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How we built News Mixer, part 2: the trouble with Facebook Connect
This post is second in a three-part series on News Mixer — the final project of my masters program for hacker-journalists at the Medill School of Journalism. It’s adapted (more or less verbatim) from...
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How we built News Mixer, part 3: our agile process
This post is last in a three-part series on News Mixer — the final project of my masters program for hacker-journalists at the Medill School of Journalism. It’s adapted (more or less verbatim) from my...
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From concept to sketch to software: Building a new way to visualize votes…...
Ryan Mark and I built enviroVOTE to help people visualize the environmental impact of the 2008 elections. We designed it in two evenings and made it real in a three-and-a-half-day long bender of data...
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Three reasons the new Tribune tabloid should be free, a twitter serial...
The Tribune announced this week that they will begin printing the fat Chicago daily as a tabloid! Huzzah! The Tribune’s move, replacing its broadsheet edition with the tabloid version at the retail...
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News Mixer roundup: links and thoughts on what comes next
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about News Mixer, and since then the intertubes seem to have taken a liking to our little project. I’m delighted that our code might live on in other projects. Steal...
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ChangeTracker: Tracking changes at White House web sites so you don’t have to
ChangeTracker is a little tool that updates an RSS feed, emails, and tweets when pages change at whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov. It’s also the first project of my internship at...
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Feeds, tweets and APIs are the beginning. Will news orgs step up to augment...
In her TED talk, Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech, Pattie Maes demos a system that creates interactive visual layers over the real world. The actual implementation, a tiny...
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Battlestar Galactica panel at the U.N. — Liveblogging tonight!
BSG is coming to the United Nations, and I’ll be there. Woot! From the Chicago Tribune: On March 17, there will be a “Battlestar” retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the...
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Code in the public interest, make your mother proud
There’s too much data, and too few hackers. The city dropped 10 years of incredibly detailed crime information a few weeks ago, and we’ve barely touched it. The state of Illinois just released an...
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I’ve got a new gig. Plus: We’re hiring!
Will write more about this soon, but yeah, I’ve got a new gig. Read about it at Poynter and Nieman Lab. And we’re looking for a few good hackers. Please spread the word, and email...
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Why I work in a newsroom
Six years ago, I googled “journalism”. I was a software architect, working on enterprise systems that optimized global email systems, simplified the lives of hedge fund managers, and made marketing...
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If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work
I gave this talk at Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires in August. It’s been edited slightly for readability but I’ve left my notes for breathing and emphasis, and the bits of Spanish, intact. It just seems...
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“What is your mission?”
I get asked that a lot. And it’s a good question. Why does the visuals team exist? What’s the point? I’ve interviewed dozens of job candidates in the last month and it’s given me time to think a lot...
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New blog: How To Be Happy
How To Be Happy is a little project I’ve been working on for the last year or so. It’s a collection of ideas I’ve (mostly) borrowed from folks who lead teams of software makers. I’m geeked to finally...
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