Assignment scope

On the surface, Jose Rivera of East-Harlem.com and Marina Ortiz of East Harlem Preservation don’t have much in common. But they both possess a love for their hometown and desire to present a positive image of East Harlem in the face of perceived bias and neglect from the mainstream media.

“I think people want to feel like the people they know matter,” said Ortiz, who grew up in East Harlem and returned to the neighborhood two years ago after spending several decades in the northwest Bronx. “That’s how I shape my Web site.”

“I wanted a place where people in the community could come and see their news,” Said Rivera, a Navy veteran and lifelong New Yorker who started East Harlem.com 11 years ago.

Every year the blogosphere goes abuzz with predictions from big thinkers about how changes the Internet will bring. This year some decided to crowdsource their predictions this year. How accurate could your readers be at guessing next year's big events? There is only one way to find out. Ask them.

As the year of YouMedia comes to a close, the crowd will probably be tapped for 2007 predictions more than any previous year. Predicting the future might be a new calling for collective wisdom, and it's no small order.

So let's start small and go from there. Before we dive into the territory of Nostradamus, predicting floods and war, let's cover what the crowd seems to have already gotten good at predicting.

Business resources just became easier to find. "What citizen journalism and YouTube have done for media, CrowdSpirit hopes to do for product development," according to this post on Springwise, a blog on future business ideas.

As the name suggests, CrowdSpirit is part of the crowdsourcing phenomenon, but it takes it into a new wave, where the 'group think' method is used to refine real world hardware products. Crowdspirt "aims to start a revolution in manufacturing by creating the first electronic products driven and inspired by customer's wishes and expectations."

This site encourages inventors to submit electronic product designs to the online CrowdSpirit community, who in open source fashion, refine the original products and vote on which ones should move forward.

The online virtual world Second Life has enjoyed explosive growth, with double-digit increases in sign-ups in recent months.

At the same time, Second Life is drawing mainstream media coverage because of the new economy -- in which users can earn real-world money. One avatar reportedly earns her creator in the neighborhood of $150,000 a year from in-world businesses.

Significant nonprofit endeavors include forays by leading universities, including Harvard, that have launched research and educational programs within Second Life.

However, there is also tremendous uncharted ground for creative journalism within this expanding frontier.

One of the great abilities of online news is its use of info-graphics to tell a story. Want to know who has controlled the Middle East throughout history? This map can give you a 90-second run down. Curious how many soldiers have died in Iraq and from what country; check this map out (click the U.S. button on the right on and off for the full story).

But a true interactive map doesn't just let you click buttons and watch a flash video. It makes a call out to the masses to share their unique knowledge of local geography, making everyone's understanding of the world better.

With tools like Google Earth, users have the ability to scan detailed images of the planet with the ease that a teacher has in spinning a globe. But how do we utilize such an all powerful tool to its maximum potential? Where do we even begin?

The hardest decision is where to focus the search. Current levels of coverage available through free satellite mapping services limit where and what we can look for.

With that in mind, I looked into deforestation.

The newspaper business is not the only industry reinventing itself for the Web. As NewAssignment.Net seeks to spark innovation in journalism it can find inspiration in otherwise obscure and unrelated places -- from knitting tribes on the Web, to open source prosthetics and even cooking.

Take searching for a guacamole recipe.

In the past, if you wanted to make guacamole, you had few options. You might have looked in the same general cookbook that you would have gone to if you wanted chow mein or chicken parmesan. You could have looked through past issues of magazines and searched every recipe index until you happened upon guacamole. Or, perhaps you went to your favorite Mexican cookbook by a renowned authority like Rick Bayless or Diane Kennedy, and said eenie. meenie. meiny, mo.

The Web offers a new variation on recipe cards and community cookbooks of the past, made of shared recipes from neighbors, friends, and churchgoers. Whereas cookbooks or food magazines might have provided a few recipes to choose, you can visit sites like Allrecipes.com and Epicurious.com, or one of countless others to find a daunting number of recipes. These sites bring together people from all over the world with different personalities and palates. Allrecipes boasts of a community of 10-million cooks.

“This is a recipe I made by taking the best of three or four popper recipes and combining them to make something that tastes wonderful,” wrote Heather Fargis about her "Best Ever Jalapeno Poppers" recipe.

The videos that surfaced on YouTube in the past few weeks were disturbing: a police officer tasering a student at a University of California-Los Angeles library for not showing an ID card; an LAPD officer punching suspect William Cardenas in the face. Both videos had thousands of views and sparked a nationwide discussion about the role of police -- an especially hot issue for a city still remembered for the 1991 Rodney King beating caught on videotape.

Both of these videos were incidents where the "filmmaker" stumbled across a controversial police encounter. Arlin Pacheco was taping her cats on her porch when she saw Cardenas and the library video was recorded on a cell phone. Yet some are not leaving cop watching to chance and have set up more systematic systems.

Since 1990, Berkeley Copwatch has been patrolling the streets of its California city with video cameras and police scanners to document and deter police misconduct. The group's methods—community involvement, public education, constant documentation—has parallels to citizen journalism, yet the group has yet to take true advantage of technology and the Web.

Issue 7: JPG Mag
Issue seven of JPG Magazine, all 20,000 copies of it, are giving the publishing world something a little different. Founders Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek-Champ (yes, they're married), print on dead-trees, but the production of the bi-monthly magazine relies completely on photography submitted by users of their online community.

"Instead of starting in print and building a community, you start online. Then when you launch your first copy, you have supporters there," said Derek Powazek.

JPG was, in part, an expansion of a working idea called Photo Club – a service that delivered an original photo once a month to subscribers. The Powazeks went online and named their endeavor JPG Magazine, "to honor all the fantastic work being put online that never saw the light of day in print." They accepted digital submissions from anyone using all the digital tools at their disposal (gmail, flickr, lulu), selected the best and produced six issues over the next two years.

Issue seven had more than 1,400 submissions in several loose themes, like "self-portraiture," "hometown," and "big," and issue eight has already received over 5,000 submissions.

And while editors still have final say, the community now votes on what photos they would like to see in the magazine. Think American Idol for magazines.

"We consider ourselves an open source magazine in that the participants have access to everything the editors have access to, with a couple of exceptions. In traditional magazines, it's all about hoarding until that last moment and then going ta-da – buy the magazine!"

Jumping off from my last post, about the link between journalism and social network sites, I wanted to highlight Danah Boyd, who has been studying the emergence of social websites at U.C. Berkeley.

Boyd realized there wasn't a good timeline of social network sites and since it would serve her work, has launched a public wiki dedicated to tracing the history of social network sites.

"There is a lot of collective knowledge, a lot of things other people know that I don't and I wanted to tap into that," said Boyd in a phone interview.

I'm interested in seeing how this history wiki turns out. The emergence of social network sites has been somewhat short -- but jam packed. Only with a comprehensive timeline can one really step back and get the complete picture.