“There are three ways to look at how society is informed. The first is that people are gullible and will read, listen to, or watch just about anything. The second is that most people require an informed intermediary to tell them what is good, important or meaningful. The third is that people are pretty smart; given the means, they can sort things out for themselves, find their own version of the truth.

The means have arrived. The truth is out there.

Throughout history, access to news and information has been a privilege accorded to powerful institutions with the authority or wealth to dominate distribution. For the past two centuries, an independent press has served as advocate for society and its right to know — an essential role during an era of democratic enlightenment.

It feels like a new era has been thrust upon us — an era of enlightened anxiety. We now know more than ever before, but our knowledge creates anxiety over harsh truths and puzzling paradoxes.”

Still rings true. The moment and the movement have overtaken the forecast, but We Media (300,000+ downloads) continues to serve “as the reference point for any serious discussions of this topic …” David Weinberger, the visionary technologist-commentator-author wrote back then.

Didier Editions asked to republish the intro in a collection of English textbooks called Password Terminale for French students 17-18 years old.

We said oui.

With more precision than the Giants’ final drive to win the game, the “show-technology” company LMG rolled out nearly 800 custom-constructed LED tiles, built an electronic set over one-third of the football field, and rigged 32 projectors 150 feet above the set in less than seven minutes.

The display of imagery, video and 3D effects that followed — living VOGUE magazine covers, reverberating speakers and a heavenly universe — dazzled. Not even production excess, Madonna, M.I.A.’s middle finger, a pageant wish for “world peace” or something called LMFAO could ruin the twelve-minute media spectacle known as the halftime show.

Then came Clint. “Halftime for the Auto Industry” brought a lump to the throat of this former Detroiter with a gritty, reality metaphor about struggle and perseverance. The spot, more compelling than the half of football that preceded it, roiled the gods of football. Google and You Tube pulled the video after the NFL apparently suffered a concussion, filing a copyright claim that the commercial was political. Can’t have emotional honesty in the Super Bowl; it might draw attention from a violent sport, entertainers shooting us the bird, and wardrobe malfunctions. Fortunately, the video is back up today.

A sequel to the pulsating, Eminem “Imported from Detroit” campaign by Wieden+Kennedy, “Halftime” is rich with the unapologetic this-is-who-we-are-and-this-is-what-we-do attitude that made me proud to work in the Motor City. A pretty good metaphor for America, too, if you want to take it there.

Calling all media, technology and social dreamers: The 2012 We Media PitchIt Challenge is open to entries. The challenge offers $50,000 in seed funding to help turn ideas for innovative media and technology startups into something real.

To submit an idea to the challenge or vote on others, visit the PitchIt Idea Hub.

The submission and online voting deadline is Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012.

A group of 6-8 finalists selected by We Media will pitch their ideas live before a panel of expert judges and the audience at the We Media 2012 conference on April 18 at Gannett, Inc., in McLean, Virginia. Two winners selected by the judges will be offered a $25,000 sponsorship to help them bring their ideas to life.

The public can also comment and vote on the ideas submitted online. The three ideas with the most votes will be named Community Choice winners.

PitchIt, which in 2011 was ranked by the web site StartupSmart among the world’s top startup challenges, gives a boost to people with big ideas – but not fully formed startups. It’s for would-be entrepreneurs who have bold visions for using media and technology to improve the human experience in the digital world.

PitchIt is unique among startup challenges because it’s open to both commercial and non-profit entries. In either case, the potential for social impact is among the criteria used to judge submissions.

We’ve created a platform for founders with ideas to take center stage – and we’ve helped launch some amazing companies built on powerful ideas. Past winners have included SeeClickFix, Sparked, Audimated, NewsIT and Stable Renters.

This is the sixth year for the challenge, which grew out of activity at the annual We Media conference, where we bring together an influential mix of media, technology and social visionaries for conversations on big ideas driving innovation, investment and opportunities in the digital culture. This is the fourth year with a sponsorship on the line to help the winners do something big with their big ideas.

The challenge is organized by We Media for iFOCOS, a non-profit research center and innovation lab, and sponsored by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Our partners for 2012 include Ashoka Changemakers, a global network of social entrepreneurs, and Gannett, Inc., the US media company that publishes USAToday.

