Those expecting “God’s work” — a reference that editor Erik Wemple spins in his opening post — will long for divine inspiration. The Lord works in mysterious ways. TBD is, to be kind (TBK), a work in progress. For now, TBD’s founders are content to celebrate getting the sucker up. The celebration goes something like this: “We’re TBD, a site whose development is always uncertain, forever under construction.”

TBD is not your typical, uncertain startup. If you live and work in or around Washington, D.C., as I do, you’ve heard for a year that Robert Albritton, the Washington media magnate, and Jim Brady, a friend who is the former executive editor of washingtonpost,com, planned to revolutionize local news. Everyone wants a piece of The Washington Post, which is under assault on all fronts. With TBD, Albritton and Brady have the beast in their sights.

In its debut TBD shows off an updated version of convergence — that mind-numbing, inward-looking, mid-90s strategy from control freaks who thought they could combine media assets and control a local market. TBD merges Albritton’s two area TV station sites, WJLA-ABC News 7 and News8.net, with an online staff of 50.

Bringing the project into the decade, it adds a network of community blogs and websites. Social media tools — today’s requisite, must-have connections such as Twitter, Facebook, RSS and mobile apps– complete an otherwise familiar formula for news display and access. More shrewd than informative, TBD’s social media are networks for promotion and distribution rather than platforms for compelling news produced by the most talented experts who blog in and around Washington.

Can TBD provide the elusive model for local news in the digital age by competing with The Post’s failed, hyperlocal strategy?

“TBD has all the parts,” Steve Klein, who runs the electronic journalism program at George Mason University, told me at our meetup this weekend with the Online News Association. As such, TBD will likely be the darling of the online news set, the Mainstream Media survivors who are trying to keep outmoded institutions afloat.

But parts is parts, says the huckster who sells chicken pieces. TBD presumes to revolutionize without innovating. There’s nothing that changes your experience, your point of view, your relationship with local news, or the metaphor for storytelling. It doesn’t engage digital audiences in a fresh way or enable them to fully participate in the diverse, exciting flow of content in the nation’s capital.

The revolution is still coming, yet to be determined.

Is Flipboard the social magazine we’ve been waiting for?

Can design hubs and templates can actually stir creativity at newspapers?

Did Steve Jobs steal my old idea for the tablet?

Opinions or insights? Let’s talk and share. We’ll share ours at a salon on current issues of creativity at our meetup on Saturday at world headquarters at Lake Anne Village, Reston.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already here. I recently learned that left and right shoes were thought up a little more than a century ago.

Consider what else you might discover over a Dale’s Pale Ale. Bring both feet — appetite and brains, too — to the meetup with the DC Area Online News Association Meetup Group from 3:30 to 6 pm Saturday at Lake Anne Village, Reston.

DC/ONA members can register here.

Friends of We Media can register here.

Taking these in reverse it would seem a) TV News would scarcely exist without drawing from the well of news stories from the daily papers b) Younger people ingest the news even more so than in years past, if squeezed through a spaghetti strainer in multiple forms and times from myriad indirect sources – but the birth of that item is still often track-backed to a newspaper reporter, somewhere c) And the Internet? Come on… there is no better way to distribute and receive timely information than on the wired and wireless Web. The rub is in the revenue – or the decreased amount of it. How do we pay for it? Naturally that’s the real story.

But let’s back away from the giant black-hole argument of how news will survive in a world of passionate bloggers working under scale, entertainment trumping what sensible people would define as news, and what now seems like crazy distribution costs for information delivered on recycled trees.

Instead, maybe the focus needs to first turn from all that to what consumers actually want to know about – directed at what is meaningful and necessary to their lives. So what’s that? In my experience people have universal desires unchanged by technology, medium or trend. These are things that matter to nearly all people, or at least are of interest to them, and touch most age groups. That’s because these are things that happen closest to them: in town, down the street, next door, in the dining room. It’s what the Joneses are up to.

And what exactly IS going on with the Joneses? Yep, the focus needs to be on the news next door.

