Leonard Brody, founder of NowPublic, rejects the term “citizen journalism,” which has often been applied to his business. “What [our contributors] do is not journalism. We don’t call it that and never have.” In spite of that, he did construct NowPublic to serve as a new kind of media site. His initial goal, he said, was, “Let’s go build Reuters 2.0.”

NowPublic is a site about current events, and it is powered by its users. Brody feels that, “Journalism is an art form. What we are is an army of eyes and ears.” So Brody’s army of contributors aren’t known for creating original reporting in the way we usually think about it. “The fantasy of the 300 word post doesn’t exist.” Rather, his contributors perform two other functions.

First, they’re an army of ants, but with cameraphones, uStream and YouTube links, and Twitter accounts. At the moment, the NowPublic contributors add, literally, alternate perspectives to typical news reports.

NowPublic "hives" allow multiple contributors to add to a story as they collect new links or create new media items.

It’s in this area where the most interesting new NowPublic features are coming. Brody said that his company is working on real-time analytics capabilities, so NowPublic will be able to automatically group input from various users into hubs on developing stories. Brody says NowPublic also soon be monitoring Twitter feeds and mapping items about particular current events into the hubs (which NowPublic calls “hives”). Furthermore, the software will allow readers to talk to users on the scene (via Twitter, presumably, but perhaps more directly, via SMS or voice) and ask them questions about what’s happening.

“The feedback loop is getting more intense,” says Brody.

Second, the NowPublic contributors act as aggregators and editors, similar in some ways to the Digg crowd. Users, not generally beholden to any given mainstream media sites, are free to pull items from all over the Web, adding their own spin on content, putting opposing views together, and so on. They are becoming the DJs of news, and that’s a valuable service. To make that function even more valuable, NowPublic recently added to its reputation and ranking system, so NowPublic readers can now more easily find and follow contributors that they relate to.

Where does this leave traditonal media, according to Brody? “Five years from now, you’re going to see these live networks like NowPublic, Twitter, and CoverItLive completely supersede today’s media. Traditional media will focus on analysis.”

The media world has seen this transition before, and more than once. In recent memory, the newsweeklies (Time, Newsweek, etc.) found their traditional role of providing the news killed by television, and eventually the Web. But they’ve managed to refocus on the post-story analysis and also on the hugely expensive art of investigative journalism.

I that that it’s important to not think of NowPublic as a direct replacement for traditional news, though. While the proportion of on-the-spot news media gathered by “users” that is seen by the public may surpass “professional” content, as an old-line journalist myself I prefer to think of this army of reporters as customers, not competitors. The growth of crowd-sourced news content allows those people who’ve made it their career to study and communicate on news topics to do more study, and more communicating.

There’s likely money in this model, too. NowPublic, currently pre-revenue, will soon start selling local advertising on its service. It also has business-to-business aspiration: It will offer a white-label version of the product to existing media outlets (all content will be shared back to the NowPublic service) as well as locked-down corporate versions that could be used for people in a distributed business, like a franchise, to keep tabs on what’s going on in the company.

See also: CNN iReport, Current, Newsvine, OhMyNews.

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Cloud computing is growing in popularity, thanks in large part to the availability of Web-based services that take some of the pain out of IT.

But when things break, it isn’t always easy to know why: Is the problem in the application or in the cloud?

CloudStatus works with Amazon Web Services now. Hyperic plans to support additional cloud service providers later this year.

Hyperic, a San Francisco-based company specializing in Web management tools, has one answer. It’s launching a new service, called CloudStatus, that reports on the health and performance of Amazon Web Services.

The free service, in beta testing now, works with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, and Flexible Payment Service.

The company says that CloudStatus will report on service availability, latency, and data throughput.

Hyperic says it plans to add the capability to monitor other cloud computing services later this summer.

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Besides the face-lift, one of Firefox 3’s less flashy, but incredibly useful features, is the new bookmarking system. Yeah, there are still folders and bookmarklets, but joining the party are useful items like tags, smart backup, and a new way to track which sites you’re actually visiting to help weed out what’s unneeded.

