Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Googlahooplesoft News Network

In response to my last post a pessimistic, a-lot-of-us-are-going-to-be-out-of-jobs-unless-we-take-responsibility-for-ourselves look at the future of journalism, Morgan commented that google could never take over the industry because commercial media is what supports companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo & Apple.

In response this... I would like to present googlahooplesoft news network concept....

What is news?
A script is written that scans "web chatter" (blog posts, comments, forum posts, flickr tags, tweets, etc.) for vocabulary works that have a burst in a occurrence on web, meaning they suddenly appear in greater numbers that normal. (Of course "a" & "the" are excluded.)

How do we build a story?
Another part of the script goes out & finds people that are talking about and sorts them or allows users to sort them by the following criteria:
Text length - a longer post, in most cases means more information
Page views
Time spent on page
Frequency of the subject
Links to a source
Etc.

We have a headline & we have some information, but not all of it is "reliable" or "accurate".

That is where the social networking aspect is worked in. There is a rating system of sources. Recommendations for the most reliable sources would be based on those who have voted for the same chatter sources as you have in past. Kind of like Amazon.com. Googlahooplesoft news recommends the following based on what other people who have viewed this story liked. Or... other people who have viewed this story gave ratings positive ratings for these sources.

I think eventually something could be written to piece meal together whole stories via a formula. This is already being done for police briefs and obits at some papers. Why couldn't you write a story that way?

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