Automated Blogging — surely not?
BBC News story.
Tuesday, 9 April, 2002, 07:46 GMT 08:46 UK
Computer scribe hits the web
Newsblaster aggregates thousands of news stories
“Online journalists could find their jobs under threat as a virtual reporter has been created that trawls the web for all the best stories.
The Newsblaster is a piece of software designed to edit, summarise and rewrite the huge amount of news currently on offer in cyberspace. ”
What is Google’s business model? Frankly, I don’t care so long as it keeps performing as well as it does. In fact I’d even pay a subscription… Bet they haven’t thought of that.
“ViewletBuilder allows anyone, regardless of technical or creative ability, to build compelling, animated presentations with ease. Get a sneak preview of ViewletBuilder3 and learn about the new version’s enhanced creation capabilities and the new, fast loading vector animated Viewlets.” [more…]
11:50:27 PM 
Very interesting and perceptive piece by Esther Dyson about real-time blogging and its impact on conferences.Quotes:
“No, it won’t make private meetings public. But it will make for more two-way communication at public meetings. Listeners can simultaneously query the speaker and communicate among themselves instead of everyone remaining silent while one person at a time speaks. ” And:
“A conference is always an attempt to orchestrate. Now, it is also something to annotate. ”
CNET has published a useful piece from knowledge@wharton about Larry Lessig’s book, The Future of Ideas. Standfirst reads:
“The hype is deserved: Lawrence Lessig’s “The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World” offers a devastating analysis of how the freedom and creativity originally built into the Internet are now being built out of it by corporations and lawyers with a vested interest in controlling what people do online and deciding who has access to what.”
Intriguing meditation by Clay Shirky on the difference between communities and audiences. Excerpt:
“As group size grows past any individual’s ability to maintain connections to all members of a group, the density shrinks, and as the group grows very large (>10,000) the number of actual connections drops to less than 1% of the potential connections, even if each member of the group knows dozens of other members. Thus growth in size is enough to alter the fabric of connection that makes a community work. (Anyone who has seen the userbase of a discussion group or mailing list grow quickly is familiar with this phenomenon.)
An audience, by contrast, has a very sparse set of connections and no mutuality between members. Thus an audience has no coordination costs associated with growth, because each new member of an audience creates only one new connection. This single connection is not even a mutual one — you need to know Yahoo’s address to join the Yahoo audience, but neither Yahoo nor any of its other users need to know anything about you. The disconnected quality of an audience that makes it possible for them to grow much (much) larger than a connected community can, because an audience can always exist at the minimum number of required connection (N connections for N users). ”
The Irish Times reports that the local version of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? TV game show has found itself at the centre of further controversy after all four potential answers to a question on last weekend’s show proved incorrect. Needless to say, a “computer error” was blamed. Ho, ho!
Sobering piece by Thomas Friedman about the crisis in the Middle East.
John Robb on why weblogs and instant outlining are superior to email and instant messaging
”Here’s my thinking on why Instant Outlining (I/O) and weblogs provide value beyond what’s provided by e-mail and instant messaging. Both IM and e-mail are great tools for conversations between consenting individuals. Beyond that, e-mail and IM break down, and weblogs and I/O take over. Here are three reasons why:
Scalability and information overload. Everyone is facing information overload. There is too much information that the average person needs to know to function effectively. So how should you get this information? Right now, most people get it through e-mail. However, for those of us on the leading edge of online workflow, the volume of informational e-mails has exceeded our ability to parse it. Why? E-mail is a terrible one-to-many publishing tool. Not because the technology can’t do it, it can, but because the volume of information published by an increasing number of publishers crowds out its basic functionality: conversations. Finding a valid conversation in the stack of inbox spam from friends, co-workers, and nameless hawkers of “penis enlargers” is frustrating and increasingly futile. In contrast, weblogs and I/O provide publishers a place to put relevant information where it can be found by interested parties. It rationalizes the flow and allows it to scale. It is a parallel processing environment for the mind.
Passive vs. active. E-mail and IM demand my attention and my time (a dwindling resource) when I am least able to provide it. The tools force me to read something I am not prepared to read (granted, e-mail is more passive than phone calls). In contrast, Weblogs and I/O leverage my time. They put me in control. I can batch process my interactions with individuals and groups. I can expand my circle of personal interactions and collaboration with little fear of being overwhelmed by the resulting interactions. For me, the ability to time-shift in a passive collaborative environment makes me infinitely more productive. Thinking in a massively active and interruption driven environment is like wearing a thought inhibiter.
Quality and complexity. Weblogs and I/O allow me to construct and publish complex thinking. Further, it archives that thinking so it isn’t lost. The conversational nature of e-mail and IM make sharing complex thoughts difficult and more time consuming. It’s hard, if not impossible to build a body of work that conveys a complex idea or plan. Additionally, I can’t easily leverage previous thinking or the thinking of others to create a more complex work. The ephemeral nature of e-mail and IM is like thinking in quicksand. ”
O’Reilly Network: Lessig on the Future of the Public Domain. Eleven times in the last 40 years Congress has extended the term of existing copyrights. And this is a practice which they’ve gotten into because copyright holders see great advantage to extending their copyrights, so that they continue to milk returns from their particularly successful properties. [Tomalak’s Realm]