If you’d like to attend the 2012 We Media conference, join the We Media mailing list to receive registration and program details. We’ll be sending invitations soon.

Contact us now if you’d like to participate as a sponsor or exhibitor.

The conference program will also include the live finals of PitchIt, our annual seed investment challenge for innovative startups and social ventures. Last year PitchIt was named one the world’s top startup challenges, along with competitions organized by MIT, IBM and the SXSW interactive conference. We offer $25,000 to each of two winners, along with advice and help from We Media – and access to a network of We Media Mentors who work one-on-one with the winners.

If you’re working on a pre-launch, unfunded startup, or need a kick in the pants to help turn your brilliant idea into something real – read up on the criteria and get your plans in order now. We’ll be open for submissions later this month.

On January 20, StableRenters will go live with landlord identity and a score based on complaints per unit for nearly every rental, co-op and condo property in the five boroughs of New York City!

As you can see, much has changed at StableRenters. I found a developer, made too much work for my part-time self, quit my day-job, and am gearing up to launch a more advanced beta version than I ever imagined.

How in the world did this happen in just two months? After looking tirelessly for the right developer and finding mostly over-qualified develop/design shops that wanted to take all my money and produce a great final product from start to finish, I decided to look farther afield. I wanted a small demo app that I could show the world and gauge response and value before going further, and no one qualified that I knew in NYC would do that for me.

I finally decided to check out Odesk, an online market for freelancers. There I found a qualified and enthusiastic Ruby on Rails developer that was willing to do the project for a few thousand dollars, a common rate among developers in Lahore, Pakistan. Along with a low intensity site administrator I found on Sortfolio to manage access permissions, I was set to begin.

I began working with these two when I still had a job, and quickly it created more work than I was able to handle in a few hours each night. Also, my wife was ready to kill me. I wasn’t sure where this would lead.

Then, December rolled around and I still had about $15,000 left from the Pitchit challenge that would be taxed if I didn’t spend it all on legitimate business expenses by the end of the month. I mapped this out, thought of extended consulting fees, a year’s worth of office space, an iPad, a new computer, and a desk. But as fast as I figured this payment schedule out, I was getting increasingly irritated by the workload of my decreasingly relevant non-profit fundraising day-job, and decided it was time to quit. I bought a few things and took the remaining money as salary. My last day at work was December 16. After taxes, I only had enough money for a few months at my current salary, but I took the plunge. If I hadn’t quit, I’d have known this venture’s outcome 100 percent. Now, at least there’s a chance at funding and success.

So after three weeks of fulltime startup-dom, I made the decision to apply to the BigApps Challenge. I found that the city had released 2 useful datasets: the identity of all landlords, management companies and the shareholders of every rental, condo and co-op property with 3 units or more in the five boroughs, as well as the complaints made to the city by these buildings’ tenants.

Sure, the Big Apps Challenge could win me $10,000. But a friend showed me last weekend that in the 2011 BigApps Ideas Challenge (just ideas for apps, not launch-ready products), one of the winners selected by a panel of judges was a platform that allows “residents to rate their building’s owner, management co., and landlord, and lets interested renters browse those ratings.”

I couldn’t believe I missed this news and it sounded too familiar to pass up. Besides, it’ll be a great opportunity to persuade the city to open up more of its data by showing the value of what could be: a site that uses every relevant piece of city data, including still-closed housing violations and lawsuits, to force slumlords to shape up and reward responsible landlords for the first time with free marketing and a flock of renters eager to do business with an honest professional.

If you know anyone that lives in New York, please like my Facebook page, and in February vote for StableRenters in the BigApps Challenge. It will make your life and city better.

There’s the physical space of weSpace, the co-working hub we’re launching for entrepreneurs and digital creatives. There’s the social space where we connect innovators through technology, collaboration and creativity. And there’s the space between the ears where we consider our place in a shape-shifting world.

Space matters. It can inspire people to do great things. To engage one-another. To think more deeply. To innovate and make a difference. Space inspires us.

But like great expectation, great space just doesn’t happen. It unfolds in time. “The future enters us slowly, as if to transform us, long before it happens,” the poet Ranier Marie Ilke counseled.

Space must be designed. Carefully, bit by bit. Steve Jobs put it this way: Design isn’t how it looks, it’s how it works.

