The Bangladesh River Journey, a BBC World Service project to track climate change, for which we built the interactive mini-site, has recently received two prestigious awards. These awards recognise the innovative way that the project brought social media reporting on important global issues into an engaging user-experience.

Webby Honoree

The Webby Awards are like the Oscars for the Web. From nearly 10,000 entries, the Bangladesh River Journey was declared a Webby Honoree, “in recognition of outstanding work”.

Sony Radio Academy Awards

At the Sony Radio Academy Awards (”the Oscars for Radio”), the Bangladesh Boat Project won the Multiplatform Radio Award. That’s a photo of the award at the top of this post.

The awards body said:

This is a project that from the very outset was designed to make the most of the multiplatform landscape. It embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr.

This is [...] about creativity and using the plethora of multimedia options now available to generate something unique and uniquely valuable. This is absolutely the paradigm for an interactive radio project in the current landscape and is by far the deserved winner.

These awards are testament to the bold, creative approach of the World Service and the well-knit collaboration within their team. It was a really exciting project to be involved with.

I have recently had a technical article about Location-Based Publishing and Services published at Dev.Opera. It’s all about the rising use of geographical coordinates in association with media on the Web, and how to get involved.

For the benefit of the Dharmafly archives, I’ve copied the article below.

Introduction

Geocoded content is transforming our Web. By adding geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) to our media, we can help others find it through location-based search engines and web maps.

The tools for publishing geocoded media are more accessible and widespread than they’ve ever been, and we are finding all sorts of ways to put our content on the Map. Figure 1 shows a typical example.

Figure 1: A web map (Google Earth), displaying user-generated content.

There’s no limit to the variety of geo content. It could be anything: a listing of houses for sale in a neighbourhood, photos taken while travelling or a stream of local news stories.

A wave of geo innovation is under way and it has the potential to connect local populations and to communicate news and ideas from every corner of the planet. If the World Wide Web has lured people away from their own neighbourhoods, then geo is the technology that will bring it back.

In this article, we’ll look at ways that you can geocode your content, using data formats such as the location nanoformat, GPX and combinations of geocoded microformats in HTML.

Where Am I?

Ever since the first cave paintings of stellar constellations, and the first attempt to condense the geographical knowledge of an entire empire on to a had a thirst to plot the location of just about everything that we know exists.

Figure 2: Ptolemy’s world map.

We’ve used the Map to find ourselves and to see where we’re going. It is both a mirror and a lens, giving feedback on the world and helping us plan our next move. It has been a catalyst for our pursuits, as we’ve hunted trade routes and treasures, and followed pathways into mind-expanding new vistas and cultures…

A Place For Everything

On the Web, we tend to navigate by subject, using keywords and tags (e.g. “world music”). The rise of blogging gave us new possibilities for navigating via time (e.g. “most recent” posts and comments), and social networking now lets us explore the context of social relationship (e.g. posts and recommendations by “contacts”, “friends” and “followers”). But into the melting pot comes another axis of meaning: location.

“Where is it?”, “where will it be?”, “where are you now?”, “what is nearby?” Given the option, you’ll find that searching for content by location can be every bit as useful as the subject, timing or person who published it.

Let’s say you get fired up by astronomy… You could explore other astronomers’ photos on a world map, showing the places where the photos were taken, as seen in Figure 3:

Figure 3: The astronomy world map on Flickr.

You could even stay up to date with new photos by subscribing to the geocoded feed, to be read in a feed reader or plotted inside a mapping application (e.g. Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, GPS unit - either a standalone handset like the one in Figure 4, or a GPS phone, camera or other integrated device.

Figure 4: A GPS handset.

You can use these devices to record a log of your movements over time and to note any places of interest (’waypoints‘). These locations can be transmitted live to another device via Bluetooth, streamed directly into the Web or transferred to a personal computer.

An increasing number of grassroots projects, such as Open Street Map and Free The Postcode, harness the global community of GPS users and challenge the traditionally top-down approach of compiling map data.

Instead of GPS, you might use a mobile application or service such as Zone Tag to determine your position from the mobile phone masts nearby. Or you might use a web map to find a place, search by postal address, or use a number of other methods.

Most often, you will need these coordinates in decimal form. This can be converted from the traditional degrees, minutes and seconds representation of coordinates.

Let us now look at some of the developing geo web standards, which allow us to weave location into our content. Imagine that you’re at The West Pier of Brighton, UK:

Figure 5: The West Pier of Brighton.

The latitude is 50.818967 and the longitude is -0.151934 (map).

HTML Meta Tags: The Old School Way

In the days before the World Wide Web, Usenet users could broadcast their location by including their “ICBM address” in the signature of their messages. This allowed the network of users to be geographically mapped.

This practice was carried over to the Web, where a web page could be geocoded by adding “ICBM” and/or “geo.position” meta tags to the document head (a geo tag generator helps to simplify the process):

<head>
   <meta name="DC.title" content="The West Pier" />
   <meta name="ICBM" content="50.818967, -0.151934" />
   <meta name="geo.position" content="50.818967;-0.151934" />
</head>

Services such as GeoUrl can be used to find such a geocoded site. For example, websites near the West Pier (or see the feed visualised in Google Maps):

Figure 6: The GeoURL service allows you to find the location of URLs.

Photos and their EXIF Data

As a geo-photographer, you can use a tool such as GPicSync, RoboGeo or GPSTagr to synchronise your photos with your GPS handset’s log. Alternatively, you might use a GPS camera, or a specialist GPS unit (see Figure 7) that can directly geocode the image files on your camera’s memory card:

Figure 7: A GPS unit for geocoding image files on a memory card.

This geo information is added to the photos’ EXIF data, which stores such details as the time each photo was taken, shutter speed, etc. Alternatively, you could upload photos to a photo-sharing website and drag each photo on to a map (e.g. on Flickr, Panoramio or Locr).

GPX

GPS devices store data in a number of different formats. However, when they communicate with other devices and applications, they often use an XML language called GPX:

<gpx>
   <wpt lat="50.818967" lon="-0.151934">
      <name>The West Pier</name>
      <time>2008-03-20T13:57Z</time>
   </wpt>
</gpx>

In this simplified example, the <wpt> element describes a ‘waypoint’ - a manually logged point of interest. The language can describe a number of other useful features and can be interchanged with other formats using tools like GPSVisualizer and GPSBabel.

Geotagging

Whenever a post can be “tagged” (such as on a blog, or a media-sharing website), it can also be “geotagged” with the location coordinates:

geo:lat50.818967
geo:lon-0.151934
geotagged

The first tag gives the latitude, the second the longitude and we’ve added a third tag, “geotagged”, so that the post can be easily found in a search for geotagged media (see Figure 8):

Figure 8: A search for blog posts with a “geotagged” tag on Technorati.

Some video-sharing sites, such as Viddler and Motionbox, allow tagging of the video timeline. This enables individual segments of video to be geotagged.

Microblogging with the Location Nanoformat

Surely the simplest of all publications is the humble txt msg

You can geocode your status updates (on, say, Twitter or Jaiku) by simply adding L: (upper-case) or l: (lower-case), along with your coordinates to the end of the message:

This place is beautiful. l:50.818967, -0.151934

‘Nanoformats‘ are a growing collection of highly simplified, standardised ways to add semantic meaning to short bursts of content, such as text messages. Some early applications that use the location nanoformat are Twittervision (Figure 9) and Twitterwhere, which let you track Twitter users and their messages on a world map:

Figure 9: Twittervision.

The BBC World Service’s Bangladesh River Journey (see Figure 10) used geocoded Twitter messages to synchronise the location of a stream of different media publications:

Figure 10: The BBC Bangladesh River Journey mashup.

Some applications also recognise place names:

This place is beautiful. l:The West Pier, Brighton, UK

They achieve this by looking up the place name and retrieving coordinates from a database such as the Geonames web service, another community mapping project.

geo Microformat for HTML

We can mark up locations in HTML with the geo microformat:

This place is beautiful.

<span class="geo">
   <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>
   <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
</span>

Note that, in this example, we could have used any HTML element instead of <span>, if that would have made better sense in context. In most cases, microformats do not require specific element types - rather, it is the class attributes of the elements that matter.

Just like any other HTML content, you can then go on to use a CSS stylesheet to highlight or embellish these geo elements, or perhaps hide them from view, and JavaScript on the page could be used to interact with the geo elements. In addition, browser extensions such as Operator or Minimap offer a number of actions for each location:

Figure 11: The Minimap Firefox extension.

The geo data on the page could also be parsed and converted by an external parser and visualised on another website.

geo Microformat Shortcut

A simple way to add machine-readable coordinates to HTML, without cluttering up the page for human readers, is to use a proposed shortcut for the geo microformat that utilises the <abbr> element design pattern:

<abbr class="geo" title="50.818967;-0.151934">
   The West Pier, Brighton, UK
</abbr>

A software program could read this snippet and determine that the text “The West Pier, Brighton, UK” more specifically refers to the location at latitude 50.818967, longitude -0.151934.

geo + adr Microformat

One of the most useful properties of microformats is that they can be grouped and nested within each other, to form compound microformats.

We could, for example, have placed the geo microformat inside an adr (address) microformat, to indicate that these are coordinates for a particular postal address or place name:

This place is beautiful.

<span class="adr">
   <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
   <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
   <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>

   (<span class="geo">
      <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
      <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
   </span>)
</span>

This produces the following output:

This place is beautiful. The West Pier, Brighton, UK (50.818967, -0.151934)

The commas and brackets in this example are for human readability (most important!) and have no effect on the machine-readable microformat.

Using the <abbr> design pattern, our geo + adr microformat might instead look like this:

This place is beautiful.

<abbr class="geo" title="50.818967;-0.151934">
   <span class="adr">
      <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
      <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
      <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>
   </span>
</abbr>

geo + hCard

Geo can also be used (with or without the postal address) within an hCard microformat, to mark up contact details for a person or organisation:

<div class="vcard">
   <span class="fn">John Smith</span>

   <span class="adr">
      <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
      <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
      <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>

      (<span class="geo">
         <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
         <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
      </span>)
   </span>
</div>

geo + hAtom Microformat

Another proposed, but as yet not finalised, use of the geo microformat is within the hAtom microformat.

hAtom is a way to build HTML with the same semantic structure as an Atom or RSS feed. An hAtom entry includes descriptive information about the post, such as its title, author and time of publication. This transforms a website into something akin to a massive Atom or RSS feed. New content can be picked up by feed readers directly from the HTML and, assuming the website keeps a logical URL structure, its entire archive of posts becomes automatically available as a web service API, with no back-end scripting required.

When you add geo to hAtom, it is analogous to moulding standard RSS into GeoRSS - that is, a geo-coded RSS or Atom feed:

<div class="hentry">
   <h3 class="entry-title">The West Pier</h3>
   <p class="entry-content">This place is beautiful.</p>

   <address class="vcard author">
      <span class="fn">Premasagar</span>
   </address>

   <a rel="bookmark" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/33333/">
      <abbr class="updated" title="2008-03-20T13:57Z">3 hours ago</abbr>
   </a>

   (<span class="geo">
      <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
      <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
   </span>)
</div>

GeoRSS is used as the standard mechanism for exchanging geocoded publications on the Web (and KML is fast becoming the most common way to visualise it). By marking up your websites in geo + hAtom, you align your content with that transport mechanism, giving it the potential for more widespread distribution.

hCalendar + geo Microformat

Geo can be used within the hCalendar microformat to provide the location of an event - both historical and upcoming events. Even fleeting, passing thoughts (or ‘tweets’) can be represented, like so:

<div class="vevent">
   <h3 class="summary">The West Pier</h3>

   <p class="description">This place is beautiful.</p>

   <a class="url" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/33333/">
      <abbr class="dtstart" title="2008-03-20T13:57Z">3 hours ago</abbr>
   </a>

   <p class="location">
      <span class="adr">
         <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
         <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
         <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>

         (<span class="geo">
            <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
            <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
         </span>)
      </span>
   </p>
</div>

The dtstart class in hCalendar is for the date-time of the start of the event. This is written according to the ‘datetime design pattern‘, which is common to all microformats that describe time.

hCalendar + geo + hAtom Microformat

For some uses, geocoded hAtom and hCalendar microformats can be combined within the same block of HTML. For example, an event (hCalendar) might be posted as a feed entry (hAtom). Or a feed entry (hAtom) might describe a passing moment (hCalendar):

<div class="vevent hentry">
   <h2 class="summary entry-title">The West Pier</h2>
   <p class="description entry-content">This place is beautiful.</p>

   <address class="vcard author">
      <span class="fn">Premasagar</span>
   </address>

   <a class="url" rel="bookmark" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/33333/">
      <abbr class="dtstart updated" title="2008-03-20T13:57Z">3 hours ago</abbr>
   </a>

   <p class="location">
      <span class="adr">
         <span class="extended-address">The West Pier</span>,
         <span class="locality">Brighton</span>,
         <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>
      </span>

      (<span class="geo">
         <span class="latitude">50.818967</span>,
         <span class="longitude">-0.151934</span>
      </span>)
   </p>
</div>

Where Next for Geo HTML?

As you’ve seen, there are a number of different types of content that can be enhanced with the geo microformat. However, at present, the microformat can only describe solitary, one-dimensional points. Formats such as GeoRSS, KML and GML, on the other hand, can also handle altitude, lines, areas and volumes. This is useful for describing streets, paths, boundaries, city and country territories, 3D buildings and natural features.

It remains to be seen whether such sophistication will make it into an HTML standard, or whether we will use HTML to embed external geo objects. These objects could be coded in a more specialised language, just as we currently embed JavaScript files and CSS stylesheets. Such discussions are well under way.

The Future of Geo

In this article, we’ve explored some of the newest developments in geocoded content. Whilst mapping itself is an ancient pursuit, we are beginning to see the promise of a new kind of cartography. When we reach a critical mass of geo content and a wider distribution of geo applications and hardware, we can expect to see a very different Web than the one we know today.

Figure 12: Google Earth, showing a 3D Empire State Building with Wikipedia content.

We are starting to see geo-awareness being built into everyday devices - including phones, computers and cameras. In the same way that clocks are now used to time-stamp the messages we send and the pictures we take, we may in future take it for granted that they geo-stamp our data too.

It may also become common practice to update a web service, such as Fire Eagle (Figure 13), with one’s current location - a practice that we might call “geoscrobbling”:

Figure 13: Yahoo Fire Eagle.

The record of a person’s position over time could be used to place anything that they publish onto a Map, or could be streamed to their friends, or to web services that have permission to access it. And yes, you can also expect a flurry of discussions on geo privacy and security.

Perhaps future camcorders will track their position as they record - quite literally, filming on location. Could something like Yahoo Live + Fire Eagle be the future of mobile video?

Summary

Geo is the most physical of all web technologies. It offers us a chance to reconnect with our local communities and to discover those around us. And as the world grows closer, we will start to see ourselves on each other’s maps. So, watch this space… (and that space… and that one)…

Social Innovation Camp was a rollercoaster! From the very first evening, when the delegates gathered at the Young Foundation in London, there was a perceptible buzz in the air…

The crowd was a heady mixture of web developers, designers, entrepreneurs and people with all sorts of skills. Although coming from different angles, everyone seemed to have a driven passion for using the web to help solve the problems of society.

The Projects

Six projects had been chosen for the weekend, from over 70 submitted ideas (one of which was my dream for “Social Compost)”:

• Barcode Wikipedia - community-driven database of product information
• Enabled by Design - product advice and support for disabilities
• On The Up - personal development tracking for youth
• Rate Your Prison - accountability for prison visiting conditions
• Rate My CV - support for marginalised workers
• Stuff Share - community network for sharing possessions

Stuff Share

I was working in the Stuff Share team. Our goal was to create a website to facilitate the sharing of possessions - tents, books, power drills, baby gear and all those other bits and pieces we accumulate but hardly ever use - in order to reduce consumerism and increase community. The idea was that pre-existing trusted groups, such as one’s workplace, neighbourhood, hobby group or children’s school, could become a hub for sharing.

We identified a number of hurdles that we’d need to overcome in order to create a successful site - such as how to support trusted relationships between users and how to get people starting to share as easily as possible. The strict time limit dictated that we decide which set of problems to tackle for the first release - and then the build was on…

The Climax

We worked hard until 2pm Sunday, when each group had to give a presentation of their project. A panel of judges then awarded prizes of £2000 and £1000 to help take the most impressive projects forward.

