The Knight Foundation just announced the 16 winners of the 2008 News Challenge, which give out $5.5 million dollars to fund a set of projects that support tools for online media and citizen journalism, community discourse and empowerment, and grassroots mobile media.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, received one of the awards for a standards project run by the Media Standards Trust and the UK-based Web Science Research Initiative that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content.

These awards were meaningful to me for a few reasons:

• I was a judge for 2008
• Local community, citizen journalism, platform tools, and community-focused mobile are of vital interest to me
• The conversation between people building tools, aka developers, and people creating content, aka journalists,bloggers, consumers needs to accelerate so that people over 25 start to understand that content and form can't truly be seperated online (like, the medium actually IS the message.)

The press release says:

• the number of applicants for Knight News Challenge increased 82 percent in its second year, to 3,000
• the percentage of foreign applicants increased to 40 percent from 15 percent in 2007.
• the contest was advertised in 10 languages.
• there was a new "Young Creators'" category to reward the ideas of those who are 25 and younger--and six of this year's winners are "Young Creators"

The new cycle for funding applications opens in September and goes into the fall; I'm going to be helping Knight with the next cycle and will be posting some ideas about  making the application process work even better and building on what's come before.( There will be chances to get everyone's input who wants to contribute.)





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"As to the rest of the wannabees, it really is true that if you haven't done it, that is: been intimately involved growing a social web app from prototype to Internet-scale on a UNIX stack, then you really don't know shit. (I know more than my fair share of people that have, and I didn't see any of them posting armchair bs on the comments)."

--Upcoming co-founder Leonard Lin, writing about scaling twitter and the general brouhahaha.

Susan sez: Check out these links as well.

• joestump.net » Blog Archive » It's not the language stupid

• I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass - Ted Dziuba

• random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition

• Liminal Existence: Scalability

• Scaling Twitter » SlideShare

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So, now that I am starting a company(more specifics on that later, and with a great partner), I've got an amazing number of things to balance. There's the ideas, the plans, the people to work with, the timetables, the costs. And then, on the other side, there's the budget, the funding, the roadmap..all those things that take resources and dollars.

In my usual fashion, one of my ways to learn is to talk with people about their experiences starting companies (thanks, you know who you are), what they learned, what they wouldn't do again. And then there's my time honored exercise in reading as a means to knowledge. I've been rooting around, looking at entrepreneur's blogs, founder's blogs, VC's blogs, and all sorts of other resources.

And here's what I learned: There's a hellofva lot I am going to know six months from now, I don't know today. But if I don't find a way to manage the info flow, I am going to a) drown and b) interrupt all the stuff I really have to do to get our idea going.

How do you balance getting critical things done/momenteum with absorbing information? What's your style? Comments here, or elsewhere, welcomed.