We Media emerged a decade ago with a prescient and somewhat ominous (at least for some) design: Networked technology would enable everyone to set the agenda for what we know, how we work and how we live. In the world we designed in 2002, control shifted from traditional institutions to everyday people. Media was democratized; power flowed to citizens.

Many people see this as the Internet revolution. It is, but not the way they think. While the “digital everything” was the first law of We Media back in 2002, it was also a foreshadowing of a social revolution to come. The age of access that we saw coming a decade ago is patently obvious today as people everywhere design or redesign their place in a connected society. The implications for just about everything are profound.

Design sits atop our agenda for the visible future. It is the way we interact with the world. It’s how and what we see, how we organize thought, how we translate concepts to others, how we create, how we express ourselves. Design brings us closer to communion with the ineffable in a period of enlightened anxiety.

Watch this space.

New plan: Build small app, get data from city government, make app bigger, spend less money.

Since my last post I found a developer after months of looking. It was a team of three techies, highly skilled in data scraping, visualization and database architecture. They had everything I needed, and if I went with them, I’d be on my way to launching a great beta site and be dead broke at launch day. Data scraping from very old and finicky databases can cost a lot of money.

But after some helpful conversations with Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) and Anil Dash (@anildash), two of the We Media Mentors I was introduced to during the Pitchit Challenge, my new plan is to make a small app that functions for about 50 addresses, and show it off to city agencies in hopes of persuading them to hand it over in a usable form. This allows me to save money otherwise spent on data scraping, and forces me to build relationships that will no doubt prove vital.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) produces this data by taking tenants’ complaints, conducting inspections, issuing violations, and occasionally bringing legal charges against delinquent landlords. Whatever administrative fee is needed for HPD to part with this data must be nothing compared to the costs of scraping the data of 1 million addresses myself.

So, forging this kind of relationship will certainly be an important step for Stable Renters. But the collaboration created will exponentially increase the impact of HPD’s work, allowing New Yorkers of all kinds to make sense of the important datasets they produce and put them to good use every time they rent an apartment.

With NYC’s Road Map for the Digital City and a newly created position of Chief Digital Officer (former We Media contributor @rachelsterne), this type of relationship is not unfathomable. Stable Renters is just one more way for the city to get the maximum value from the wealth of data it produces every day. HPD recently released its Property Registration information (aka the identity of the landlords and management companies for most rental properties) through NYC’s Open Data hub. This information should change next year as the effects begin to be felt by Intro-87, a city ordinance passed in August 2010 that will require landlords to provide real names and addresses for all human (not corporate) stakeholders holding 25% or more of a property. This will make it harder for landlords to hide behind a different corporation name for each building they own, and easier for tenants to find out who actually owns a building. That’ll be a great day for New York City.

For story-tellers and publishers, the app from filmmaker Steve Rosenbaum and developer Jeff Soto of Tendigi also explores new territory and a new template for digital books – in this case, a collection of stories told mainly through video.

Better known as the Twin Towers, the skyscrapers of the World Trade Center became an iconic symbol of New York City when they were completed in the early ’70s. They dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan and gave substance to the city’s unabashed conceit as the greatest on earth. For the past decade, they have also symbolized the nation’s worst terrorist attack, the rubble and crater where the towers once stood a gaping void in the city’s and nation’s psyche. Now, construction of new skyscrapers is under way, along with an underground museum and outdoor memorial designed by architect Michael Arad that will formally open to the public on Sept. 11, 2011.

Rosenbaum’s digital story of the World Trade Center is an app in the sense that it works only on the iPad. The story itself is told mainly through videos collected from a variety of sources, along with photo galleries, a smattering of explanatory text and a timeline. The format is especially well suited for the videos. A book full of videos – that’s a new kind of thing and it’s engrossing, like a good book. Unlike a book, the app experience has no beginning or end. That’s “non-linear” in geek speak. There’s no right way to “read” it.

The app will be available in the iTunes store Sept. 1, where it will be free until Sept. 12. Then the price will be $9.95. Click here for more about the app.

Creator Steve Rosenbaum is an old friend and longtime participant and contributor to We Media. He’s also the author of the recently published Curation Nation and founder and CEO of tech startup Magnify.net.

I asked Steve to share some insights into how and why he took this approach with the 9/11 anniversary.

