Congratulations to Lisa Williams and her team on the relaunched Placeblogger site:

Placeblogger is a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative ideas in local news delivery).

The 2008 Knight News Challenge Screening Team is in Miami today to work through all of your great applications. Here’s some of the energy in the room today:

Just some of our incredible team of screeners led by Susan Mernit: Debi Jones, Brian Oberkirch, Andrew Hyde, George Kelly, Chris Messina, Beth Kanter, Rosental Alves, Dianne Lynch, Joyce Barnathan…

As of now, there are nineteen days left to apply for the Knight News Challenge, the yearly $5MM contest to find innovative ideas about delivering information to specific geographic communities.

To find out more about how to apply and win funding for your idea, join me, Kristen Taylor, this Thursday at one of two meetups in Austin:

This Thursday, 3:30pm at the University of Texas at Austin (Burson Conference Room at the College of Communication building–Room 4.128 in the CMA Building) Map

This Thursday, 7-8pm at Pluck (200 Academy Drive, plenty of parking) Map

Here’s the Facebook invite and the Upcoming invite.

I’ll also be at the Austin Maker Faire on Saturday and Sunday (details).

Any questions, please let us know in the comments below. And if you would like to work through your idea before you apply, please go to the News Challenge Garage and request a mentor (remember that you still need to apply through the main News Challenge site here).

Thanks to the News Challenge winner Lisa Williams of Placeblogger and the Berkman Blog Group for a great Boston meetup last night where we talked about the history of the News Challenge (the $5MM yearly contest to find innovative digital delivery ideas), the Garage site for working through ideas before applying, how mentoring in the Garage works, and brainstorming ideas for this year’s contest.

You’ll see Steve Garfield and Jason Pramas (Open Media Boston) in the group below as well as developers and thinkers from MIT, Harvard, and Somerville organizations.

Next Thursday, we’ll host meetups in Austin and we’ll also be at the Maker Faire during the weekend. After that, we’ll talk in San Francisco (Facebook invite). We hope to meet you then–

Remember that the News Challenge contest closes November 1st; you can apply here and work through your idea before applying here with a mentor who has won the contest in the past.

From the archive, Knight CEO and president Alberto Ibargüen interviewed Muhammad Yunus at the Poder Philanthropy Forum on March 12, 2008.

Founder of Grameen Bank Yunus and Ibargüen discussed certainty, freedom, and the dreams of flower children, among other things:

What would you ask Muhammad Yunus?

Until 5 PST this afternoon, you can watch the live webcast of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy Community Forum at Google.

Archived video will live on the Knight Commission site, and smaller clips are in a Flickr set and below, some highlights from the media panel that just finished a few minutes ago:

Linda O’Bryon, Chief Content Officer, KQED Public Television talks about QUEST content collaboration:

Knight Commissioner Andrew Mooney asked about journalism business models:

And Jim Bettinger, director of the Knight Stanford Fellows answered:

Knight Commissioner Michael K. Powell brought up “information snacking”:

And Raj Jayadev, Founder, Silicon Valley De-Bug talked about the internet as a gateway:

Posts on the speakers are on the new Knight Commission blog.

What do you think about journalism business models and information snacking based on the videos above?

This week, the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism presents a week of intensive workshop training for journalists in multimedia.

Mark Glaser of MediaShift (a blog the Knight Foundation supports), is live-blogging some of the workshops.

From MediaShift posts, find out about the Christmas Tree approach to incorporating multimedia, why UC Berkeley journalism school new media director Paul Grabowicz advises “print might be going away but not text,” how video should be part, and not all, of a specific piece, why RAW format isn’t necessary for the web, and try building this Flash template that “will help you do the interactivity for about 90% of Flash designs.”

The Center offers more tutorials here.

What other topics would you like to see covered at a multimedia training week?

This week, thirty Knight Foundation employees are working alongside thousands of other volunteers constructing and rehabilitating houses in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Knight Foundation is directly sponsoring eight houses, and we’ll be posting video and updates from those eight houses all this week.

One Knight Foundation program director, Anne Corriston, is blogging her experience here; in the past few days, she has been moved by messages of hope, impressed by veteran Habitat volunteer skillsets, and wary of pig boots.

Below, Leah Witmer, who manages special Habitat projects in the Gulf Coast region, describes her job and how excited she is about thirty new houses.

Have you volunteered with Habitat for Humanity?

Leave tips and encouragement for the build crews in the comments below.

Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen spoke at the Pennsylvania Avenue opening of the Newseum, the interactive museum for all things journalism and news, deeming the occasion a ’spirit of liberty’ moment.

More: speech transcript; Newseum video blogs.