It was 1990 as the greenhorn editor at a weekly newspaper in New Jersey that I wandered into the paper’s musty morgue (where old copies of the paper are laid to rest) to find issues of the very paper I was editing from the late 1890s. And what did I read on the front page of this century-old broadsheet, among stories of festivals and a nasty summer storm? Columns and columns of peeping missives about the comings and goings of people around town: “Mrs. John Beattle called on Mrs. Jack Brown Thursday for tea and discussion of the recent disruption in the primary school,” – or something very close to that – and all I could think of, aside from nosy interest in the school ruckus 100 years before … what could it be? – was that if this progenitor of mine was devoting a third or more of Page One to this kind of reportage then I darn well ought to pay attention to why.

Shortly after that I moved on to a daily paper before having a chance to try a similar brand of micro-local reporting updated a bit for the modern audience. But in 1996 I found myself in a world of experimentation as a “founder” of Digital City, AOL’s attempt at curating and creating local content; it’s latest is called Patch. I quickly realized news was a big draw online, particularly news that happened within a close proximity to our site’s visitors. I’ll spare the details of how much effort went into persuading local and regional mainstream media that this “information superhighway” thing was good for them, and people typing comments on their reportage was also good, and instead jump to the lesson learned: People adding their thoughts about the hot local news / sports / etc. stories (now known as user-generated content) did not just add to the experience but suddenly became the story. The dirty lawyer scandal took a back seat to people’s personal stories and interactions on the street and in the neighborhood with that dirty lawyer.

This is not to draw attention to the obvious – that people like to comment on what matters to them in a public forum where the ego can blossom. Rather, it’s about a slightly subtler occurrence. People care about what happens in the geographic proximity of their lives, and particularly how the experience of people near them differs from or mirrors their own interpretations. But how to best satisfy that need? We can fast-forward through our tests of hyper-local citizen journalism platforms – here’s a category, suburb and publishing platform… go! – and jump to today where several entities are looking at the travails of the past and trying to meld together inexpensive ways to report, reflect, curate, aggregate or comment about anything that could possibly be paired with the words “news” and “local.”

It’s fair to say many efforts are focused on some mix of a combo meal of professional journalist + freelance journalists + interested volunteers = viable model to satisfy readers and participants in the local happenings of their geographic sphere (with others trying various similar tacks: ReportIt, Everyblock, Outsidein, fwix). It’s a confluence of events that makes this seem workable: lots of reporters are, sadly, out of work and technology has advanced enough to fill gaps that yesterday would have been bridged by a paid human. Fair enough. But possibly that’s all missing the larger point – the little subtlety I alluded to where people want to know what exactly is going on across the street and what do others know and think about it all. Will these new entrants into ‘nearby news’ provide ways for readers or viewers or experiencers to participate in a form of news that illuminates, with proper privacy, the headlines from behind the door at 123 Elm Street? Will we finally know what the Joneses are into before it’s too late and we’re again playing keep-up?

Arguably newspapers are positioned to use their brands to gain entrance into the home of Mrs. Jones, so to speak. But not with something that rolls off a press. The question is whether they can stomach the likely sacrifices this could call for: No local movie reviewer? No traffic reporter, or food editor? Sorry, those are commodities in this world. Will they hire neighborhood “monitors,” and can those kids who used to deliver the papers be turned into information collectors? The infrastructure is there to move this way, but is the will?

Surely those other guys charging ahead online have an answer in mind.

So we’ll see. But put this in ink: Internet Saves Newspapers (if only the news and lots of paper

At first flip, Flipboard is stunning (you have to download the app; the website is a brochure). The free app renders links from top tech and social media sites into a well-designed, magazine-style layout. Flip through content with a flick of the finger. The content-at-your-fingertips interface is intuitive, functional and fun — yet another incremental advance in haptic, information design based on human gestures. Touch screens, the iPad and trackpads move us closer to Minority Report.

But Flipboard is off to a shaky start. The app exhausted capacity within a few hours of launch. Flipboard’s big idea — creating sections for the news that my networks and friends are sharing — fizzled at the start.

I couldn’t add either my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Rather, I was instructed to email Flipboard for an invitation to add content. The shortcomings of the launch made me and other customers cynical.

