Martin Belam, talking about news beyond chronology
From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to liveblogging, there's a tyranny of chronology. Events happen over time with consequences.
You children, if set homework to study climate change, they'll go to Google and end up on Wikipedia, not any of our news sites. Why does Wikipedia do better? It's not tied to the tyranny of chronology.
Yet, we do put packages together around great stuff.
Our atom is the story. A national newspaper will have loads of articles about foreign policy, and Cuba and Obama. And you have loads of travelogues,
"obama foreign policy cuba Venezuela" - produces a search page of articles.
We can do better - break stories down to paragraphs and sentences and then tag them as what they are.
Computers are very good at repetitive tasks ONCE human beings tell them what the task is. This means: metadata.
However, it needs to be done more intelligentally. Daily Mail: a search for Gordon Brown brought up a caravan review, because it mentioned him.
We used to have librarians, who managed and curated our data. We stopped that, and brought in CMSes that shove everything into reverse-chronological order.
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