NewsTrust.net founder Fabrice Florin is on a panel at WeMedia in Miami, a conference to discuss issues of the changing media environment. I'm in the audience and will live blog the event. It might be messy and geeky, but hopefully informative too. NewsTrust.net is part of a larger conversation, and being on this panel alongside the business developer of Google and Mary Hodder, who created modern day Folksonomy (tagging), shows that NewsTrust.net can play a role in helping people find valuable information online. There are lots of issues we have to discuss - and we want to keep you all informed about some of the issues that are facing NewsTrust and the larger world of search ie: Getting information that you want.
So what is the panel?
Search World | Trust, relevance and rights
If you can’t google it, does it exist? Search functions unlock the Internet’s potential, but how can we make it easier for everyone to find relevant information and act on it? Innovative thinking about metadata, permissions and trust could provide the necessary breakthroughs.
Session Chair: Jim Kennedy, VP Strategy, The Associated Press
- Fabrice Florin, Executive Director, NewsTrust
- Mary Hodder, Founder, Dabble
- Josh Cohen, Director, Business Development, Google News
Jim Kennedy started the panel out right - with a "party trick."
There was a power outage in Florida yesterday - so he did a quick Google search for "power outage" to show that the top result was from the Boston Globe. Informative yes, but perhaps not the best considering the power outage was in Florida. The point isn't that the Boston Globe is no good - but that we don't know what the answers are in terms of search: How can we make sure people who are searching for news get the results they want or are the most informative. That's the question Jim possed to the audience to get this thing started.
Opening thoughts from Mary Hodder: There is a lot of value in the 10 percent of people who use systems that are the organizing class ie: using tags, or submitting content to social news sites. But it's a larger issue: we have so much information online - We want to figure out how to harness meta-data from people because publishers understand the content different from how the publishers do.
Semantic systems: How do you match up how people understand things, especially considering cultural differences? This is a huge problem - I've been working on search for eight years and there is no answer. The question - could publishers create a standard that works for all news publishers?
Fabrice (our man!): We are trying to help people find quality news and information onine - which is a broad objective - so we invite people to rate content based on core principles of journalism which apply to information at large. By looking at these dozen key qualities we are able to help people as a group help evaluate how well the piece of information performs against these principles - and in the process we are helping to define a language. We are helping our members discover for themselves and each other what it means for a news story to be well sourced.
We are creating meta-data that balances the information itself and also about the people doing the review - creating a system of trust. The content is just the tip of the iceberg, but we are probably going to have to do meta-data about meta-data, because the amount of information from sites that are linking to it is becoming very large.
Jim: Communities become filters - so how do you scale that up? That seems to be what you are pointing to. But how do we make those useful to people who don't know you exist. My question to Google then is - as you dominate search, knowing that people are coming at this, what is Google's position on this? Are you going to integrate this into the algorithem, create your own standards.
Josh Cohen: Standards become tricky - even if we apply it across all "news publishers" (which is tricky in itself) - we need to think about scale. If you are talking about 50,000 publishers, that's such a small subset of all the content on the web. Maybe whatever standards work well for those publishers - we are talking about millions of content creators. We have to consider that whatever it is - does it apply to all possible situations. That's the challenge we face. That said: More information is helpful to us - we look at it from an algorithm perspective.
Discussion: The first iteration of search failed because it was based on meta-tags, but it was tags that users couldn't see, but people who did know could game the system with it. So how can we avoid that: Fabrice: To present the meta-data in a way that people can understand it. Am I looking at Meta-Data from AP, Dabble, NewsTrust, you need to identify the source of the meta-data. That is something you try to do in journalism. Mary Hodder: That sounds like a really great idea, but it's surprisingly hard to figure out how we can do this. Ask an engineer to do this and their head will blow off.
Fabrice: It's really easy, we just need to get 6 billion accounts - everybody gets one (laughs).
But they group eventually comes to the consensus: that is a big challenge - because then you have to vet the source of meta-data information. Meta-data from AP is trustworthy, what about meta-data from other sites?
Amy Gahran from the Poytner institute: I'm intrigued about how meta-data can help us find specific news stories that people wouldn't find easily otherwise. If everyone here were to give one tip in the actual writing of the content to connect better in the searches what would it be?
Jim Kennedy: The content has to have basic structure to it. The byline, the dateline and if we could code that in a specific way.
Fabrice: To clearly label the kind of content that is coming out - is it news analysis, editorial, breaking news. That's an important label because it changes drastically what the reader gets and expects. Also I encourage journalists to rate themselves on NewsTrust.net -- consider it feedback from our community, letting you reflect.
Then there was a discussion about Digg, Mixx, etc - with some concerns about gaming that can go on. Mary asks: How can you develop a rating system where people can recommend to people that they "know" online because they are good at finding content.
Fabrice: one of the things we want to figure out - how can you determine the expertise of the person doing the review. Because that is how we function in real life - you ask somebody you trust. So how can that trust translate to people online that we don't know, how do you access that expertise. That's a concern because we don't want this to be a game, yet at the same time if you do what we are doing at NewsTrust it requires more on the part of the user. We want to know if there is a happy medium - between a game and something that is work. But tracking reputation is going to be key.
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