At Wired magazine, Tim McKeough has pulled together a fascinating and beautiful slide show he titled "Frame that Spam! Data-Crunching Artists Transform the World of Information" where he displays the works of a new crop of data-crunching "artists" who are using data the same way "Picasso applied paint." The artists used blog posts, traffic patterns, government reports digital video, and email to transform "the world of information into mesmerizing abstractions." 

These pieces of art and graphic design are amazingly beautiful, but they aren’t just "eye candy," as McKeough writes.  The artists used census data, NASA images, and even human emotion samples from the blogosphere to display the information in an interactive and insightful manner.  And it’s only the beginning of what the Web 2.0 revolution will do with information as it evolves.

Check it out.

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Arianna Huffington is entering the world of citizen journalism with her announcement of a new project: The Wisdom of Crowds Hits the Campaign Trail. It's got the makings of a great effort: she's recruiting citizen journalists from around the country to cover the major presidential candidates and asking each of them to contribute to a candidate-specific group blog — offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video. The goal is to provide more sources of information, and more outside-the-mainstream voices on the upcoming presidential campaign. She's got the readership to make it happen.

She's doing this a joint project with Jay Rosen's project - NewAssignment.Net, one of our grantees. Jay recently launched his first major distributed reporting assignment in conjunction with Wired.

Some details of this project from Jay include:

Sometime this spring, then, we'll roll out twelve new pages at NewAssignment.Net with a mix of news, information, original reporting and views not-found-elsewhere. Behind each candidate page will be a contributors' network built by hand, made up of people who would like to participate in the 2008 election by claiming a campaign beat and making their own news and commentary, in collaboration with others doing the same thing (but coming from a different place.) All overseen by an editor paid to make the whole thing run, and evaluated by how good the twelves [sic]pages are. …

So there's a structure, and for the contributors substantial freedom within that structure. Some order, some chaos. There are editors, but contributors post what they want at their own mini-blogs. We don't pay you for your time if you choose to become one of our contributors. Neither do we own your work. A Creative Commons license will apply to it. There will be no ads at the NewAssignment.Net site, which is non-profit, an experiment with the power-of-many in online journalism. The Huffington Post, which does have ads, will have the right to pull content from our 12 candidate pages.

I can't help but wonder how we might apply this concept to some key Congressional campaigns in 2008.

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