iWitness, a 2011 Knight News Challenge Winner, launches its new app which helps users explore social media content. The following, written by Jesse James Gareth, is crossposted from AdaptivePath.com

The iWitness concept was one of the winners of last year’s Knight News Challenge, an open competition that funds media innovation projects. That funding enabled us to bring in a development partner, New Context, to help turn our concept into a reality.

We designed iWitness to enable people to explore content in new ways. We wanted it to be a vehicle for discovering what’s happening in the world in cases where time and place really matter.

But we didn’t just want to create an interesting new product. We also wanted to see what could be done with the latest web techniques and technologies. As a result, iWitness runs entirely in the browser—it has no server-side component.

Although today is the culmination of that development effort, it’s really only the beginning for iWitness. We’re releasing all of the source code via GitHub, so anyone can build on the work we’ve done. As social media itself continues to grow and evolve, iWitness will be able to evolve right along with it.

You can check out the app at iwitness.adaptivepath.com. For more on the project, read ourcase study, or come see my presentation at UX Week 2012.