The Uncharted Backwaters of the Unfashionable

Quick Hits

As I mentioned, things have been happening at just about breakneck speed the past few months. Here are a few things that I think merit mention:

•  Springfield 911 0.8 is live on news-leader.com. It allows users some pretty cool access to our police calls database, but leaves a little to be desired. The next round of updates should include, at the very least, an address-radius event finder and associated RSS feed.
• I, too, got in on the love-in that is the Knight Challenge. I’ve never been one for having truly revolutionary ideas (see: this and this), but I did see a place where technology could greatly improve my news organization. In our multimedia office, we have file cabinet after file cabinet filled to the brim with old negatives. Tens of thousands of the things. They span from the 40s through the 90s, and chronicle the whole Ozarks region — every city, most streets, every event that came through. So how cool would it be to put that all online, archived and geotagged, allowing folks to zoom in to their very own street, their block, or even their house, and see how it’s changed over the years. When I was a kid, there was this mediocre bar and grill right in the heart of our century-old neighborhood. Everyone knew the food was, er, uninspired. But the place was always packed, in no small part because of the photos that dotted the walls — photos of our neighborhood as it grew up. Basically, I want to take that idea and open it up to everyone in our community; No need to buy droopy french fries, sir. Enjoy your stay.
• Finally, as of this week the wall between my role as Data Editor and my craving to report has come crashing down. I’m again going to be doing some regular old reporting, probably starting with Springfield’s interesting policy to charge for both staff time AND benefits. What’s going to be odd about this position is that there’s no associated beat — any stories are either going to have to come through reporters, or from data work. Yeah, anyone who has been down this road before should get in touch. Links will probably be appearing as the stories run.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 11:11 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.