Challenge time: Feb 14, 8am-noon EST

Challenge: Gather 100+ first kiss stories from people around the world and overlay them on a map. The topic was chosen for its universality, and ease of recall.

Click to view the map and the stories. The map clusters all stories from a certain city. To view them all, expand the list (>>) on the left of the map.

Objectives:

• do a project pegged to a timely and (largely) shared theme, Valentine’s Day, that involves other users in creating content;
• find alternative ways to gather/present information;
• do a story that broadens traditional news values – from “what is new” to “what is”; from “public interest” to “personal stake”; from “conflict” to “life events”.

Tools:

• ZeeMaps.com (I discovered this tool early in the morning; it’s the first map making tool I came across that looked easy enough. The ability to upload spreadsheets sealed the deal.).
• Google Forms – decided to use forms to collect data (Name, Story, City, Country) for two reasons: 1. Ease of input by users. 2. Some form of control over what gets posted to the map.
• Bit.ly – to make custom URLs to be shared and later be able to count clicks.
• Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Instagram.

Results (at 11:50 am, 10 mins before closing the challenge):

• 180 collected stories;
• 36 shares on my original Facebook post (doesn’t count direct posts by others);
• 4 retweets on four total Tweets;
• 498 clicks on Bit.ly form link; 212 clicks on Bit.ly map link;
• 8 bogus entries deleted

Issues/Conclusions:

• given the response rate, this was a successful project, that would be easy to replicate for other topics – from the mundane (favorite restaurants) to the more serious (stories of poverty);
• many of the shares were endorsements, with people commenting and praising the project, not just passing it on. This is a sign of sharing because it was relevant/interesting to them;
• couldn’t embed the map directly into WordPress, because the iframe code isn’t working, and I couldn’t figure it out in time;
• the map tool clusters all entries from the same city, and makes browsing less satisfying. One can still see all entries on a list, but it’s less fun. Potential solution for future projects: use streets, GPS coordinates, different types of markers;
• a pre-existing social network is extremely helpful for quick-turnaround projects. Facebook was by far the tool that helped me best; Twitter barely had any traction;
• such projects are – at least early on – heavily biased to the geography of one’s network. Potential solution: partnering with others across the globe, extending one’s social network.
• I had issues with Romanian diacritics and had to clean the spreadsheet by hand and turns ASCII (?) code into letters.
• a tool that collects and uploads data/stories to a map in one-step (ideally with administrative privileges) would make the process smoother. One could even build analysis tools on top of it: sort by gender, by age, by other variables. [They might exist; I didn’t have time to look for one in the allotted challenge time].