With my project, I’m starting to collect content from the partner newsrooms, KBIA, KOMU and the Columbia Missourian. I’m hoping to partner with other newsrooms in the area as we try to document and assist the mid-Missouri area during this recession. I’m hoping to add site-based content as well: a database of contacts who can help people in economic crisis, original content that is based on a web-first presentation and hopefully a number of easy ways for people to communicate with each other on the site. I’m currently playing around with Google’s Friend Connect tools. It’s a VERY young site and it doesn’t have everything it needs at this point. But it’s starting to roll. I’d love some thoughts on how to take this site and make it into an online hub of information. My goal is to help the community and help newsrooms collaborate. It has a better feeling than what happens when you visit Smart Decision ’08. But both projects have the same goal: bring multiple newsrooms together to better inform and collaborate with the community. That’s why I keep doing everything I’m doing. I want to help journalists remain relevant while helping my community. It’s a great feeling. I’m planning to talk to a group of students (and anyone else who wants to watch) during a Society of Professional Journalists presentation tonight. I hope to talk about this project and brain storm with the crowd about what could really happen on this little space on the web.

I look at this on two levels: How can it work for me and how can it work for my news website.

For me, I love social networking. I love chatting, learning and sharing. It’s kind of obvious from my previous posts. But I think it’s so cool to be able to share and see different perspectives from people I trust. It’s the same idea as having a get together with your friends – but I know I’m not alone when I say many of my friends live across the country. We move around a lot! Not to mention, my job has given me the chance to meet really cool and smart people in all kinds of locations. Social networking lets me stay in touch in ways that writing a letter and sending it in the mail can’t do. And in a slightly self-centered way, it gives me a chance to know what my friends are doing after years of them reading my family blogs and never leaving comments! They know all about me but I don’t know a thing about their most recent updates.

On the professional side of things, I want my news product used by my market! So that’s why I tried an aggregated website sharing the news from KOMU.com, the local NPR newsroom and a local newspaper as a test. We’re aggregating all of our election-themed news and sharing it into the SmartDecision08.com website. This is a way to create a one-stop information hub on the election season in Missouri, specifically mid-Missouri. I don’t have enough funding to make it function as well as I would like it to function, but it is deep. There is so much information and it’s delivered in a way that can really let a news and political information consumer learn a lot. I want to find ways to help collect information and give people the change to socially learn and share on this kind of level. Take news and make it personal. That’s been my goal for years. It’s so cool to see how today’s technology is reaching the concepts I thought about a long time ago.

I am trying out a new site called blippr.com – it gives you a way to socially share the things that entertain you: books, movies, music and games. It’s a level of social networking I haven’t really participated in before. Facebook has all kinds of options that include those items, but blippr seems to have a very clean, concise and non-gimmicky way to accomplish sharing entertainment reviews. It connects to facebook and twitter and friend feed so the idea is to use it as an aggregator of sorts to collect and share your likes and dislikes within the products you already use. I think that’s where everything is headed. I just wish I could wrap my head around how we can use these kinds of tools and still help inform online consumers the news they want and possibly need to know to participate in the non-computer based world where they live. I would have something really cool if I had money and programmers who would put up with my constant brain dumps!

I’m deep inside many different social networking tools. I use them personally in order to see how useful they are for my job. If it’s useful for my day to day life, then there may be a great reason for my newsroom to share its information using those tools. A year ago I got into Twitter, but no one else in my circle got into it so I left. I jumped back in last fall and it’s really picked up steam. Now I’m trying to think of ways these short messages can be helpful for my job and I’ve enjoyed what I can talk about in my life. Fun products like Tweetstats can show off what I talk about the most (like kids, work, meetings, newsroom). I spend a lot of time playing with these tools and thinking big — on a personal and professional level. I blog on WordPress and Blogger, I tweet on Twitter, I post pictures on Flickr, I create “scrapbooks” on Scrapblog, I co-moderate a Yahoo group, I connect with people on LinkedIn and Facebook. I oversee a news website and an election website. I text, I surf the web from my phone. It’s a hell of a juggle and someday someone is going to find a way to merge all of these products and concepts that offer a connection into one cellphone based tool. I hope I’ll be able to join in and help with the creation of those tools. It wasn’t that long ago when my boss and I were talking about how he would love to see a small handheld video player — Oh you know, like a video iPod? I’m visioning the world’s most interactive iPhone where you can type, talk or post without any effort. That will be super cool. Who knows. Maybe’s Google’s Friend Connect will do that… When it goes live (and it’s rumored to launch today). This could have major implications on how to help a standard website (like komu.com) connect with its audience in a more social way. (The Washington Post explains)

That’s all I can say. Check this out: Google has created a new initiative called “Open Social.” I haven’t found a page on Google yet, but it’s all over the blogosphere. Even though the New York Times says it won’t happen, I really think that Google is planning to try and smoosh Facebook.

Here’s a summary. Google announced it’s going to share ways to let people openly share content in whatever way they can think of… And that code will be open for all to use. That’s not the case with Facebook. When you create a Facebook application, it’s for FB only. As I’ve said before. I’m a geek for information sharing in whatever form you can find. I can’t wait to see how this works.

I love, love, love to see how major newsrooms are taking advantage of technology.

First, using the simplicity of building maps using Google Maps, the LA Times came up with this one. Also, this looks like one of the first major opportunities for MSNBC to use its FirstPerson project. It’s a pretty slick little set up that gets online users involved in sharing their personal pictures, video and first-hand account. I’m hoping to help the newsrooms affiliated with the Missouri School of Journalism to improve this kind of interactivity through a multi-newsroom election project. I’ll brain dump on that soon… But not while I’m at work. I’ll need more time to focus my thoughts.