"Covering Digital Culture," day four

Back at home after a stimulating four-day seminar from the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. Here are some notes from the final day:

* The seminar's participants spent Friday morning at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab, going around in small groups and getting a five-minute elevator pitch about different researchers’ projects. The journalists I talked to were uniformly impressed with the quality of work going on at the lab.

Allison Druin, the lab’s director, said the lab operates on utopian ideals of using technology to solve the world’s problems. Many of the applications created there can be freely downloaded from the Web.

A few stood out. Ben Bederson, an associate professor and former director of the lab, demoed an intuitive digital photo organizer called PhotoMesa that uses zooming technology to make it easy to browse a library of digital photos. You can download it for free here.

* Many at the lab worked on the International Children's Digital Library, a Web-based library of children’s books available in a number of languages. Another free application was KidPad, an art program designed for children, though Druin said it's replaced PowerPoint for her.

* Bederson is also an executive with Zenzui, which is working to commercialize a zoomable user interface for mobile devices.

Bederson gave a talk about mobile technologies and shared some surprising statistics. This year, he said, more users will access the Internet by phone than by computer. Mobile advertising is a $33 million market this year, but it’s predicted to grow to $1.4 billion by 2012 – a 112 percent annual growth rate.

* This week’s seminar gave me a wealth of great information and story ideas. I can't wait to get some of them in the paper. We'll have to wait, though -- I'll be on vacation next week. See you Sept. 24.


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