Notes: News aggregation

Access to multiple sources of news over the internet increases aspirations corresponding to news consumption: readers don’t have to restrict themselves anymore to news that we or they think will be useful to them.

Consequently, news aggregators become more than that: they are now personalized news repositories from which news is consumed. With implementation of tags-based searching and use of metadata in posts, aggregators can be made to fetch information that they can algorithmically evaluate as being useful to us.

Last, aggregators are mostly automated, shrinking delivery time and removing it out of the equation.

[caption id="attachment_24252" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Google News[/caption]

RSS readers are largely meant to “keep up with” news as and when it happens. However, given the volume of information, which RSS readers were designed to handle in the first place, the lifetime of a news story is reduced to a few hours or even just a day. In other words, if articles in the aggregator are not consumed quickly, they will be replaced by more current ones.

Human-powered news aggregation has its most significant advantages with respect to the accumulation of digital property. Where a news aggregator would spit out numerically evaluated news, human curating serves to:

1. Cut down a lot of the riff-raff that inevitably arises out of mass-aggregation and make news-reading easier, therefore more pleasurable, especially when readers are being exposed to a broad range of writers and other readers


2. Maintain the value of “social currency” – especially when social media is shaping up to be the single-largest interface through which news is consumed, resulting in a large influx of data – in such an environment, being more accurate makes as much sense as clocking in first

There are some guidelines to keep in mind when working with aggregated news. The most important is that one must ensure citation leads to content, and the source of that content, without ambiguity.

The advent of social media has given rise to a “post-reporter” interface between the producer and the consumer, with “post-reporter” signifying a marked proclivity toward crowd-sourcing by producers. Instead of taking news to the people en masse, a social media interface works as an aggregator with in-built sharing (multi-dimension engagement) and cross-promotional (e.g., incorporate a button to Amazon when books are reviewed online; get a cut of the sale) capacities.

On a macroscopic level, social media renders news as a commodity: it can be engaged with in ways more than simply reading (liking, sharing, recommending, agreeing, dismissing, etc.), and this gives rise to the commoditization of information. Where a story was compressed into letters, the same story can now be conveyed without any such information-degeneracy.

For example, opinion pieces earlier marked a relationship between newspapers and their readers; now, they are springboards for public debate simply because social media platforms have enabled discussion around them. As mentioned, social media not only make crowd-sourcing easier but also more relevant.

Where a producer worked essentially as an employer/manager of reporters who in turn engaged with the news, we now have the option of producers moving ahead of reporters, getting news from the people, and working harder at the dissemination of localized stories. However, this results in a tendency to democratize news (giving people what they want), which could lead to populism.

The compartmentalization of lifestyles

The most popular websites, apps, blogs, concepts, and ideas on the internet today are digitized versions of some aspect of our lifestyles. A very accessible example is Facebook: it's a framework that enables our social life to be brought to life virtually. Within that virtual space, we exchange comments and create and consume information that is very real. This goes for everything from email and chatting to enhanced organizations like Couch Surfing, where you can meet people in a city you're backpacking through willing to let you sleep on their couch for a night. Essentially, we're increasingly moving our lives online, distributing tasks that require a group effort among hundreds of people. The broad and broadening reach of the internet has made us aspire for more, and we're reaching those goals by crowdsourcing assistance.

At the same time, this tendency has highlighted how we compartmentalize our lives. Principally, if the mechanisms purely of technology were subtracted from the operational mechanism, what must be left behind is the digital blueprint of a social activity. To wit: The functionality of Facebook is determined by its developers on how well and fulsomely it is used by people, on how intuitive the social network they build is as a social network itself. Twitter is hinged on easing the process of stumbling upon bits of information, an activity that earlier was simply serendipitous, and hence has sped up the process of becoming aware. Instagram has done what Twitter and Facebook have done but only pivoted itself on picture-sharing. Pinterest has set up pin-boards online to complement the learning process and has increased our access to creativity and inspiration (and then Pinstagram did what you think it did). Posterous (broadcasting opinions), LinkedIn (professional networking), TED (listening to experts), Couch Surfing, WTFSIMFD (deciding what to make for dinner), Google Maps (knowing where people are/where what is), Circle (proximity to friends and social networks), and 9GAG (humour) are other examples.

The incentive to move our lives online is to enhance different aspects about it that are otherwise limited by space, time or both. We get to involve more people, increase the volume and frequency of information influx, drive engagement and, most importantly, globalize our lifestyles, enabling us to reach out to like-minded people anywhere on the planet on a variety of fronts. Axiomatically, because we're doing things faster and therefore doing them more often, those compartments that we've outsourced to the virtual free up space for other activities - in other words, more compartments. Parallely, some activities are also exhausted quicker, mostly because we overdo them.

