If you have yet to comment on our top 5 and need to do so you may do it here.
1. Information overload
This is kind of based on a premise of what a Magazine might look like if it were completely made for the Internet and it was maybe 5 years in the future. Mostly evolution of current ideas that are already out there so this might not make a good project. Its also sort of based on a single website rather than a tool that many websites could use. Right now were thinking of having a main page that's completely focused on multimedia presentation of stories. So for instance, your page would simply consist of a wall of pictures that attempt to sum up the stories being presented. Hovering over pictures would give some more information and maybe cause it to animate or change a bit. Clicking on the image will start a sort of interactive slideshow and enlarge so you can see it better. The slideshows themselves would be arranged in linear fashion with a possible narrative track or text depending on the authors decision. Slides could be composed of pictures or visualized data (graphs and such) or 3D maps that you can spin and zoom of where the stories took place, pretty much anything that can be done visually. It would hopefully be better quality audio and picture resolution than youtube since it wouldn't have to deal with video. The source of content could include users and full commentary functions could be applied. So basically youtube for slideshows, it could also establish some kind of standard slideshow medium like .mpg for videos, and you could compile the slideshow though an online tool and record audio and such without leaving the website. Focus would obviously be toward documentary type presentations, could also serve as a repository for academic slideshows (not sure who else loves the Research Channel but it's surprisingly pretty cool [its just a bunch of academic slide shows]). Like I said, somewhat of an obvious step so it might not be appropriate for this project but it doesn't exist and I'd like to see it.
2. Facebook/ Myspace/ Social Network News Categorization System
We thoroughly discussed whether this would qualify as original or appropriate to the project. And we concluded- Maybe. This would not be a tool to help people present news or information in a different or new way but instead would simply function as a system of connecting people to news. Those connections themselves could be mapped and analyzed as a feature of the system or individual stories but on the whole this would function as a news acquisition tool. The focus would be on bringing relevant news to people who might not otherwise be interested. Most likely it would work kind of like google's adsense- and I think that google news uses a similar algorithm to hook people up with news- but would incorporate people and relationships into the equation. So it would take into account what kinds of things interest yourfriends or what they have read and liked or disliked and try to produce a communal sort of news page where you can discuss with friends certain stories or topics. Discussions would ideally be conducted among people you know or who are within your social (or academic/professional/etc) networks. So you wouldn't see all the comments that a story got(although you could probably have the option), but just those made within your community. In my experience people tend to be slightly more civilized and reasonable among friends andcolleagues than in a general anonymous forum.
3. Online Fact Checker/ Plagiarism Exposer/ Summarizing Compiler type tool thing
The main problem with this one is that it would be difficult to do. It would either rely on writers to break their stories into variable data types and quick summations or would require a very sophisticated language interpreter to do the same type of thing (which I dont think exists yet). The more difficult part would be analyzing contextualization, which might be easy for a person but impossible for a computer program. The tool itself would be a system that compares various stories from different sources and analyzes the differences in style and character or tone and more importantly tags and categorizes omissions or additions of individual facts or data. So, due to technology restraints this would rely on journalists themselves breaking their stories down into computable variables or an army of analyzers doing it for them. The end of the process might produce a veryconcise break down of stories and provide users with a lot of media analysis in the process. Of course, some stories might not be divisible in such a way. So this is still kind of a squishy idea that were still working on.
4. Locational News/In-Your-Face Interface updated*
So we are updating our Locational News idea to include our inteface idea thing which follows- for pictures scroll down through posts to appropriate thread.
So I was thinking about the whole passive news feed thing again and I thought, how bout if I could just get my news by looking out the window? Like I get the weather? Well I dont have any windows with any kind of view so its not very useful to look out the window but what if there was a place I could go to and look at a virtual view from a really nice view and get all the information I need from that angle?
