I can’t help myself, I see new amazing use of technologies everyday and imagine how they will change everything. More than two years ago I first used my GPS and I saw the end of news advertising. Most recently a colleague pulled out his Google Phone and put it on the desk near my laptop and he said find the wireless networks in the room. His phone was the wireless router for the whole room. I know it is nothing completely new, but it amazed me and amazes anyone I tell about it.

The New York Times wrote about Mi-Fi last week, but I think the cellphone app is even more amazing. After all, we are all carrying a cellphone. And soon everyone will have something better than an iPhone or Google Phone in their pockets. So our wireless router will always be with us.

The friend also pointed his Google Phone camera at the barcode on a bottle of Hellman mayonnaise and instantly was told where he could buy a case cheap. So, of course, once we all get used to doing that we will never buy anything without finding out where to get it cheaper. The ramifications of that are huge. First ramification: high-priced stores will no longer display the barcode.

Of course, the other app is the Microsoft Tag. You point it at a barcode-like tag next to movie advertisement in a newspaper and instantly you get to see the trailer on your smart phone or to hear book reviewed being read.

Eventually, Microsoft is going to charge for this stuff, but are news organizations getting involved? I hope so. Are they creating their own tag or barcode readers that can take us from the page or a billboard or whatever to their own content and deliver it instantly to our smart phones?

Above is a barcode tag example produced by Long Zheng, you can make your own at Microsoft Tag. Don’t like Microsoft, then try ScanLife.

Joel Kramer, MinnPost founder, writes:

MinnPost is a national leader in building a new economic model for high-quality local journalism on the Internet. This is not easy to do. Our traffic is growing dramatically — we’ve tripled our page views in one year — but revenues from sponsors, advertisers, and our nearly 1,300 members currently cover only about 60% of our very lean spending.

One of the ideas floating around for financing journalism is “community-funding” — getting lots of people to donate small amounts to support a writer, a beat, or a specific story project they are interested in.

So we’ve decided to try this concept out with BrauBlog, since it’s our most popular feature on MinnPost, other than the home page itself. This is an experiment. If it works, we’ll brag about it all over the country, and pay some of our bills, too.

Kramer adds:

What you will NOT get is public recognition…because David Brauer does not want to know which individuals are supporting him.

The Harnisch Foundation also underwrites the Center for Sustainable Journalism here at Kennesaw State University. Here is what Ruth Ann Harnisch says about the matching grant to MinnPost:

I don’t read MinnPost.com — it’s local news, and I’m not a local.

But what happens to MinnPost.com is going to affect the future of local journalism everywhere.

People all over the world are looking at your community and wondering if MinnPost.com is going to succeed….

It’s your community, not mine — but I’m investing in your community’s bold experiment in journalism because it’s a beacon of hope on a bleak business landscape. If you succeed, others will follow. Who will pay for the news? I’ll pay for some. Will you?

Welcome to J-startup news, a place for news people to discuss, rate and share news and commentary about journalism startups, new business models for news, hacker journalism and anything else that falls along these lines.

Here is its widget:

Its founder adds:

I hope this becomes a place where startups announce their projects, ask for help and post job openings.

Another handy thing that J-Startup News will do is create a central place for the best news from all the folks covering the industry on blogs and pro sites. For the last few months I’d been wishing for a site like this to give me all the best links right now in one place. I am morally opposed to RSS readers so social news sites are how I find stuff I want to read. There wasn’t one for news people who want to read about “the new news.” So now we’ve got one.

You can first hear Kinsey Wilson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, NPR Digital Media, talk about where NPR is heading,  and then me making my pitch on how to turn PBS into a News Powerhouse. Each of us makes a five minute pitch. The full panel discussion lasts for about 90 minutes.  You can listen to this MP3 file: Future of Public Media News.

Or for a more controllable audio platform go to Bill Densmore’s site, he made the audio tape.  I think a video was also made. We will let you know when that is available.  The full panel included:

Moderator: Julie Philipp, Managing Editor, WXXI Center for Public Affairs Panelists: John Barth, Managing Director; PRX; Mike Bauhof, Manager, Online Communications at KETC; Susanna Capelouto, News Director, Georgia Public Broadcasting (Radio); Jessica Clark, Director, Future of Public Media project at the Center for Social Media, American University School of Communication; Robert Rosenthal, Executive Director, The Center for Investigative Reporting; Anna Shoup, Local/National Editor at the Online Newshour; Kinsey Wilson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, NPR Digital Media; Leonard Witt, Distinguished Chair in Communication and executive director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University, Blogger, PJNet .

