The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and PBS unveiled Idealab yesterday, a large and ambitious online thinktank on the future of community news in the digital age. Idealab features a long list of contributors; all of the bloggers are recipients of recent Knight News Challenge grants. The project is being edited by the capable Mark Glaser, who has been running PBS’ Mediashift for many years. Thus far, there are some pretty intriguing posts. I’ve spoken with some of these folks in my prior work as a print journalist; a few years ago, I interviewed Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor and author of Pressthink, for a feature story I wrote for the Village Voice on academic bloggers. Rosen has a thought-provoking post on Idealab on using social networks for beat reporting.