At the time I thought it was because of the Pope’s visit to Australia, but now it’s down again. It would be interesting to know why they’re down, or what’s causing the down time.

Again, the message on the screengrab is the same:

We’re sorry…

We’re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.

Personally, I like the idea of geo-tagging content so that readers can get a map view of their news across the city, state or country, and then be able to pick out what news to follow in feeds based on particular regions.

I’ve been experimenting with Yahoo!Pipes in trying to do that with news content that hasn’t specifically been prepared to be ‘locative’. It’s certainly time-intensive experimentation while I teach myself, and is yet to yield the results I’d like.

The list linked to by Paul Lamb is by LoJo connnect, who are also conducting a survey of news outlets and their offerings/experiments in locative media.

Via:
Paul Lamb at MediaShift Idea Lab

User generated content is populating a map, so that individual stories are tied to a particular location using plain text, images and video.

This could be compared to Every Block, but for breaking news/continuing stories on a particular event, rather than data.

The potential for storm stories, either by user submitted photos, or using information as it comes in from police, makes it a great tool for 1) rolling updates of affected areas and, 2) a continuing story of what people are experiencing on the ground.

And they’re sending it in to you, talking about it, interacting with it.

Often we may write, “The Smith, Jones, and Harry street bridges in Doe Shire have been washed away by flood waters,” but people could have no idea where those are.

In some instances online sites have been giving a link to a Google map of a street location mentioned in a crime story, for instance.

Expand that to include multiple locations and you have big-picture view, that everyone can see.

Spokesmanreview.com: Storm Stories

Colin Mulvaney works at the Spokesman Review, and for more pearls of online wisdom, see his blog, Mastering Multimedia.