Extending NSGIC into Social Media and Stuff Like That

As a result of discussions at the recent NSGIC Conference (you may have heard about it), we have staked a NSGIC claim in a few social media spaces this fall.

A basic introduction to NSGIC has been added to Wikipedia. The material for this was mostly drawn from the About NSGIC page, with some expansion based on personal experience. We have tried to include material and references from outside of NSGIC, as a way of cementing the new article in Wikipedia. Any NSGIC folks who are Wikipedians should feel free to keep and eye on the new entry and edit or add as they see fit.

There is also now a new NSGIC Group on the business networking site LinkedIn. A number of NSGIC folk who are on LinkedIn have already linked to the new group. The rest of the NSGIC community is invited (encouraged? urged? peer-pressured?) to join as well.

Someone mentioned a NSGIC profile on MySpace or FaceBook. We'll have to think about those, though I will note that if we go that route my teen-aged daughter will be horrified.

Another Map-Based News Aggregator

The Online Journalism Review has an interview this week with "noted journalist/programmer/Web guru Adrian Holovaty" about his new project EveryBlock, which filters local news by neighborhood and presents it in several formats, including a simple map view.

Mr. Holovaty was behind the recently ended chicagocrime.org which looked at one data stream for one city. He describes EveryBlock as an attempt to provide a full news feed for each individual block in three major cities: New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

While the graphic map-presentation aspects of this site are interesting -- Holavaty and his team created their own version of a base map, for example, instead of using Google or Yahoo -- what may be more interesting is their work on finding new sources of interesting information and new ways to extract location information where it is not already embedded.

"...we're detecting geography in narratives -- "blobs," so to speak -- and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents that refer to specific places near them."

It is also interesting to note that the project is funded under a grant from the Knight News Challenge that requires the source code to be released under an open-source license at the end of the 2-year grant period.