Show HN: Grasswire – A collaborative newsroom for the Internet

http://grasswire.com/#/newsfeeds/d3ebe78f-918f-4a9f-9c98-cdd5cba9be26

by austenallred • 12 years ago

69 25 12 years ago

Hey, so it's pretty buggy, but we decided to throw it out there sooner than later.

Basically the idea is to bring in all of the social media feeds and let everyone upvote and fact-check the content in real time. Turn the news over to everyday people.

joshstrange2• 12 years ago

I really like this idea, for quite some time I've been toying with the idea of creating a way to collect and organize all news (social/online newspapers/etc) into one stream by topic so things like "Aaron Swartz", "Ukraine Conflict", "BP Oil Spill", "Heartbleed", "Goto fail bug", etc and then arrange them on a timeline. The thought being to create an order of events and maybe even support connecting articles that link together so that you can see where (and when) a story broke and watch it unfold. Possibly even couple it with a summary engine so you can get quick bullet points about one subject across multiple sources. There would have to be a way to rank a sites credibility (Maybe through voting, maybe through an algorithm, maybe a little of both) but yeah. I really like what you have here so far as it seems to be in a similar vein.

austenallred9• 12 years ago

Thanks. That is the end goal - you could literally follow any topic (and we're adding more social networks).

The thing that we found performing the process manually is that some of the best content comes form people with a couple followers, so there's not enough data (retweets, interaction) to determine what content is quality. Our proposed solution to that now is just to show everybody everything that matches a certain keyword, similar to the hackernews or reddit /new feed.

Interestingly enough there are some people doing this already, just without a tool. So they'll watch the networks all day and gather links into google docs, fb pages, twitter, etc. It works really well, but it's a one-man team, and it's a very painstaking manual process. We want to let more people contribute to that same process, and eventually (hopefully) entirely crowdsource breaking news.

bradleysmith2• 12 years ago

I've been following grasswire for a month or two now, since I was made aware of it (I've actually linked you on my website as a similar project to one of mine). I'm excited to see it is up now and will definitely be playing with it.

The 'fact-check' feature is fantastic, I'm excited to see how it plays out and hope you get some traction.

You don't happen to have an RSS feed being generated for grasswire, do you? I'd love to play with the feed via xml.

Would love to collaborate you if you need another interested brain to bounce ideas off of, feel free to email me.

austenallred9• 12 years ago

No RSS feed yet. My email is in my HN profile as well.

nwalter08• 12 years ago

Yea I'm pumped for the fact-check stuff as well.

trevmckendrick• 12 years ago

This would have been great to prevent the "mob ruling" on, say, Reddit during the 2013 Boston Marathon. Very cool.

austenallred9• 12 years ago

That's the hope. Reddit is great at what it does, but that system needs to have something to reign it in. Generally a very simple fact-check has done the job when we have been "reporting" on Twitter (@grasswire and @grasswirefacts), so we are trying to expose more people to that process and democratize it.

TrainedMonkey2• 12 years ago

Good idea, however at this point of time almost all the news are about Ukraine. I know it is important, but surely other events are going on as well. Technology is fine, but content is king.

austenallred9• 12 years ago

Yes, of course. This feed is specifically about Ukraine; we can add other feeds by topic (see http://grasswire.com where we will eventually list other topics/events).

The concept is a newsroom that we can spin up with one click about any given topic, and let everyone curate and fact-check it.

TrainedMonkey2• 12 years ago

Did not see that, good point.

bradleysmith2• 12 years ago

Seems to be defaulting to the landing page. Load from front page traffic, I assume?

austenallred9• 12 years ago

DNS issues; it's really slow to propagate the new page for some ISPs. Sorry about that.

http://grasswire.com/#/newsfeeds/d3ebe78f-918f-4a9f-9c98-cdd... is working better for some.

jkhowland• 12 years ago

Sometimes I get the app with the Russia news and sometimes I get the landing page. It's probably a propagation issue.

Looks awesome. Excited to watch this grow.

ccallebs• 12 years ago

Austen! So glad you launched successfully. The new site looks great.

gwintrob• 12 years ago

Cool stuff, Austen. Good to see a product that cuts through the noise online. What do you think of inside.com from Jason Calacanis?

austenallred9• 12 years ago

I feel like Inside is mostly a response to summly. Calicanis basically said, "this computer-generated content doesn't work well, I'll do the same thing by paying reporters.

But I feel like that misses the larger point. We're all instantly connected and publishing now, and realistically every single person can act as an editor, fact-checker and reporter; it doesn't make sense that we still use the same model as we did in the 1800s to create news.

Basically, we think we can create a world where news is entirely controlled by everyday people, and not governments or corporations.

jonnyscholes• 12 years ago

Love this idea. My only crit so far is that you limit my password to 20 chars. Really keen to see where you go with this :)

austenallred9• 12 years ago

Haha, we'll look into that :)

joshdance• 12 years ago

Nice work Austen. Excited to see this out there.

Show HN: Grasswire – A collaborative newsroom for the Internet

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