Today, Knight is launching a new community site called Knight Pulse, a place to discuss the future of information.

Updated: Here's a video introducing the site:

Despite the current explosion of information, we are less informed. And in a world defined by information exchange, we need new ways to give, share, find, and receive information in our communities.

The goal of the Pulse site is to start conversations with a video post and listen as you debate ideas in the comments (and in other places, linking back). The site gives you a chance to develop collaborative projects about information that Knight Foundation may consider funding.

On the site, you'll find information projects that the Knight Foundation is funding, events that foundation staff and Pulse users are attending, opportunities to volunteer, and blog posts about information needs from feeds across the Web.

And you'll find profiles of people like you, who are also interested in improving information delivery--from details about local restaurant inspections (Everyblock) to discovering perspectives from bloggers around the world (Rising Voices).

Join the conversation and let us know what you think of the site--we're using Get Satisfaction and UserVoice for feedback, both on the Pulse 'Widgets' page, or leave a comment below--

The site is built in Drupal, and we are very pleased with the team at Development Seed and their great work on this project.

Knight News Challenge (the yearly $5 M contest for innovative local news delivery ideas that has just closed for this year's cycle) 2007 winner Rising Voices has been nominated for World's Best Blog in the Deutsche Welle awards.

From the Global Voices site:

Global Voices' citizen media outreach project, Rising Voices has been nominated for a 'Best of the Blogs Award' (B.O.B.) in the category 'Best Weblog'. More than 8,500 weblogs were suggested for nomination and a jury selected the final 11 in each of 16 categories. Anyone can cast their votes online for their favorite blogs until November 26, 2008.

Deutsche Welle wish to give special attention to the promotion of freedom of information and expression around the world.

Rising Voices is a project that has provided micro-grant funding for more than a dozen community blogging projects in some of the most under-represented parts of the world (thanks to a grant from the Knight News Challenge).

Through the people in this amazing community, we've learned about social unrest in Bolivia through Voces Bolivianas' bloggers, we've gotten to know the new bloggers in Nakuru, Kenya from the REPACTED project, and in Romania from the Blogging the Dream project.

(Watch this video, and you'll know who to vote for...)

 

Congratulations to the Rising Voices team of David Sasaki, Rezwan, and Julia Bhatia. Read all the Rising Voices news on the site or the feed, and remember to cast your vote here.

Editor's note: This is the first blog post where we are specifically highlighting an innovative project from another funding organization; let us know what you think in the comments. This post is from Gary Kebbel, Director of the Knight Journalism program.

More and more individuals and non-profit organizations are experimenting with new ways to bring important information to the public, using new digital tools or processes. One example is an experiment in getting the public to micro-fund investigative journalism, called Spot.us. Another new investigative reporting site, Pro Publica is relying on a large charitable contribution to fund top-notch professional investigative journalists to write stories that many daily newspapers no longer can afford to do. And now, the Kaiser Family Foundation has created Kaiser Health News, a new, nonprofit health policy news organization that will provide free health policy news content to for-profit and non-profit news organizations.

Kaiser Health News joins Spot.us and Pro Publica as experiments in how to fund serious journalism. Kaiser Health News is an experiment in niche journalism funded by an interested party, a foundation whose mission is to focus research and grants on the major health care issues facing the U.S. According to the foundation's web site, KHN will be an 'independent news service, to report on the nation's complex health care system and the increasingly urgent political and policy debates surrounding it.' To achieve that goal, journalists Laurie McGinley, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, and Peggy Girshman, now at Congressional Quarterly and formerly of NPR, have joined KHN.

What do you think about the Kaiser Health News experiment in niche journalism?