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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
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Aggregating: Using Layout to Indicate Who Wrote What
Today I'm still exploring news aggregators and enjoying the irony of
having little time to read the actual news stories. I'm storing
the summaries to read later, so here's an experiment. I'll give each of
my aggregated "to read" items its own entry in this weblog so they can
be bookmarked at a "permalink" indicated by a # sign, and I'll add
a comment of my own in green.
The indented sections are the text and
links as delivered to my aggregator by Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Meanwhile, see the Christian Science Monitor's site for an excellent "About"
page concerning news-site RSS feeds and aggregators, as well as the RSS
links for its news sections and resident webloggers, including Tom Regan, whose advice on online scams is just in time for April Fool's Day (more on that topic below).
Now, back to the aggregated news...
For several years I've been
telling people that Pablo Boczkowski, now a professor at MIT, had
written a doctoral dissertation that I'd be happy to put my name on.
That's because his was a lot like my own dissertation proposal, minus
the distractions that kept my project in a stack of "in progress..."
files for years.
Even though my own is finally done,
delivered, and official ("Ph.D., class of 2003"), I still like Pablo's
dissertation, and friends finally can see what I mean, now that it's a
"real book" they can buy from MIT
Press, Digitizing the News.
Never having met, and about 1,000 miles apart, Pablo and I each had the idea of investigating innovation in the
early "online news" newsrooms by doing case studies at three online news
sites, and adding some historical perspective on digital news
delivery. We both started our fieldwork in 1997. Pablo chose three
newspapers in the U.S. for his case studies, after being inspired
by online news back home in Argentina. I did my work in North Carolina.
At that point I had been working my way through grad school with a part-time
job as an online news editor at Nando.net in Raleigh for a couple of years. For the dissertation, I planned to
compare online news projects at a television station and two
newspapers, but I refocused the project after visiting WRAL-TV.com, also in Raleigh. I jumped at an adviser's suggestion that I just focus on the television
station, which he thought would save me time and money.
It did save me money, but it also turned into a longer project. After I backed up to do a more
TV-background research, I found my first interviews being overtaken
by staff changes and redesigns at the WRAL site. The redesign process provided
the lemons I turned into eventual lemonade
to finish the dissertation. Perhaps someday it will be part of a book
you can shelve alongside Pablo's! I think they'd work really well
together.
Yesterday he introduced his Digitizing the News to a small but enthusiastic audience at MIT. I was there; so was
J.K. Baumgart, Harvard news-librarian-blogger, who even took notes and
already has them online! So here they are, fresh from the aggregator...
5:20:15 PM 
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Of course no one reading this
weblog is going to fall for any of the usual Internet hoaxes, even if
they do come around again for April 1st. But if anyone does, I'll be
able to point them here to let them know they're not alone.
Net Hoaxes Snare Fools All Year.
Infinite power supplies, 87-pound house cats and dehydrated water do
not exist. Yet people continue to be fooled by online hoaxes. It's that
time of year again, so watch out. By Joanna Glasner. [ Wired News]
4:29:45 PM
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Third-degree aggregation: This is
an NITLE item about a Times item about a Pew study. It reminds me to go
back and look at the MIT Media Lab's work with an online newspaper for
older users, originally under the heading "Silver Surfers." (If I do
get back to this later, I'll add a link or two here.)
(via New York Times: Circuits )
4:26:35 PM
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Obits in the aggregator? I do want to read these when I have time... each someone whose work I've admired.
John Sack, 74, Correspondent Who Reported From Battlefields, Dies.
John Sack was a pioneer of New Journalism who was best known for his
reporting from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. By
Christopher Lehmann-haupt. [ New York Times: Arts]
Emily Morison Beck, 88, Who Edited Bartlett's Quotations, Dies.
Emily Morison Beck was the self-described literary archaeologist who
edited three editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. By Douglas
Martin. [ New York Times: Arts]
Alistair Cooke, Elegant Interpreter of America, Dies at 95.
Alistair Cooke was the urbane and erudite British-born journalist who
was a peerless observer of the American scene for almost 70 years. By
Frank J. Prial. [ New York Times: Arts]
4:23:10 PM
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There's no Boston outlet as far as
I know, and my first attempt to tune this new radio voice online ran
into trouble with the Real Audio player... I'll try again later.
4:18:35 PM
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Hmm. I wonder if anyone read this and started thinking outside the box about bringing high-tech to the Delta?
4:16:17 PM
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This book intrigues me, because
I've often wondered whether Sam Clemens thought about the Mississippi
while strolling down the hill from his Hartford, Conn., home and along
the banks of the small, meandering Hog River , now reduced to a
concrete flood-control channel. (I lived a few blocks away in the
1970s.)
4:14:00 PM
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© Copyright
2008
Bob Stepno.
Last update:
7/19/08; 12:55:33 PM.
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