The road sign got me thinking about acts that were passed as part of the New Deal: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The WPA was created by President Roosevelt in 1935. Expenditures from 36-39 totaled nearly $7 billion. As a side note, my grandfather use to refer to the WPA as “We piddle around” for their lack of work.

The CCC was a public work relief program for unemployed men age 18-24 to provide development of natural resources in rural areas from 1933 to 1942.

In North Carolina, both the WPA and CCC helped build the Blue Ridge Parkway:

On June 30, 1936, Congress formally authorized the project as the “Blue Ridge Parkway” and placed it under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. Some work was carried out by various New Deal public works agencies. The Works Progress Administration did some roadway construction. Crews from the Emergency Relief Administration carried out landscape work and development of parkway recreation areas. Personnel from four Civilian Conservation Corps camps worked on roadside cleanup, roadside plantings, grading slopes, and improving adjacent fields and forest lands. During World War II, the CCC crews were replaced by conscientious objectors in the Civilian Public Service program.

What does this have to do with technology?

The CCC and WPA were good ideas in the 1930′s, but there are new and greater demands that need to be met during our current recession. Government spending is at an all time high while red tape and bloat hinder a system that our founding fathers helped establish.

One of the main problems facing the government is a lack of innovation and creation with technology.

It’s time that we take the next step and create new agencies that will help bring us into the next era of a public and open government.

Large strides could be made by putting people to work in the technology sector of government. Designers, developers, community activist could all work in stride to help make how the government spends your money and help hold your elected officials accountable.

What could these jobs produce?

Designers across America for example could help redesign websites such as the South Carolina Governors Mansion website.

These jobs could help create databases of information that are publicly accessible by all. A good start would be to build a system for Roll Call voting as outlined in the South Carolina Policy Council’s 2009 transparency report. The US Senate has an XML feed of their votes available, a key piece of legislation that was championed by S.C. Senator Jim DeMint. Politico goes further into the pro’s and con’s of this.

Sites like scvotes should have API’s that work with counties GIS departments to report voting results for precints statewide in realtime on election night.

Any state ran or supported website should also make their analytics avaiable under FOIA laws. This could help determine the sites actually impact to cost ratio.

Copyright laws should also be updated and any text and photograph make publicly available. On the South Carolina Flim website for example, in the footer the following information appears:

Photographs and art on this website and any downloadable publications are copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without the written permission of the photographer and/or the South Carolina Film Commission. © 2010 by the South Carolina Film Commission, a division of SC Parks, Recreation and Tourism. All rights reserved.

All information on any taxpayer supported website needs to be licensed through a Creative Commons license. Government entities should also use open platforms such as drupal, django and share their code using Github.

SCPC also supports the idea of an online check registery. [PDF] After submitting FOIA’s to 85 district counties, 12 counties quoted an expense of more than $10,000 to complete the request.

A technological workforce reinvestment could help solve these problems by working with those 85 districts to move their financial records online using open linked data.

There are five stars to linked data: 1. make your stuff available on the web. (whatever format.) 2. make it avaiable as stuctured data (excel instead of pdf.) 3. use non-proprietary format ( csv, tab delimited instead of excel.) 4. Use urls to identify things, so that people can point to it. 5. link your data to other people’s data to provide context.

If you think about it, it’s a pretty simple idea. Why can’t citizens log in to one website and see a single view of their account with a city or state. (water, sewer, real estate, auto excise tax, registration, etc.)

All of this requires a massive amount of imagination and innovation, but it has to start from the ground up. People need to learn that they have just as much control of what happens in government as the people they elect. The media does a good job of informing what’s happening in government, but they miss a great opportunity when it comes to educating people on how to make changes.

In conclusion, it’s time to take a serious look at the types of projects we’re funding with ARRA and look for ways to promote real change through a digital workforce reinvestment.

I think a lot of newspapers are missing the point of what these articles are saying. Instead of bickering back and forth about using readability or actually using links in articles, what I would like to see is more people encouraging newspapers to actually use links!

I’ve visited quite a few South Carolina based media companies this week, searching for their RSS feeds for my new job and their sites have a long way to go. Some papers like The New York Times do decent jobs at creating topic pages, which I’m a fan of, but there are very few outgoing links to other, competing websites.

When would this be helpful?

For beginners, linking out to other sites helps define you as an authority on news. It’s showing your readers that “hey we don’t know everything, but we’ll show you who does, and we’ll show you where you can find it.” Be a link authority in your community and at your paper.

How can we get started?

If you’re a reporter, you should have a delicious account. Delicious is a free online bookmarking service that allows you to store links online and tag this with specific keywords. You could do this with every story that you write, with items that you’re following or as your own personal clipping service. Here’s my delicious account.