Without personalized feeds, Flipboard is just elegant aggregator. It’s a leap forward from Internet sites that look as if they’ve been assembled by computer, which they are, or shoveled by news organizations from an old ditch into a new one. Flipboard feeds display-content into images and extended briefs that link to original content. It leaves the impression that content is personal and that on Flipboard it has been curated, redesigned or re-edited with a personal touch.

Incumbents see the threat and are staking out traditional ground. After its impulsive tech writer praised the Pulse News Reader, a visual browsing app, The New York Times forced Apple last month to remove Pulse from the App Stores for infringing on its rights. The app, a $4 download, was reinstated after Times feeds were removed.

The impressive part about Flipboard, as well as Pulse, is that it applies visual, nteractive and social metaphors to news access. The interface is far more appealing than the existing metaphor, the old syndication standby, RSS. RSS pulls original content and formatting from simple, authorized feeds. Traditional providers embrace RSS because they believe it extends distribution of content prepared for another medium by sending users to their destination sites — which happens only some of the time. Flipboard is just one of a new breed of “feed readers” that ditch the visible plumbing of RSS for their own content scrapers. Those scrapers translate content into visual nuggets that fill the nutritional needs of most news consumers on the Internet. The issue is whether they’re fair.

“Fair Use” — the principal that guides usage and linking to original content — remains the force majeure of the Internet. Aggregators and indexers such as Yahoo! and Google have stretched the limits of fair use on one of the fronts of the unholy war with content providers. It’s a war the aggregators winning. The weakened providers have settled for a truce that grants them pageviews from links and RSS feeds. But where traditional news providers have largely capitulated in the interests of survival, the new breed of Internet-only news providers are beginning to take exception. One of them, the technology weblog Gizmodo, even questions whether Flipboard is legal: “Flipboard … has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.”

You can read that sentence in the digital version of Wired, which licenses content from Gizmodo, which supplies content to Flipboard. Presumably, you’ll soon be able to add feeds from your Twitter and Facebook friends linking to the Gizmodo story that appeared in Wired that was picked up by The New York Times and distributed through its RSS feed.

Flip to the next page. It looks better.

Go to Top Secret America. Watch the video, view interactive connections and maps, search the data, weigh in on Twitter, contribute to the project.

Now imagine if newspapers everywhere did this all the time.

1. Freeze flip-flops, walk the Mall until feet thaw.

2. Frozen ritas in the Metro Center ESPN Zone.

3. Turn the AC app on your iPad all the way up.

4. Duck boat tour with crash in the Potomac.

5. Movie at Iceplex 16: Cold Souls.

6. Speed Segway races down Capitol Hill.

7. Edit Flickr photos of February snowstorm.

8. Alaska cruise with Sarah Palin. Cold, very cold.

9. Hurl water balloons from top of Washington monument.

10. Cold showers with Michaela and Taraq Salahi.

Or you could chill with us from 3:30 to 6 pm on Saturday, August 7 at our Lake Anne meetup in Reston with the DC Area Online News Association Meetup Group: paddle-boat rides, WeSpace open house and picnic, Dale’s Pale Ale, and a salon on creativity at Cafe Montemartre.

Sound nice? Click for directions and to RSVP

When we look back, I hope the BP Oilspill will be part of the story – and I hope we’ll call it that, rather than the Gulf Oilspill. The story will be dark, kinda like the 70s. Malaise. Lots of young people out of work – and they want better. I do too.

The global economy was limping along, wars still simmered in Afghanistan and Iraq, not much seemed to be improving for anyone. In the US, the Tea Party in Iowa compared Obama to Hitler in a billboard. Republicans frothed at the prospect of saying hell no to everything, a basketball player’s move from Cleveland to Miami briefly eclipsed all news and about anything; a dozen Russian “sleeper” spies accused of blending in and doing nothing in the US were deported; it was hotter than hell in Virginia and we even had a small earthquake to remind us that the earth itself really can slip from beneath our feet. I felt it. First in my life.

The Oldspice guy was there too.

Then again, maybe we’ll forget all that. Maybe when we look back, this is what we’ll see:

Sure, there’s a web site, online signup and all that. But when we say hub we’re talking about a real place – a co-working office space we’ve designed for creative people who care about how and where they work.