Q: How did you build it? Literally – what tools did you use?

A: I knew I wanted to create something different. A ‘book’ that you could read, or a series of photographs that you could explore, or a collection of videos you could watch. And I knew that this story would have different audiences that would want to explore it in their own way, from their personal point of view.

So I sketched out the user interface on paper, and then downloaded wireframe elements for Photoshop. From there, I designed and created a working blueprint of the UI.

Once I’d come up with the idea of Past, Present and Future as the overriding navigation – I added a Gallery feature so that users could go deeper in either video or photographs, and a timeline so that readers who wanted a linear history could find that in the app.

Now, I’m a writer and a photographer, and a filmmaker – but I don’t write code. So I went out looking for a developer who’d work with content apps before and had a real love of the iPad look and feel. I found Jeff Soto at Tendigi – a development shop that is deeply rooted in Apple i0S development. He was able to bring a project plan and a development timeline, and in addition to writing the app, his team did a great job created the graphic elements that make the App’s UI easy to engage.

So, I did the wireframes and pulled the images and edited the videos and the Tendigi team wrote code, and turned my sketches into pages.

The content came from the work I’ve been doing at the WTC site for the past 5 years. I have almost 22,000 images, and 300 hours of video. I’ve been covering the story since it 9/11/01 – and so I’ve been able to develop amazing relationships on the site and with many of the key participants.

I’ve been shooting in HDV -in a dual system that records to Compact Flash Memory cards and HDV tape on a Sony HVR Z5U HD camera. I’ve got 14 terabytes of storage to back up the cards, and then the tape provides a secondary backup. For the stills i’m shooting on a Canon 7d.

The important thing to know is that this App is an early take on the subject, and I’ll produce a feature length documentary once the National 9/11 Memorial Museum opens in September 2012.

Q: Why this story? I know you’re a New Yorker. So are lots of people. I know you’re a film guy. So are lots of people. How did you wind up with this story?

A: As a filmmaker, you mostly get to choose your subjects. But the story of the 9/11 Memorial really chose me. I’d made 7 Days In September and frankly thought that was all I wanted to do on the subject. But as the site was cleared, and then the designs became public, I found that I was drawn back to the site again and again – trying to understand what was being built and how it could possibly fill such a terrible loss. When I saw architect Michael Arad’s designs for Reflecting Absence – I knew I was going to follow the story until the site construction was completed.

Now it’s been five years – and I’m proud that the remarkable team at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum have allowed me into their world. Day in and day out – the work they’re doing is demanding, complex, and important. What they’ve built on the Plaza is elegant and powerful. It honors those who lost their lives, while at the same time embracing life and offering the city a space that will help return lower manhattan to the city. Underground, the Museum under construction will i think suprise even jaded New Yorkers with its complexity and it’s throughout history of the events.

Q: Why an iPad app?

A: Building an app wasn’t a forgone conclusion. I knew I had a unique collection of editorial elements, text, video, and photographs. My first thought was an eBook – but the more I learned about the format the more I understood that it was primarily a textual format with video and photo’s as an add-on. The Kindle, a device I love, wasn’t going to make it possible for me to share the media elements the way I wanted to. Sure, I could have built for Android, or even for iPhones, but I wanted to be on the iPad first, and given the tight timeline, I had to make a choice. The iPad has a 30 million unit footprint, and that’s around the world. I know that 9/11 is a world story – so it seemed like the right platform.

I wouldn’t say it was an experiment. For me it was an evolution. I’d just had my first book come out – and having it in stores as Borders went out of business reminded me that the evolution from physical books to digital books was well underway. Yes, I could have done a photobook, but then I wouldn’t have been able to share my video – which I think is pretty important for this project. So I was ready to do a digital project, and the App format was the best fit.

Q: What did you learn with this project?
A: I’m very much used to telling stories from beginning to end. Taking the reader by the hand and going on a Journey. But 9/11 is a story where doing that is likely to turn off as many readers as it engages. If you were 12 years old in 2001, as my older son was, you don’t need to see the ‘day of’ video ever again. You lived it. But if you’re my younger son, who was four years old on 9/11, then maybe you need to see the day to understand what happened – how the sky turned dark as night in the middle of the day.