Another option is to use Publish2. I used publish2 while at The State when the Boeing news story broke to aggregate stories from around the U.S. on Boeing’s big news in S.C. It received a lot of high praise for including supporting stories.

What should we do next?

Your next step is to talk to someone in your online department. More than likely, they’ll be willing to add the links as assets to your story (hopefully). If you have a system like CCI or some other offline system, it might add them for you automatically. You should also requests for your online CMS to your website and ask your Online Editor to let you go in and manually add the links yourself, you may get shot down, but you won’t know unless you try.

In conclusion:

Stop talking about how the internet is making us uber ADD and just look at it for what it is: a way to make the world more connected through a simple use of an HTML link.

Here’s some more info about SCPC:

The South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation has brought together civic, community and business leaders from all over our state to discuss innovative policy ideas that advance the principles of limited government and free enterprise.

I will be leading the efforts to engage users on their websites, The Palmetto Insider, The Nerve and Unleashing Capitalism. I’ll also be in charge of their primary social media accounts @scpolicycouncil and @thenervesc.

I’ll still continue to blog and share my photography and ideas about how we can work together to make the journalism world a more sustainable in the digital world.

Between 2004-2008, video was suppose to be one of the “saviors of journalism.” Plenty of newspaper shooters and CEO’s had high hopes for video, most of it was a flash in the pan.

In my opinion, video-journalism has been limited from the beginning because of the view environment. Just as mobile phones are not good for long form journalism, viewing long form video while sitting upright at work is not ideal. Watching videos at work or while on the move lends itself to watching quick short videos.

Looking at metrics from most videos, most people exit a video after viewing only 1:30 worth of footage. What would happen if they were in a better viewing environment? Would newspapers finally have the chance to create the long form video they’ve always wanted?

Bringing the internet to the living room is something that I’ve been wanting for a very long time. Apple TV did this previously, but in a very limited capacity, before and after it crippled Boxee from running on it’s hardware. Apple allowed Youtube and Flickr to stream to it’s device, but Google TV will search the entire internet.

What Google has done will open the door for newspapers and self publishers alike. No more viewing video on a small computer or cell phone screen when it was meant to be viewed on the big screen.

Newspapers who explore this option should look at the ability to run regular interactive commercials similar to what Hulu offers. Longer video opens the door for advertising options other than pre-roll or post-roll ads.

It would be interesting to see research done on how the same video compares in two different viewing environments, one on the computer and one on a flat screen TV.

This announcement also opens many new possibilities for publishing video on the internet. For example:

• Small businesses can now publish longer serial dramas using Youtube channels.
• Newspapers could publish in-depth videos exploring socio-economic issues in their viewing areas allowing individuals to contribute to the report.
• Athletes and celebrities can publish their own interactive channels combining various social media outlets.
• Political candidates can host their own interactive town hall meetings and fireside chats remotely, giving them the ability to travel to more places, saving time and money.

Google TV doesn’t have to be just a one-way device either. It can be interactive using social media tools as well. This could potentially opening the door for RPG/choose your own adventure webisodes.

Now more than ever newspapers need to start looking at Google as a distribution partner and not someone who’s “stealing their income.”

There, doesn’t that feel better? When newspaper CEO’s look to cut costs, they look at the bottom of the employee food chain to cut expenses, instead of cutting frivolous expenses like Associated Press feeds.

When your news site publishes AP feeds for example, you’re not only wasting money, you’re also helping to fragment the web.

Take for example the recent Associated Press headline “Some oil spill events from Tuesday, May 11, 2010.” This query in Google returns over 3,000 versions of the same story. Do we really need that many copies of one single story floating around the internet?

Jeff Jarvis has a great idea known as the link economy. His basic thesis: Do what you do best, link to the rest.

Links are the currency of the new media economy. We bloggers think we’re doing AP and papers a favour when we link to their articles. I teach my journalism students that their headlines and intros are more important than ever because these are the advertisements that will draw people to click links and read more.

The problem for AP and other syndicates is that they are trapped in an old-media economy, selling their content to publications to support their work. In print, we needed countless copies of an article. But now, online, we need only one copy with countless links to it.

If it’s better to link to a story, why run AP feeds at all? Most of the time, AP feeds are bundled with a print subscription service, therefore forcing sites to use both. In the case of chain newspapers, they don’t have a choice about running the feeds it’s a part of their contract. There have been a few cases of papers dropping AP feeds, but not as many as you would expect.

What can newspapers do instead?

Newspapers have always bundled news into their products. It’s a low cost, low value alternative to actually producing original news. Prior to the internet, Editors have made a living deciding what news is most relevant to readers. Most ed’s considered their “news judgment” superior to readers judgment.

Step one: Educate readers on how to consume news electronically. Show them how to use and subscribe to your RSS feeds. Show them how to collect different RSS feeds from around the internet. Show them free tools like Google Reader.