This is really more of an interface for delivering news than it is a way of reporting but I think it would be pretty cool. You would have the whole city out in front of you and by clicking on different elements of the picture, different overlays would pop up and give you the news on that aspect. Color coded arrows or something would pop up in different areas to clue you in on where a particular story happened. So instead of having a frantic front news page with every story crammed in and vying for your attention, you would initially just have a view of the city. Current weather conditions and time of day would be reflected on screen. If there was a major fire or something in town you would also be able to see the virtual fire plume. Planes and birds and helicopters would fly overhead. Freeways would reflect actual traffic, fireworks would crackle on holidays, flags would blow in the wind, etc. I would want the default screen to be something that can be left up like a screen saver or a second browser window, like for my second screen. Something pretty but also highly informative if I want it to be.
Hovering over different neighborhoods and clicking would bring up a similar miniature version of them but restricted by that areas borders, maybe a 3/4 angle to get more of the actual geography in. Similar arrow-news system and overlays would be used on the more local level as well. Clicking on actual stories would pop up the text and pictures with an option to have the stories read as audio. you should be able to browse and queue up a few stories to be read while your doing something else pretty easily. Maybe show the story's pictures as a slide show if you want to look over occasionally.
I think that this as an interface can work in combination with our other ideas. It doesn't solve the news gathering dilemma but I think it creates a cool place to show stories off. You could integrate citizen journalism as an overlay option or as the main method. Community pictures or videos can be integrated as well. Features can be done according to topic, but thats a whole nother issue I will possibly post up later. Lemme know if this fits our project parameters and what you think in general. I think that flash would work brilliantly but doing big flash programs is hardware intensive so maybe java would work better in this case. I'm also not sure I can learn enough of either within a month to actually make a working model of this. Also if anyone has seen ANYTHING like this lemme know. I know that the Rob Curley was doing something similar on his weather page by using the actual city as a backdrop but I think this goes way farther, in the same vein.
--original-->
News has always been categorized and distributed according to location. So were still figuring out the originality aspect of this idea but basically our idea is to bring it to a critical mass level and start to cover new types of stories with hyper local news and make it easier to aggregate.
So here's Hepi's original idea and how we interpreted it in our group. (Since I'm not sure I understand it myself yet)
News stories generated to you via your physical location (on your laptop, cell phone or pda). Kinda like Chicago crimes, but with news stories good and bad. It'd be useful for finding events, and knowing when certain things have happened and it could indicate the potential interest or impact stories in your proximity would have.
Not sure if it's possible anymore with all the privacy software out there, unless you type in your zipcode or something. I guess IP address can do it for you. Seems like it would be more of a feature though like at the side of the news page- here's what happened on your block- who got arrested, who sold a house, which restaurant is good, etc. could be a nice element in the whole interrelated content thing though.
I am intrigued by Hepi's idea of physical location news....I picture it being like a tour of a city with information each place you stop....could be great for tourists. If not, then it would be a great feature to add with the Flicker/Second Life (map with proximity news).
Sorry to toot my own horn, but I really like my first idea. The only thing is I think it maybe more of a cellphone/pda type application because of the GPS/tracking capabilities of these devices. However there could also be a database, that's accessible online, that people in their homes could use to check out the news in areas they are going (or just out of curiosity).
5. Mood simulator/ Storytelling graphic enhancer type thing
I'm a little confused on this one too! It was sort of last minute and I probably didn't catch all of it but here goes.
My explanation probably sounds very simplistic but basically it would be a program where the website would change its look and style according to the type of story. I think this is based on the the idea of how movies or pictures or text can set a mood where the story fits into and cues the viewer about what they should expect or what kind of environment they should imagine. So this would be way of changing the atmosphere or mood according to the story. It could be just simple colors or something more complex. I'll try to get more info on this idea since I'm not really sure about it but yeah, probably needs a lot of work.
7 comments:
So I am a straggler, sorry guys. But here are my thoughts if you still care:
1. This idea sounds a lot like the site mediastorm.org. It's really cool, though it's all visual story telling at this point (I think it's a Magnum site primarily.) You've got some good dimensions to add to the site though. I think you're right in that this idea is a little too broad for our project, but it could easily be reworked into something with a more concrete demographic, and I don't think that it being a web site precludes it totally from the project. It's a cool idea, though perhaps you could think about ways to modify it to get more people into the site and therefore the news?
