LOJOCONNECT.COM
location-based technology + journalism

By Satta Sarmah

The Lojo Team has been working hard to create a locative experience centered around Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.

We’re attempting to venture into a realm that many media outlets have yet to explore—or so we thought.

As I was surfing the Internet looking for topics to blog about, I came across an interesting feature on the New York Times’ Web site.

In its travel section, the Times has a feature called “Rome at Night.” The feature is accompanied by the usual multimedia suspects–a map and a slideshow.

But what makes the Times’ feature so distinctive is the inclusion of a “Walking Tour of Rome at Night” that users can download to their Ipod.

The tour is narrated by Ian Fisher, chief of the newspaper’s Rome bureau. Fisher also wrote the accompanying article.

Since I’m not in Rome, I obviously can’t experience the tour first hand. Luckily, the NY Times had the foresight to allow the audience to experience the tour online.

The Web site has a map of Rome with more than 10 locations that people can visit on the walking tour. Each location on the online map has two buttons–one for sound and one for audio. People can click on either button to see a photo or hear information about the location.

After seeing the Times’ walking tour, I decided to do a Google search to see if any other publications had done something similar.

It turns out that from 2005-2006, Slate Magazine had a series of audio tours that users could download from its website.

Slate’s first tour was for the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Slate called it an unauthorized tour with “commentary museums don’t want you to hear.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the tour is that Slate’s art critic, Lee Seigel, tells you which paintings are the most overrated and underrated at the museum–a perspective that only a journalism critic could offer.

In previous discussions about locative storytelling, we said it was a great way for newspapers to tell innovative stories that discuss the history of place or report on a once-in-a-lifetime event like the Olympics.

The Times and Slate tours show that this kind of storytelling is great for travel sections as well. However, the challenge will be for news outlets to offer something to travelers that they can’t get from a tour created by a tourism bureau or travel business.

I’m sensing more unauthorized tours are in the works…

By Hilary Powell

How would you like your phone to buzz about a sale at that store you just passed?

For creating an innovative application with Google Inc.’s upcoming free and open mobile operating system, Android, four MIT students recently won a prize in the Google-sponsored Android Developer Challenge to create software that tests the power of open phone systems.

Yahoo! news featured an article Monday about a class project 20 students were given to design a software program for cell phones that uses Google Inc.’s upcoming Android mobile operating system. According to the article, the students tested ways to make cell phones act differently according to location. In a way, they tried to endow cell phones with a kind of conscience:

“One project named GeoLife gives users a way to set to-do lists and get reminders on their phones. Walk by the market, and the device might buzz with a message that you’re supposed to pick up milk. Then there was Locale, which lets users configure their phones to automatically adjust their settings when the devices detect themselves in certain zones. So you might set your phone to automatically go into vibrate mode in the office and silent mode at the movie theater, and ring everywhere else.”

Other applications that made it into the top 50 include a program that discovers pricing and other data for any product with a barcode by scanning the code with a cell phone camera, a tool that allows users to navigate and record a route using images instead of maps and a niche innovation that gives golfers real-time, location-specific information, such as the weather and game statistics.

By Ki Mae Heussner

Road trips just got a whole lot more interesting.

Forget books on tape, talk radio and even in-car DVDs. Earlier this month, a team of sketch comedy writers and actors launched what they’ve dubbed the “world’s first satcom” or GPS-assisted comedy.

Called “230 Miles of Love,” the program is a series of comedy sketches that can be downloaded for free to a GPS-enabled mobile phone or other device. As you cruise the M6 motorway - the longest motorway in the UK - the sketches automatically start to play as you reach relevant points.

For example, as you start to grumble to yourself about the expense of an upcoming toll plaza, a short sketch about the pricey nuisance might start to play.

So far, reports and reviews of the satcom say it’s very humorous and no more distracting than a radio show. The program’s producers - Moving Audio - intend for “230 Miles of Love” to be the first episode in a six-part series of locative media comedies about transport and geography.

They’ve also taken a very open, transparent approach to the project. On their Web site, they clearly explain how they made the GPS tour (they recorded the whole thing in one day and edited it in two) and invite others to experiment with the tools themselves.

The Moving Audio team used Kansas-based Geovative Solutions’ GeoTours Premium to create the satcom but emphasize that the company also offers free applications.

By Joyce Chang

Our project was initially discussed as a way to depict a future event – to show what Chicago would look like if it wins the 2016 Olympic bid – but we’ve also realized that locative storytelling can be a rich tool for envisioning the past.

On May 1, Berlin launched a GPS-based multimedia tour to virtually re-create the Berlin Wall, since very little remains of its physical structure, according to German news site, Spiegel Online. The Mauerguide, a portable device equipped with GPS technology, traces the Wall’s path, offering video and audio eyewitness accounts of the Wall’s creation in 1961 to stop an exodus of people from Soviet-held communist East Berlin.

The Mauerguide tells the story of Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old bricklayer who was shot in the stomach and back by East German border guards as he climbed the Wall in August 1962. He fell back onto the eastern side and was left to bleed to death in no-man’s land as he cried for help.

