Holovaty who does some exciting things through programming that allow data to tell their own stories.  For instance, he set up the Campaign Tracker for the Washington Post, and he is now running his own site Everyblock – the database driven hyperlocal news site.  Further, in our newspaper studies we have examined how news organizations use the Internet.

While at the CIO Perspectives Forum here in Washington, DC last week, I was wondering about what kind of role CIOs should play at news organizations.  Their organizations may already use them as I am thinking (at least I hope).  However, it is important to note that in an October 2008 white paper titled “The CIO Profession: Leaders of change, drivers of innovation” IBM reports that most organizations mainly view and use CIOs as implementers and not as strategists.  Hopefully, news organizations turn to CIOs for planning and strategy and not just technical execution.  Of course, a CIO with a journalism background could help even more; Adrian Holovaty is so innovatively partly since he has a background in both programming and journalism.

If CIOs are involved in strategic planning, they can help the business and editorial staffers not only understand what is realistic, but they can also introduce them to new ideas that someone without technical expertise would know.  Further, a CIO could also identify potential problems and other issues in advance and help either avoid them or prepare other organizational stakeholders in advance. 

Here are a few examples of how a CIO can help news organizations strategically plan: 

• Broadcast journalists are now going out to the field with recording and editing equipment with fewer producers and camera people accompanying them.  Before such equipment and software is purchased, the CIO could help determine the requirements for such equipment and software and then help identify applicable products.
• A CIO with a decent understanding of database management could help find new application ideas like the ones that Adrian Holovaty has developed.
• During our newspaper studies we look at the website features that news organizations use by examining the different features (i.e. blogs, RSS feeds, video sections, etc.) they harness.  A CIO would have a valuable perspective on helping developing a strategic plan on what the organization’s website should do. Further, he or she she can help evaluate content management systems (CMS), applications, and vendors to determine how well they meet the organization’s needs and desires.
• A CIO can help an organization envision and deploy an API – like NPR’s API — which allows members of the public to use its data in interesting ways that the organizations itself did not image.  This is one way that a CIO can work with the business and editorial people at a news organization to help them find ways to profitably exploit an API.
• The CIO could help find ways to organize content for the public in many different ways.  For instance, tagging enables people to find information in ways other than the traditional divisions like News, Sports, International, etc.  In fact, The Guardian newspaper wanted a tag editor back in October 2007.  This would help make the news organization’s site more easy for the public to use.

These are just a few examples of aspects of journalism in which news organizations can turn to their CIOs for strategic planning, and considering the dire state of media companies, they can use all of the help that they can get.

How else can news organizations harness their CIOs to help strategically plan?