Information Overload: Can algorithms help us navigate the untamed landscape of online news? by Jason Cohn.
From the post:
Digital journalism has evolved to a point of paradox: we now have access to such an overwhelming amount of news that it’s actually become more difficult to understand current events. IDEO New York developer Francis Tseng is—in his spare time—searching for a solution to the problem by exploring its root: the relationship between content and code. Tseng received a grant from the Knight Foundation to develop Argos*, an online news aggregation app that intelligently collects, summarizes and provides contextual information for news stories. Having recently finished version 0.1.0, which he calls the first “complete-ish” release of Argos, Tseng spoke with veteran journalist and documentary filmmaker Jason Cohn about the role technology can play in our consumption—and comprehension—of the news.
Great story and very interesting software. And as Alyona notes in her tweet, it’s open source!
Any number of applications, particularly for bloggers who are scanning lots of source material everyday.
Intended for online news but a similar application would be useful for TV news as well. In the Altanta, Georgia area a broadcast could be prefaced by:
- Accidents (gristly ones) 25%
- Crimes (various) 30%
- News previously reported but it’s a slow day today 15%
- News to be reported on a later broadcast 10%
- Politics (non-contextualized posturing) 10%
- Sports (excluding molesting stories reported under crimes) 5%
- Weather 5%
I haven’t timed the news and some channels are worse than others but take that as a recurrent, public domain summary of Atlanta news. 😉
For digital news feeds, check out the Argos software!
I first saw this in a tweet by Alyona Medelyan.