Step two: Create an OPML file of RSS feeds for them to get started with. Include feeds from the New York Times, Washington Post and other large daily newspapers from around the U.S. Include various types of feeds like news, business and sports.

Step three: Use the free service Publish2 to curate links from around the web. More than likely, your editors are spending a portion of their day hunting for the best links around the web and looking for the most interesting stories to publish in tomorrow’s paper. Why not give them the one click ability to share their favorite/most important stories with your audience. Publish2 also allows users to create a collaborative newswire so that everyone in your sports department can include their links into any given section.

Conclusion: Your site doesn’t have to spend thousands of dollars to keep your readers informed about current situations when services like Google’s living stories (which is open-source, available for anyone to use) can do it cheaper and more efficiently. Instead of focusing on waste and fluff, give your readers meaningful content and show them that you can be an authority on news by collecting and sharing the best of the best.

UPCOMING POST IDEA: Do you think the Associated Press and newspapers are fragmenting the internet by publishing multiple copies of the same story? What happens to the structure when there is more than one URL for the same story?

If you agree with me, be sure to send a tweet to @stevebuttry letting him know that he should #hirechip!

Managing social media outlets, such as Twitter feed(s), Facebook fan page(s), YouTube and Flickr channels;

I manage the following accounts: @thestate @thestatesports @gogamecocks @cophotog @smccolumbia.

From managing these accounts, I’ve learned that interaction is best. It’s great when someone asks a question and realizes that there’s a human being on the other side that is listening. Social Media goes much further than just listening though, it’s also about immediacy, which is why we’re getting news much faster on twitter than through traditional news services and the Associated Press.

I also manage fan pages for The State and SMC Columbia.

Monitoring and responding to social media references to our work;

I kept a close eye on @thestate during the coverage of Mark Sanford and we used twitter to help identify Joe Wilson as the “You Lie” commenter, giving us a jump on our local competition for the story.

Aggregating social media content for linking to or posting on our site; promoting our content and community-engagement opportunities using social media;

We crowd-sourced storm photos for thestate.com and fan photos during the Kenny Chesney concert. We’ve also used twitter to collect photos from accident scenes as well as football games. We also aggregate tweets at sporting events based on their physical location for our @thestatesports accout.

Using Twitter and other social media to crowdsource breaking news stories, supplementing staff coverage;

We used @thestate and @gogamecocks to post breaking news of Ben Axon, a USC recruit charged with simple marijuana possesion. We also used the account during the Travis Barker/DJ AM plane crash, Mark Sanford coverage, Michael Phelps marijunana saga, coverage of Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” comment and other small breaking news events in the area.

The biggest help with breaking news came with Twitter’s location API, we are now able to search certain areas for tweets related to events.

I’ve also used Qik on iPhones to stream live video from house fires in 2009.

Other accomplishments include conceiving and implementing the use of other social media tools including Cover it Live.

CIL was most recently used in the the USC Baseball tournament which was lead by Neil White and Dwayne McLemore and with the Soccer State Championships lead by Akaliah Nelson and I.

Both of these examples have a high return on investment for our website.

Planning tweetups and other social-media-oriented community events.

As president of Social Media Club Columbia, we hold regular tweetups and events for our community in Columbia. In October of 2009, we held our largest meeting about the future of journalism with Dan Conover, Doug Fisher, Holly Bounds, Adam Beam, myself and Jeff Elder. You can find more here: http://bit.ly/1wmEMr

In addition to my work responsibilities, I’m also an award winning photographer. You can view my work here: http://bit.ly/8NB7AZ

I was also a first round finalist in the this years Knight News Challenge with my idea for Augmented Reality using data relationships. You can read that here: http://bit.ly/39Zc00

The thing that intrigues me most right now is location based services. I feel like newspapers have a really great opportunity to harness LBS for news. Everyblock is a start, but I imagine something more granular than that. You can read about that here: http://bit.ly/5NzoX9

I’ve also been very critical over the media’s (mis)-use of twitter. I’ve written numerous position papers for my company on what we can do to better harness social media and most of those efforts went unnoticed. http://bit.ly/397JLR

Where else should I go?

View Larger Map

Here are some of my geotagged photos:

View Larger Map

I’ve always believed in the power of journalism. The platform and delivery of information is not important, a well informed society is.

Good night and good luck everyone.

2009 was a very busy year for me personally and professionally. It will always be remembered as the year that “all of my friends got married.” In addition to staying busy, my camera spent a lot of time sitting in a bag because my lens (17-85 f4-5.6) didn’t work half of the time. I’m working on getting that fixed now. At least it still shoots.

This year was a really off year for travel as well. I usually spend my summer traveling between Charleston and Asheville which I didn’t do much of this year.

