Drupal Planet (published to the world instantly)

I think every connection between Drupal and people (and the occasional knight) who are trying to finally get the semantic web built is a good thing.

So I was happy to see where the link went in this e-mail from Calais today:

Live from the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's News Challenge announcements looked a little like the Drupal show. It may not be millions of dollars, but millions more people are likely to be using new local, cutting edge community news Drupal sites within a couple years.

Among the winners:

• Margaret Rosas and her Drupal-focused web shop, Quiddities, will be creating a Drupal installation profile for public radio stations ($327,000).
• Tony Shawcross has his eyes on the 1,000 public access channels across the country. His project is to build them a set of tools in Drupal to share programs and information and where users take a larger role ($380,000).
• Alexander Zolotarev will help the citizens of a small town in Russia share their reactions to becoming the center of the 2014 Olympics ($600,000). (Insider information puts Drupal as the likely platform for this people-powered coverage.)

Other projects may well use Drupal, and they are all amazingly awesome in any case. The caliber of people this round may be indicated by another winner, with Martin Moore, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who uses Drupal to blog. And he did some other thing about inventing the World Wide Web.

My favorite of all though is David Cohn's plan for community funded reporting, Spot.us. But he still hasn't settled on Drupal! So Drupal developers, get ready to respond to his request for proposal. Drupal world domination in the service of reporting in the service of democracy to save the world.

Update Spot.us is surely worthless 'cause it won't be using Drupal. BUT:

Dan Pacheo's Bakersfield-born project Printcasting uses Drupal.

And don't anyone forget the separate, and very exciting, Knight Drupal Initiative, which is for any idea that can make Drupal better for local public interest journalism.

Related: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs.

Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem.

As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a key opportunity for people doing journalism.

With original investigation and with editorial discretion, real reporting serves to increase the signal and filter out the noise.

However, most ways of generating revenue from journalism come from the editorial role, and news organizations are losing control of this role. Yet the real issue isn't whether Google, Inc. or the New York Times Company does the filtering, it's how whoever has this power uses it.

Ultimately, we can trust controlling the flow of information to no one but ourselves. The future of journalism (and consequently democracy, and humanity, and all that jazz) depends on not allowing private interests to monopolize the lifeblood of human organization, communication.

If we expect to pay for aggregation and filtering services through attention, loss of privacy, and lack of control, and the work of hard reporting is not paid directly, then journalism truly is in trouble.

Subverting this expectation will help build an environment where people sustain hard journalism. We can and should do aggregation ourselves. Investigation we should expect to pay for.

At NewsTools2008 (Journalism That Matters, the Silicon Valley sessions) this week I will be talking to anyone who will listen about mass communication for collaboration with moderation by the many, not the few.

But the reason I have the privilege of a blog at PBS.org/idealab is a less ambitious, more practical project: Related Content.

From before proposing this tool and in the time since, developers have released dozens of modules relating to relating content in Drupal.

What will set the Knight News Challenge-funded Related Content project apart from others is the focus on using computer-suggested relations to make it easier for people to establish human-vetted connections.

So far the project has its information architecture – URI (web address) based, rather than Drupal node-based – and a plugin system to use other modules for related content suggestions. The first public release is coming soon.

The goal is to greatly lower the barrier people's participation in increasing the signal to noise ratio. And yes, to prove we can do it ourselves. Not as opposed to journalistic editorial decisionmaking, which will always have a role in journalism, but as opposed to the overarching aggregators (online and off) that tempt us to exchange control of communication for convenience.

On the last hours of the coding sprint following the amazing Drupal conference, I accosted Steven Peck and asked in person about (one of my many) pet issues: that documentation (or any non-spam node) not be deleted from Drupal.org. Assorted drupallers wandering around MIT agreed with this in principal, but also agreed with Steven that old content referring to unsupported versions of Drupal would have to be very clearly flagged.

Enter the Term message module, which Agaric Design Collective hopes can address this problem.

Right now it uses the Drupal message system and I would like feedback on whether to use that, or blocks, or Drupal hook_help before working on theming.

I'm on the go all weekend and apologize for the hasty work, but this is quite important to me and I would even hope that it become official policy during and for Drupal.org redesign to only archive and deprecate content, never delete and break links.

Save the nodes!