The outfit got a big boost this week thanks to a $1 million donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will be used to expand its growing video library and to make it easier for video browsers to find everything from Jon Stewart to Walter Cronkite.

Right now, the Internet Archive has more than 400,000 news clips dating from 2009 that it offers as a research tool to scholars, journalists and the general public. Users can search them using closed captioning tags and other metadata the Archive has assembled.

“You can discover culture that’s languishing unseen and unheard,” Roger Macdonald, Internet Archive television news project director, told me by telephone.

He explained that the Internet Archive, which last year began using BitTorrent as a distribution system, had been recording the broadcasts for years — “we ingest, index and make available,” in Macdonald’s words.

The new money will help the nonprofit afford the petabyte’s worth of broadcast data it collects every year, and stores on servers located at its office, a converted Christian Science church in San Francisco’s Richmond district. Macdonald said the Internet Archive will also hire people to improve what is for now a fairly rudimentary user interface.

There is also the question of how the Internet Archive will be able to obtain older TV footage — think Dan Rather, Howard Cosell, I Love Lucy and so on. For now, the television networks jealously guard their copyright and make such content available in very limited ways; for instance, users can watch old shows from NBC, ABC and CBS at New York’s Paley Center for Media — but cannot do so online.

Macdonald said the Internet Archive, which lets users watch 30 second clips or rent DVDs, is in talks with the networks about gaining access to their content in the capacity of a digital librarian.

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The company received a $335,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in June 2012 to improve communities by making better use of data collected on mobile phones. At the time, the startup explained its goals and what it would do with that funding:

“Behavio wants to open access to, and help make sense of, the data routinely collected by mobile phones. Their open source Android platform turns phones into smart sensors of people’s real world behaviors and surroundings: how people use their phones, how they communicate with others, and environmental factors like sound, light and motion. As a result, Behavio can understand trends and behavior changes in individuals as well as entire communities, and help them understand and make use of this information.”

The startup’s CEO and co-founder Nadav Aharony was formerly with MIT Media Lab and then a product manager for Android from 2011 to 2012 before he left to start Behav.io in the summer of 2012.

The company noted the change on its website, explaining that it would be shutting down the closed alpha version of its product but maintaining the full open source project:

“We are very excited to announce that the Behavio team is now a part of Google! At Behavio, we have always been passionate about helping people better understand the world around them. We believe that our digital experiences should be better connected with the way we experience the world, and we couldn’t be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment but I’ll update this post if they do.

Update at 11:40 AM: Google confirmed the Behav.io team would be joining the company but politely objected to the term “acquisition,” since the product is being shut down.

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The broadcaster’s former partnership with Microsoft acquired EveryBlock in 2009 for what sources said at the time was “several million dollars” — two years after it was founded by developer/journalist Adrian Holovaty with a $1-million grant from the Knight Foundation, one of the first winners of the now-annual Knight News Challenge (the original code for the project remains open source, as required by the terms of the grant).

Everyblock closed down. That's nuts. They may not have found exactly the right product, but it's clearly the future: everyblock.com

—
Tom Coates (@tomcoates) February 07, 2013

NBC chief digital officer Vivian Schiller told the Poynter Institute that the project was a “wonderful scrappy business,” but didn’t make sense as part of the company’s growth strategy. In a memo to staff, she said EveryBlock provided an engaging user experience, but wasn’t a good fit with NBC’s core strengths (she also pointed out that the media company still owns and operates a former news startup called Breaking News, which it acquired in 2010). Said Schiller:

“As we continue to grow and evolve the NBC News Digital portfolio, we are focused on investing in content, products and platforms that play to our core strengths. The decision to shut down the site was difficult, but in the end, we didn’t see a strategic fit for EveryBlock within the portfolio.”

In a blog post, Holovaty — who wrote a seminal essay on the use of data in journalism in 2006, and created some of the earliest data-driven projects at the Washington Post — said that he was saddened by the news, and added on Twitter that looking through some of the comments about its demise was like “attending my own funeral.” Holovaty left EveryBlock last year, and said at the time that he expected the company to be around for “a long, long time.”

@digiphile @NBCNews @everyblock @adrianholovaty i'm a big believer in Adrian's original vision and the EB team. It was a tough call.

—
Vivian Schiller (@VivianSchiller) February 07, 2013

EveryBlock started as an automated news aggregator that pulled in data from local feeds and databases, similar to what Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org project did, but the site pivoted somewhat in 2011 to focus more on human contributions and community. Other hyperlocal efforts, including the New York Times’ local experiment, have either been shut down or downsized significantly, and AOL’s Patch is also rumored to be undergoing cuts.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Karen Gentry

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At first glance, you might not think median home prices or transit data would be all that interesting. But Sitegeist, the location-based open data app from the Sunlight Foundation and famed design firm IDEO, is proving that good design can make public data cool.