WeSpace is located at We Media HQ, next door to the Lake Anne Coffee House in the historic Lake Anne Village Center of Reston, Virginia. It’s a unique, funky, human-scaled neighborhood in the heart of Northern Virginia’s technology corridor. It’s a visionary notion of the ‘burbs – a walkable community ideal for work and play.

WeSpace is a low-cost alternative to working at home and to virtual offices, cubicle farms and other bland workplaces. You bring your laptop and cell phone, we provide the wifi and workspace in an inspiring environment for work, collaboration and creation. You also get to hang out and share ideas with the We Media crew – and an insider’s look at what we’re working on and how we work.

Co-working is simpler than traditional office rentals, less expensive and designed to offer a creative and collaborative work environment for individuals and small teams that may work at home, in coffee shops or where ever their work takes them.

In our own work we’ve seen first-hand that the nature of work and business itself is changing. For many professions, technology makes work anywhere possible. That might mean you work at home some days, in an airport others, or where ever your business takes you. Co-working provides an inspiring “place” and a community for independent professionals who find they work better together than they do alone. You can read more about co-working and find other co-working spaces here.

If you’re a Northern Virginia entrepreneur, web or app developer, designer, writer, consultant, telecommuter, Starbucks denizen or any kind of mobile, digital creative, we hope you’ll work with us at WeSpace. Memberships, which include wifi, power, kitchen and access to shared meetings spaces and whiteboards, start at $300/month, or $30/day.

Learn more, see photos and sign up for membership at: www.wespace.biz.

So, there I was on a sun-soaked Miami street back in March, mildly hung-over and hailing a taxi to the airport while juggling my suitcase with a billboard-sized check for $25,000. No problem finding a taxi. Or crowds of passersby who wanted to pose for pictures with our winnings.

We’d won the WeMedia PitchIt! Challenge for what we now call ‘Report It’ – an innovative ‘crowd sourcing’ mobile and web app that will turn thousands of citizens into investigative journalists in local communities across the U.S. and beyond, ‘mashing up’ social networks with professional newsrooms and assuring high-quality, high-impact user generated content simply not available anywhere else.

Back in Washington, it was time to turn ideas into action, plans into reality. There were tasks to prioritize, milestones to meet.

We’ve been toiling in offices of Capitol News Connection on workflows, wireframes, user interfaces, algorithms, user reward and recognition for several months now, as we scramble to raise enough funding to build and launch Report It, drive participation and ensure its success and sustainability.

Now we lift the curtain on our progress, ideas and challenges, as we work toward unveiling a 1.0 iteration of Report It this fall. We’re building a user-generated content platform that involves users in every step of the content creation, curation, and distribution process – so we want and value your input as we build and iterate our apps over the coming year.

This summer we’ll be looking for your feedback on everything from the type of assignments you would sign up to complete, how to ensure our user interfaces are elegantly intuitive and fun, how best to recognize and reward users for their contributions, and what would make you shout from rooftops to all your friends about why they must (must!!!) join your assignments and ‘Report It.’

It may be that you are in Louisiana documenting with photos and video the sickening spread of oil into wetlands and beaches. You may want to be one of 2,793 people standing on 2,793 bridges documenting crumbling concrete and corroded steel. It may be that you want to collect conflict of interest statements from local officials in your area, ‘find the pork’ in the financial reform bill, or follow incumbents and challengers on the campaign trail during the Midterm election campaign. You may want push alerts on your iPhone so you can volunteer for breaking news assignments in your area. And of course you will want to provide tips and story ideas for Report It assignments!

Right now we are putting a lot of thought into what sort of assignments Report It users will want to tackle. We want to make sure there’s something for everyone, so we’re matching assignments to interests, expertise, time commitment, user ideas and demand. Not everyone is going to be a Pulitzer or Peabody Award winner, so we want to make sure there’s an assignment for folks at all levels – and that users can improve their contributions, reliability and community ratings, and progress over time.

Broadly speaking, we think quality begins … at the beginning, with highly-focused assignments that limit the chance of failure by pairing users with the right assignments, and by being there to help with real-time advice of award-winning journalists and online tutorials. Quality is also assured by the community, who will rate and rank each others’ submissions, by Report It algorithms, which will help establish user accuracy and impact over time, and by a professional newsroom – our own and those of our content partners.

