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Google's Future
the_exile
Kupo!
in Zocalo v2.0
[url]http://letitblog.com/epic/[/url]
Fascinating...
Fascinating...
Comments
And then radio by television...
Do we sense a pattern here?
I found it really interesting though, I can see Google doing that. And I have no qualms about Microsoft fading into black :D
-Φ
:shadow1:
Even journalism students make massive screw ups in their news writing, both in style and in form. News given by vain, teeny-bopper, self-important, attention-whores instead of professional journalists will be the dark age of the future. A global dark age, where things are so bleak, the sane world not buying $300 Nikes and posting their life story on their website will cry out for an elite class to save them. This is a dark age where the burgoise will rise up against the proletariat in an intellectual struggle for one of the most important institutions in a healthy democracy. And if crushing the blogger-wannabe-news-writers means turning into a pretentious snob, then so be it. It's for the good of mankind.
Sure, the proletariat will have their Halmark-moment appeals, and seemingly utopain slogans -- but what do they know? They get their "news" from Sally down the street, who hates the mail man because she's a paranoid freak. The poison they sell is a strawberry flavored drug that kills slowly while putting a smile on your face and a warm feeling deep down inside. But your brain is melted into the fuel that burns in the black, black heart of the boatman bringing human civilization to the lowest layer of hell. And because people's minds are so perverted by flowery sayings and cheap, naive ideals, they don't notice it when the scenery changes and the torment starts. After all, with global technology, they'll already be too used to everyone screaming all at once at them.
Interesting animation, though. My futures studies professor would've loved it.
[B]And what is to prevent the "bourgoise" from writing their own take on the news? [/B][/QUOTE]
Formal training, editors that know what they're doing, more editors, fact checkers and lawyers -- overall professionalism.
Good reporting is hard work. It's not something you can expect someone to do regularly [i]and[/i] competantly and correctly if it isn't their job, especially with the ease of online publishing. Sure, we've got freelancers now, but they have (and need) professional, human editors. All writers need them, even movie reviewers.
News as it is now is a lot better than unchecked bloggers with computer editing, advanced algorithims or not. And everyone's a lot better off trusting "elites" to be reliable than they are trusting in the masses, desperate to share.
I get writers like that sometimes; and they have to be coached and trained. The term we use around the office for material that's written wrong is "blog-worthy." And we either spend a lot of time making sure it gets fixed or, if it's not worth it, we send it over to the opinions desk and let them deal with it.)
Consider this: who would you rather trust: John Doe staff writer over at the New York Times, or John Doe matress salesman at [url]www.lookatmycats.com[/url]
If John Doe staff writer screws up bigtime, chances are you'll hear about it from the Times or from a rival. If John Doe matress salesman screws up bigtime, you'll hear about it if you follow a webforum, which would probably be clogged with all the other bloggers' screw ups. So then you've got to wade through all that...
On top of all that, formal news organizations can make the proper arrangements to meet with the people they need to talk to, because they're (the organization and their reporters) seen as legitimate and worth talking to. Can you imagine just a random blogger trying to talk to a mayor or a city spokesperson? Or a random photographer just wandering around at an event (for free) without the proper credentials?
"Elite" news sources help keep the chaos at bay, and provide the public with an easy, reliable way to find good material written by good writers and edited by good editors.
I will add that there's a (potentially fatal) flaw in that science-fictional idea: Google News is only a search engine that depends completely on news items published by newspapers (including the NY Times) and/or agencies (e.g. Reuters) to present items. If it displaced those newspapers into oblivion Google News itself would disappear.
There's another interesting beta service by Google ([url]http://scholar.google.com/[/url] ) that allows to search the scientific literature, they've also recently announced a joint project with several libraries to digitize the libraries' collections and make those contents available in the web for free (unless they are still under copyright, then only an excerpt would be available).
These developments might have a major impact, maybe larger than the Google News consequences, but they are recent and not foreseen by the authors of that presentation.
But it was entertaining.
:)