That is just one of many stories included in the tour. For people who can’t make it to the Berlin Wall site, there are sample tours online. It seems that mostly tourism groups and museums have utilized these types of historical, audio-visual tours up to this point. One reason the media may shy away from using historical locative storytelling is that newspapers generally emphasize current, breaking news, and do not necessarily go into such background depth. But the ability of locative storytelling to provide context for these locations or events makes it a really powerful tool to give a better understanding of history and its lasting effect.

We recently visited the Chicago History Museum to get historical pictures of planned Olympic venue sites. We realized that many of the sites have a rich history, including Washington Park’s role in the World’s Fair in 1893. We also plan to meet with a cultural historian. We will weave these historical pictures and stories into our final project, along with images of the current sites and schematic drawings of what to expect in the future.

By Hilary Powell

As we research the possibilities of Google Maps for our LoJo needs, the team realizes that it’s important to know the limitations of such technology.

In establishing our goals for locative storytelling, we must take into account that there are some places kept private, even in the virtual world.

For example, just last month, Google pulled Pentagon pictures of U.S. military bases from Google Maps. According to the BBC News, the military denied access to the company because “close-up, ground-level imagery of US military sites posed a ‘potential threat’ to security.”

In early April, reports surfaced in the blogosphere that the Singapore government is pondering a ban on Google Earth for fear the images infringe on the Singapore Land Authority copyright.

To ensure that the company protects individual privacy, Google has taken a few precautions. According to CNet News:

Now anyone can alert the company and have an image of a license plate or a recognizable face removed, not just the owner of the face or car, says Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.

By Satta Sarmah

We’ve seen interactive maps used to recount historical events like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination or to make public data on city crimes and home foreclosures more accessible to average citizens.

Now, one organization in New York City is using an interactive map to build community awareness and promote much-needed development in neighborhoods across the city.

The Community-Based Planning Task Force of the Municipal Art Society has created an “Atlas of Community-Based Plans in New York City.”

The task force touts the atlas as the “only publicly accessible compilation of the city’s community-based plans.”

The map appears to be the first of its kind in any U.S. city.

Though it’s labeled as an atlas, it’s basically an interactive map powered by Google. Each trigger point on the map has links to a text pdf version of a community-based plan for a particular area, whether it be Coney Island, East Harlem or Chinatown.

The task force also made the atlas very user-friendly and location-centric. Users can search for plans by borough or by type. For example, you can look up community plans in Brooklyn or search for housing revitalization and water revitalization plans. The atlas includes current plans and plans dating back to 1989.

The atlas was initially created to provide local political candidates with in-depth information about improvement efforts in certain communities. However, the atlas is also being used as a road map for communities that want to mimic plans created in other neighborhoods.

Presumably, the task force has used the atlas to push community development efforts to the forefront of the city’s consciousness. In their explanation, the task force said they created the map because the city seems to be committed on paper to improving disadvantaged areas, but needs to put in more elbow grease to complete these projects.

The atlas has certain implications for journalists, especially community and urban affairs reporters. It could be a good source for stories, provide reporters with an overview of neighborhood concerns on their beat and help them determine the efforts local politicians are making to address these issues.

By Joyce Chang

Unlike celebrities, most journalists don’t typically walk around with an entourage. But our team’s test creation of a Mediascape today resembled that sort of spectacle, raising curious looks from fellow students and even a Chicago Sun-Times reporter.

As we tested our location-based mobile tour while walking near our classroom in Evanston, we took photos and videos of ourselves to document our process, while being giddy with excitement when multimedia elements (also known as “media events”) would trigger as expected on the device.

Although our final project will focus on planned Olympic venues throughout Chicago, we wanted to see for ourselves that we could easily load photos, audio and video into the GPS device, and that they would automatically be displayed or heard at the appropriate locations along our mini-tour.

The test run proved to be useful in identifying some of the following limitations to consider when developing our final project, as well as potential solutions:
• Difficulty viewing the GPS device’s screen outdoors (Possible solution is to provide a visor to shield the screen from the glare of natural light)
• Difficulty hearing audio without headphones, especially near busy traffic intersections (Solution is to provide headphones to tour participants)
• Difficulty viewing video (Possible solution is to download a Pocket PC Flash player onto the GPS device or to re-save videos using the detailed specifications suggested by the Mediascapes Wiki help files)

One of the more worrisome problems was that the Mediascape tour did not work when we retraced our steps on our return trip. We thought it could be that the device only triggers a multimedia event once, rather than multiple times when covering the same ground. So we restarted the device and started it at the beginning point of our return trip. But the device still failed to trigger events at several points. The device finally worked after another try, but the test run raised questions about reliability and possible signal interferences.

Suggestions from our test run included:
• A desire to have the multimedia only play once for a given spot (If the user pauses in a particular spot, we don’t want the multimedia to continue to loop and to repeat the same material.)
• A welcome screen that remains until users enter a hotspot for multimedia (otherwise, users just see an empty black screen until they trigger a multimedia event.)
• A pause function during the tour
• A primary use of color photos rather than black-and-white images, which didn’t appear as clearly or have as much contrast on the device

Here are some images from our test run today (Click on each to get a larger view):

By Hilary Powell

Savage winds are common in the twister-prone prairies of the Central U.S., but, on Monday, southeastern Virginia was pummeled with an unexpected series of tornadoes.

