Conceived last Monday, and built in a three-day coding sprint that ended in the wee hours this morning, the site tracks the environmental impact of the elections by comparing winning candidates with environmentally-friendly endorsements.

The numbers

Amy Gahran got the scoop with her E-Media Tidbits post:

The site’s home page features a meter bar currently set to zero. That will change as election results come in tonight. You can also view races by state, with links to specific eco-group endorsements given to specific candidates. …

But the analysis goes deeper than that. Below the meter bar is a percentage figure. That’s where Envirovote gauges the level of enviromintiness of the 2008 elections. Boyer defines enviromintiness as “The freshness of the breath of the nation. Technically, this is the percent change in the eco-friendliness of this year’s elections compared to the last applicable elections for the same seats.”

We calculate the eco-friendliness of a candidate based on how many environmental endorsements they’ve received compared to their race-mates.  Most of the endorsement data, as well as candidate and race information was lovingly sucked through the tubes from Project Vote Smart.  Other data was pulled from Wikipedia and the environmental groups’ websites.

The awesomeness to come

The enviro-meter hasn’t moved yet, but very soon it’ll show the environmental impact of today’s election.  We’ll post the results as they come in tonight, and if America made environminty choices, those bars are gonna start turning green!

So, what are you waiting for?

Check out enviroVOTE tonight, as the polls come in!  And for the play-by-play, follow us on Twitter!

The New York Times Visualization Lab… allows readers to create compelling interactive charts, graphs, maps and other types of graphical presentations from data made available by Times editors. NYTimes.com readers can comment on the visualizations, share them with others in the form of widgets and images, and create topic hubs where people can collect visualizations and discuss specific subjects.

It’s based on the technology developed by the folks at Many Eyes (about which I’ve blogged before). In this implementation you can’t upload your own data. Instead, the data you’re able visualize is provided by the Times editors.

Still learning a bit

The interface is pretty cludgy, and the initial data sets don’t quite work with the canned visualizations (NYT folks: if you’re watching, see below for my bug report), but they should be able to work that stuff out.

My other complaint is that the data is more like what I’d look for in an atlas than I’d expect from a newspaper. Party Affiliation By Religious Tradition, National League HR per AB Leaders 2006-2008, and Sarah Palin’s Speech at the RNC are fun as a start, but don’t realize the potential of this system.

I sure hope data sets discovered while researching New York Times stories get uploaded to the lab. They’ve got to have some FOIAed federal data on their desktops. That kind of stuff is begging for citizen journalism.

Or, do it yourself

If you love this, you’ll want to take a swing at making your own charts over at the full-featured Many Eyes site. I’ve been playing with the Illinois State Board of Education’s schools report card data:

(The Times did make one huge improvement… their embedded charts have a *way* better color scheme.)

Nathan at FlowingData weighted in on the Lab last night:

I said the API was a good step forward. The Visualization Lab is more than a step. … I’m looking forward to seeing how well Times readers take to this new way of interacting.

Agreed. I’m really excited about this. It ain’t perfect, but it’s an exciting development for online news, especially if they start uploading lots of source materials and make it a bit easier to use. The big question is: Will people use it?

The web is not TV

Television news has gotten us used to a specific format of video. But a TV piece doesn’t make much sense on the web, especially when you’re accompanying a written story. I don’t need an intro, talking heads, or scrolling text updates online. I’m already reading the story! All I want is the payoff.

Show me the gaffe. The explosion. The kid saying something adorable. I don’t want to see a reporter, or your logo, an ad or anything else. Just the goods. Use video when words fail to capture the moment.

This bit from CNN.com does it right. News videos are usually a separate piece from the written article, this one is the exception to the rule. (Compare to this other piece from CNN.com.) The videos cut to the chase and go straight to her dialogue — they are an interesting accompaniment to the story.

But wouldn’t they be more effective embedded directly into the story, as illustrations? Couldn’t we treat videos like photos in a magazine? Instead of using video as an alternative to reading, use it to punctuate ideas.

