“It’s almost impossible to describe how important the Web was for getting the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund off the ground,” said co-founder Karen Dalton-Beninato . Karen and her husband Jeff, who grew up playing music in the Ninth Ward, used Web technologies and social media to reach out to music fans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina . Now, almost exactly five years later, another crisis is hitting the shore, the Gulf oil spill . “With the current state of the economy, we get more used instrument donations than anything else these days, but it’s been an amazing ride. New Orleans is going to have a rough summer with Gulf Coast tourism dropping already after the oil spill. Hopefully people will keep the city and its music in their hearts.” Sponsor Karen and Jeff started the fund in a Chicago FEMA room when it became clear that many musicians and others wouldn’t be able to return to New Orleans for weeks if not months. Jeff, who grew up playing in the Ninth Ward and was a member of the 80s pop band the dBs, as well as playing with roots and jazz outfits, turned to the Internet. He and Karen put together a Website with an online donation function . Podcasts were a powerful way to reach out to both a distributed public and a fractured musical scene, as was the blog they started . They used social media and more old school Web tools to beat the bushes and pass the hat. Straight out donations, walkathons, downloads and t-shirt sales . Money came in to help get people home, to help them repair storm damage and to pay rent and, above all, to give them back their means of making a living: get them back their bones. In addition to money, people donated trumpets and trombones, traps and guitars and even pianos. There’s a feeling that once a certain amount of time passes after a disaster, people should have the decency to be OK. Unfortunately, given the sheer bulk of the mess, both physically and politically, that’s just not been the case with New Orleans, as co-founder Jeff Beninato reminds us. “If you think this tragedy is over think again. There are still families out there in corners of this country trying to figure out what they are going to do to get their lives back to some normalcy. There are so many musicians who were well known in New Orleans that are totally unknown where they are now. Imagine building your fanbase or your work base in your workplace and suddenly it all disappears.” And now what promises to become the single largest ecological catastrophe in the nation’s history, the Gulf oil spill, is bearing down on the city. The travelers and the money they bring are starting to dry up again. The resource economy, fishing, shrimping and crabbing, that all funnels into the city, is faltering. The need to plug in to this newest of technologies – the Web – to save the oldest – music – is pressing, again. There is some truth to the notion that this technology we cover levels and democratizes. NOMRF is using it to make the process of helping the men and women who provide the soundtrack to your hopes and dreams more egalitarian and more direct. Think trading tracks and files is “peer-to-peer”? Pass the hat at the Green Dragon and buy a guy a trumpet so he can gig and get his kids new shoes. That’s peer-to-peer, brothers and sisters. Can I get an amen? I said… Can I get an amen? Alright, then. Discuss

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Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context – that’s what we’re looking for in the journalism we read, isn’t it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use. NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews . The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app! Sponsor When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it’s easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined. The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust. The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It’s one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it’s another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality. The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It’s a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing. NewsTrust and MyNews aren’t for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.) Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content. Discuss

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