When we started telling people about our "nutrition label for the news" project, one question came up fairly frequently: “Do nutrition labels even work?”

Of course, when people ask if labels work, they implicitly mean, "Have nutritional labels prevented America from growing more obese each year?" In this case, the obvious answer is “No.”

This doesn't mean that labels don't serve their purpose, or that we don't need them to get healthier. Your political identity is shaped by many things other than where you get your news: your parents, your siblings, your childhood, your education, your workplace, or hey, maybe even your most basic morals or the type of bacteria in your belly.

Surface dedicated in Newspapers front pages vs. Twitter about #Occupy Nov. 17th after Occupy Wall Street eviction.

With the growth of the 99 Percent movement and occupations all over the world, a large number of citizen journalists and activists have turned to real-time video casting services such as livestream, ustream, and justin.tv. Live streaming offers a compelling way to experience a protest on-the-ground as it's happening – and it has even trickled up to more traditional media services. Time.com published the live feed from The Other 99 on its front page last night during a 2000+ person strong general assembly in Liberty Plaza, NY. And CBS published a live stream of Bloomberg's morning address in which he explained the city's motivations for evicting protesters.

Download! (Embedded version below the fold.)

While you view our video below, read Ethan's rundown of our superb event, Mapping Media Ecosystems. It featured Hal Roberts, of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Erhardt Graeff, founding member of the Web Ecology Project; and Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development for SocialFlow:

I asked them to share some of the recent work they’ve been doing, understanding the structure of the US and Russian blogosphere, analyzing the influence networks in Twitter during the early Arab Spring events and understanding the social and political dynamics of hashtags. They didn’t disappoint, and I suspect our video of the session will be one of the more popular pieces of media we put together this fall.

Here's your breakdown of news in civic media this week...

VIDEO

Mapping Media Ecosystems
Hal Roberts, Erhardt Graeff, and Gilad Lotan

FEATURED EVENTS

Greetings from London! Matt, Dan, and I from the Center for Civic Media are in the UK this week for the Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom, and the Web. Matt and I arrived in London on Wednesday to meet up with interesting people in the UK before the conference. Here's a quick run-down on our trip thus far.

In Cambridge, we spoke with Matt Williams, social enterprise coordinator for the UK Youth Climate Coalition. Matt was the programme manager for PowerShift UK in 2008. We talked about organising climate campaigns as well as models of action around adaptive responses to the human impact of climate change.

This term, I plan to develop a visual map of the field of CoDesign. And I need your suggestions for what it should include.

CoDesign is a process in which the designer makes a commitment to a community of use, involving them in all stages of the design proces. Here at the Center for Civic Media, we're developing a CoDesign toolkit, led by Sasha Costanza-Chock. My visual map is one small part of this larger project.

The standard US FDA nutrition label is well-known here in the states because it is both consistent (for better or worse) and ubiquitous: you'll find it on almost all packaged foods, excluding certain foods like fresh meat (until 2012) and fresh baked goods (creating an opening in the market for cupcake detectives).

As we consider the equivalent of a nutritional label for information consumption, I'd like to strike a balance between the consistent, widely-recognized FDA label and the far more creative, dynamic approaches to visualizing information all over the internet.