Enter the long picture

When Flickr introduced video support earlier this year, their photo-loving users flipped. To calm them down, Flickr suggested that the community thought of them as “long photos.” By limiting the time of a video to 90 seconds, they encouraged brevity and simplicity of production.

& by striatic

Blurry, short, and fan-freakin-tastic

12seconds and Seesmic are already thinking this way, but about conversations. They show us something very important: Video doesn’t need to be perfect to be compelling. Watching John Cleese and a little girl have a conversation is totally great even if the video is brief and grainy.

You don’t need videographers

I’ve found the sweet spot length of a video is under a minute for sure, and I’ve been quite happy with videos eight to twelve seconds in length. With a video that short, folks don’t really care if the camera shakes or if it’s a little fuzzy. And you don’t need to edit it! Just shoot a bit of video, upload and embed.

And the gear couldn’t be simpler. My $300 Panasonic TZ5 digital camera takes great pictures and shoots *HD video*. Plus it’s got image stabilization and a mother of a zoom lens. Or you can keep it super simple and pick up a Flip - they’re cheap and do a great job. (I shot the video embedded above on my TZ5. For more examples, check out my Long pictures set on Flickr.)

This is simple stuff. You don’t need expensive equipment or a video production team. News organizations are already encouraging their reporters to take photos — why not ask them to shoot a bit of video too? It doesn’t need to be perfect to tell a great story on the web.

Facebook says Connect will enable users to:

• Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
• Connect and find their friends who also use your site
• Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

By clicking on a button like the one above, you’ll be automagically logged in to our site!  This enables us to do some very interesting things, as I wrote about on the Crunchberry blog:

Besides lowering the mental overhead of forcing a user into signing up for yet another account, we’ll be able to play with real, established social networks. (And without expecting folks to set up a friends list on a site that none of my friends use!)

For instance, when a user makes a comment, we’ll push it to their Facebook feed. Will you be more likely to comment if you know your friends will see what you have to say? Will you be less likely to act like a jackass?

A little Face(book) to Face(book) chat

We’re betting that we can increase the quantity and quality of conversations by bringing them into to your network.  Why would I comment in a vacuum?  I want my friends to hear what I have to say.  And when they do, maybe they’ll back me up.  And since I’m being heard, maybe I’ll think twice before being a jerk.

Yay, props!  Yay, shame! It’s almost like a real world argument.  All we need now is a pitcher of beer and a table to pound on. Is there a django plugin for that??

Part one was a brief attempt at defining agile and explaining why it’s important:

What can happen in a year?  Twitter catches on.  The stock market crashes.  Your competitor releases a new product.  A new congress is elected, and they change the laws.  It’s discovered that margarine is healthier than butter.  Your business model becomes obsolete.  And you’ve invested nine months in a product that nobody needs anymore.

And let’s just say that you’re living in a time warp, and the world remains completely static, who’s to say that you even got the requirements right in the first place?  If you’re wrong, you just invested a year of work in a system that doesn’t work for your users.

As a great Chicagoan once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once and a while, you could miss it.”  Your requirements will change.  Agile teams are prepared for the chaos.

Part two in the series begins to explain how our team is implementing agile processes: how we meet, the weekly atomic work cycle known as an iteration, and why we think meetings are toxic.  Plus, it’s got a great parenthetical reading list:

(… If you want to do this right, read Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin, and The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andy Hunt, and Dave Thomas.  Or even better, go to Ann Arbor and learn it from the badasses at The Menlo Institute.)

(Also, read Getting Real by the folks at 37signals.  Please, just trust me on this one.  It’s important.  Much more important than reading this silly blog post, that’s for sure.)

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be sharing our design process, task and defect tracking, how we test, and lots more.  Stay tuned!

The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign.

