Different ways to use the same kind of information.

A local newspaper may look really smart and 2.0-savvy by including feeds from local bloggers in its online edition. It may be cleverly done by automatically aggregating posts which are tagged with appropriate keywords such as Gorizia, Trieste,…

But what if three of those local sources are regular newspapers of their own (Bora.la, Gorizia oggi, Osservatorio sui Balcani), registered in a court, and with a Creative Commons license which does not allow commercial use of the contents?

How would you call it, if it all were done without asking for permission (and I know this for sure, for at least one of them), copying the whole articles within the newpaper page layout (actually rebranding them and putting along their own ads?) I don’t know whether it is "commercial use" or not, but it is sure not a respectful move. A thing I am sure is that the combined read of those three news feeds makes an excellent source of local information, way better in my opinion than the good old newspaper.

The funniest part about it is the "instructions" page, which says that offensive comments will be removed. How, from the blogs?

Ok, I’m being negative. I promised different ways to use local tags, so let’s compensate: here is a great way to use them.

 

The CityWall is a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the everchanging media landscape of the city.

The content displayed on the CityWall is periodically organized into themes or events that are currently taking place in the city such as festivals, carnivals or sports events.

The CityWall is designed to support the navigation of media, specifically annotated photos and videos which are continuously gathered in realtime from public sources such as Flickr and YouTube.

There is also a movie – it’s awesome.