2. I am confused by this idea. Are you talking about a social network of some sort, or a derivative for news purposes? How would you find these people who you're going to have a discourse with about news? How would you choose what news to see? Do we have any ethical qualms about offering only news people want rather than also including what they need to know? Why would people who aren't into news join a social networking system to talk about news? What would bring them to it? I feel like you need to answer these questions more throughly before this idea can really be a contender.
3. I like this idea. I think, if it were to exist, it could be a really helpful tool. I'm not sure if it really fits the program's description because I don't see how this could bring news to people, but it would be a cool tool. I think you've pointed all most of the flaws in this yourself, but again, I would like to see something like this come into being, so if there were a way to take some of the information generated from a reporter breaking down a story and maybe recycle it to an online brief of a story then maybe it could be useful in two ways and fit the program description better.
4. This is a big one. I like the idea of visually summing up local news, but I have a few questions: who would update this? Would it be hosted through an existing news source or as a site unto itself? Who would update the fireworks, fires etc...? Where would people be able to upload their own news? Would you start this with a specific region like Boston or try to make it national? Would you maybe pair with googlemaps? There's a lot of potential with this, but I think you need to establish who is going to host it etc. . . Another issue is would you be able to incorporate national and international news into this in some way? The way you have it set up now is just for local news, which is cool, but it would be nice if there were some sort of refer to national stories or a place where you could get them. I'm also unclear about how you would incorporate PDA's or cell phones into this. Great idea though. . . very cool.
5. This idea is by far your thinest. I'm not sure what changing the visual mood of the site would do to get people to read more news or bring them into the site. It might be cool looking, but it's more of a neat feature idea. This needs more substance, or it has to offer more to the reader.
Good luck all, hope your summer's are going well. . .
Forgot to sign my name on the last one, so here's a repost.
1) This sounds like a decent idea – if you had a dozen graphic designers with an infinite amount of time on their hands. It sounds like the idea revolves mostly around eye candy – it also sounds incredibly difficult, and not a great benefit to “community journalism.” If you could implement visual storytelling on a community Web site, the idea would probably be more valuable.
2) I like the idea of a social network devoted to news – that is, friends read news they’re interested in, rate it, comment on it, whatever – and other friends can see the resulting opinions. And yes, it would generate some interest in news to people who have no interest in news – but how are you going to originally attract people to this site or application?
3) “The main problem with this one is that it would be difficult to do.” You’re right.. let the humans do the fact checking, not the robot. I can’t imagine a computer being analytical enough to break down a story and compare it to a giant database of other stories for plagiarism checking. Plus, isn’t there already a plagiarism Web site? I hate to imagine how complicated that site is in itself.
4) Whoawhoawhoa. This sounds freaking impossible to do. Who’s going to program and design this beautiful program? It sounds like a news feature out of some sci-fi story and not something that we’re likely to see in the next 10 years. Yes, it’s a great way to view community journalism – hovering over a virtual city and seeing flames coming out of a burning building, maybe even people jumping out of windows? Slightly cynical, but the details are up for programmers and designers to punch in, yes? It sounds like a graphically beautiful idea, to a fault. This idea doesn’t stand up to the mention of the digital divide. Hepi’s original idea of a digital map and viewing all news based on location is a much more practical and useful tool.
5) The mood of the Web site certainly can set the tone for the story. However, this doesn’t seem like an incredibly innovative method of helping community journalism or storytelling, period.
-Brian, KU team
1. I'm not so sure about this one. It seems to me that it wouldn't be that terribly different than a normal website, except you can only access certain pages by going through the sequence rather than going directly to where you want to go. Slides, as I understand this idea, would really just be kind of like webpages, and it seems a lot like a Flash program. Perhaps with more explanation I would better understand what makes this unique.