Here is Tom and Seth’s presentation of the Stuff Share project:

(video permalink)

The Prizes

Alas, Stuff Share wasn’t a prizewinner, but big congratulations to Enabled By Design, who came first, and Rate Your Prison, who were runners-up.

Work is continuing on Stuff Share and is hoped to be launched at stuffshare.com some time in the near future…

URL: goomusic.net

Goo Music are a vibrant, young band management company in London. They manage The Subways, a high-energy band who are currently putting together the final touches to their second album and are about to launch a world tour.

We’ve created a distinctive website for the business, in the style of a one-page fanzine that keeps itself up-to-date with feeds from the Twitter and MySpace profiles of both Goo Music and The Subways.

Photographic

The site design uses a layering of photographic images:

• a pavement from Lancaster
• an old plectrum
• a penny
• a guitar cable, and
• a stapled stack of papers (actually it’s part of a manual for LSL, the scripting language used in Second Life)

We now have browsers that can handle part-transparency in images (since Internet Explorer 6 finally left the scene). So, it has become possible to sculpt this kind of photographic layering into a website, bringing the viewer into a richer visual environment. It can be more laborious to create such a design than with standard techniques, but the results can be impressive.

Semantic

Although we have gone for a highly visual design, we have also given full consideration to accessibility and the usage patterns of different users. For example, the design adapts well to different text sizes in the browser and it is built on a backbone of semantic HTML, for the benefit of screen readers, search engines and the best of the Semantic Web.

The site is constructed from HTML microformats (specifically, hAtom, hCard and xFolk). These are small building blocks of information that can be read by both humans and computers.

We’ve used microformats to build the site’s blog posts, contact information and links, where they allow people to interact with the information in useful ways. For some ideas about how to interact with microformats, see the Bangladesh River Journey post.

Full RSS Feeds from MySpace

To bring in content from MySpace, we had to be a bit sneaky. MySpace, for all its wisdom, doesn’t provide full RSS feeds. For example, the feed for The Subways’ blog shows just the first couple of sentences of each post.

We first tried using the Dapper service, which lets you convert HTML on any website into RSS feeds and more. However, as you’ll see from the Dapper feed we created, and its resultant RSS feed, Dapper doesn’t quite have the sophistication yet to deal with MySpace. So, we took advantage of Scott Reynen’s MySpace Feed Creator web service to create a full RSS feed, which we then convert back into HTML on the Goo Music website.

Road Crew

Full kudos to Aidann for his rough and ready design, Pete for forging the CSS styling and Kaanchan for the back-end piping of feeds. Rock on…

I’ve submitted “Social Compost” as a project proposal to Social Innovation Camp.

SI Camp is a grassroots conference, where social entrepreneurs and web developers get together to help each other out. A number of great ideas have been submitted, a few of which will be selected for the event. My idea is to connect local people who produce kitchen scraps with those who produce compost.

I’ve moved home twice in the last 6 months, and both times to a top floor flat with no garden. We get a weekly delivery of fruit and veg (from Pulse) and quickly turn it into a whole heap of peelings. How could we just throw that juicy waste away… to slowly fester in a plastic bag on some landfill site?

And so, we have scoured both of these new neighbourhoods, looking for someone with a compost bin to take our scraps (thank you Toni, Jon and Anna). There must be a better way….

From the Social Compost proposal:

‘Social Compost’ would be a drop-dead simple website, based around an interactive map. There would be an option to add yourself to the map and to offer either kitchen peelings or mature compost. You could use the map to find others who are offering either peelings or compost.

Have you ever been in a situation like mine? What did you do? And how might such a website help you?

We were happy to have attended Tuesday’s launch of UnLtdWorld, a social networking site for social entrepreneurs.

UnLtdWorld brings together people and businesses who make a difference in the world and connects them with potential co-workers and supporters. It aims to be a hot-bed for collaboration, the sharing of services and the pooling of resources.

At the core of the UnLtdWorld site is the social networking software Elgg - an open source platform that attempts to remain flexible and unassuming within the differing needs of social networking projects.