…The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn’t understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page. Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission). Browsing a newspaper is rewarding and serendipitous, and doing it online should be even better. This will not by itself solve the newspapers’ business problems, but our heritage suggests that creating a superior user experience is the best place to start.

He adds:

We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way. We need to make it easier for a user who sees one piece by an expert he likes to search through that expert’s entire body of work. Then our users will be able to benefit from the best of both worlds: thoughtful and spontaneous, long form and short, of the ages and in the moment.

Then he speaks of the power of facts:

Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse.

He adds:

Here at Google the words of every colleague, from associates to vice presidents, carry the same weight so long as they are backed by data. (If you don’t think we live up to this standard then please feel free to correct me … but you better have the facts to prove it!!!)

Right now the Times has approximately a circulation of about 1 million. To have it delivered can cost a subscriber as much as $600 a year.  What if The New York Times said we want to put the newsroom into a cooperative trust owned by its readers as it eases into the online world.

We own the newsroom, the New York Times owns everything else and the governance for the newsroom would remain much the way it has been in the past.

If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times paid $400 a year, just for it online, but also got shares into the cooperative, that would be $400 million a year. The Times newsroom costs about $200 million a year to operate. The extra $200 would go into an endowment, so in five years there would be a billion dollars, in ten years $2 billion. Enough that the subscription rate would go down for anyone who contributed for ten years. A ten year investment would be $4,000 or $2,000 less that what you pay for the newspaper now.

It would be like owning the Green Bay Packers, but it would be owning The New York Times’s newsroom. The larger company could do whatever it wants on the business side, but we would all own the newsroom and demand high quality news. Perhaps we would work out a deal that a certain percentage of the business side profits would go into the news endowment. Of course, the cooperative trust would be set up in a way that the Sam Zells of the world could never intrude.

Would I sign up, if asked today? Yes. Of course, the real test is — Would you?

1. Cut costs 40% by 2010.
2. Continue to raise print subscription prices
3. Explore charging an online subscription fee

I am most intrigued by the idea of no firewall but still a fee. Anyone can link to the stories and you can see the linked stories. However, if you want to read the entire site, then you have to be a subscriber. Blodget sets the fee at $80 a year. It’s an intriguing idea.

On making the cuts, I like the comment by Dan, who writes:

His Locally Grown Northfield community affairs blog, which he operates with Tracy Davis and Ross Currier had its own online community. Every day the triumvirate blogs and every day Northfield citizens comment.

The triumvirate wanted a journalist, who would provide the time and energy to do the digging and reporting they could not. With funding from the Harnisch Foundation, we were able to provide them with Bonnie Obremksi, our first Representative Journalist.

Today a post by Griff Wigley demonstrates what a good decision it was to go with Locally Grown. Read Griff’s post, he perhaps understands the new news ecosystem better than 99 percent of the folks in the news business. It is a brilliant sketch of how things might be in the future.

Indeed, if he and the good folks of Northfield succeed, it will fulfill many of the promises of public journalism which got me involved in first developing the Representative Journalism concept. Watch the work of Wigley and friends, it might just change the face of journalism.

PS. Without Wigley there would be no PJNet.org. He convinced me that I had to start blogging back in early 2003, when most of us were totally ignorant of blogging’s possibilities.

University of Minnesota researcher Christine Greenhow and Seattle-based news aggregator News Cloud will test new ways to engage youth in news and information by launching two social media publications on the popular social networking site Facebook. The project is being made possible by a $249,529 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

University researchers, led by Greenhow, will investigate how online social network sites like Facebook can engage youth in world events, build community and generate real world impact. Greenhow’s previous work investigated the learning benefits of online social networking sites (MySpace , Facebook) for teenagers.

Here is more:

The study, which will be published next year, will seek to discover which strategies work best to engage 16 to 25 year-olds in current events and how the Internet can be used to deliver educational materials in innovative and effective ways.

Facebook was chosen because it has 120 million active members and is the most-trafficked social media site in the world. More than 85 percent of four-year U.S. university students use Facebook, making it an ideal space in which to gather this data.

The first Facebook publication, which will be produced in partnership with online environmental magazine Grist.org, is focused on climate change. The second publication will provide news sharing and community features for Minnesota students.

The impetus for the study:

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has increased from 25 to 34 percent since 1998.