A Website

Yesterday, a friend of mine was awarded the biggest prize in journalism. I can't say I was all that surprised: I've known Matt Waite for a lot of years, and few reporters anywhere have amassed a more impressive body of work than he has. We're talking about a guy who took graduate-level courses and earned the equivalent of a master's degree in order to get a story.

So, as many of us heard the news yesterday that Matt and his colleagues at the St. Petersburg Times had won a Pulitzer for national reporting, the natural reaction was: "It was only a matter of time."

But there's way more to this story and the significance of what happened yesterday cannot really be overstated. I (among others) described it as a "Color of Money" mom ...

I don't have to tell you that media companies are struggling. Every day, it seems, there's word of another news organization cutting back, laying off or shutting down completely.

Newsrooms are fighting for their very survival. But thanks to the internet, we're not fighting alone: Whether it's hyperlocal, the link economy, citizen journalism, social media or micropayments, someone somewhere is coming up with the next Big Idea to save journalism.

In fact, there are so many great ideas out there, it's harder and harder to keep track. With that in mind, I'm proud to announce my new project: What's Saving Journalism?

Think of it as a fly strip for creativity: Ideas that used to buzz around the web for a while, and then vanish out ...

Instead of doing something productive yesterday, I decided to mess around with the Twitter API some. The result of that is a little time-waster I call EZPoll.

What does it do? Well, for one it will prove me right in my ongoing debate with Brian Hamman, who is dead wrong about people who work with computers. They should not hesitate to discuss their love of science fiction.

But less importantly, EZPoll is a dead simple service that will allow you to create a simple user poll on Twitter. For now, I am the only one who can create an EZPoll. But once I make sure this all works as expected, and add a bit of error handling, I'll open it to everyone.

How does it work? Like I said, it's dead simple.

To register with EZPoll (when I open it up to everyone), you simply send a tweet to ...