writer/coder

For January and half of February I’m traveling in India. I’m starting in Bombay and spending five days until I go on a tour with intrepid travel. It will take me from Bombay to Delhi, stopping at towns and cities along the way. And I’ll end in Delhi where I’ll meet two freinds and spend two weeks exploring the city and surrounding area.

Check my flickr for photos. I’ll be uploading a few here and there (Internet has been slow and spotty for the first few days).

We presented News Mixer this week to Medill Facult, friends and to our partner, The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. People loved it. The internets were all a twitter about our project.

News Mixer is your home for connection and interaction around news in Eastern Iowa. News Mixer adds a new dimension to your relationships with your Facebook friends by taking advantage of a new service called Facebook Connect. We hope News Mixer will helps you build new connections with other people interested in talking about Eastern Iowa news.

This first version of News Mixer is a demonstration site for you to test and explore. Take a look around! We would love your feedback.

I’ll be posting more about the project when I get the time to write. In the meantime – checkout our code.

We got some write-ups:

Medill’s News Mixer remixes story comments – Patrick Beeson said it “could be a game-changing effort for news story comments,” and Richard Kendall, an editor for

Newsmix opens the door to engagement – Richard K called Newsmixer “Very impressive”

A good day for new media in Illinois – Classmate Erin Halasz wrote about our project

I’ve setup a Google code project with my work on the CTA Accidents and Derailments project. I’m slowly plugging away at building a Django back-end to make data entry simple and open to everyone.

If you are interested in contributing to this project in any way send me a message or leave a comment.

My fellow hacker j-school classmate Brian Boyer and I spent our weekend putting together a web site called enviroVOTE. It tracked the election results and showed the envirominty-ness of the elected candidates. We lined-up candidates with endorsements each received from environmental interest groups and used a meter to show how the environment was faring in the election.

Lifted from my story on the News 21 project website:

How might this election change our country’s policy on the environment? At enviroVOTE.us, we show you the potential impact of this election by reporting how people are voting for candidates endorsed by environmental groups.

The centerpiece of the Web site is a large meter that fills up based on the number of newly elected candidates with environmental credentials. We are also comparing this year’s election with previous elections to see if the new crop of law-makers are greener then the last. Think environmintier officials to freshen the breath of the country.

Drill down through the site and find the meters for the results in specific states. Look at individual races to see what endorsements the candidates received and find out more about each candidate.

The night went well, we ran into some technical issues throughout the evening, but no show stoppers. Brian did a great job of promoting the hell out of the site. Here is some of the coverage:

• Little Green Animals: Will the planet win the day
• Amy Gahran on E-Media tidbits: Envirovote: How Green Is This Election Season?
• Amy Gahran on Contenious: Envirovote.us: Keeping important context visible
• Envirovote on Boston.com’s Green Blog
• StarNewsOnline.com’s EVER GREEN: Envirovote to track how “green” the election winners are
• News21 Project: Introducing enviroVOTE: Is the environment winning in this election?
  
• Medill News Service
  

Brian also setup a twitter page. At the last minute, he wired up envirovote to automatically twitter as we updated election results in the system. Very cool.

We had a lot of help from Medill grad students Alexander Reed and Julia Dilday, without whom entering all the election results would not have been possible.

UPDATE:

Another post about enviroVOTE:

AcClimate: How “enviro” were Tuesday’s votes?

I love this thing.

I watched bits and pieces of the VP debate on Thursday night, but had a bit cute overload watching Palin, and donchaknowit – I had to turn it off.

So friday I looked around the interwebs for a good thorough recap of the debate and found the New York Times interactive video of the debate. I watched the whole thing over the course of Friday, and that night showed my brother the highlights. It was so easy to pick out the best parts: Palin’s shout outs and winks, and Biden on McCain the maverick and his family.

New York Times debate interactive screenie

It would be great to see more video presented this way – especially talking-head video. Better yet nytimes should linkify the transcripts of the debate, allowing people to go in depth and find out what the candidates are talking about.

Cool.