Archive for the 'information media' Category

Page 2 of 2

what is blogging?

Published on 3 November 2008 in information media and web. 0 Comments

This Wired article reminded me of a rant I saved as a draft a while back lamenting the inability of traditional media to get the difference between blogging & writing a one-way diary or news channel.  What the corporates and media online today call blogging is really a news page that comes with an rss feed.  The richness of conversation and interaction largely enabled by blogging features such as trackbacks, etc is lost as generally they are not supported by those merely using blogging as a buzzword to show they are hip with the internets.  Even Wired refuses to support trackback.

 The flip side is obviously they do not want to fall victim to the myraid of spamsters using blog posts or comments as the new medium of choice.  But between them they are sapping the web of an important part of it’s intrinsic value.

Further on the trend following thing

Published on 9 July 2008 in information media, machine learning and newsflow. 1 Comment

Yesterday I blogged about the use of online news aggregators such as Google News to map trends. Further surfing on the topic yielded the current state of the art in such aggregators – Silobreaker is at it’s most basic another news aggregator. But it’s added value lies in it’s ability to analyse, group & visualise related news stories in a way much more intelligent than the likes of Google’s related story results.

For an example of how this fits in with my idea of a trend alerting system, see one of it’s bespoke topics – profit warnings. Historic data seems to back anything up to a year, and what Silobreaker calls a ’360 degree’ view, you get quotes, blogs, media trends as well as the news. The trends graph can be used to compare the relative media interest in news subjects, or ‘entities’ – a welcome nod in the direction of the Semantic Web there, with users having the ability to add entities not already recognised.

Further on the Semantic theme there is a network function that produces graphs of related entities. The obligatory news to map function is also available, and extremely useful it is too – I just learned of the US airstrikes against Al Qaeda on Somali soil because of it. As with the trend function, a time range can be specified.

There are always room for improvements on machine learning, and Silobreaker is no different – the above US airstrike news item was listed as of Baghdad origin, which in itself seemed fine as source of the article was a UPI journalist in Baghdad, but there was no mention of the Somali bombing run over Somalia itself on the world map.

Registering gives you the ability to personalise among other things your list of news sources. I guess what I’m saying from all this is that Silobreaker does much of the heavy lifting I’d envisage a financial trend forecasting tool to do. What now is needed is an API to access this analysis – something I’d be hopeful for, considering their background in ‘open source’ intelligence.

Who to trust?

Published on 16 June 2008 in information media and international. 0 Comments

This is the Wikipedia generation. Peer information is often considered more reliable and trustworthy than the top-down message. It’s far from wishful thinking: studies showed that the survivors of the World Trade Center tended to be the ones who relied on peer rather than official information. It may be anathema to the cult of the imperial leader in politics or the boardrooms of media corporations, but it is the future.

source: ft.com [sub required]

Disregarding the horrendous ‘Wikipedia generation’ coining attempt, I was struck by how much the p2p concept has pervaded into the mainstream.  I had a look around the net on this topic, but nothing really worthwhile at first glance.  Sure, there’s observations regarding the crowd-source type news networks built up around digg, the mobile phone to net video sites.  These though chiefly focus on information distribution, not necessarily information quality and subsequently it’s trustworthiness (particularly in my experience of Digg anyway, but that’s an aside).

The world-wide ridiculing of the current US president is surely the best example of this challenge to supposed superiors.  Cynicism in the system is pretty much ingrained these days – or maybe a new hierarchy of trust is replacing the old political one, the question then is what the new one consists of.  If it is largely a movement to a kind of meritocratic new media – p2p information still requires publication after all – does it mean we get International subject experts or cross-border idealism?  Is it really merit, or simply a self-fulfilling meme galvanised by a crowd willing to act as sheep?