This week’s podcast is a joint interview with three of the minds and voices behind CNET’s Buzz Out Loud — Tom Merritt, Natali Del Conte and Jason Howell (Monday co-host Molly Wood was unable to make the interview). Buzz Out Loud may be an audio (and video) podcast, but it utilizes ...

This week’s Leaderboard is all about participation.  We are featuring three distinct ways beat bloggers are getting their users involved and harnessing the collective intelligence of their communities. In today’s era of limited journalism resources, utilizing a knowledgeable user base...

It’s a new year, and it’s time for a new Leaderboard. Remember, you can join our Publish2 group and submit nominees whenever you want. You can also DM us nominees @beatblogging. You can also e-mail us nominations as well. The first Leaderboard of the new year is a mix of the old with the...

I care about news. It’s why I love talking with Gabe Rivera, the guy who makes TechMeme and a bunch of similar sites, like I did in Paris France at the recent LeWeb Conference. I told him that TechMeme has grown cold for me, which is why I wanted a new system — one where humans bring me ...

The problem with crowd sourcing is the overabundance of opinions, suggestions and remarks you’ll get from the community. How to sort these out? And how can you decide which ones can be taken seriously? A possible solution for this selection problem is to add an expert layer. BloggerInsight has...

A recent report on mobile technology use by NGOs that Paul blogged about last week included an innovative example of how mobile sensing technology is revolutionizing data collection. “ According to [Eric]Paulos [of Intel Research, California], in many cases our knowledge of ambient air quality...

  novhk (pronounced “invoke�) calls itself “The First Community-Managed Eco-Friendly Surf-Inspired Clothing Company.� The Los Angeles-based cooperative has been recruiting members since December and, with over 2800, is set to launch on June 5. For $50/year, members will help make major bu...

What the hell does a product-design site like Kluster have in common with a community-filtered news service like Digg? They both use vibrant communities of enthusiastic—and perhaps overly......

Cambrian House (review), a website which allowed ideas to be crowdsourced (many people work together) into products, has ‘failed’. They are selling their assets to another venture film for much less than what was invested in it. As their CEO said ‘our model failed’. I am not ...

Microfinance is justly seen as a savior for millions around the world. As of 2007 it’s estimated that over 16 million of the world’s poorest benefit from the small extensions of credit that the over 7000 global microcredit organizations channel. The volume of loans now approaches some $2...