Check out this iPhone app to locate real estate

At the Reynolds Journalism Institute Symposium at the University of Missouri, a nifty application called NearBuy won the student iPhone app competition:

The app uses your location to serve up either homes for sale in the area or apartments for rent. They bring in listings from Google Base, Craigslist and Oodle. You can then view info on listings on a map, including photos, property details, contact information. Plus, you can use Twitter to query people for opinions on particular places, and then rate the place. Extras include a rent calculator and a Flickr add-on that lets you see photos geo-coded nearby.

And even though it didn’t win, I really like the sound of The ADverse Network, which offers an enticing business platform for news outlets in need of innovative ways to work with advertisers (particularly local businesses):

They wanted to create a geo-located advertising service, so that you would get local ads based on your location. Ads are inserted into the two apps we developed, iCoMoNews and Vox. For the advertisers, there are tools like a live map that shows where people are accessing the network, and even more granular “heat maps” to show where people are viewing and clicking on ads. They say they got a clickthrough rate on ads of 3.8% which is pretty good.

Save these online journalism classes

Fire up your bookmark folders, I’ve got a good ‘un today: Online Journalism Blog has a number of useful online classes, PowerPoint-style. Topics covered include writing for the Web, podcasts, blogging practices (including points both for and against frequent posts), Twitter for beginners and managing feeds.

Beginner’s guide to beatblogging

Patrick Thornton explains what beatblogging is, why journalists need to do it, who does it best, and offers examples of practices that lead to a successful beatblog.

Ashton Kutcher, king of Twitter

At Nieman Journalism Lab, Mathew Ingram looks at criticism of Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN to become the first with a million followers on Twitter. And he concludes that “Far from being just an egotist who wants to take advantage of a medium to promote himself,” Kutcher has something to teach us about the evolution of media:

As a celebrity who is in the public eye almost all the time, he also has a somewhat unique take on the media industry and how it is being transformed.

 

In his video discussion with Oprah about Twitter, for example, Kutcher says he believes that “we’re at a place now with social media where a single person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire news network — that is the power of the social web.” (although obviously it helps if that one person is a celebrity). He then talks about how his life is “somewhat on display anyway, and not always by choice… so instead of them publishing pictures and videos I don’t like, I can publish pictures and video of myself… that I’m happy with. If there’s some sort of fallacy that’s out in some magazine or that some blogger has written about, you can respond to it, and you can actually respond to it in a genuine way, directly with your fans, as opposed to having to go through the whole rigamarole of publicists and so on.”

Connecting news with communities

A quick rundown of what The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and a group of hyperlocal sites are doing to build audiences.

The New York Times takes a look at hyperlocal sites EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch,

Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, offers his philosophy of what reporters need to do to grab eyeballs:

The art of a good blog is figuring out the right mix between the piece that you know is going to get maximum search-engine hits to the piece that really defines what you’re doing that’s uniquely valuable. That second piece might not bring in as much traffic, but it’s the piece that’s gonna keep the traffic once you get it in the door. So all of that, which is part of the job of building a community, building an audience — those are totally new skills.

Meanwhile, The Washington Times is embracing citizen journalism — in print:

Learn digital media in 10 weeks

Arizona State University’s Cronkite School New Media Academy is offering training for adults who want to learn how to build multimedia-rich websites:

Participants will learn how to design and develop a Web site, how to effectively present and edit photos for the Web, how to use social networking tools, how to create Web-based graphics, how to do podcasting and audio slideshows, and how to edit and use video on the Web.

The weekly summer program begins May 30 and concludes Aug. 8, and costs $2,000 for the full 10 days of training.

G20 summit is a social media event

Live blogs, interactive maps, Audioboos, Twitterfall — the G20 Summit is London has been a hotbed of journalists showing off their social media skills.

Saved searches come to Twitter

Good news if you’ve discovered the power of using Twitter to work on stories.

Beatblogging reports that Twitter has now developed a Web interface allowing users to save their searches.

The Circle of Twitter

At TechCrunch, a guest author invokes the Bard when he asks:

Does Twitter want to be more like MySpace, which is cleaning up to be more like Facebook, which wants to be like Twitter? Where shall these three meet—in thunder, lightning or rain?

Social networking class at Poynter

Just a quick alert: Poynter Institute will be hosting a live webinar called Social Networks: The New Architecture of the Web. Paul Gillin, a content marketing consultant, will lead this virtual class, which will explain:

• Why online “friends” are the foundation of social networks’ appeal
• How trusted sources are migrating from mass media to friends’ networks
• From examples of news organizations that are leveraging social networks to extend their influence
• What newspapers can do right now to tap into emerging communities

The webinar is scheduled for April 14, 2-3 p.m. The cost is $24.95.