I hope that in 2010 I’ll be able to some trips and spend time doing some actual shooting.

Enjoy the images below, I’ll have a couple more to add before January 1, 2010, until then Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The history of twitter is well known, the service started as a way of quickly letting people know what you were doing through SMS like messages.

In the recent article, “Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter,” the story reveals how twitter users dictate what changes twitter needs to make.

But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.”

These changes happened because of demand. The media will not be part of this transition.

Look at all of the rules and restrictions placed on reporters and editors by organizations such as the Washington Post, New York Times and ESPN. Most of their rules are so restrictive that it’s hard to have an online presence.

When managers look at social media, they’re looking at it from an old-guard point of view. They want to apply their rules. Control the information and control the message. There have been two exceptions to this rule, The Colonel Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman. These two news organizations social media strategies work because of clearly defined goals. It’s difficult for people in traditional media to understand the significance for two reasons: 1) They see media as a one-way street. 2) They are so disgusted by comments on their own Web sites they would rather not participate because they see it as noise.

Mass Amateurization

Columbia twitter user Ryan Bowen recently asked Mandi Engram on twitter “any chance of us cola peeps starting news/traffic/etc hashtags?” Ryan has a great idea for using #cae hashtags on his site. This is the type of ground-up movement we need to see more of.

In the book, “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky points out that “The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from Why publish this? to Why not? The problem is, citizens can’t wait on newspapers to publish that information for them.”

Starting a revolution on twitter isn’t hard, it just takes the right group of people. Asking a media outlet to start a twitter account for traffic isn’t going to get you anywhere because they’ll never decide on any sort of standardization or rules for the account. When do we tweet? How often do we tweet? What do we tweet? Since there is no definitive answer, the solution is simple, the mass amateurization of media.

Dan Conover and the folks at the Digitel held a #CHS hashtag summit earlier this year with the idea of standardizing hashtags for the Charleston area. They include #chsnews, #chsweather, #chs and #chstraffic. This was a great idea. A way for people in Charleston to filter their news to receive what matters to them. It worked because dedicated group of people got all media outlets to come together and agree on what to do and how to do it and most importantly it started from the ground up.

Twitter list gone mad

In a recent conversation with Mathilde Piard, we both questioned why the LA-TIMES, NYT and other newspapers created lists for the Fort Hood shootings and Orlando shootings when other news organizations had already created those lists.Those tasks were duplicated and unnecessary. The idea that they have to be the authority on the internet is a classic holdover in print to online mentality. Why duplicate the work of others? Why not just point to the original source? I would trust you much more if you did that instead of asking me to follow your news list. I’m not suggesting newspapers ask users to follow a list of a reader they don’t have a working relationship with (for obvious reasons). But if Etan Horowitz creates a list for the Orlando shootings, just ask people to follow his list.

Twitter accounts done wrong

Prior to media outlets actually listening to their followers, most ran RSS feeds for headlines. In the case of @thestate, short headlines mean more retweets. But tweets with context usually provide the user with more information than “two die in crash.”

One of the assumptions with @thestate is that we provide headlines from accross South Carolina. We don’t do that. We provide news from Columbia and the surrounding area, because that’s the news we produce.

Recently we started tweeting about traffic jams from the Columbia area. For our Greenville and Charleston followers, this amounted to nothing more than twitter spam because it means nothing to them.

The Greenville News includes an API on their account that automatically tweets about car accidents. What an awful idea. It alienates followers who send @ replies to Greenville asking them to stop the service. Because no one is manning the account, the rub continues and the users will stop paying attention.

Twitter accounts done right

In the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, The Austin-American Statesman created an account for updates specific to the shootings. What a brilliant idea. Instead of spamming users with updates, they used @FTHOODSHOOTINGS and asked people to follow that account. After seeing this in my tweetstream, I retweeted the request from @thestate’s account asking users to follow them. There was no need for us to tweet details of the shootings since it was outside of our coverage area.

That’s what’s so great about twitter: it’s fight or flight. It takes nothing to setup a temporary account, (other than an email address to get started) and once your event is over, you can phase out the account.

Where this is all heading: FILTERING

The theme here is the ability for users to filter the information most important to them. Does there need to be traffic accounts for Columbia, Irmo and Gilbert? No, because hashtags work just fine. Instead of media outlets always talking about twitter or going to twitter, they could spend time teaching users how to use twitter. Of course, that would mean employing someone who actually knows how to have use it as well. I am willing to bet at least one person in every organization knows how to use twitter, and more than likely that person is not a manager and has been with the company for less than five years.

Unfortunately, media outlets have neither the time nor the staff to constantly update an account for traffic incidents in any given area. Asking the public to help partly crowdsource this information would be a good idea.