Giving readers the material to take their own journey is a leap of faith – it’s in some ways harder than a piece of linear narrative. Because you have to trust the reader to engage, and explore, and find their way out of the story. Not all readers will do that – but I hope many will.

Q: What do you want people who use the app to learn or feel or do?

A: The Memorial is in some ways deceptively simple. Big empty sky where the buildings once stood, massive voids where the footprints where. Arad’s design is complex, and the story of how he conceived of it is remarkable. So getting to meet the architect, and listen to him tell the story in five, six, even seven minute segments is something I hope people appreciate. No news story, or even documentary film would be able to let him tell his story this way. I want people to come away from the app understanding what was built, how it came to be, and why it is in many ways a triumph – it is something New Yorkers and Americans will be proud of.

Q: I know you’re a documentary guy, a story-teller, a New Yorker. Still – aren’t you tired of watching 9/11 videos? 9/11 sucked. How does your app about 9/11 NOT suck?

A: The app is most certainly not about 9/11. If fact, probably less than 10% of the app covers the day of 9/11. It’s about the 10 years, the construction, the memorial, the artifacts. It’s about the future, not the past. And it’s a future that I think has the potential to be looked at as an effective and emotionally pitch-perfect project. If you can visit the site, the app can service as primer that helps you understand the site and get oriented. If you want to visit, but can’t make the trip – then the App is a way to answer the question: “what did they build at the WTC site” and give people a hands-on understanding of the Memorial.

Q: How does a tech startup CEO find time to write a book, make a documentary and build a mobile app about the nation’s greatest crisis in half a century?

A: Well, the book I wrote, Curation Nation, is about the emerging practice in editorial of organizing content in to a coherent narrative from multiple sources. Happily, that’s what Magnify.net does – so writing book that helped me understand the field that I need to both understand and lead. The app too is curated – there’s content from the construction of the Twin Towers from YouTube, and links to news sources and blogs in the Timeline.

The video in the app is powered by Magnify.net, so for me and my team – learning how to build an app with video that was embedded, powered by our platform, and able to be updated from a web interface was a great piece of learning.

I think for a CEO of a company that makes a software platform for curated content, staying active in curated content is very much part of my job. Curation isn’t something you learn on paper, you learn it by doing it – anything less is just theory. I wanted to put curated video for apps into practice. And we did that.

By Ben Sacks
What a kick in the pants! The We Media Pitchit! Challenge really got me to start moving. Not only did I have a chunk of equity-free change to start building with, We Media introduced me to some seriously knowledgeable people.

Everyone pushed me to move as fast as possible towards launching the product in some form. I shouldn’t worry about getting set up with a corporate structure, planning for the project to be larger than it has to be at first, or even soliciting additional investment (if I don’t need it yet) until I get public buy-in in the form of real usage. “Your users know more than you do,” one person said to me. “They’ll even tell you what you want to hear if you just give them a place to say it.”

Stable Renters was pretty hard to think about in minimal terms. Virtually everyone I speak to has a new idea for where it can go. But it has at least one unique aspect: it uses specialized data that few others have endeavored to leverage. If it turns out that no one cares how well buildings are managed, then I’ll know I need to come up with something new.

So not long after I wandered through the train with an enormous check, wondering if I could exchange it at a check-cashing store, my goal became to hold down the fulltime day job and get a lead developer to launch something by the fall.

But it’s been two months since then, and I’m still looking for that developer. Yes I’ve advertized on Craigslist, related Meetup groups and at university departments, and I told everyone I know that I’m looking. But while Scott Heiferman (@heif) celebrated the flourishing of NYC’s startup scene at the New York Tech Meetup last month, a professor in a local CS department sent me a form email (literally said, “Dear So and So”), basically telling me that there were no students that would fit my unmentioned criteria.

And yes, I have met developers. “Oh yeah? What languages do you work in?” I often ask. “Everything, really everything” is my least favorite answer, especially when it’s followed by, “Oh, no, not Python. Not MongoDB.” But while some have presented the right technical capabilities, it seems that many in the startup world don’t care about the social benefit, about media innovation, about real impact. I hear far too often that all these good things must come with a financial drawback. And yet, few question Stable Renters’ profitability. Entrepreneurs don’t let that stop them for some reason. But many think that this revenue model’s inherent social value will hold the company back.

