It’s great to hear that our augmented reality and geolocation toolkit for journalists has got through to the semi finals of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge: mobile. Journalists have always had an acute sense of time about their work. But the rise and rise of mobile search means that they will need an equally acute sense of place to find an audience for their work. Historically the ‘place’ bit has been a meta issue someone else took care of. Your work was just in a paper or channel marketed at a specific place. Publishers themselves have been slow to wake up to geo-tagging so that the web itself knows where their stuff is about. And as the density of content about place and things increases exponentially media outlets , need to experiment with new ways of displaying place or object linked content such as the burgeoning augmented reality environments enabled by new powerful smart phones.
Our bid is to help journalists and others by providing simple tools to geo tag content and to bring it into augmented reality environments. We’ve done the hard bit – getting the tech to work at all in partnership with NESTA – we hope Knight will support us to grow and bespoke this work for journalists working across our great networks. Naturally I think we should win, but even if we don’t i hope our proposal gets people talking about the issues.