When we agree with something, it’s very natural to say, “oh yeah, I like that!” That phrase seems like something we all own, something that we all have a little stock in (like how all those Green Bay residents get a piece of the Packers, you know what I mean) when it’s said. But somehow, someway, Facebook has managed to take over those three words, and along with them, the thumbs up sign we all know, love, and hand out freely when we agree with something.

It’s nearly impossible to disassociate the “like” button with Facebook these days, and we’re feeling awfully strained just thinking of something similar to the phrase. In our project, we want to create a rating system, something that allows users to agree with statements and throw their support behind a particular answer to a topic. Sure, “agree” seems alright, but what sort of symbol goes with that?

We’ve tossed around a raised hand, a dog catching a frisbee, a smiley face, and the most recent, a flaming number (that indicates it’s a “burning question”). And I can totally get behind the “burning questions” idea, but during our usability testing our participants are seriously confused by the concept.

And I’m seriously steamed with the swashbuckling Mark Zuckerberg; we want our site to reflect community concerns, not look immediately like a Facebook offshoot. So I have to ask, hyper-local community, what other ways can you say “like?”

A big portion of getting from step 1 to step…well, I’m not sure what number the final step will be, but you get the point. Let’s say in going from A to Z, one of the big steps is deciding a name for this project. We’e played around with “Project Querity,” but there have been some so-so responses to that name.

When demo-ing the site around town there have been some interesting suggestions, but it’s difficult to really encapsulate the entire project in just one phrase. On top of that, the elephant in the room is search engine optimization–we want to make our name catchy but we also want to come up in all the google searches.

Something we were relatively happy with is “search.it,” but we were immediately deterred from that name because .it isn’t very SEO-friendly. And once the issue of SEO came up then we started thinking about the content of the site and it’s lack of “SEO-ness.”

Read more »

For definitely as long as I can remember, and certainly for years long before, journalists have been carrying the weight of delivering timely, comprehensive, well-reported news to local communities. The evolving news ecosystem changes that expectation.

Now community members can play a huge role in helping report and even writing the news, which takes a huge load off the back of journalists who may be spread too thin in their communities.

Legitimate sites are starting to sprout up that are helping to ease the reporting process. OpenFile is a new site that allows community members to open a file and describe a topic of concern. OpenFile then assigns a reporter to the subject and the story gets written–everyone ends up happy. As OpenFile puts it, “We see the news as a discussion, not a monologue. And listening is only half of the conversation.” Read more »

Since this is my inaugural post here on Local Fourth, I’d like to package up some random musings from the last few weeks to get us up to speed.

It was about midway through last quarter when rumors began to circulate regarding the nature of the innovation projects. Worried conversations hinted that the two capstone courses here at Northwestern might be of the non-traditional variety. We knew one project had something to do with the iPad (You know, that thing that makes it really easy to read on the go? No, no–not a paperback book–don’t be silly.) and the other was concerned with hyperlocal news websites.

Read more »