We're seeing the rise of the topical page as the atomic unit of content. Journalists will no longer write stories, persay. They're going to write topics, which will have story-like elements, but won't look anything like the articles they focus on today.
Read More
Right on the heels of my defense of Wikipedia and thoughts about accuracy comes this story about a Wikipedia hoax repeated by journalists around the world. Some kid inserted a fake quote in an article about the recently-deceased French composer Maurice Jarre. Journalists took the quote, reportedly by the composer himself, and inserted it in their obituaries.
Read More
I had an interesting exchange with someone from the BBC at the RTNDA conference I attended last week. I was on a panel devoted to ethics in digital journalism, and much of the discussion and concern among the audience surrounded user-generated content, specifically user comments.
Toward the end of the discussion, I made the point that people in the audience who were expressing disdain for the practice of inviting in user commenary should realize that this is about more than just controlling trolls. Wikipedia and Google, I said, were built on user input -- small acts of creation by millions of users. It's the 'collective intelligence' meme that has built powerful, new information tools, fundamentally transformed business and made billions of dollars for some on the Web.
Read More
In Überpedia lives, Jeff Jarvis talks about how the German publisher Bertelsmann is creating a 'vetted' version of some of Wikipedia. We've been wondering whether there's a need for a Dallasopedia. Here's a great way to get it done efficiently: Take what's there and make it better.