We’ve put together a small guide to help you take advantage of bookmarking in Firefox 3. If you put these lessons to use, you’ll go from having a big, clumsy menu of sites you like to an ever-changing list that can quickly be parsed and prioritized with minimal effort.

Step 1: Master the quickie
On a site you like? Don’t bother with keyboard shortcuts (although Ctrl+Shift+L is dead easy); just hit the new star button in the address bar. It’ll quick-save it to your bookmarks list the same way the keyboard shortcut does, although it saves a click or two by skipping the “edit this bookmark” dialogue that usually pops up when you try to squirrel a link away.

If you do want to access that dialogue without having to delve into the full-fledged bookmark editor, just click on the star again and you’ll get that same drop-down menu with quick fields you can fill in to edit tags or simply remove the link from your bookmarks.

With tags, save typing and a visit to figure out what a site is about.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Step 2: Use tags
Tags are helpful. If you’re bookmarking a site you think you’re going to keep around, it’s worth tagging. The biggest reason is that Firefox will now use tags as shortcuts in the address bar, meaning that if you tag this article “awesome,” typing awesome into the bar will automatically pull up this page as one of the top results. It’ll also take any tags you’ve previously added and autofill them for you as you type. This makes it easy to fill in some simple descriptions quickly and efficiently.

To quickly add pre-existing tags without typing anything, just hit the little down arrow in the bookmarking menu. This will list all of the tags you’ve typed in before, and simply clicking on any one of them will add it as a tag.

Step 3: Use smart bookmarks and folders to discover new content
Are you an iTunes user? If so, you may be familiar with smart playlists, the playlists that will automatically fill with tracks based on what boolean values you set up. Firefox 3 has two similar features called smart bookmarks and smart folders that let you do this using query strings or simple searches. Now as a warning, this isn’t as simple to do as it is in iTunes, which has drop-down menus, but the good news is that there a ton of pre-built options you can simply copy and paste.

• Smart bookmarks: Smart bookmarks are a grouping of links that change based on what values you plug into them. To make your own, click on bookmarks, then “organize bookmarks” (you can also hit Ctrl+Shift+B). Highlight “bookmarks menu” from the source list below, then right-click on it and select “new bookmark.” All the magic for making a smart bookmark is in the location field, which is where you’ll be dropping in a line of code that does all the heavy lifting. These codes can range from simple queries to a string that will search a domain and give you the latest stories, or simply those related to a keyword. The possibilities are nearly endless. The sad truth is that this method is complicated. MozillaZine has a huge thread on the ins and outs of building your own code strings, as does CyberNet News. Just keep in mind that you’ll have to have some basic coding knowledge to build your own from scratch.



Saving sites you've been to in a certain genre can be a time saver. Smart bookmark folders let you do this the easy way.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

• Smart folders: Smart folders are similar to smart bookmarks but require far less work. There are a few ways to make smart folders for things like your browser history and browsing habits, but one of my favorite uses is to create little folders of bookmarks based on where you’ve been.

  To start, just get back to that organize bookmarks menu (Ctrl+Shift+B) and use the search box on the top right. When you type a name it’ll search both history and bookmarks. You can pick either of those, or both categories, and save it as a search, which will now reside in your bookmarks toolbar as a smart folder. If you add or visit a site with that word or domain in the name it will automatically show up in that list, saving you from having to re-categorize it. These are incredibly useful if you drop them down into the bookmarklets bar, since they’ll act as drop-down menus that will save you crucial screen real estate.

Firefox 3 keeps multiple backups of your bookmarks, but so should you.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Step 4: Import/export and backing up your bookmarks
There’s nothing worse than having to try and remember all the things you’ve bookmarked in case of a hard drive crash or corrupted file. Save yourself the trouble and make backups from time to time.

My way of doing this is to use two of Google’s services, Gmail and Google Calendar, to bundle reminders and file storage in one place. Step one is setting up a Google Calendar reminder every month for a backup. Now, every time you get the reminder just go organize bookmarks, then click on “import and backup.”

