Congats To Us!

Congratulations to us! The Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting (of which I'm v-p) has just gotten word from the Canada Revenue Agency's charities directorate: We now have charity status - the first media organization of this kind to be granted the status in Canada.

Congratulations first and foremost must go to our tireless and dogged executive director, Bilbo Poynter.

Stay tuned to the CCIR website and Facebook page for more exciting centre news and programming soon, including a fundraiser-slash-panel discussion in Toronto in August.

Tools: What's the Meaning of Life? Ask Google's Freaky New Brain

Just added three cool sites to my "Resources: Tools & Search" bar of links in the right-hand column. Wolfram, Google's freaky new artificial intelligence sideline, offers two really interesting new tools I've linked down there:

- Wolfram/Alpha, a searchable artificial intelligence tool that computes answers to your questions (including, for example, "What is the meaning of life?") Some say Wolfram/Alpha is so smart it'll change the internet.

- The Wolfram Mathematica Online Integrator, an engine that performs computations using 2,500-plus math functions

The third site is WordReference.com, a professional-quality online translation and definitions tool that includes a searchable and query-able forum where linguists discuss tricky translation questions.

TAGS: tools, online journalism

Web 2.0: Divining the Collective Brain

Great idea from this item at the Online Journalism Blog, one of my regular RSS reads through iGoogle. (If you don't know what iGoogle is, go here pronto. It's a very cool aggregator tool you can customize to scan all your fave sites.) OJB suggests that journalists and news organizations should make a habit of creating "datastores." These are simple spreadsheets and other databases linked from their stories that give raw data for the public to chew on.

One benefit from such datastores for news workers is reeping the bountiful harvest of "distributed journalism," OJB says in this other interesting item. That's the idea that the public can participate in journalism by finding new patterns and connections and giving tips and feedback for stories. Datastores give the public more tools to do just this.

I'm a big fan of this idea. Us journalists like to think we're so smart and no one else can do our jobs. But blogging here and especially at my market site has opened up an amazing world of "distributed knowledge" for me, from which I've learned an immense amount. It's actually, in my opinion, one of the main reasons to blog.

TAGS: tools, CAR, online journalism