There is also an initiative to build a comprehensive API into the UnLtdWorld data, which will allow third-party developers to access information about social entrepreneurs and their services. This data could be combined with other kinds of data, for example, to marry the needs of a local community with UnLtdWorld members that may be able to assist.

You can find me, Madhava and Dharmafly on the UnLtdWorld site. Come and say hi…

This weekend was SemanticCampLondon (alt) - a grassroots conference of semantic web developers.

Semantics is all about meaning - and the idea of the “semantic web” is to use techniques that add greater and greater meaning to web content. The intention is for computers - as well as humans - to “understand” something of the content, allowing them to make associations with related content and to present options to the web user based on those associations.

When web developers agree about standard ways to add semantic meaning to content, then some pretty amazing things become possible.

Tom Morris and Daniel Lewis did an excellent job of pulling the event together. It seemed to me that they acted as a bridge between developers who approach the Semantic Web from quite different angles. There was a spectrum of perspectives and some tangible synergy taking place…

Niche TV

On a whim, I started using Yahoo Live to stream live video of the conference from my webcam. The service launched last week and is so easy to use - just plug in the webcam and “Go Live”.

It was pretty effective. There were viewers from different parts of the world tuning in, asking questions and educating each other on the fine points of the technologies being presented. In this way, something of the event spread beyond the confines of London. I will try to encourage a handful of people to stream video from next month’s BarCampBrighton…

Compound Microformats

For my session, I put together an interactive demo of Compound Microformats - a way of combining simple building blocks of HTML, so that their combined semantic meaning becomes greater than the sum of their parts:

(Image from Microformats wiki)

We talked about people innovating on new patterns for combining microformats. We also discussed whether software that understand microformats should consider the configuration of compounds, to glean something more of the semantic meaning intended by the coder.

Goodwill and loveliness to all our friends, colleagues, clients and peers.
It’s been a truly transformational year. Can’t wait to see what 2008 has in store…

Well, this one didn’t get blogged yet… Back in June, we stayed up all night at the BBC / Yahoo Hack Day in London. The task was to combine data sources and build something experimental - and a little bit edgy.

We forged a script to enhance mainstream news sites (such as BBC News) with a layer of grassroots community content - from bloggers, photographers, and the like. The idea was to propagate the news and views from the streets, alongside mainstream media. The result: ‘HackHUD‘.

It’s a Greasemonkey userscript and it uses a number of Yahooey things (Pipes, YUI and Term Extraction), to display content from Flickr, Technorati and Newsvine.

We were clackety-clack on the keyboard, non-stop for over 24 hours. There were tears and laughter… and in the end, a prize.

» The HackHUD Project
» Install the script (quickly, before the BBC redesign their site ;)

Changelog

• 0.16 - Public release.
• 0.17 - Problem with Flickr photos fixed.
• 0.181 - Wikipedia and Twitter options added.

I am afraid it is no exaggeration to say that what we saw was a hellish scene. [source]

It has been a sobering experience to see reports of the Bangladesh cyclone - and to watch them flow through the Bangladesh River Journey site we built for BBC World Service. The project’s original aim was to expose the very real presence of climate change in Bangladesh - a low-lying land of myriad rivers - and the cyclone’s arrival seemed shockingly symbolic.

While news of the cyclone competed for airtime in the general media, the World Service maintained a stream of often very personal and touching accounts from the Bangladeshi people. Their Flickr photos and Twitter texts acted as informal media channels, adding an extra dimension to the more formal reporting on the World Service website and radio.

Social Media News

This year, the World Service are celebrating 75 years of global media broadcasting. They, and the BBC in general, are about to launch a major website redesign and there is a conscious effort to embrace new media techniques, such as microformats, APIs, social networking and open content.

What is the future for news reporting through social media? Is there greater or less authenticity in such reporting? Share your thoughts below…

Further Reading

• Technologies in the Bangladesh River Journey site
• Cyclone Sidr group on Facebook
• Oxfam cyclone group on Facebook
• United Bangladesh Appeal for cyclone donations
• ‘Uncultured Project’ visit to the disaster area
• Rezwan advises on helping victims
• East-west perspectives on climate change
• Helping cyclone victims from overseas