Journalism.co.uk have a list of this year’s “leading innovators in journalism and media”. I have some additions. You may too.

Nick Booth

I brought Nick in to work with me on Help Me Investigate, a project for which he doesn’t get nearly enough credit. It’s his understanding of and connections with local communities that lie behind most of the successful investigations on the site. In addition, Nick helped spread the idea of the social media surgery, where social media savvy citizens help others find their online voice. The idea has spread as far as Australia and Africa.

Matt Buck and Alex Hughes

Matt and Alex have been busily reinventing news cartoons for a digital age with a number of projects, including Drawnalism (event drawing), animated illustrations, and socially networked characters such as Tobias Grubbe.

Pete Cashmore

Mashable.

Tony Hirst

Tony has been blogging about mashups for longer than most at OUseful.info, providing essential help for journalists getting to grips with Yahoo! Pipes, Google spreadsheets, scraping, and – this week – Google App Inventor.

Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison

I’m unfairly bunching these two together because they were responsible – with others – for the Django web framework, which has been the basis for some very important data journalism projects including The Guardian’s experiment in crowdsourcing analysis of MPs’ redacted expenses, and Holovaty’s Everyblock.

Philip John

Behind the Lichfield Blog but equally importantly, Journal Local, the platform for hyperlocal publishers which comes with a raft of useful plugins pre-installed, and he runs the West Midlands Future of News Group.

Christian Payne

Documentally has been innovating and experimenting with mobile journalism for years in the UK, with a relaxed-but-excitable on-screen/on-audio presence that suits the medium perfectly. And he really, really knows his kit.

Meg Pickard

Meg is an anthropologist by training, a perfect background for community management, especially when combined with blogging experience that pre-dates most of the UK. The practices she has established on the community management front at The Guardian’s online operations are an exemplar for any news organisation – and she takes lovely photos too.

Chris Taggart

Chris has been working so hard on open data in 2010 I expect steam to pour from the soles of his shoes every time I see him. His ambition to free up local government data is laudable and, until recently, unfashionable. And he deserves all the support and recognition he gets.

Rick Waghorn

One of the first regional newspaper reporters to take the payoff and try to go it alone online – first with his Norwich City website, then the MyFootballWriter network, and more recently with the Addiply self-serve ad platform. Rick is still adapting and innovating in 2010 with some promising plans in the pipeline.

I freely admit that these are based on my personal perspective and knowledge. And yes, lists are pointless, and linkbait.

PHP Freelancer

You may have seen this on Mashable, but equally, you may not, so I thought I’d pass it on. Demonstrating the value of being open about your processes (because this document will now be viewed by thousands of people), PhotoKast created this 37-page guide to how they developed their iPhone app. Very useful reading if you’re thinking of doing something for iPhones.

Building PhotoKast: Creating an iPhone app in one month

PHP Freelancer

Mashable has a very lengthy but equally illuminating overview of social bookmarking site Digg, following the service’s decision to ban many of its biggest users. It’s essential reading for anyone involved in reader communities and user generated content. Here are some of the highlights:

Users quickly realized that one way to get diggs for their submitted stories was to make someone your Friend and consistently digg that person’s stories. Reciprocal diggs would usually follow.

… Users who had these attributes naturally saw a large percentage of their stories get promoted to the front page. This was what led to the concept of “top users” or “power users,” a notion that was, in some ways, antithetical to the idea of democracy (and that’s completely leaving out the fact that the site needs editors to supplement the efforts of its users).

… At one point, Digg’s top 100 users were responsible for over 50% of Digg’s front page stories.

… In a stunning analysis by ReadWriteWeb, the site … began dramatically expanding the variety of its front-page topics, focusing less and less on technology as the years went on (in other words, while the proportion of tech stories to all stories submitted remained roughly the same, the proportion of tech stories promoted to the front page went down dramatically). The implications of this were more troubling: Digg was actively manipulating the distribution of front page stories.

And here’s the key lessons at the end:

True Democratization of News is Difficult – Rose and his crew are undoubtedly a talented group of programmers, but even their Digg algorithm has had compensating for the flaws inherent in Digg’s system. In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories. The Web is still struggling to come up with a news model that can efficiently crowdsource its editorial process, although sites that automate the process (e.g. Techmeme) or sites that rely on editors (e.g. Fark, Slashdot) are at least more transparent with their advantages and failings.

Recognition is a Key Motivator – Social networks typically have a tangible way for users to track their notoriety. MySpace has “Friends,” Youtube has “Number of Times Viewed,” and Twitter has “Followers.” Digg has “Stories Made Popular.” Top users often pointed to this number with pride, a reminder of the thrill of seeing one’s submission spread to thousands of eager readers. Digg, however, has done nothing to acknowledge their contributions and with its recent bannings, it has indicated it doesn’t believe it needs them at all.

While Digg’s growth may not be adversely affected by the accounts gone missing, it seems that when Time named “You” the Person of the Year in 2006, they were actually on to something more meta than originally thought: People like being recognized for contributions and the potential for Internet fame that may follow. Social networks that have gone on to insanely high valuations or become profit-making ventures have recognized this fundamental fact of Web 2.0. Digg has not.

Communities Require Nurturing – The way that Digg has treated it users has not been with the committed touch of a benign leader, but of a dictator that assumes its actions (or lack thereof) will be consistently met with the assent of its followers. Its town halls have been little more than PR exercises, and user-requested features like the Recommendation Engine have taken years to roll out, while others (e.g. forums) have yet to be implemented at all. 

More over at Way of the Web:

The fact that the high profile, long term devotees of Digg could be powering the rise in a close rival (in terms of the type of service provided) [Mixx] could prove to be a very interesting case study – if the very people Digg banned turn out to be able to power the rise of a challenge.

PHP Freelancer