Read Write Web’s take is on:

One thing that big media still does have a particularly good share of, though, is information processing resources and archival content. The Times’ campaign contribution API is a good example of this. The newspaper is far better prepared to organize that raw information, and perhaps offer complimentary content, than any individual blogger or small news publisher. …

When developers create applications that use their data, the Times will once again assert itself as an essential part of our information landscape - both in mind share and in inbound links/Search Engine Optimization for their online content.

Outstanding.

When we visited the Gazette, Cedar Rapid’s daily paper a few weeks ago, the city was still soggy.  The streets were lined with discarded appliances and stacks of rotten home remains — though we were reassured that things looked *far* better than a few months ago.

A&W on Ellis Blvd. by justj0000lie

It is in this setting that my final project at Medill began.  Our team of six budding new media journalists, under the guidance of instructors Rich Gordon and Jeremy Gilbert, has teamed up with the Gazette to create something for their community.

Our mission?  To build and strengthen connections among 20 to 35 year olds in Cedar Rapids.

Rich’s take:

The decision to target young adults was sensible, given their heavy use of digital media. Still, I think it also increased the “degree of difficulty”…. Local media companies have had some success creating online products geared to this audience, but they have usually revolved around entertainment….

This week comes the hard part: settling on the core idea for the students’ innovation. What kind of site or service will they try to build? How will this site or service connect young adults in eastern Iowa? What role will news or journalism play?

I’ve got a feeling that the next ten weeks are gonna be frantic and fascinating.  If you’re interested in following along, we’re recording our experience over at the Team Crunchberry blog.

Crunchberry?

In honor of the berry-riffic scent that wafts from the Quaker Oats plant through downtown Cedar Rapids, we named our team after a certain breakfast cereal that’s close to all our hearts.  If we can continue making champion decisions such as this one, we’re destined for success.

Today at the Online News Association conference, Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news tech at the NYT, told a session audience that they are planning to release this tool as an open-source project!

(He said it’ll be on Amazon EC2, though I’m not sure exactly what that’ll amount to.)

Details are slim, but this seems like a pretty cool thing. Pilhofer didn’t give a timeline on this project, or on their previously-announced news API, but both are on the way.

I’m guessing it’ll be after the election. They’re probably pretty busy creating all those kick-ass visualizations.

UPDATE: Be sure to check Aron’s comment below. It will be open source, but they’ll also deploy it to EC2 for folks to use instantly.

Between now and when the [next Medill innovation project] starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore.

Right now there are two competing ideas, neither of them yet specific enough to organize the class around:

• Civic engagement through online conversations
• Mobile content and services

This project will be my primary focus for the next three months. We’ve got a great team, but we’re still hunting for a killer idea. What’s a great news problem to solve?

As for the platform, I’m leaning towards Android. (Admittedly, I’m putting the cart waaay in front of the horse here. The platform should always follow the idea, buuut…) The new gear from Google’s phone project is coming soon, and I agree with John Biggs at TechCrunch:

An open, powerful platform backed by a major, web-focused corporation is better than a useless accretion of outdated functions owned by a Borg-like conglomerate [Microsoft] or an OS created by a gnomic, arbitrarily pissy design company [Apple] in my book.

What do you think six budding new media journalists, two of whom code, should do for a quarter? Ryan and I could hack something pretty substantial in three months!

Any ideas?

Starting today, CNN will allow all users to embed videos from CNN on their blogs or social network profiles. With this, CNN is following a growing trend among news organizations like MSNBC, FoxNews, and CBS. … CNN is clearly hoping to see some of its clips go viral, and with the political season in the U.S. heating up in the run-up to the November election, they might just have chosen the right time to enable this feature.

It doesn’t work perfectly yet: I couldn’t get the embed button to work properly in my browser (Firefox on Ubuntu Linux, it works on my Windows virtual machine), and for some reason the embed button is disabled on the front page item on the video site (maybe a conscious choice, but if you’re clever enough to find the video at the bottom of the page and click it, the button comes to life.). UPDATE: the button doesn’t work until you click play. Doh.

Why I hate widgets