|
 |
Monday, October 01, 2001 |
 >>>>
Scripting. Poor people in the US resent rich people. Well, the PBS show in question interviewed people in Burlington, VT.
Burlington, VT is a very unusual city. It is only only place in the US that has elected a socialist congressman. If, as a journalist, you wanted to find programmed resentment and a sense of class struggle, Burlington is the place to find it. It is hardly a representative sample of people across the US and shame on the journalists for portraying it as such.
7:49:40 PM 
|
|
>>>>
The top link on Weblogs according to Daypop. In some ways, we have a way to go.
5:59:01 PM
|
|
>>>>
WSJ mentions Daypop.
""One other new search site worthy of mention is Daypop. This site, at www.daypop.com, isn't meant to compete with Yahoo, Google or other general-purpose search tools. Instead, Daypop scans and indexes some 3,400 news sites and web-logs, those personal online journals that usually contain commentary and links to other sites.
Daypop's creator is Dan Chan, an avid weblogger who got the idea for what he calls a "current-events search engine" while trying to follow news about the 2000 presidential campaign. For news junkies, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Daypop is a must-bookmark site.""
5:08:00 PM
|
|
>>>>
Washington Post: Clinton disbarred by the Supreme Court. Will it ever end?
4:12:02 PM
|
|
>>>>
Vivisimo. A new search engine that autogenerates categories in an outline format for your keywords. Nice.
2:55:03 PM
|
|
>>>>
NYT. Paul Krugman writes about the fear economy in the NYT magazine. His analysis points to the similarities between our decline and that of Japans in the late nineties. Note, one thing he left out was the loss of confidence Japan felt when the Aum Shinrikyo attacked a Tokyo subway with sarin nerve gas in 1995.
The similarity is frightning. Until the attack, Japan like the US felt itself to be invulnerable. It was the safest nation in the world. After the attack, that confidence was shattered. People didn't feel safe anymore. All the old vulnerabilities flooded back. Japan is the only country in the world where the two of the most horrible weapons we have ever developed have been used. They could never be safe. It would happen again.
In response, demand dried up. People saved cash and withdrew money from low yield bank accounts. Given the precarious position of the economy at the time (in the midst of recovery from the financial bubble and stagnation in exports), Japan's economy fell off the proverbial cliff.
Could we be headed in the same direction? I hope not.
2:23:48 PM
|
|
>>>>
Two things: An added benefit to news organizations that self categorize content and use RSS feeds is traffic. What news organization doesn't want hundreds of thousands of Weblogs feeding it traffic every day?
1:21:54 PM
|
|
>>>>
Categories and metacontent. A great way to increase the quality of flow is self-categorization of content by authors. Keyword searches are fine, but they often miss items that are on topic but don't contain the keyword. Radio has the ability to enable authors to attach articles to categories and create category specific Weblogs. Unfortunately, there isn't a single categorization system available for people to use.
I tried to develop a system of self-categorized content for a research system I built at my last job. The idea was to have analysts publish Weblogs and categorize the entries based on a corporate corpus of metacontent. Customers would have the option of subscribing to the specific category flows that pertained to them. Although I didn't get it finished while there, the idea would be very easy to implement using either Manila and Radio or Radio by itself.
The same idea could apply to news organizations. Weblogs with self categorization would vastly improve the reading experience. It is also a more elegant solution that blunt tools like Moreover.
With Weblogs it is almost a necessity. A personal Weblog is often a mishmash of personal activities, random thoughts, timely links, and great analysis on a variety of topics. There are very few sites I am willing to read in their entirety. An ability to filter news from a large variety of sites into a multiple streams of relevant topics would help improve my productivity as a reader. I would still visit and read the entire Weblogs of people I know, but would rely on the category streams to cover the rest.
1:09:44 PM
|
|
>>>>
Network problems. You don't appreciate a functioning network until you have problems with it.
12:42:29 PM
|
|
© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
|
|
|
