One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me. Nozzl Media today unveiled a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records like restaurant health inspections, building reports and public safety emergency responses. It's like a little robot reporter and the company plans on offering it as a mobile app in the future as well. Nozzl raises questions, though, about what constitutes news and whether or not human reporters are expendable in the news process. Sponsor Nozzl was founded by a team of ex-newspaper reporters and engineers. They got out when it was clear the newspaper industry was in trouble, but now they aim to give something back by bringing together the real-time, programmatic possibilities of the web with the reporting of the newspapers. Reporters have for decades written programming scripts that repeat database queries over and over again to extract public data for bulk analysis. The Nozzl team has taken that to the next level and combined it with new social media. The company put up a demo page for Portland, Oregon news that anyone can look at today. The public records streams are the big value-add and are fully customizable per newspaper. Visitors can then type live filter terms into the box at the bottom of the widget to zero in on topics of interest to them. That's the nozzle in Nozzl Media. User Experience is Hard For Robots Unfortunately, there are two big issues here. First, the flow of Tweets is overwhelming and undifferentiated. On the demonstration site you see almost nothing else unless you can think of something to filter for. If automated Twitter feeds hold value for local news, they will probably require some smart pre-proccessing before being presented to the reading public. There have always been people who like to listen to police radio scanners. Myself, I like to read restaurant health inspection reports, building permit applications and liquor license applications. If Nozzl had some categories I could choose between, that would be very helpful. The second, and more interesting, problem is that the public records that are extracted are exciting in theory but relatively unreadable in practice. The truth is, Nozzl didn't exactly tell me that there was an unconscious person reported at Nike HQ today - it told me with code from a form that there was an UNCONS/UNRESPONSIVE report at 1 SW Bowerman Drive, in Portland. A little Mad-Libs style transformation of forms into human-readable sentences and some pre-fetching of names associated with addresses could go a long way. Run the name associated with that address through a News search engine and tell me if its an entity that's been reported on in the past - if so then it's probably high-priority news to push live again. The company needs to put these machine-readable pages it displays into coherent English sentences, or find some other solution. Don't Forget the Humans Ambulances to Nike's Headquarters to help someone unconscious today? That sounds like it could be news. Even if the technology presented the information this clearly - it may take a human eye to pick this out of a list of automatically captured ambulance reports. Having a human available to pick up a phone, call Nike HQ and ask who was found unconscious there this afternoon would add another element of value to this data - but that's not what Nozzl is looking to do. The company is serving up raw data to news consumers. In the end, human reporters and raw robot feeds sound like a great combination. That appears to be what Nozzl is aiming to create by offering its widgets to established news organizations. The company says that a mobile application could be in its future, too. That's something I'm very excited about. Be it a widget or a mobile app, Nozzl's robot reporters need more polish before they are ready to win back the hearts of fast-leaving newspaper readers. As a picture of the future, though - Nozzl is very inspiring. Interested in what companies like Nozzl Media mean for the future of the web? Check out our profile of Nozzl and ten other case study companies in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Discuss

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Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters

A group of podcasters in Portland, Oregon have teamed up with internet friends around the world to create a new type of charity fundraiser, a live streaming telethon. Called 30 Hour Day , the event begins this evening. It will use streaming media services to deliver the content, the Causes Facebook application to collect donations, and Twitter to spread the word. 30 consecutive hours of music, variety acts, podcasts and other entertainment will raise money for local charity organizations. Will it work? Portland has a deep community of geeks and connections all around the web, so perhaps this group will be able to keep people entertained around the clock. Sponsor Well known geeky guests from outside Portland will include leading international nonprofit tech consultant Beth Kanter and author Tara Hunt . Charities benefitting from the event will include low-income computer assistance project Free Geek , the very innovative Oregon Food Bank and Toys for Tots. You can follow the event on Twitter at @30hourday . Discuss

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30HourDay: Now There's a Telethon 2.0

