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?

Googlinians and Yahooites

My fiance, Josh, and I are sort of an odd couple. We met back in my undergraduate days while I was working nights at the Columbia Daily Tribune. He was and is a pressman, and  I worked in post press operations and went to school during the day for photojournalism. He proposed to me, then I became an interneti.

When I went webbie, we joked about the irony of our career paths. Then one day recently I suggested taking my idea for my master's project to Google or Yahoo. This is how our conversation went.
.......
Josh - "What? What am I going to do?"

Me - "Baby, they have to have some sort of printed publication near by that you can work for."

Josh - "No they won't! You don't understand what those places are like. There will be no place for me. They have their own cities with names like Google Town and Yahoo City. Do you think that they have printed publications in place like that. I'll bet you they don't. I'll bet you they don't even have recycling pick up for paper, because they just don't have any."

Me - "Baby, if I am going develop this series of mapping idea for news organizations, I think Yahoo or Google would be the best places. I don't want to waste my time developing a concept, when it could already be in the works."

Josh - "What happens if everything turns out? What happens if you stay? How will you hide me? You are going to have to tell your co-workers one day what I do for a living?"

Me - "Baby, you are being silly."

Josh - "All those Googlinians and Yahooites are going to mock me*. They won't even let me on the compound. I can't even work the elliptical machine at the gym, let alone a computer. They will know I am a fake.... After you finish your project, you will exit the techno, Mormon-like cult compound to tell me that you are going to leave me for some Drew Carey look-alike**. I'll bet you those places are full of them."

Me - "Baby stop, you are being ridiculous."

Josh - "Next thing you know, you will take my Histoogle idea, sell it too Google and leave me."

Me - (Me LOL.) "How am I suppose to take you seriously? I'm done with conversation. I'm going to back to work."

Josh - "Are you mocking my Histoogle idea?"

(Me exits stage left.)
......

*This sentence has been edited for professional purposes. Josh agreed to this edit. The original content contained a few curse words and sexual references.
**Please refer to the YouTube video of Ben Clemens, Director, Yahoo Design Innovations, in my last posting. A friend asked me, aren't you afraid to post a comment like that, especially since you are planning on pitching your project to Yahoo and Google. I told her that the best places I have worked at were so because I got along with my co-workers so well, no matter how much money I did or didn't make. I would like to think that a co-worker or supervisor would be flattered by such a comment. Then I continued to explain, that it was my fiance, not I who said it, and that I have nothing for or against Drew Carey look-alikes.

User comments, a broken system

Google added the option to comment on news stories, but only by those mentioned in the story. Read more: Google News Adds Barely 100 Comments in 30 days

Good? Bad? I can see where they are going with it. After monitoring boards during some of my internships, they can get out of control in numbers and in content. On the linked blog above, there were a couple comments made that suggest everyone should be able to comment and those mentioned in the article should be noted so.

I was always an advocate for a user ranking system, sort of like Yahoo Answers or system similar to that which the Naples Daily News uses. In both situations users are able to vote comments up or down. If a comment receives so many negative votes, it is blocked out, but not deleted. A user has to consciously click "view" to view the comment. I am not sure why more media outlets do not use such a system. While it is not full proof, it does assist with a great deal of the monitoring, well, at least more than an automated system that tries to deny in appropriate language.

Google's system does add to a story. It takes what is a journalist "conversation" potentially into a debate, but as one person mentioned in a comment on the blog, the comments become less genuine and can come of PR-ish.

Shall it be spelled GoogleAP or Googleap?

Welcome to a new world of Googleap.
Google will now host AP news, instead of linking off to other websites. This will translate as a revenue loss. See > Time to rethink the AP model? - Lost Remote TV Blog
So maybe this is not Googlezon, but for news media it is still kind of scary. Maybe we slow down with pulling stuff of the wires for the website as a result? Wasn't the notion always to have something, so if we don't have something, let's hope the wires do?

Telling Google you have moved

As casual “Sunday bloggers”, we often don't think of the repercussions of moving domains. As webbies, it might be more evident and considered a no-no.

There are sometimes when it has to be done. Moving a domain can be devastating, as I found out during one my internships.

Telling Google Your Domain Moved

There’s a few things you might need to adjust in the different Google apps when moving to a new domain...