Undercurrent

The BBC has bought its own container and is sending it around the world for a year as basis for reporting on globalisation and the world economy. It’s now full of whisky… So far it hasn’t left Britain/Ireland, though! Wish I could embed the map of the journey. (tip: Passport blog).

Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore have won a grant for their project to create tools for transparent journalism and better navigation on the web (the project will be open source). This is something to watch:

The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data – the “story behind the story” – to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.

There were other notable winners of the Knight News Challenge also:

• Using the Web to solicit funding from the public to pay for investigative journalism projects
• Creating software that allows a computer to become a digital radio transmitter, significantly reducing the cost of setting up community news stations in India
• Blogging to discuss the idea of interactive games where students measure and track their personal demand on natural resources.

The Freakonomics blog now have its own prediction market. The first question where you can join in with your predictive wisdom is this:

Which country will be first to announce its boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games: USA, Australia, England, Canada, France, Denmark, Taiwan, Other, or No Boycott?

At the time of writing, 40% think there will be no boycott.

The killings and atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo — why is it that news and even basic knowledge of this conflict, its reasons and history, do not even seem to exist to us? Despite such terrific work as that of photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale. See his new multimedia production presented by MediaStorm (click on the image above, released by MediaStorm for promotional use). The DRC is typically featured in the lists of most underreported humanitarian crises. So if we are interested, we can find out what has happened there. Recommended: the case study on the conflict in the Crimes of War book.

Someone is going to be cross because the new Climate Debate Daily site is placing “dissenting voices” and “calls to action” against climate change next to each other, but never mind, this is a great new resource from the man who brought us the still indispensable Arts & Letters Daily.