NowPublic

These days I'm looking for a news search engine that will allow QTSaver to draw news from it by API. That's how I stumbled upon Nowpublic, Web 2.0 tool of peer production journalism. I subscribed to try it out and gathered the following information about it:
1.http://www.nowpublic.com/node/17228 - NowPublic: Missing Persons Board
o NowPublic is a place where the general public can post news reports for others to read. It's like a newspaper except all the news comes from the readers. Thousands of NowPublic members have been affected by Katrina. If you have stories you'd like to share about your experiences during this catastrophic time we invite you to sign in and publish them here. Your stories can enlighten others and be a catalyst for re-building.
o In addition to being a collection of news stories written by its members, NowPublic was the location one of the first databases of missing persons for people affected by Hurricane Katrina. Since we started our efforts many other professional organizations - devoted solely to this task - have stepped forward. Organizations such as the Red Cross are now better equiped to deal with missing persons issues than NowPublic.
o The best way to find out if someone has already posted a story about a missing person is to include that persons name in a NowPublic website address.

2. http://drupal.org/node/19327 Featured site: NowPublic.com | drupal.org
o NowPublic.com is a Drupal powered site focused on changing the way the news becomes news. Imagine that you are walking down the streets of Manhattan when a trailer drives by with the group U2 jamming away. You use your camera phone to snap a wicked shot of Bono - but where do you send it?
o But how is anyone who doesn't know you going to find it? Instead, you could email it to news@nowpublic.com and let the world know that there's something cool going on. NowPublic lets you share your good stuff with not only your friends but with the world, while at the same time protecting your rights and giving you full credit.
o Now imagine that you are interested in an event or some other news story but you either can't get there yourself to check it out or you aren't satisfied with the coverage that is being given by Big Media. That is when you go to NowPublic.com and "demand coverage". Specify the location, the time and the event and reporters in the area will be able to respond to your request and provide you with the coverage you really want. Other people viewing the site can second your request for coverage, speaking out with one voice calling out for information.
o NowPublic.com is the brainchild of Michael Tippett of BlueHereNow Technologies, Inc in Vancouver. He is a big fan of Drupal. The Drupal aspects were coded principally by myself, Michael Meyers and Alan Evans.
o NowPublic.com employs an impressive array of Drupal modules including: filestore2, fscache, image (old), mailhandler, mailalias, mime_registry, moblog and userposts.In addition, we created six custom modules to handle everything from custom RSS tracking to an entire XML-RPC API for communicating with Flash objects.
o It allows each Smart Media Flash object to be a mini-client to the site. That means anyone looking at our Smart Media on a 3rd party site can register a user with NowPublic.com, log in, post comments, contact the media owner, and most importantly, copy the Smart Media to their own blog by copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript which the Smart Media provides.

3.http://www.corante.com/getreal/archives/2005/09/11/nowpublic_emergent_journalism.php NowPublic: Emergent Journalism. Get Real: Stowe Boyd's Soapbox
o Following a tip from JD Lasica, I took a long look at NowPublic.com, a very interesting experiment in social news gathering and dissemination.
o NowPublic provides a great level of control on the sharing of "footage" -- imagery of various sorts. I have not experimented with that element of the service, but I intend to do so.
o NowPublic allows contributors to pull stories from other locations -- such as blogs -- via RSS.I set things up so that entries that I post at my personal blog, A Working Model, are now accessible for reposting at NowPublic.
o For those not already blogging elsewhere, NowPublic provides free basic blogging, and supports RSS feeds from them. Oddly enough, blog posts are not automatically posted as stories, and importing through the RSS feeds doesn't work: NowPublic gives an error message when I try to import my NowPublic blog content as news stories (although I was able to import that feed into Feedigest, and to import the exported feed from Feeddigest).Also odd: none of the tag or rating architecture that supports news stories have been integrated in the blogging technology: there is no way that authors can tag their blog posts and readers cannot search via tag cloud, nor rate blog posts. A strange omission, perhaps intended to get folks to push their blog posts into the NowPublic news channel.

4.http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/001169.html
Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Thinking about NowPublic & Citizen Journalism
o Sites like the newly-launched NowPublic are interesting. One of the things that blogs and photo-sharing sites end up doing is a kind of drive-by journalism. They're there, so they document what they see, and that can be decent first-person journalism.
o It makes oodles of sense, however, to try to impose some structure on the process, to tell people what other people want to see and to tie content demand to content supply. As near as I can figure, that is at least one aspect of what NowPublic is trying to do.