The concept seems simple when you open the app, the app uses data and information pulled from a wide variety of sources. Sitegeist allows users to set their location and then flip through several screens to explore data tied to their specific location. The screens include: people (median age, age distribution, household income, gender, and political contributions), housing (median home value, average rent, percentage renting v. buying, and commuting patterns), local attractions (popular businesses, local movie theaters, and restaurants), environment (weather), and history (median home age and number of housing units.) The app is available for both iOS and Android.

The sheer volume of data that the Sitegeist app provides for each location is a reminder that between census data and public APIs from companies like Yelp, Foursquare, and Dark Sky, users can put together a relatively comprehensive profile of a geographic location. The Sunlight Foundation put together a “how we did it” blog post, explaining the technology behind the app and how they used different APIs to build a comprehensive product:

All of this wonderful data resides on our servers. When you select a location, the latitude and longitude are passed along with the ID of the pane you want to view. Of the various geographies we keep track of (census tracts, ZIP codes, etc.), the boundaries of any shape that contains your location is found. This uses a customized version of Chicago Tribune’sboundary service. We then match those geographic boundaries with any data we have, making calls to third-party APIs as needed. The collected data is rendered into templates and returned to you as the beautiful infographics you see in the app.

But presenting the information in an intuitive manner with help from IDEO was just crucial to the app’s success as the data that went into it. The Sunlight Foundation won a grant from the John and James L. Knight Foundation to hire external designers to work with them on the Sitegeist app, which was the third in a series of data apps the group worked on. The Sunlight Foundation is focused on using technology to promote openness and transparency in government, an idea we’ll be exploring at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York in March.

“These apps are designed to make the case for why open data is important to people,” said Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs. “And I think it’s really accessible for people. It’s visually striking, which is a credit to IDEO’s designers and Sunlight’s designers, and everyone has an investment in their neighborhood.”

I downloaded the app about two weeks ago, and I’ve found myself opening it in different neighborhoods around San Francisco to see what kinds of people live there. The app would be an ideal travel companion for exploring completely new areas, but even comparing two spots in SOMA (on the left) and Telegraph Hill (on the right), was eye-opening:

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The funding for the venture comes from the Knight Prototype Fund, a relatively new effort from the foundation that is designed to help jump-start new ideas and startups — it invests via grants of up to $50,000 and says that the program is intended to help entrepreneurs “build fast [and] fail fast” while they try to reinvent the way that journalism works online.

The Washington Post‘s political editor, Steven Ginsberg, got the idea for a real-time fact-checking service while he was watching a speech given by former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann in 2011. During her talk at a sports bar in Iowa, the candidate repeatedly misled her audience and Ginsberg said he envisioned a mobile app that would have allowed anyone to check whether she was telling the truth as she was speaking, and then challenge her statements.

Truth Teller checks facts against a Post database

The beta prototype that the Post launched on Tuesday isn’t quite there yet — it is only capable of checking facts related to taxation law and proposed changes to those laws, information that has been hand-fed to the system. But eventually, the newspaper says that the application should be able to do this about a wide range of topics by checking the Post‘s database in real time.

The Post‘s executive producer for digital news, Cory Haik, explains that the application turns speech from a video into text and then checks statements from that text version with an algorithm (a modified Rabin-Karp using Levenshtein distance). While watching a video of House Speaker John Boehner, for example, when he says that raising the top tax rate would “kill 700,000 jobs,” the application pops up a large warning in red, saying: “False.”

Below the video, there is a transcript of the speech, and users can click on any sentence and go to that section of the video — and they can also “view source” and see the basis for the newspaper’s claim that something is false. In the case of the Speaker of the House’s claim, it’s a piece from Glenn Kesler, who writes a column called The Fact Checker, and wrote a post specifically addressing Boehner’s statement — and ultimately awarded it three Pinocchios, which are the newspaper’s version of a thumbs down on the facts.

Political truth can be a slippery thing

The topic of fact-checking political statements became the focus of much debate during the run-up to the election, especially after the former public editor for the New York Times wrote a post asking whether the newspaper’s reporters should be “truth vigilantes” — in other words, whether they should challenge politicians on their statements during the campaign, or just report what they said and fact-check them later. The reaction from readers was astonishment that the newspaper wouldn’t want to do the former, but Brisbane argued that fact-checking is often harder than it seems.

This is one of the potential flaws with an approach like the Post is taking with Truth Teller: such automated systems likely work best when they have specific facts to drawn on, such as Boehner’s claim about 700,000 jobs being lost. But in many cases, the mis-statements that politicians make are much more vague and subject to interpretation than that, and so would be difficult to check against a database of facts.