2. I like the idea of providing the news using an adsense-like program, but my big fear would be that it would be a very complex, and possibly very annoying application. This idea has a lot of potential, but it would have to work very well to justify the adsense-esque collection of news rather than simply allowing users to specify what topics or geographies they want. That said, this is a very intriguing idea, and it's definitely worth exploring.
3. This is a good idea. So good, in fact, that I think it might already exist, at least in a limited form. The key, as you stated, would be to create the very complex algorithm/program that could effectively aggregate and compare stories to determine if plagiarism took place.
4. I like the idea of hyperlocal news, and it sounds like that would definitely be this idea's angle. This sounds at least somewhat similar to one of Ithaca's ideas, as well as our hyperlocal wiki idea. The cell phone/GPS/physical location angle is interesting, and is worth exploring, although I'll be honest, it kind of makes me think of Big Brother.
5. This idea sounds very interesting. An immediate concern is that it may throw any supposed objectivity over the side. A story that is presented as "sad" will automatically influence readers to interpret the information a certain way. Kind of like journalistic bias in a graphic form. Still, very intriguing, and could be useful for certain types of stories, particularly soft news and stuff like that.
- Chris Raine (KU)
I’m going to preface my comments with an internal discussion we’ve had during our team meetings. We hit a point where we started describing some ideas as “flying cars that run on rainbows.” They were great ideas, but far outside of our ability to create or implement inside of the structure of the innovation project. We didn’t want to over constrain ourselves, but we also wanted to come up with a core set of ideas that we felt were achievable (at least on a limited basis) within the time and resource limits that exist in this project. I know we’re supposed to be designing the future, but the reality is that we only have a couple of months to work in and we are supposed to eventually build prototypes of our ideas.
All that being said, I think most of your ideas are too big to achieve inside this project. Maybe I’m wrong (if you have some very knowledgeable coders on your team). If so, go for it.
1. I think you are hitting on the idea that the web is so powerful, that there has to be a better way to tell stories than how we are currently using it. Which I do think is true. And you’re talking about an intuitive graphical interface, which is always popular (think DOS versus Windows). But, I think a discussion like this has less to do with tools and more to do with changing the culture behind news creation and presentation.
Ideas 2, 3 and 4 require very advanced coding, algorithms, and/or graphics, etc., to achieve. I think all of them have some value, but there are huge hurdles to overcome that are well beyond our capabilities right now. #4 could be built on a scaled down level and then expanded. Our team has discussed similar ideas and the idea of geography/mapped news has recurred multiple times in this project, so it’s obviously on a lot of people’s minds.
5. Who determines what the mood of a story is? Maybe I laugh when I read a disaster story, while my fiancé cries at the same story.
I guess I also should have said that the previous comment was written by Courtney Farr of the Univ. of Kansas team.
Yep, lots of flying cars here, I'm afraid. But hey, it's Vegas. Roll the dice.
1. My mind gets a bit boggled each time I read this one, but I've come to a comfortable (to me) conclusion about what exactly it is that you're describing here: a website that features news in the form of photo blogs in the form of slideshows. Brilliant! I wish I had thought of that. I love photo blogs and to have them as slideshows would be even better.
2. I like the idea of discussing news stories among online social contacts. I do this by posting news stories in Myspace bulletins all the time. Despite the near-impossible algorithm you'd have to come up with for this, I would have an app that provided a finite number of news stories to each person's profile each day, but also have a space where the news stories that were provided to his/her friends would be visible so people could see what their friends were reading and discuss them.
3. So, it's a robot that checks the entire Web for plagiarism?
4. This thing is crazy. My fundamental critique is that it's way too focused on presenting news in new, flashy ways that does not in any conceivable way improve the news it presents. It would make people pay even less attention to the fact that Dick Cheney said he couldn't be impeached because he's not part of the Executive Branch. However, it would be interesting to see this in, say, Alaska, where there would be a worried-looking polar bear on a melting glacier off to the side every day.
5. If you could make this site more like a mood ring and have it present news according to how the reader is feeling, then that would be something.
Post a Comment