This could be anything - for me, they're video-hopping, gaming, and blogging (the frequency's dropped because of the invasion of microblogging). If I had been doing them at a slower pace, perhaps they'd have lasted longer as hobbies, but now, by speeding things up, I can actually live more. Purists at this point would argue that all this matter of virtualizing a way of life has robbed it of its natural essence, that by speeding things up, we're losing out on a lot of... whatever.

The virtual way of life is fast becoming highly recommended, soon probably would be mandatory, too. The way of the web has been to breakdown and categorize what we do so that we may better understand how to improve them. Without such compartmentalization - which inevitably reduces the incidence of mano-y-mano events - life would definitely be more continuous and people-centric than contiguous and experience-centric. It's my personal opinion that concepts on the web are now moving in a direction that yields us the best of both worlds.

Plays of the day (from Reuters)

This is the Reuters News Agency's tech. newsletter I received only a few minutes ago. All that I read within seemed very good, and too long to post as my "status" on Facebook or as a tweet, so here.

--

Hewlett-Packard is close to a deal to buy software company Autonomy for $10 billion and will announce a long-rumored spinoff of its PC division.

Autonomy, which counts Procter & Gamble among a long list of major corporate customers that use its software to search and organize unstructured data like emails, confirmed it was in talks with HP.

Google+, which has picked up more than 25 million users since launching in June, is headed down the right path and is the first serious challenge to Facebook's dominance.

Google's infant social network, which counts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a member, has met skepticism so far but some venture capitalists see reason to be optimistic.

Speaking of Facebook, the social networking giant has won access to computers, files and emails it hopes will prove an upstate New York man's claim to own half of Zuckerberg's stake in the company is a fraud.

At issue is the authenticity of an alleged 2003 contract under which Paul Ceglia said he hired Zuckerberg, then a Harvard University freshman, to work on StreetFax.com, a street-mapping website intended for the insurance industry.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is close to rolling out its own music streaming service that will work across its mobile devices.

The new service is likely part of an attempt by RIM to beef up its BlackBerry Messenger service as it seeks to compete with the mobile media platform strengths of rival Apple and of Google''s Android.

Are governments inching ever closer to the some form of censorship of social media?

British Prime Minister David Cameron has flirted with the idea after recent riots and Western democracies and emerging authoritarian states alike, the temptation to try and regain control through censorship may grow.

As governments draw up strategies for cyberspace they face fundamental questions about the power and limits of the state.

Finally, Blippar has developed a smart phone application which detects the shape of chocolate bars and other objects and converts them into virtual experiences.

Cry havoc and let loose the apps of war!

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't eagerly awaiting the launch of Google+. I'd heard about it a month ago and ever since, I've had this feeling that Google's going to be integrating all the products it's rolled out in the past in one stroke, posing the first real threat to Facebook. While Buzz, Wave and Lively each had their flaws when deployed as a standalone application, they could find some relevance in this new avatar of social networking.

Going by the few reviews that have come out, it seems like Google+ is ahead on points because of its "refreshing" approach to online privacy - called Circles - and the video-chat add-in for conferencing.

Bernard Moon at VentureBeat had this to say:

But I realized that for many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, Facebook was their first and only social networking experience. These people either simply accepted all their worlds colliding, or limited their Facebook “friends” to real friends. Circles allows someone like me to group casual business acquaintances into a distinct circle where I don’t have to share personal details like family photos. It also allows for those previously uncomfortable with Facebook to potentially “let loose”.

He's right. Facebook for many years monopolized the social networking industry to the point of forcing its users to build their life around it, but with Google going the other way by being a little more flexible with its options, users now avail a choice: live around your social network, or let your social network live around you.

Here's another thing I noticed: Facebook co-owns the information I put up on it. Google+, on the other hand, has this to say on the license agreement:

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

That's more like it!

(In fact, Google's privacy policy is only some 1,000 words long against Facebook's 6,000+.)

Let's set aside the broader picture for now and focus on the little things. The thing about Facebook and Twitter that made them quickly popular was their accessibility. On Twitter, all you had to do was create an account and pick the users you wanted to follow. On Facebook, after a simple login, you could add friends and... voila! Every other tool was ready for your use.

Not so for Google+. As soon as I login, I'm told I don't have a profile. See, and I didn't know that. So I went about filling in stuff and uploading my CV and whatnot. Then, it was time for my profile picture. That's when I realized that uploading one is apparently one of the things we take for granted: while it works like magic on Twitter and Facebook, it took me 20 minutes to "get it right" on Google+. First, it wasn't a picture of me. Fair enough. I picked another one, gave it a crop and hit submit: too big. Next: "Your internet connection is too slow". Next: "Invalid image".

Having a profile picture is one of the fundamental things about social networking, and I'm not moved by Google's concern to have everyone put up "legitimate" pictures as much as I'm frustrated with the delay it poses in accessing the good stuff. This should be moved out of the way as soon as possible.