I should note that the terms of employment have almost never come up in these conversations. I’ve been quite flexible as to whether the position would begin on a roadmap to co-foundership, would remain as lead developer, or gain differing amounts of equity as the work progresses. Virtually all of this is on the table in some form. And in only one case did the terms offered actually raise an objection, one that was quickly rectified. In even this case, it seems as though the concept of doing good in exchange for money gives entrepreneurs the willies.

So I want to take a moment to talk about social entrepreneurship. While definitions abound, examples of the phenomenon can be found in almost any industry. And this is where I begin to disagree with the naysayers. In a society with no banks, lending money for just about any purpose could arguably be social entrepreneurship. A society without access to capital means that risk takers can rarely seize opportunities, and that the needed and possible improvements to the public good will go unrealized. Banks fill a real need.

So if banking counts, then what are developers afraid of? If you question profitability, fine. But don’t let good will scare you away. Banks do their job, they make money. We do our job, which happens to do something good, and we make money.

Work for me. We’ll make money and feel good about it. And as long as even one landlord continues to contemplate stiffing a tenant, we’ll never need a bailout.

Photo by Shayan.

It illustrates the shifting power dynamic in the world. Social media is enabling ordinary people not only to express themselves but also to organize themselves quickly,” said Andrew Nachison, a U.S.-based analyst at We Media, a digital research agency.

In April, I won $25,000 from the We Media PitchIt competition. The following photo
shows how I felt:

The experience with We Media was my inflection point. Since then, we’ve made
some beautiful progress. Fundraising is a lot harder than anticipated (where are the
billionaire philanthropists who write checks for $250,000 over coffee??), but we’re
getting there.

Following the win…

• I met with Merrill Brown, one of my new We Media mentors. (A veteran
  journalist, media executive, consultant, and mocha-drinker.) He offered to
  make introductions to various foundations and venture capitalists around
  NYC.
• I leveraged the We Media win to convince a Palo Alto VC fund to commit an
  additional $50,000. (They rarely give money to nonprofits, but they are
  making an exception because, obviously, Pando is awesome.)
• I met with Stowe Boyd, a web anthropologist, We Media mentor, and urban
  lumberjack. He was incredibly generous and invited me to The Guardian
  Activate Summit, where I met incredible people including Andrew Rasiej,
  who runs the Personal Democracy Forum.
• I met with Steve Rosenbaum, the author of “Curation Nation” and another We Media mentor. Steve has trendy hipster glasses and an amazing business mind. He strongly suggested that I think of ways to open a for-profit arm of Pando.
• I met with Esther Dyson, a We Media mentor and mysterious female VC. It
  was hard to gauge her feelings about Pando, but she did offer to help me
  speak at the New York Tech Meet-Up, whenever I’m ready.
• I met with Charlie O’Donnell, a We Media mentor and Principal at First Round
  Capital. He was incredibly cool and recommended that I spend the summer researching Pando’s competition and carefully planning out our online platform.

For the next three months, I have three goals:

• Plan out and design the official Pando website, which should be capable of scaling to support thousands of projects.
• Recruit two team members: a CTO to build the site and a COO to help me execute our vision.
• Raise $250,000 in seed funding, which will be used to fund the official website and hire two paid staff members to develop the materials that people need to execute their projects.

I’m incredibly grateful for all these introductions, and for the legitimacy that We Media have given Pando. I’ll continue to post a blog every month, to let you know about our progress. Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about Pando, you can reach me at milena@pandoprojects.org.

Steven Rosenbaum

I love the smell of old records. The cardboard sleeves, the vinyl and the memories. I like the sound and the feeling of a rotary phone. And I like thinking back to a time when the web was something we ’surfed.’

Remember that?

Surfing the Web. Ah, back when the waves lapped against the shores and then pulled back. With a rhythm and a volume that was at human scale. Today, no one surfs the Web, we survive it. We tolerate it. We try not to be enveloped by it. Because, the Web no longer operates at human scale. It’s Moore’s Law applied to information.

Which is why I was both charmed and surprised to hear Google’s Dan Russell being interviewed by Leo Laporte on “This Week in Google”. Russell is in charge of “User Happiness” at Google. “Well, you know, people are pretty happy when they’re searching,” Russell said, in describing his role. “That’s one of the reasons Google is where it is. Happiness comes from a lot of things. One thing it comes from is whether or not you get that sense of delight.”

