The venerable Associated Press is the latest in a string of major media players that have announced plans to incorporate citizen-collected content into daily news offerings. Others who have already taken that leap include the BBC, MSNBC, CNN and Gannett. The AP announced earlier this month that it is entering a partnership with Vancouver, Canada-based NowPublic.com to harvest material collected by the growing company’s sizable network of citizen contributors.

Michael Tippett is co-founder and CEO of NowPublic.

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Q: What type of content will be delivered to AP?

Michael Tippett: We’re working on the protocols now. It’s going to be anything: text, photos, video, audio.

Q: Do you have a launch date?

Tippett: I can’t tell you exactly yet, but it will be very soon, in the next couple of months I would expect.

Q: Jim Kennedy, AP’s vice president and director of strategic planning, has said, “We’re not just going to take content directly from the [NowPublic] contributors and put it on the wire. We’re going to edit and verify it just like we would any other contribution.” Do you have a sense that AP will be more carefully editing NowPublic content than they have done for other sources?

Tippett: Their job is really to apply the highest possible standard to the verification of info they distribute. We’re more like a Wikipedia: there’s a very, very good chance that it’s true, but it’s not 100 percent. There’s a chance the info will be modified. Our role is to connect them with an army of roving reporters who can get the material. They will do the verification, just like they do with anything else. I don’t think they’d have any reason to think that our content would be more suspect than something that hadn’t gone through any kind of process.

Q: So a plane crashes in nowheresville, Alabama. The AP benefits from the NowPublic connection — if anyone is there to take photos. What about putting citizen journalists at risk? I’m sure we don’t want them running into burning buildings.

Tippett: That’s obviously something we think about here. We don’t want people to endanger themselves and take personal risk, and we try as best we can to advise people of that. We encourage them to be cautious when it’s warranted. We have a code of conduct that people are required to agree to and sign, and it says they’re not going to take risks just to get the story.

Q: Does it prohibit reporting from war zones?

Tippett: Not specifically. We take a relatively hands off approach at this point. We do have people in Baghdad, who typically have some experience as war journalists.

Any aspiring media mogul knows by now that harnessing the potential of the Internet means building Web sites that offer more than just static text and images. That means audio, video, Flash elements, infographics and, above all, interactivity. But how this holy grail of direct involvement with the public is being realized is something that has perplexed many journalists and media players for the last few years. One technology that some users say offers significant potential in this area is Drupal.

Drupal is a free content management system and blogging engine that was conceived six years ago for bulletin boards by then-22-year-old open source programmer Dries Buytaert from Belgium. Since then, Drupal has been pressed into service behind a number of high-traffic Web sites, such as Sony’s Musicbox, and is known for its strength in building online communities, earning it the tag line “community plumbing.” The software is written in PHP and is in version 5.0.

Journalist and media consultant Steve Yelvington, who helped set up BlufftonToday’s Drupal site, says he is currently working on deploying Drupal to the Morris company’s other regional newspapers.

While it’s surely no surprise to the tech-savvy, it bears repeating that video games are no longer just kids’ stuff.

So what do more intelligent video games look like? Anyone who grew up on the trusty Apple IIc or IIGS may remember the campy but lovable Oregon Trail series of games. The goal was to shepherd an enterprising band of settlers across the mighty American West, and the result was a first-hand connection to history, as players had to cope with a range of real-world problems, from food shortages and diseases to hazardous river crossings and buffalo stampedes. Similar edutainment spin-offs included The Yukon Trail, Africa Trail and The Amazon Trail.

In Activision’s venerable Civilization Call to Power (1999) and Call to Power II (2000), gamers were given the “god-like” task of creating an entire society, balancing such factors as infrastructure development and social well-being. Similarly, Maxis’ iconic “Sim” lineup presented virtual world builders with myriad challenges and possibilities, from SimCity (1989) to SimAnt (1991), SimLife (1992) and beyond. Maxis’ forthcoming Spore is widely anticipated, both for its ambitious content—in which players pilot a single species through multiple levels of evolution—and for its sophisticated backbone technology, including advanced procedural generation.

Today these games are seen as educational for the player, but in a recent post, gaming expert and blogger David Edery asks if video games can be used to “effectively aggregate individual players’ actions into a form of collective intelligence.”

Edery came up with the idea by realizing that 1) the wisdom of crowds often means that more heads are better than a few (and lots of brain power is directed towards video games) and 2) video games are good incentives for people to do stuff and think about problems.

Given the phenomenal growth of massive multi-player online programs, from World of Warcraft to Second Life, which boast millions of users, Edery may be on to something.

The online virtual world Second Life has enjoyed explosive growth, with double-digit increases in sign-ups in recent months.

At the same time, Second Life is drawing mainstream media coverage because of the new economy — in which users can earn real-world money. One avatar reportedly earns her creator in the neighborhood of $150,000 a year from in-world businesses.

Significant nonprofit endeavors include forays by leading universities, including Harvard, that have launched research and educational programs within Second Life.

However, there is also tremendous uncharted ground for creative journalism within this expanding frontier.