Institute for Analytic Journalism

We've been using a variety of web-based bookmarking tools for the past four or five years, tools like the now-departed Blink and Backflip. They were all OK (so long as they remained financially viable), but never quite seemed to meet all our needs. Recently, though, we learned about Furl (www.furl.net) and we like what we see. Furl is in beta, so we don't know what the ultimate price will be, but journalists will like the ease with which we can pull URLs off a web page, markup those savings with keywords, copy-and-paste webpage annotations and then save the citation in a folder of your making. Oh yeah, you can also save and e-mail the link(s) to anyone. In fact, we like Furl so much, we will be demo-ing it next week at the IRE conference in Denver.

As the Furl gang says:
"Furl will archive any page, allowing you to recall, share, and discover useful information on the Web. Browse your personal archive of Web pages, and subscribe to other archives via RSS."

Check it out.

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Thursday, May 19

Doing well by doing good

by JTJ on Thu 19 May 2005 03:50 PM MDT

Here at the IAJ we believe one of the reasons people come to newspapers or broadcast stations is to get the data which, upon analysis, they can turn into information that helps them make decisions. Ergo, the more meaningful data a journalistic institution can provide, the greater value that institution has for a community.

A good example arrived today thanks to Tara Calishain, creator of ResearchBuzz. She writes:
** Getcher Cheap Gas Prices on Google Maps
<http://www.researchbuzz.org/getcher_cheap_gas_prices_on_google_maps.shtml>

"Remember when I was saying that I would love a Gasbuddy / Google Maps mashups that showed cheap gas prices along a trip route? Turns out somebody has already done it -- well, sorta. You can specify a state, city (only selected cities are available) and whether you're looking for regular or diesel fuel. Check it out at http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ "

The data driving the map is ginned up by GasBuddy.com It's not clear how or why GasBuddy gets its data, but it offers some story potential for journalists and data for news researchers. It has an interesting link to dynamic graphs of gas prices over time.

Surely the promotion department of some news organization could grab onto this tool, tweak it a bit, promote the hell out of it, and drive some traffic to and build loyalty for the organization's web site.

That's the obvious angle, but what if some enterprising journo started to ask some questions of the data underlying the map? What's the range in gas prices in our town/state? (In Albuquerque today, the range was from $2.04 to $2.28.) Are there any demographic or traffic flow match-ups to that price range? How 'bout the variance by brand?

Would readers appreciate this sort of data? We think so, especially if there was an online sign-up and the news provider would deliver the changing price info via e-mail or IM much like Travelocity tells us when airline ticket prices change by TK dollars.

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Wednesday, May 11

AnyLogic: Tool-of-the-Week

by JTJ on Wed 11 May 2005 10:33 PM MDT

A talented band of coders in St. Petersburg, Russia has put together a nifty simulation modeling application written in Java. Anylogic™ "supports virtually all existing approaches to discrete event and continuous modeling, such as process flow diagrams, system dynamics, agent-based modeling, state charts, equation systems, etc. With this incredibly rich toolset you are not limited with the technology anymore – analyze the problem, identify the best approach, and find the solution!"

The package is relatively affordable, especially if one can qualify for the educational discount. It could make for a handy tool to model and/or illustrate a variety of dynamic aspects in an urban setting -- ambulance response time, crowd movement during an anti-war demonstration.

Today, too, the roll-out of the LA Times re-designed web site includes an intuitive interactive map of freeway traffic flow -- real time -- of the greater LA basin. Perhaps some enterprising news organization will figure out a way to tie these maps from SigAlert into the dashboard-mounted GPS navigation devices. Or will SigAlert itself deliver those goods?

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