Google appears likely to purchase local review site Yelp for 1/3 of a YouTube, $500 million, according to TechCrunch and confirmed by the New York Times . Is this desirable for the users that made Yelp what it is today? Yelp was founded by members of what's called the PayPal mafia, geeks made wealthy by the sale of PayPal to eBay, and funded initially by the same. It's been hounded by ugly if unprovable allegations of extortion and is both loved and hated by the businesses it reviews. It's lovable none the less for users, a great place to learn about a business before you patronize it. How do users feel about the idea of their Yelp becoming the next Google property? Check out the opinions below and share your own in our poll or comments. Sponsor Below are some of the most interesting opinions we've been hearing about this deal, first from tech geeks and then from people in local Yelp forums around the US. Do you feel good about Google acquiring Yelp? ( answers ) "No! I love Google, but they need competition. Buying Yelp moves Google one step closer to becoming yet-another-Microsoft." -Kathy E. Gill, digital media educator at the University of Washington [I] "don't care one way or another if Google buys @Yelp but not sure (like Dodgeball & Jaiku) that they will do a good job integrating." - Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered, Inc. "The combo Aardvark [another rumored Google acquisition] + Yelp would be killer in the local search space because of the consumer purchase process." -Sebastien Provencher, Praized Media "Yelp has success with interacting with its most active members locally, and I can't see Google continuing that. Would be bad move." - Drew Olanoff "Maybe if Yelp were acquired by the GOOG it would become reliable again. Yelp's been hijacked by extortionists." - Clay Newton, UX designer "No. Yelp is a community that doesn't need Google as their overlord." -Joseph Manna, InfusionSoft From Yelp Forums "I'm not sure how I would feel about a Google owned Yelp. One more step towards complete domination of the web." -Chris "Walking Toxicology Report" L., Portland, Oregon "Isn't it the dream of every small internet startup to be swallowed up by a huge mega-conglomerate? Congrats, Yelp. Now I'm wondering how Google will destroy this site once they buy it...." -W.C. San Francisco "Anyone ever look at the comments on youtube videos? That is what is gonna happen here." -Devon "Completely Appropriate™" F. San Francisco "If this happens, I'm deleting my profile." -Eric "Hypeman E." W. San Francisco "Yelp is about to get the sSHIT regulated out of it. goodbye shadiness." -Joseph "the finest hat I've ever known" F. San Francisco "Wouldn't be surprised if it happens. Google is always on top of the most useful things around. Maybe they'll finally create a good Android app " -Irena "World Traveler" C. New York Discuss

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What Users Are Saying About Yelp Being Eaten by Google

Twitter turned on its long-awaited Geolocation API today, meaning that users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week's release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kroner of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible. Sponsor Exposing location data is an opt-in feature for users, but 3rd party app developers are being told to "encourage your users to enable it by sending them to their settings page." Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it." With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data. These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks. Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see. "Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location. How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered. These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind. Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include... Imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Most Twitter search engines index not just the 140 characters in a message, but the text in links being shared as well. If you think people like being the Foursquare mayor of a popular coffee shop, imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today? News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on. Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics of the week? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm. Cop Watcher Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed. Inventory Forecast If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it. Politics & Marketing People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on. Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time. Flu Trends+ Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool ? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area? Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset. What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data? Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com. Discuss

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What Twitter's New Geolocation Makes Possible

Employers all around the world are wrestling with whether employees should be able to access Facebook and Twitter at work - but some businesses are explicitly requiring that job applicants feel comfortable using Twitter. Just for fun we did a search across Craigslist job postings in some cities around the US to see how many listings mentioned Twitter in each location. The top city this month? New York City, with 196 jobs welcoming Twitter use. If you live in Bismarck, North Dakota though - no one on Craigslist is looking for Twitter users on the clock. Sponsor Mentions of Twitter in Craigslist Job Postings November 1st-18th, 2009 New York City, NY: 196 San Francisco, CA: 159 Boston, MA: 115 Seattle, WA: 50 Chicago, IL: 50 Portland, OR: 41 LA, CA: 40 Austin, TX: 26 Dallas, TX: 17 Phoenix, AZ: 11 A few others... Houston, TX: 11 Denver, CO: 6 Philadelphia, PA: 4 Boulder, CO: 2 Zero in Bismarck, ND Admittedly these are still very small numbers. In my home town of Portland, Oregon for example there are 41 listings that mention Twitter so far this month - out of 3,400 listings total. That's just over 1%. Note also that some number of these listings in some cities are posted by recruiters with their Twitter profiles listed (that probably says something still) and real-estate startup Redfin is looking for two agents in most of the cities we searched. None the less, it's a fun list and may say a rough something about social media adoption by businesses in different places. Businesses that are down with the internet are generally down with the Twitter, it's emblematic of adult social media use these days. Most of the jobs listed were for marketers who would broadcast over Twitter, but customer service jobs were well represented too. There's a whole world of business opportunity on Twitter that's based on listening, but that will take a while to catch on. Of course not all of these are good jobs - would you want to be "a full-time, experienced social media expert" working for $10 an hour ? How would you like to be a community manager for a company that's raised $6 million in high-profile venture capital ? "This is a part time unpaid job for 3-4 months that could lead to a full time position. Around 20hrs per week, but must come every day to the office ." Times are tough, but those positions are a far cry from what some top bloggers and social media consultants are making . There could be some real gems hidden in these listings, though, and it would be interesting to study rates of pay in social media by location. Are there any secret enclaves we didn't think to look in? Let us know if your town is unlisted but has a substantial number of search results in the jobs section for Twitter this month. In the mean-time, see you in Boston! See Also: Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile Working bird illustration by Pasquale D'Silva . Discuss

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Top 10 US Cities Where Twitter is Mentioned in Craigslist Jobs