Okay, reality check here. How many of you remember when the Web, and in particular Google, was delightful? I do. I remember Mosaic. I remember when Google was amazing. The Web was seemingly growing volumes of quality content, and Google helped me find it fast. Awesome.

But recently, I find that Google isn’t my first stop when I’m looking for what Jeff Jarvis calls the serendipity of “unexpected relevance.” There are just so many choices, and so many of them that seem to know me better than Google does.

Russell seems to understand this. “If we could read your mind, and help to presage what’s coming next,” he says, “that would be great!”

But you have to understand where he’s coming from – where Google’s coming from – to understand how he defines delight.

Russell has been at Google for more than five years. Before that, he worked at Apple for 5 years, and before that, Xerox PARC for 12 years, and before that, IBM. And while Laporte gently suggests that what Google needs is less computer scientists and more social scientists, Russell laughs and admits he has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence.

So while Google is defining ‘delight’ as popping a weather graphic on your screen, users are drowning in a flood of tweets, blog posts, check-ins, and other real-time data that overwhelm comprehension and exhaust users. And it’s clear that Google understands this – with new CEO Larry Page making sweeping changes in the goals and management of the company.

Page is hyper-focused on competing with Facebook in the social sector, recently sending out a memo to employees that ties 25 percent of their annual bonus will be tied to the success of Google’s social strategy in 2011. But after just one week on the job, critics like Computerworld’s Mike Elgan say Google still doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about over at Facebook. ”Google doesn’t seem to understand that Facebook is a party,” says Elgan. ”People prefer Facebook to Google because Facebook is a place they can go to be social. With Google there is no ‘place.’ There is no party. Google’s approach to social isn’t fun.”

Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net, is the author of Curation Nation: How To Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators.

Among other things, Mr. Gomez is a leading practitioner of what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls transmedia – that’s fiction and entertainment spread across many different platforms.

Professional credentials and bona fides aren’t the point here. Jeff’s personal story, told at TedxTransmedia in 2010, is about the power of story itself. The price of admission is 22 minutes of your time.

We have to provide an architecture that allows for people to lift themselves from darkness and mundanity.

If you live in Washington, DC, and can offer a little bit of your time, sign up and check out the project details. You can go down into the subway to see how long it takes to escape, or assist with mapping data and other text, photo and video tasks.

Sign up and share this link to invite your friends:

http://newsit.net/assignments/454

I’m rooting for team NewsIT, and I’m biased. NewsIt won our 2010 PitchIt Challenge, and we’ve been advising the project since then.

A few elements of the DC Metro investigation are innovative and notable for those who care about the future of journalism. First, NewsIt is doing its work in public. That’s a departure from the traditional cloak of secrecy that shrouds investigative journalism until the work is done – followed by the traditional “big reveal.” NewsIt has told us exactly what they’re working on – and they’ve asked for help.

Second, they’ve asked for help in a manner that should be appealing and practical to a broad network of individuals who care about the investigation and its results – whether or not they care about or want to call themselves citizen journalists. This rips a page out of citizen science – built around volunteers who collect data to contribute to large-scale research projects; and from the world of micro-volunteering pioneered by services such as Sparked and SeeClickFix. (Both of those also launched as winners of our PitchIt challenge).

This version of collaborative, volunteer-powered investigative journalism curated and produced by a commercial, professional hub also offers an alternative vision for the future of local journalism – compared, for instance, to AOL’s Patch, which is building out a network of local sites built around volunteer bloggers. You don’t need to be a dedicated or good blogger to make a meaningful contribution to NewsIt.

Finally – this project is an important test for NewsIt, a startup from Washington founded by journalist Melinda Wittsock (@cncpundit). NewsIt needs to prove its model to prospective investors and industry partners.

One thing the Aussies liked, and we do too, is that the PitchIt prize does not require commercial winners give up any equity. But we do ask for something back from the winners – they’ve got to “pay it forward” by sharing what they learn with founders who follow in their footsteps. We think that’s a fair bargain with real value on both sides.

We’re working on plans for the next PitchIt Challenge. For news and announcements on submission deadlines, join our email list, follow along on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.