I'm just wrapping up 4 days of this year's North American Drupalcon in Washington, DC - http://dc2009.drupalcon.org. First off, the the DCDC team led by the folks at Development Seed have done a fantastic job. Everything from the venue to the identity design of the whole conference have been most ex...

MTV tacked on a $500 stocking stuffer to the final paychecks of those charity bloggers it was avoiding paying. Could it be the raunchy Viacom network believes in God? Or at least karma? Eh, maybe. The two Street Team members we heard from were certainly happy about the money. One called it "a nice g...

MTV claims checks are in the mail to the "citizen journalists" it really didn't want to pay, even though it got a big charity grant on their behalf. The network feels just terrible. MTV VP Ian Rowe called Sara Benincasa (pictured), a member of the Knight Foundation-funded "Street Team '08," to say "...

An MTV "citizen journalist," Erica Anderson, has gone public to describe "grueling" work conditions on a charity-sponsored project, and to confirm what anonymous coworkers told us Friday: The network isn't paying project staff. Anderson, identified by name here, boldly posted an account of her exper...

This week the Knight Foundation launched its latest Drupal project Knight Pulse. The Knight Foundation works on a broad range of issues related to innovative media work and improving access to information for people and communities. Knight Pulse is a new community site designed to bring everyone inv...

Last night I attended a presentation by Susan Mernit (Twitter) about the Knight News Challenge , an initiative by the Knight Foundation to promote democracy and discourse through innovative digital (and social) media projects. My notes on the presentation, which I first heard of through my employer,...

Got a great idea to improve how information is spread and exchanged in your local community? Then read on and see how to cash in on the five-year, $24-million Knight Community Information Challenge. In this email interview conducted by Leonard Witt, Mike Maidenberg, a former Knight Foundation VP and...

I had dinner Friday night with Dean Mills and several other folks from the University of Missouri J-School. Not one word was said about the death of print, the crushing debt loads taken on by big publishing companies, or other depressing topics that tend to dominate journalism conversations (and blo...

The dots are getting more interesting to connect. Consider the TV and film writers strike. What sparked it? The concern that digital revenue will soon surpass what writers have been taking through traditional channels led to the strike. And since it's really tough to estimate digital revenues -- and...

The Census Bureau is a treasure trove of information about communities. But sometimes getting to the data and making sense of it takes a bit of work. It can be hard to find the data and even harder to wade through it, especially if you want to use it in a Web application. To help, Professor Wendell ...