Many of the services that are being developed as part of the ‘semantic web’ are necessarily works in progress, but they all contribute to extending the success of this burgeoning area of technology. There are plenty more popping up all the time, but for the purposes of this post I have loosely grouped some prominent sites into specialities – social networking, search and browsing – before briefly explaining their uses.
There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation. It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it. At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.
Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory. Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us. Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.
JEEcamp09
On Friday May 8 2009 I’ll be hosting JEEcamp09 – an unconference (or barcamp) for journalism experimenters.
Last year’s JEEcamp was great. This year we’re doing it all again, but with some cute ideas to stir things up.
These include:
And there will be other ideas as we go along. If you have any other ideas for stirring up the traditional format, I’d love to hear them.
The day will be opened by Kyle Macrae, the man behind one of the original new media journalism startups, Scoopt. That was sold to Getty in 2007, who closed it down last month. Kyle will be talking about his experiences of getting Scoopt off the ground, and why he thinks Getty failed to make it viable.
After that, the really interesting stuff is in the heads of the attendees, how we – and you – get it out.
You can get tickets at http://jeecamp09.eventbrite.com/ – and add your comments below as to how you’d like this to pan out.
Following on from the previous Something for the Weekend, Twickie, which allows you to collect responses to a question posted on Twitter, this tool allows you to present a conversation – with impressive control.
QuoteURL allows you to drag and drop (or copy and paste) Twitter tweet URLs to reconstruct a conversation. Continue reading
That was the question I posed to the Twittersphere earlier today. And here are the very helpful answers: Continue reading
3 weeks ago my class of online journalism students were introduced to the website they were going to be working on: BirminghamRecycled.co.uk – environmental news for Birmingham and the West Midlands.
The site has been built by final year journalism degree student Kasper Sorensen, who studied the online journalism module last year.
In building and running the service Kasper has done a number of clever, networked things I thought I should highlight. They include:
The site itself is clever too.
Kasper wanted to explicitly follow a Mashable-style model rather than a traditional news service: he felt an overly formal appearance would undermine his attempts to build a community around the site.
And community is key. When unveiling the site to the journalists Kasper made the following presentation – a wonderful distillation of how journalists need to approach news in a networked world:
Which comes first? A newspaper’s agenda or its readers’ interest in those subjects? The search suggestions at Express.co.uk give a revealing insight into either what its readers are searching for or what the Express wants them to be interested in.
The screenshot below, first published on this blog, is a photomontage of the search box on the Express site. Every time you reload the Express search page, a different ‘example search’ is shown. The list seems to suggest a certain editorial agenda …
Daily Express search suggestions
Anyone can look at my Delicious bookmarks for ‘online journalism’ – they’re republished in a widget on the side of this blog. But I’ve now created an email newsletter for those bookmarks if you want to receive them that way. To subscribe, just enter your email address in the box below.
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The widely respected #CollegeJourn is coming to Europe. #CollegeJourn was established as the real-time online discussion for members of the college journalism community in the US. But it runs in the early hours of Monday mornings, which often stops people from this side of the Atlantic attending.
So Sunderland journalism student Josh Halliday, editor for www.injournalism.co.uk, is launching a chat for Europe at a more amenable hour. #CollegeJourn Europe will launch this Sunday 22nd March at 8pm GMT.
Josh said: “It’s a great chance for those in journalism education who are either worried or excited about the state of journalism today to come along and see what others think.”
If you want to share some ideas for the discussion in advance, you can send any topic suggestions towards the #collegejourn hashtag on Twitter, to Josh directly or the deceptively named @florida_mike. To read more about plans and topics that might come up then take a read over at Josh’s blog.
The mission of #CollegeJourn is to provide a meaningful and resourceful forum of conversation for college journalists. University journalists, journalism professors, and journalism professionals, are all welcome. Josh is hoping to attract some big names in j-education to the opening debate. The chat takes place in Meebo. Put it in your diary now, and spread the word.
Twitter or Seesmic? Dipity or YouTube? I thought it might be interesting to see which tools are being most widely used within newsrooms. Hope you can help provide the answers…
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