The other problem is that even Ginsberg’s example of the Bachmann speech assumes that any of those listening would have wanted to fact-check her comments in real time. In the same way, the Truth Teller system — and other similar efforts such as the “Truth Goggles” project, or even more established fact-checking services like Politifact — assume that anyone will take the time to actually go there and check the facts. But will they?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

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Safecast’s efforts in post-quake Japan, were pretty awesome. The team — which was almost all volunteers — created a grassroots network where concerned citizens in Japan collected radiation data using geiger counters. At the time, not a lot of accurate, or current, data was coming out about radiation levels in towns surrounding the Fukushima site.

The Safecast team even had designer and Chumby co-founder, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, design an open source geiger counter that a manufacturer used to make a more consumer-friendly geiger counter. The open source geiger counter design managed to help Safecast raise over $100,000 on Kickstarter.

Bonner tells me via email that Safecast will similarly be working on designing a open source device to collect air quality data, to help people contribute local air quality data to Safecast’s grassroots map. Bonner says: “the benefit that air quality has over radiation is that the sensors are much cheaper and more readily available so we expect more people will be able to help out on their own.” Safecast will first focus its air quality mapping work in L.A., and then other cities in the U.S.

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The Knight Foundation, a non-profit entity that is one of the biggest funders of journalism and media-related projects in the United States, announced the winners of the first round of its Knight News Challenge on Monday in Massachusetts — a contest aimed at funding the next generation of news entrepreneurs. This round was aimed at startups that are taking advantage of existing networks such as Ustream and Twitter, and the winners who are sharing the $1.37 million in prize money are trying to develop video, mobile and crowdsourced solutions to the problem of filtering the vast ocean of news that washes over us every day.

In past years, the Knight Foundation — which was set up by John and James Knight, whose family founded what became the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain — has hosted a single News Challenge, worth a total of $4.7 million last year and divided among the 16 winners. This year, the foundation decided to split the challenge into three parts, each with a slightly different focus on the future of news and journalism, and the first was aimed at ways of using existing networks. The foundation said in a blog post earlier this year that its thinking was influenced by watching what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio was able to do by using Twitter as a news source during the “Arab Spring” revolutions:

Andy, a one-man aggregation vehicle, [is] someone who successfully leveraged a network to tell stories and engage communities. Andy did not go off and build a new platform to aggregate news from the Middle East and North Africa — he leveraged an existing one.

Looking at the past entrants in its News Challenge, the foundation said, confirmed the idea that “projects that brought with them their own networks were better placed for success than were those starting off on their own.” So the first round of award winners each use different networks — and in many cases multiple networks — as a source of both news and as a distributor of their own content. And in many cases the idea seems to be similar to what Andy Carvin tried to do with his Twitter stream: namely, to filter and “curate” the massive amounts of video and other content to find meaning.

Two of the winners focus specifically on video:

• Peepol.tv –- The Knight Foundation describes this startup as “leveraging streaming networks like Ustream and TweetCaster” to aggregate live, mobile video streams of breaking news events and present them on a world map so that viewers can see live video of events as they unfold. Award: $360,000 – Winners: Felipe Heusser and Jeff Warren.
• Watchup –- Founded by Adriano Farano, a former Knight Fellow at Stanford University and founder of a European “crowdsourced journalism” community called CafeBabel.com, this startup is developing an iPad app that will allow users to create their own on-the-fly video channels from different news sources. Farano has described it as “Hulu for news.” Award amount not released.

One of the other Knight Foundation challenge winners shows how broadly the contest is defining the term “news”: instead of being a tool or service that produces or distributes or even filters traditional news content, Recovers.org, awarded $340,000, is aimed at allowing residents of disaster-stricken communities to co-ordinate news and information about their situation through a single website hub. The startup was founded by two sisters after a tornado destroyed their Massachusetts home, and is designed to provide a platform for other communities to communicate and share information in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Two of the other startups are similar to the winners of last year’s News Challenge, many of whom were focused on mining data and analyzing it in order to understand more about news events and other information:

• Signalnoi.se –- Still in beta, this service is designed to help editors and newsrooms monitor how their content is being engaged with or shared by readers, so that they can decide where to put their resources and where to position that content online (award amount not released). This sounds similar to some of the features that analytical tools like Chartbeat offer.
• Behavio –- Behavio is described as an open-source platform that turns phones into “smart sensors” that can capture people’s behavior and help them understand everything from how they use their phones to how they interact with the world around them. It will be interesting to see how much of that data users want to reveal, and how journalists want to use it. The startup is based on an open-source project that founder Nadav Aharony developed while he was at the MIT Media Lab. Award: $355,000 – Winners: Nadav Aharony, Alan Gardner and Cody Sumter.

Although each of these winners has a unique take on the problems they are trying to solve, one of the more interesting startups for me was the Tor Project, which is aimed at helping journalists — whether the professional or the amateur variety — do their jobs more effectively and securely. The Tor Project, awarded $320,000, is based on an open-source development effort called Tor, whose network of “anonymous proxies” protects users from online snooping by governments or other authorities. Critics have pointed out that many journalists fail to take appropriate precautions even when reporting from dangerous locations, and the Tor Project could help to change that.

The second round of the Knight Foundation’s news challenge closes at the end of June, and is focused on startups who deal with data. The foundation also said that Signalnoi.se and Watchup have received funding through the Knight Enterprise Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund associated with the foundation (which is why their funding amounts were not released). And the Knight Foundation also announced on Monday a new fund aimed at helping news startups take their ideas to the prototype stage — including one startup focused on “drone journalism.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Ed Kohler and Petteri Sulonen

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Public Media Accelerator is backed by a $2.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation and run by public media network PRX. “Nonprofit and for-profit ventures, building apps, services and media products” can apply for funding. Nieman Journalism Lab has a few more details about how it will work:

Technologists and digital storytellers will compete for cash to build their ideas. Winners will come to Cambridge for intensive, 12-week development cycles, under the guidance of mentors with deep experience in the field, all culminating in a demo day and the chance to win additional rounds of funding.

The Knight Foundation will keep a stake in the for-profit companies that receive funding, Nieman Journalism Lab notes, “moving away from its traditional role as pure philanthropist.”

release

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The site is run by nonprofit civic news organization City Limits, which also owns a broader site focusing on civic affairs across New York City. The Brooklyn Community Foundation and Knight Foundation are each providing $50,000 for the first two years. The Brooklyn Community Foundation is also financially supporting Brooklyn College’s Center for the Study of Brooklyn in its efforts to “analyze statistical data and develop neighborhood and borough-wide trend reports,” which will be posted to Brooklyn Bureau.

Stories at launch include investigations of hunger in Brooklyn, rezoning wars downtown and ongoing controversy at P.S. 20 in Fort Greene.

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That’s precisely the target market for Ownlocal – a Y Combinator graduate which is today announcing a new round of investment from a string of investors including the Knight Enterprise Fund, Automattic, the makers of WordPress, and a number of prominent angels.

“You call it gray space, but I call it white space,” says Lloyd Armbrust, Ownlocal’s CEO, from the company’s HQ near Austin, Texas. 

“There are 14.1 million businesses in the U.S., and only somewhere between six and eight million have some sort of web presence.”

That means that around half of businesses don’t exist at all on the web – covering everything from hardware stores to contractors to beauty salons and law firms and more. And even when they do have a site for customers to visit, many of them aren’t satisfied with what they’ve got.

That’s why the company thinks it has found a space to offer basic online presence, including web hosting, social media and blogging services to the underrepresented portion of small businesses across America. It isn’t the only company doing so: big players like Reachlocal are also active, not to mention the plethora of small town web design shops and friends-of-friends who hack together sites for people they know. 

The difference with Ownlocal, says Armbrust, is how it sells. Instead of taking on the time-consuming and money-intensive job of setting up a local or national sales operation, the company is partnering with people who already have serious connections: local media outlets.

“What we do is work with small businesses to help them with their web services — but we do it through local newspapers, radio stations, even chambers of commerce’” says Armbrust. 

The idea is that when salespeople at, say, a small-town newspaper are doing their normal advertising deals with local businesses — many of whom they have been working with for decades — they can try and upsell them to Ownlocal’s services as well. If the company buys in, both sides split the revenue — usually straight down the middle.

That’s a great deal for Armbrust and for imperiled regional media, who get not only a slice of revenue but – perhaps more importantly – recurring income, not just a one-off sum.

That’s one reason why Knight, which is a spin-off off fund from the venerable but non-profit focused Knight Foundation that puts money into profit-seeking businesses that can help journalism, has joined the round. It also marks the first strategic investment for Automattic, which is an interesting move since Ownlocal’s services aren’t based on WordPress (full disclosure: both GigaOM and Automattic are funded by True Ventures).

But neither are putting a huge amount into the round, which is being referred to as a ”seed plus”.

That’s not just a reference to the relative size of this new funding (which isn’t being disclosed, although the company says it has now raised $2 million in total). It is also intended to express the fact that the company is trying to complete its transition from previous incarnation Seeing Interactive, which graduated from Y Combinator last year and scored angel investment from the likes of Gmail and Friendfeed guru Paul Buchheit and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter.

Back then, the company was focused on tools targeted at helping local news outlets sell ads: it then started to shift to offering a daily deals service. So is this the end of a transition, or just another stop along the way?

Armbrust says it’s happy with this pivot, since break-even is just a few months away, and customers are already starting to stream in. Will it work? He says yes, not least because the pivot is based on intimate feedback in the field.

“In the last year we must have spent thousands of hours each out there, talking to businesses about what they want,” he says. ”We now have enough examples where we can say to people, ’here’s how somebody else used our services successfully’. That’s really important.”

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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