Knight News Challenge Winners, In Brief from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

• From small news projects to ambitious advertising products, there’s some cool stuff here. Among the winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge – which means that the Knight Foundation gives tech-leaning journalists money to chase their dreams – are the Windy Citizen (which has a pretty cool real-time ads platform), CityTracking (which hopes to make city visualizations interesting and embeddable), The Cartoonist (which hopes to make editorial cartoon games), and LocalWiki (which is seriously the kind of idea we’ve heard bandied about more than a few times). Oh, and lots more. Check out the video and the full list to get the scoop. source

• We see this same jocks-vs.-nerds conflict play out every time a pro sports team threatens to skip town unless the taxpayers cough up money for a new stadium.
• Brad Flora (of The Windy Citizen, a site we really like and recommend) • On the fate of the Olympics in Chicago, which took a nosedive in part because of strong skepticism the endeavor faced for years from what Flora describes as nerdy critics who pointed out budget crises that could be caused by two weeks of sweaty people doing sweaty things. Flora portrays Obama as the guy whose job was to bridge both the nerds and the jocks, having cred with both. But he couldn’t pull it off. • source