links for 2011-01-17

Well here’s another gap in the data journalism process ever-so-slightly plugged: Tony Hirst blogs about a new Q&A site that Rufus Pollock has built. Get the Data allows you to “ask your data related questions, including, but not limited to, the following:

The RSS feed is a Yahoo Pipe of the following job feeds:

Takeaway: Journalism is still looking for ways to exploit geo-located content; how can you as an individual or your newsroom use mo-bloggers to your advantage? Could you turn your reporters into mo-bloggers?

Maps are part of the very idea of hyperlocal – but when is it best to use them to help illustrate a story – and when is merely adding the name of the road or postcade area enough for residents to get a geolocal grip on the content?

The Patch network also has a business and services directory that now contains more than 630,000 listings, 5 percent of which are real estate-related, Webster said. Real estate business owners can claim their office listings and include information about their brokers and agents, how many property listings they carry, the type of real estate they handle, and add photos and videos for no charge.

"There's nothing more local than real estate," Webster said.

An initial investor in Patch, Mr. Armstrong, who is 40 and lives in Connecticut, has plowed $4.5 million into the site. A few months after becoming AOL’s chief executive in 2009, he led AOL’s $7 million acquisition of the nascent service.

A failed effort to find online information about volunteer opportunities for his family in their hometown gave Mr. Armstrong the idea for Patch. He began researching local news and at one point called his local paper to encourage it to create a Patch-like site.