• CNN: World’s Best-Designed News Web Site (CNN.com) and World’s Best Designed News App (CNN for iPad)
• The Globe and Mail: World’s Best-Designed News Web site
• The Guardian for iPhone: World’s Best-Design Mobile App
• NPR for iPad: World’s Best-Designed News App

Back in March, the SND announced sixty other winners for individual project.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

If you’re a baseball junky you’ll love Pennant, an iPad app that visualizes every play from every Major League baseball game played since 1951. 

The app was created by Steve Varga for his Master’s of Fine Arts in Design and Technology thesis at Parsons in NYC.

The past century has seen a rapid progression in the way we see and experience live sports. As we now find ourselves with access to every live game detail imaginable across a multitude of devices, we must now ask ourselves the question “Where does all of this information go?” Pennant is both an attempt to explore the vast amount of baseball data that has been collected in the last sixty years as well as a study in using interactivity as a means for investigating the extremely large data sets that are becoming increasingly available.

Baseball not quite your thing? Think of this as a prototype of what could be done with deep data sets such as those coming out of the Open Gov movement.

Nice promo video from The Atavist, a Brooklyn-based start-up that’s thrown its hat into the long-form journalism ring.

Via Forbes’ Bill Barol: 

The Atavist wants to be an outlet for longform journalism, and although the app itself (currently for iOS) is free, the journalism isn’t. The first two stories, Brendan I. Koerner’s Piano Demon and Evan Ratliff’s Lifted, sell as in-app purchases for $2.99. This alone seems to strike some users as a bait and switch, although there’s no effort to hide it. Are the purchases worth it? The quality of the journalism is high (Koerner has written for Wired, Slate and The New York Times; Ratliff, who doubles as the site’s editor, has also written for Wired, as well as The New Yorker). The articles are long enough to sink into, at a meaty 12,000 words each, and the presentation is slick and engaging, with inline maps, photos, audio and video. (The content is also available without extras for $1.99 through Amazon’s Kindle Singles program, and on the Nook.) I’ve started with Piano Demon, and it’s a great yarn, every bit as seductive as the logline on The Atavist site: The globetrotting, gin-soaked, too-short life of Teddy Weatherford, the Chicago jazzman who conquered Asia.

We often note that the Web is moving toward an increasingly closed system.

I don’t like it but our media overlords continue pushing to make it so.

Back to Hirschorn:

All of this suggests that the era of browser dominance is coming to a close. Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based. As app-based usage climbs at the expense of the browser and as more content creators put their text, audio, and video behind pay walls, it will be interesting to see what happens to the Twitterverse and blogosphere, which piggyback on, and draw creative juice from, their ability to link to free Web content. If they don’t end up licensing original content, networks such as Twitter and Facebook will become purely communication vehicles.

At first glance, Web sites like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post will have a hard time once they lose their ability to hypertext their digests; on second glance, they will have an opportunity to sop up some of the traffic that once went to their now-paid rivals. Google, meanwhile, is hoping to find ways to link through pay walls and across platforms, but this model will clearly not be the delightfully free-form open plain of the early Web. Years from now, we may look back at these past 15 years as a discrete (and thrillingly indiscreet) chapter in the history of digital media, not the beginning of a new and enlightened dispensation. The Web will be here forever; that is not in question. But as Don Henley sang in “The Last Resort,” the Eagles’ brilliant, haunting song about the resortification of the West, “You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”

Head over to The Atlantic to read his complete thoughts.

About Is the Browser Dead?

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

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True, WP has a function where you can email in posts but, equally true, I never tried it out or gave it much thought.

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Posting from my phone? Maybe.

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But I view any phone activity as predominantly tweet oriented and don\\\’t imagine I\\\’ll really do another in the future.

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I could see the the benefit if I was part of a team and needed to post to a group blog/publication. Say I\\\’m at an event and need to get something up to ScribeMedia. But if that were the case, I\\\’d hopefully have my \\\’puter.

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Verdict then on WP for iPhone? Only in a pinch, or crunch, as the case may be.