Save the backup JSON file to your desktop and e-mail it to yourself in Gmail. Be sure to set up a bookmarks label and tag every backup with it so you’ll save yourself some time searching later on.

Now, what if you lose everything and need to re-import? If you’ve got a copy of that JSON file laying around you just import it using that same menu you just used to do the backup. Likewise, you can go back to previous versions of your bookmarks by selecting an earlier date from the drop-down list, although I wouldn’t recommend doing that unless you’ve made a mess of the ones you have.

Step 5: Make it social
OK, so you don’t want to use Gmail and Google Calendar while saving and uploading files. I really can’t blame you. A far simpler solution is tying in your bookmarks with a service like Delicious, Magnolia, or Mister Wong.

Of the three, my personal preference is Delicious, if only for its community and browser plug-in that was recently updated to work in both Firefox 3 and IE7. We’ve written about Delicious many times before, but the gist is that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere, and when saving a bookmark it’ll automatically suggest tags for you based on what other people have saved that same link with. It’s a huge time-saver, and if you’re seriously into Firefox 3’s tagging system, you’ll end up saving a lot of time by integrating it with Delicious.

If you don’t feel like sharing with anyone else you can also check out Foxmarks, which also has multi-browser bookmark sync and backup.

These were just a few tips on how to manage and master bookmarks in Firefox 3. If you’ve got any of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.

Related:
Set Web e-mail as default Firefox e-mail
Three useful Firefox 3 ‘awesome bar’ hacks

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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang visited lawmakers to help reassure them that the Yahoo/Google advertising deal is good for consumers and the online ad market….

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SmugMug, a photo host geared toward prosumer and professional photographers, launched a new service Monday called SmugVault.

As the name would suggest it’s all about storage, but not just for the standard slew of files you’ll see supported on sites like Flickr or Google’s Picasa. Instead, SmugVault is all about the files professional or advanced users end up with, like the RAW and TIFF files from high-end digital SLRs, and the PDF and PSD files from post-processing.

The service is tapping into Amazon.com’s S3 cloud storage to serve up all that space, and offering users an unlimited amount of it as long as they’re willing to pay. There’s a re-occurring $1 charge per month, alongside 22 cents per gigabyte and charges every time you transfer data in and out. In consumer products like Box.net this fee is usually eaten by the start-up or subsidized through a premium plan. Smugmug’s hope is that the a la carte model will appeal to the folks who don’t fit into segmented plans from other providers.

Squirrel away tons of files in different formats with SmugVault.

(Credit: SmugMug)

However, the real appeal of putting all your files in SmugVault may be that it uses the same visual file browser found in SmugMug. This means you can sort through your photos and videos in a familiar interface. There’s also a built-in system to keep you from downloading duplicate files (even if they’re different formats) by putting them together by file type.

One thing to note is that potential SmugVault users must have both a SmugMug and Amazon account. SmugMug is only serving as the front end to Amazon’s S3, so all of the billing will be done by Amazon. As Allen over at CenterNetworks notes, this is likely going to end up confusing folks who want to keep their paying Web accounts consolidated.

The only upside I can see is that I’d rather Amazon have my billing information than yet another start-up, even if it is one that’s been profitable since launch.

(Via FriendFeed)

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Fandango, the movie-ticketing company owned by Comcast since 2007, announced on Monday that it has acquired Movies.com, a movie news and reviews aggregator. Movies.com had previously been owned by Disney’s Walt Disney Internet Group.

Financial details were not disclosed.

The aim of the acquisition is to provide a one-stop movie hub for the Web, executives said.

“We are pleased to expand our rich-entertainment reach through this strategic addition of Movies.com,” Chuck Davis, CEO of Fandango, said in a statement. The ticketing site currently sells admission to 15,000 theaters in the United States. “We’ll be able to leverage our combined assets to offer millions of new moviegoers the best movie-related information available on the Web.”

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Microsoft’s Dynamic Language Runtime allows multiple app dev languages to run on .Net platform; Google might be working on a competitor for Google App Engine….

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