(Cross-posted from beta.boston.com)
Stitching together multiple realtime video feeds, syncing questions and and answers to videos, crowd-sourced editing of video highlights, and automated news karaoke — these were some of the ideas brainstormed at Monday’s Knight Mozilla Hacks/Hackers Boston Beerathon.
The crowd of “hackers, reporters, editors, students, interested oddballs, etc.” (as described by Globe Creative Technologist Chris Marstall) met up at MIT’s Medial Lab to tackle the topic of “Unlocking video”, the first of three Knight Mozilla Innovation Challenges (the others are reinventing discussions and general ‘blow our minds’ killer news apps).
An MIT research project is looking for beta testers for its Knight News Challenge proposal for a WordPress data visualization plugin. Sign up on their blog.
As Professor David Karger writes, his team has created a WordPress plugin called Datapress that lets folks WYSIWYG author interactive visualizations of any data without any programming. Using the tool, users can drop maps, timelines, tables, charts, lists, thumbnail grids, and graphs into your article the same way images drop in an image.
About 25 people gathered at the MIT Media Lab on October 30 for a Hack/Hackers Boston co-organized event to build geolocal apps using OpenBlock, an open source hyperlocal news and data gathering system based on Django. OpenBlock is based on EveryBlock. Boston Innovation had great coverage and a video, which can be seen above, which interviews Matt Carroll, of the Boston Globe, and Nick Grossman, of OpenPlans, who did the heavy lifting to organize the event.