The Human Algorithm. When I became a reporter, almost 20 years ago, my job was to dig up scarce, precious facts and deliver them to a passive audience.
Today, scarcity has been replaced by an unimaginable surplus and that audience is actively building its own newsroom. Journalists the world over are struggling to cope with a social and mobile tsunami of ‘user generated content’, to use an increasingly inadequate phrase. Twitter and YouTube will overwhelm news organisations who can’t master their potential. A common mistake for those seeking to cope with this profound disruption is to confuse technology with innovation.
Recollection: A Collaborative Tool For Sharing And Visualizing Cultural Data. As digital tools move on, standards change, and interoperability fails, we lose access to older information.
As our history becomes harder to access, only the newest information rises to the top, leaving us with a collective digital memory that is foggy on anything but the most recent past. To correct this problem, the Library of Congress is debuting Recollection, a free platform developed by the LoC's digital preservation program, with help from information architecture company Zepheira, to preserve and present digital history. Www.arabmediasociety.com/articles/downloads/20110317090740_YoumansBrown.pdf. Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content. During an otherwise mundane story about Microsoft’s recent decision to offer a free, web-based version of its Office suite of products, I was struck by this sentence in an Associated Press story: With Office 2010, Microsoft must decide how much software it can give away online without undermining its lucrative desktop software business.
If it doesn’t make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue.