Hyperlocal Media

The hyperlocal media movement is really important lever for instructional technologists. This movement makes the local community the source of content for media coverage. Teachers naturally are content creators, but they have terrible tools to use at their skill level. Hyperlocal media enablers, Rob Curley and Adrian Holovaty, have found value in what local community actually value, their towns, their teams and their kids. They worked together at Lawrence Journal-World. Does education not share these values?

I first read about Rob Curley in a Fast Company article. This is where I first heard of this idea of hyper-local. (Notice how I've since dropped the hyphen, a sign of shared meaning). I tried to learn a little more about him, but he seems to be a hired gun moving from one media outlet to another. Currently he is at Newsweek Interactive. I thought that was the end of that.

But today, I picked up on a thread about Adrian Holovaty, a colleague of Curley. In American Journalism Review and Corante, they portray him as a mashup of computer programming and journalism. Holovaty created Django, a Python-based web framework. In the family of rapid application development frameworks as the more famous Ruby on Rails. These frameworks cut to the chase and help developments build out user requirements in the order of days not weeks or months. I read the overview of Django, and really wanted to learn it. However, I don't have a project right now that would be a good learning opportunity. I'm learning to use the ModX content management system. But I digress. Holovaty is right, rapid development tools turn creative ideas of all participants into something that is journalism.

These rapid development, web frameworks are not going away. They represent a sea change in how developers/programmers are becoming vital team members to any project, be that media, education, politics, scientific. This connects me back to an episode I heard on the .Net Rocks podcast about the SubSonic ASP.NET-based web framework, created by Rob Conery. Instead of Django or Rails, the next time I get the chance I'd like to try SubSonic. I already understand ASP.NET, so I can focus on learning how web frameworks work.

Allow me to jump back to Corante for a second. As I follow threads on blogs and articles most mornings, I often like to look at the home page of the site. Is the article I'm reading representative of a larger body of work that I'd be interested in? Or is the article an anomaly that just happened to align with my interests? Corante seems to be a network of writers, and not exactly a good fit for daily reading. I managed to click through this network into the Business Information Factory. I immediately wanted to read and watch most everything they had. Maybe tomorrow, I have to stop blogging at some point today.

I thought Bruce Nussbaum's article might be a separate post today, but I think I can wrap it into this one. The RSS feed mentioned "shifting from experience to identity." I just had a thought about identity last night. Teaching a course on developing a graduate student portfolio, I rambled on to a student about how a goal statement should represent the development of identity as an instructional designer. (This will be a separate post in my portfolio). But then Bruce talks about C.K. Pralahad's term, co-creation. People need to build their identity with products, tools and services. The more those products, et al., allow them to build their own identity rather than conform to the brand's identity, the more value gets created. Co-creation of identity is the engine of hyperlocal media?

This is the last one I swear. Who'd have thought an article on ESPN would apply here too? Jayson Stark tells the story of how the Colorado Rockies video training guys started using iPods to deliver video on hitters and pitchers. Now players are studying on the plane, in the restaurant, before the game, during the game, after the game. These guys travel all of the time, portable video players totally change the rules of the game. In fact, at the end of the article they allude to the fact that a rule about iPods may become necessary. More importantly for me, these guys are studying more time in the day, time in places that would otherwise be lost to them. Tying it back up, baseball clubs have been creating hyperlocal media for a long time, baseball at-bats. With this better platform, an explosion happens over night. Learning and performance increase nonlinearly.

2/11/07 Update: Businessweek's article on GateHouse Media buying up more than 400 local newspapers.

Ones to Watch

The Etech conference is being held March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego. Though I can't go, I wanted to know a little more about what I'm missing. Looking through the Speaker's list, two programs caught my eye.

How to Innovate on Time by Scott Berkun (his blog). This talk sounds like an elaboration on what PaylPal founder, Max Levchin, said on NerdTV. "I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution." This idea that execution, implementation, and delivery are what success is about in the field of innovation seems to be a more shared view. I noted in a previous post on the Cox Review, which distinguished between creatively generating new ideas and using innovation process to exploit it's potential into real products and services.

Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks by Marc Hedlund. This kind of training is necessary not only for programmers, but for all new media participants who are creating rich content. Also, in the session blurb he mentions intrapreneuring. This is what I do at George Mason. I don't have any contacts outside of the university. I just bounce between departments seeking to collaborate on different projects. I think this is a synergistic way of developing the next generation of doctoral students. They learn to work in a collaborative fashion, while professors get access to new technology skills and ideas.

When I went to his company's blog, Wheaties for your Wallet, to find out more about him, I noticed that he was attending SXSW. This seemed strange to me because I thought this was a music festival. Boy was I wrong.

The South by Southwest Interactive is kinda of a mashup of an O'Reilly conference and Sundance and Bonnaroo. Or at least that's what it seems like on first glance. Especially on the new media side, it might be a great place to interact with new people. Seems very cool and I plan to go sometime soon.

Breakthrough Ideas for 2007

In the February 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review, you can access the free article Breakthrough Ideas for 2007. One of the twenty authors, Eric von Hippel, discusses how User-Centered Innovation needs to be a national priority. Seems to be a trend today, the Cox Review shares this theme.

Also Clay Shirky discusses the nature of open-source projects and their ability to out-succeed and out-fail traditional projects. Failure leads to growth and learning, why can't schools and the education community understand this?

Davos--12 Power Shifts That Are Changing The World

Bruce Nussbaum reporting from the Davos conference on power shifts in four categories: geopolitics, economics, technology/society and business. Two in particular seem relevant to me in terms of learning and education: "Rise of The New Individual, empowered by networks" and "Shift to collective intelligence from individual intelligence and aggregators of information".

If individuals can become empowered by networks, it would seem to me that people have to learn how to do this and live this way. I know from my own experience, it took me quite some time to learn how to be effective with ubiquitous networking power. Even now I don't take full advantage, and I'm on the leading edge. What about everyone else, how or will they learn this? Kids are easy, this is the only world they have ever known. Adults have to unlearn before they can learn, and that's hard. If they don't then they lose out to those who can adapt. Technology learning establishes a selection force.

Technology Management Speaker Series: Robert Kahn

I just rsvp'd for this event on February 9, 2007 hosted by the GMU School of Management.

In the mid-70’s technology pioneers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed the common computer language that gave birth to the Internet. Today, as chairman, CEO and president of the Corporation for Research Initiatives, Kahn continues to nurture the development of the medium he helped create. Join us as he shares his insights on the future of network-based technologies.