News automation
I'd really like to have useful news automation, I eagerly await the day. Note that I am still waiting.
I like what Google News is trying to do, but in many ways it has a long way to go. In Politically blogging, I discussed the idea of balance in articles and I think there may be some of this in Google News, but it's not readily apparent. The biggest problem I see is that current hot topics are not sufficiently wide in any category. To be honest, it might also have a bit of left leaning bias on topics and sources, but I'm not sure, it's just an impression.
Michael Kinsley complains that we're getting too close in Computers Go Too Far which examines Google News. Mr. Kinsley seems to think that editors can be replaced with machines, which I find pretty crazy. Editors control the content within a particular publication or site and act as the strong arm folks for publishers with a slant they favor. Software replacement
of editorial control is a scenario that I find quite unlikely (at least within the next ten years).
News aggregators, such as Google News (not to be confused with weblog aggregators) do nothing but find hot topics and articles which discuss them. What they can not do is to find important topics and continue to rank them as important (if there are two articles per week on a particular subject it is not hot, even if it important). I sort of touched on this in What is journalism?, but perhaps I did not go far enough. Here's a blurb from Michael Crichton's Airframe (I had pulled it off the shelf for my son, he got bored and I ended up reading it again myself, I'd just recently read this part which says it very well) which I find pertinent:
There was a time when reporters wanted information, their questions directed to an underlying event. They wanted an accurate picture of a situation, and to do that they had to make to make an effort to see things your way, to understand how you were thinking about it. They might not agree with you in the end, but it was a matter of pride that they could accurately state your view, before rejecting it.
That kind of objective reporting is largely historic. The slant is assumed simply based on the publication, which makes objective news aggregation even more important. I want to see both sides, I think many people do. What happens is that a particular news outlet becomes enamored of it's opinions and somehow forgets about balance, at which point people who tend to disagree start ignoring the publication. That's a position that many of our big city daily newspapers find themselves in. They can't understand where their readers went (they died or just stopped reading) and don't understand how to attract new readers (stop making current readers so upset they want to cancel?)
Weblog's are quite useful as a channel for new sources but don't usually do point / counter point style linking. This seems to be an interesting area for automation to explore.
2:59:33 PM 
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