Comments on: Making information valuable http://www.fixjournalism.com/uncategorized/making-information-valuable/ a conversation about journalism's future Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:17:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: Perry Gaskill http://www.fixjournalism.com/uncategorized/making-information-valuable/comment-page-1/#comment-217 Perry Gaskill Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:42:52 +0000 http://www.fixjournalism.com/?p=562#comment-217 Interesting post, Donica. The question of information wanting to be free, or valuable, was probably first posed by Stewart Brand back in 1984, and has been a topic of discussion ever since. It seems to me that in order to understand how to make information more valuable, it's important to understand where we are on the technology curve. And what we've seen on the web has been a transition from portals, then into search engines, and now heading into a semantic web. Eventually there will be some advanced level of Artificial Intelligence. That the transitions haven't happened sooner is because the semantic and AI parts are much harder to do than anyone anticipated. To get an idea of what's out there now, here are a couple of links: Open Calais - http://www.opencalais.com/ This is a Reuters project, fairly far advanced, which allows for semantic tagging based on existing common ontologies. Using such semantics means that machines can understand what content is about, which makes the content more valuable because it can become easier to find in the context you're after. Intelligent Software Assistants - http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22117/ This is a recent story by MIT's Technology Review in which it named the Top 10 emerging technologies. Most of the heavy lifting for one of these, Siri, was done for the Department of Defense and is designed to base information retrieval on what's appropriate for a particular task. It also seems to me that one of the bigger issues going on with the journalism community is that a large portion of journalists tend to be consumers of technology and not part of the process of implementing what's emerging. We use Twitter to ask questions, or Facebook to find sources, and write our stories but don't spend much time thinking about how best to channel our stories to the people who want or need to know what we write about. Not just today, but also in the future when someone may be hunting for a package of related information and needs not only the now of the thing but also fast retrieval of deeper background, for example. Interesting post, Donica. The question of information wanting to be free, or valuable, was probably first posed by Stewart Brand back in 1984, and has been a topic of discussion ever since. It seems to me that in order to understand how to make information more valuable, it’s important to understand where we are on the technology curve. And what we’ve seen on the web has been a transition from portals, then into search engines, and now heading into a semantic web. Eventually there will be some advanced level of Artificial Intelligence. That the transitions haven’t happened sooner is because the semantic and AI parts are much harder to do than anyone anticipated.

To get an idea of what’s out there now, here are a couple of links:

Open Calais – http://www.opencalais.com/

This is a Reuters project, fairly far advanced, which allows for semantic tagging based on existing common ontologies. Using such semantics means that machines can understand what content is about, which makes the content more valuable because it can become easier to find in the context you’re after.

Intelligent Software Assistants – http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22117/

This is a recent story by MIT’s Technology Review in which it named the Top 10 emerging technologies. Most of the heavy lifting for one of these, Siri, was done for the Department of Defense and is designed to base information retrieval on what’s appropriate for a particular task.

It also seems to me that one of the bigger issues going on with the journalism community is that a large portion of journalists tend to be consumers of technology and not part of the process of implementing what’s emerging. We use Twitter to ask questions, or Facebook to find sources, and write our stories but don’t spend much time thinking about how best to channel our stories to the people who want or need to know what we write about. Not just today, but also in the future when someone may be hunting for a package of related information and needs not only the now of the thing but also fast retrieval of deeper background, for example.

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