We’re putting a lot of thought right now into the best way to define and incentivize user success. We’ve started by asking a simple question: What is success? We want users to be accurate. We want them to find out things no one else knows. We want them to help ‘connect the dots’ by discerning patterns or trends. We want them to produce quality video, audio and photos. We want them to create high-impact ‘viral’ content. We want them to bring their friends into assignments. We want them to make waves, change things and improve their communities. In the coming weeks we are working on front-end and back-end solutions that will translate into success – and soon we’ll be running ideas past you as we progress in this ‘bootstrap’ period.

That’s the fun stuff. And, man is it fun! But fun it won’t be if we don’t raise enough money to actually develop and launch the app. So you can imagine, that’s what’s occupying a huge amount of our time right now. We’ve assembled a talented team of developers to get this done, but we have to find a way to pay them – from the mathematicians who will make the algorithms work to the designers and UX experts who will make the app intuitive and fun to use, from the information architecture to the CMS, from iPhone and iPad to Droid, WAP and desktop – it adds up. And we haven’t even talked about the editorial, engagement, sales or marketing teams needed to drive participation, content partnerships and monetization strategies. So we’re all ears about ideas, prospects and introductions for fundraising and investment.

And finally, as we build the 1.0 app, we plan – parallel to our development efforts – outreach to journalism schools, media content partners, local community and interest groups and others to drive early participation. We want to launch with an active user base.

Did I mention we’ve been busy? Did I mention I am also launching an app to increase the hours in the day to 36? Please send your thoughts, comments and ideas to us. We’re all ears! Comment here or catch us at reportit@cncnews.org

Photo by Dierken.

For the record, I own a MacBook and an iPhone 3GS, which I just updated to iOS4.

Processing payments or moving money online via e-commerce solutions can be more complicated than many entrepreneurs expect.

Don’t assume that Paypal or Google Checkout will be your payment processor. Each of these merchant service providers, which handle credit card processing, have their own terms of service and caveats. Paypal for example, requires that each of your customers create a Paypal account. Google Checkout and the other processors all have their own varying fee structures.

Depending on your business model and what types of payments you will be handling these fees can become quite costly. There is also a technology called SSL which encrypts credit card data over the internet. This technology is a must so plan on making an annual purchase of SSL technology with any e-commerce site.

There are also regulatory agencies that you must be in compliance with in order to process payments. In order to process credit cards for example you need to be PCI compliant. If you plan on storing credit card data, or financial data (like banking and check information) you will need to be SAS70 compliant and possibly Sarbanes-Oxley compliant as well.

You may need to be compliant with several of these classifications, so it’s a good idea to get your potential merchant processor on the phone to discuss your business model prior to assuming you will be using their service. You don’t want to hear after the fact that Paypal cannot support your operation because you are not PCI or SAS70 compliant.

Audimated has been through several payment processors and merchant banks in the past few months. We tried Paypal, Authorize.net, Costco Merchant Services and using our local bank (Chase). After reviewing all of these services and being turned down by some, we settled on a smaller company called e-onlinedata.com. We didn’t have a recommendation from any past customers, but rather did price quotes across the industry and settled on one that could work for us. We decided to go with e-online because they were able to provide us an affordable rate and were able to work with our business model.

We have finally settled on a solution that works for us, but wasted significant time learning about compliance after the fact. It is important to research and understand your needs prior to signing up with a merchant provider. Many providers charge an application fee as well so before you spend time, energy and money trying to fix your solution after the fact, spend some effort on research and talk to your provider before applying to make sure it is a good fit.

[Creative Commons Photo by The Consumerist]

Here’s some of what Kennedy wrote:

Berkowitz may not have conceived of SeeClickFix as something that would interest news organisations. But he says he soon discovered it enabled a grassroots style of community journalism that had almost gone out of fashion. For instance, one of the site’s first breaks came when Berkowitz stumbled upon a pothole map on the Boston Globe’s website. He called an editor and told him he could help the Globe do it better. Soon he had a major client.

Read the full article at The Guardian.

Fred McClimans knows as well as anyone how people get/share information and what role technology can, and should, play in that effort. He is an Information, Technology and Business Analyst with over 20 years of experience in developing information/analytical methodologies and content distribution systems for global markets.  In his WeThink essay, Fred explains how he “expected the iPad to be a phenomenal tool for getting news/analysis online.” But after visiting about 40+ different “media” sites, he isn’t convinced.

Here is an excerpt:

I’ve been waiting for Apple’s iPad for about 10 years, ever since the first real “tablet” PC prototypes began to hit the market, and I’ve been logging some serious time on it since it came out – enough to say that if AT&T retains its newly announced tiered data plan structure, I’ll be in the top 2% that will take advantage of the unlimited plan. Yes, I’m impressed with the iPad. Great book readers. Perfect for email and social media sites, not to mention web surfing and tons of cool apps (even though many of them are still suffering from Rev 1.0 Crashing Syndrome). And I’m sure I’ll be equally impressed with many of the coming Droid-based dPad’s and the Microsoft-based mPads that I’ll also buy, analyze and try to break.

What I really like about the iPad is the devices “concept” – it’s not a “touch-screen PC” or laptop replacement and is clearly not a “content creation” device, as evidenced by the fact that writing this piece on my 64Gig 3G unit – without an external keypad – is like watching my 2 yr old try to unlock my cell phone (slightly amusing at first, but ultimately annoying when he figures it out and starts deleting emails). Rather it’s a new breed of device with a form, fit and function radically different from its bigger brother (the Mac) and its smaller siblings (the iPhone/iTouch/iPod, etc.). While the iPad is not bad for email, taking notes, social media sites, etc., this device is clearly a “content delivery and consumption” device.

With this in mind, I expected the iPad to be a phenomenal tool for getting news/analysis online. But after visiting about 40+ different “media” sites, I realized that:

• Most “news/analysis” sites have not yet figured out the iPad’s real function or how to present information in this new X by Y format, not to mention the internal inconsistencies that abound (such as sites that routinely mix Flash and non-Flash video on a page by page basis, or those that offer different page layouts based either by author or subject matter – a major turn-off),
• The iPad highlighted differences between “blogs”, “analytic” and “journalistic” sites (Mashable, btw, still comes across as a blog, CNN as more of a newsy site, the WSJ as a clear journalistic site and the NYTimes as a hybrid split personality “not quite sure” site), and
• Nobody has yet figured out how to appropriately use different media formats to best convey their news/information on the iPad (a great example being a five-page, text-only news story that I read – I don’t remember what the story was about but I do remember it made me feel like I was sitting on a runway tarmac for five hours without bottle of water).

Clearly there are issues with the iPad – and everyone seems quick to highlight them. But these issues are technical in nature and they will be solved (for example, fixed-size images work great on a laptop, but “tappable” thumbnails that expand are ideal for an iPad device).

But the most significant theme that kept coming to mind as I cruised from site to site involved the shortcomings of the individuals who were actually producing the online content – the editors and writers themselves! It wasn’t that their content was bad, but that more often than their “content creation” approach just didn’t match up to the UI (user interface), screen size and “application-oriented” potential of the iPad.

[More later]

Fred’s full essay will be available later this week, so stay tuned.  In the meantime, Fred will be at the Tabula Rasa DC event to share some his thoughts about the iPad, and help brainstorm a more effective use of tablet technology by folks in the content business (details about attending the event available here: http://trdc.eventbrite.com).

Ask questions, raise issues, arrange meet-ups, provide feedback, or note key findings for innovation from the conference. Just bring your iPad and download the Disruptathon app. Or use an iTouch that Disruptathon founder Pete Erickson will provide you at the conference.

TRDC is all about creativity, connections and the latest technology. It’s about participation, too. The Disruptathon platform is just one way we’ll capture ideas and examples from everyone, including TR’s group of Digital da Vincis.

Panels and Powerpoints are for the Digital Dinosaurs. Join us for creative conversation, striking show-and-tell and cool connections on Monday, June 14 at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm. Check out the latest on the program and watch the video.

Register today.