Vadim Lavrusik takes a look at Kommons, a new project from New York University senior and founder of local news blog NYU Local, Cody Brown.
Brown is developing a platform for local news communities, combining the strengths of Twitter and Wikipedia, to create a flow of real-time news and updates in response to specific questions and queries from users. Kommons will focus on issues of trustworthiness and identity of contributors and be tested on a version for New York University:
A profile page has a stream of status updates, but anything that is @tagged by a user in a status message becomes its own wiki-like page that users can edit and add information to in real-time. This means anything can be tagged and have user-created information attached to it. The function applies to users that are tagged. A user has a short background profile, but other users can attach information about that person. In a lot ways, the identity is determined by the community of users similar to how a bio page functions on Wikipedia.