In their coverage of the rare event, a number of news outlets used maps to help readers grasp the depth of the destruction.

But some industry watchers wondered why the use of location-based technology wasn’t more widespread and/or sophisticated.

The issue was brought to the team’s attention by a Roosevelt University professor in Chicago who recently took our survey on how locative technology is being used in newsrooms.

He was hoping to find even a simple, non-interactive map showing where the tornadoes hit in Virginia, but both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune disappointed him, he wrote to me in an e-mail.

So I went looking for stories that used maps to explain what happened.

A Google search for ‘Virginia AND map’ resulted in a trickle of stories accompanied by a map, including one from The Examiner online. It used a basic Google Map, with a bullet point focused on Suffolk, a city where emergency crews were deployed after the storm. But besides clicking the dot — revealing the longitude and latitude of the location — there was not much interactivity involved.

The Virginian-Pilot’s online map of the area is a step up in terms of locative technology. The Pilot’s map zooms in on the Suffolk area and provides a tool that allows viewers to plot and enter small blurbs about their own “storm stories.” I wish those stories had added some pictures and maybe even home footage. If the map is going to be labeled “interactive,” let’s not skimp on the possibilities of that term. Still, the map key helps to break down details on road closures and major damage. It’s a strong example of using maps to localize a story.

Finally, after much online searching, CNN.com gave me the Flash fix I needed to better understand how the storms devastated specific locations.

These are just a few examples of how news outlets are using available locative technology to tell stories in interesting, forward-thinking ways, and they will help us determine where to go next.

By Ki Mae Heussner

Location, location, location. It’s the most oft-repeated mantra in real estate. But now that location-based services are sprouting up all over the Web, it’s starting to take on a new meaning to more and more professionals in the news media.

Charged with devouring as much as we can about mobile technology and its applications for journalists, team LoJo has been scouting the Web for updates on how newsrooms are adapting to and capitalizing on locative media.

During the past few weeks, we’ve encountered some excellent examples of location-based storytelling that seem likely to push more newsrooms into the emerging geo-journalism space:

- Earlier this month, the New York Times and Google announced a new partnership that allows readers to track articles geographically using Google Earth. (If you want to see what’s going on in Paris, for example, a few clicks on a Google Earth map will show you the latest headlines coming out of the French capital.)

- When protesters attempted to disrupt the Olympic torch procession in San Francisco, the Sacramento Bee used Qik (technology that streams live footage from videophones to a Web-based flash player) to broadcast live videos of the scuffle.

- And, just the other night, as we waited for the results of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary to come in, we were treated to a high-tech presentation on CNN, featuring correspondent John King and a gigantic, touch-sensitive interactive map.

These examples give us the sense that locative media is gaining a foothold in newsrooms across the country, but… we know that there’s a lot going on out there that we still don’t know.

So, to scrape together a clearer picture of locative media usage, we’ve posted a survey online.

If you’re a working journalist or work in the news media in some other capacity, please help us out and complete our (very short) survey. If you don’t work in a newsroom, but know those who do, please forward on the link below.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Pw7knnDn37s7tY0C9sA2Pw_3d_3d

As always, we’ll share the results online, along with our own analysis.

By Amy Lee

Industry chatter for years has suggested that the “newspaper” of tomorrow will be produced and distributed on paper-free portable electronic devices. To a certain extent, this is true today, as users can navigate the Internet, search newspapers’ sites and read stories displayed on most current cell phones. But this process (in my case, at least) is often slow and clumsy, and it’s one more feature of a phone – not a device dedicated solely to e-news reading.

So I was intrigued to learn that Orange, the telecommunications brand of France Telecom, on April 17 launched a test run of Read & Go, a portable “electronic newspaper kiosk” that allows users to access five French newspapers. It’s kinda like Amazon’s Kindle e-reader in that users access the newspapers via touch screen and it’s Wi-Fi and 3G-enabled. It’s also kind of large compared to a cell phone. The five newspapers involved in the trial are Le Monde, Le Parisien, Les Echos, L’Equipe and Télérama; Orange claims information from each newspaper will be refreshed on the Read & Go every hour. The device also offers 1 GB of storage (enough for 200 newspapers, according to Orange) and 30 eBooks, including novels and city guides.

The company is currently seeking about 150 users to try the device for about two months, and also hopes to geolocate ads on the device. This tied right into the LoJo Connect team’s focus of supplying information to users based on their location. Personally, I think the Read & Go looks a tad large and that most people prefer a multi-use mobile device (like cell phones with Web access, etc.) to carrying around yet another portable tech device. But it’s cool that users can access several newspapers at once and that it’s free to navigate, for now anyway. This is perhaps the best example yet of the heavily foreshadowed portable e-newspaper of the future and could help carve the direction of e-news and location-based advertising, so it’s worth checking out.