An excerpt from CNN's piece on the release:

Google+ has photo sharing, which places a large emphasis on smartphone usage. For example, photos taken from an Android phone can be automatically dumped into a private folder in the Google+ Web service, a la Apple's iCloud.

The +1 button, which was previously made available as an optional program for Google account holders, ties this all together, not unlike Facebook's "Like" button. Clicking +1 on Google search results, embedded on other sites or from within Google+ pages, allows you to share links with friends or selectively with groups of friends.

Unsurprisingly, Google has tapped its prowess in Web search for a section called Sparks. It's like Google Alerts, for receiving updates on favorite topics. Facebook's search engine is Microsoft's Bing, but users of that site can't subscribe to updates in this way.

That pretty much sums it up. The release is still in Beta and so nothing can be said about the site's dynamics when large volumes are concerned. One other thing is that Facebook and Microsoft are known to share a close relationship, and the latter's hefty acquisition of Skype a few weeks ago could mean a closer tie-in between the two to rival the video-chat advantage Google holds.

On a separate note: perhaps Facebook couldn't bear all the attention diverted away from it. Reuters got there first.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to "launch something awesome" next week.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments.

'Nuff said.

Cry havoc and let loose the apps of war!

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't eagerly awaiting the launch of Google+. I'd heard about it a month ago and ever since, I've had this feeling that Google's going to be integrating all the products it's rolled out in the past in one stroke, posing the first real threat to Facebook. While Buzz, Wave and Lively each had their flaws when deployed as a standalone application, they could find some relevance in this new avatar of social networking.

Going by the few reviews that have come out, it seems like Google+ is ahead on points because of its "refreshing" approach to online privacy - called Circles - and the video-chat add-in for conferencing.

Bernard Moon at VentureBeat had this to say:

But I realized that for many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, Facebook was their first and only social networking experience. These people either simply accepted all their worlds colliding, or limited their Facebook “friends” to real friends. Circles allows someone like me to group casual business acquaintances into a distinct circle where I don’t have to share personal details like family photos. It also allows for those previously uncomfortable with Facebook to potentially “let loose”.

He's right. Facebook for many years monopolized the social networking industry to the point of forcing its users to build their life around it, but with Google going the other way by being a little more flexible with its options, users now avail a choice: live around your social network, or let your social network live around you.

Here's another thing I noticed: Facebook co-owns the information I put up on it. Google+, on the other hand, has this to say on the license agreement:

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

That's more like it!

(In fact, Google's privacy policy is only some 1,000 words long against Facebook's 6,000+.)

Let's set aside the broader picture for now and focus on the little things. The thing about Facebook and Twitter that made them quickly popular was their accessibility. On Twitter, all you had to do was create an account and pick the users you wanted to follow. On Facebook, after a simple login, you could add friends and... voila! Every other tool was ready for your use.

Not so for Google+. As soon as I login, I'm told I don't have a profile. See, and I didn't know that. So I went about filling in stuff and uploading my CV and whatnot. Then, it was time for my profile picture. That's when I realized that uploading one is apparently one of the things we take for granted: while it works like magic on Twitter and Facebook, it took me 20 minutes to "get it right" on Google+. First, it wasn't a picture of me. Fair enough. I picked another one, gave it a crop and hit submit: too big. Next: "Your internet connection is too slow". Next: "Invalid image".

Having a profile picture is one of the fundamental things about social networking, and I'm not moved by Google's concern to have everyone put up "legitimate" pictures as much as I'm frustrated with the delay it poses in accessing the good stuff. This should be moved out of the way as soon as possible.

An excerpt from CNN's piece on the release:

Google+ has photo sharing, which places a large emphasis on smartphone usage. For example, photos taken from an Android phone can be automatically dumped into a private folder in the Google+ Web service, a la Apple's iCloud.

The +1 button, which was previously made available as an optional program for Google account holders, ties this all together, not unlike Facebook's "Like" button. Clicking +1 on Google search results, embedded on other sites or from within Google+ pages, allows you to share links with friends or selectively with groups of friends.

Unsurprisingly, Google has tapped its prowess in Web search for a section called Sparks. It's like Google Alerts, for receiving updates on favorite topics. Facebook's search engine is Microsoft's Bing, but users of that site can't subscribe to updates in this way.

That pretty much sums it up. The release is still in Beta and so nothing can be said about the site's dynamics when large volumes are concerned. One other thing is that Facebook and Microsoft are known to share a close relationship, and the latter's hefty acquisition of Skype a few weeks ago could mean a closer tie-in between the two to rival the video-chat advantage Google holds.

On a separate note: perhaps Facebook couldn't bear all the attention diverted away from it. Reuters got there first.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to "launch something awesome" next week.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments.

'Nuff said.