Self-Updating, Self-Localizing News Stories
This is one of those things that might not ever really get here (then again it might), but I absolutely love the idea: Adrian Holovaty, head of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek Interactive, had a story recently on XML.com in which he explains his ideas for dynamic news stories. Holovaty doesn’t get all that blue-sky in the piece, pondering things like dynamically updating time words (today, yesterday, last week), currency rates and other commonly taggable items, but at the end he toys with a really promising tangent:
Isolating people and quotes: How about marking up each quote, and associating it with the person who said it, so it would be possible to automatically retrieve all quotes by a given person, and all articles in which a given person was quoted?
Isolating individual facts: This is a pipe dream, but how about giving each and every fact a unique ID, and doing things like
? This would let journalists and readers create elaborate “fact trees,” which could display the relationship between information.
I want my fact trees! Holovaty talks about this a bit more over on his own blog. Relationships between facts, stories and people, all could be embedded in the text of a story via the kind of microformats Holovaty describes. And why stop there? There are all kinds of cool things you could do if location data were embedded in a story. Imagine if every news story had GeoRSS data embedded in it, so that all you had to do was click the “MapIt” button and your story was automatically displayed in a Google Maps mashup. Can someone write this for us? Please? Wouldn’t even be all that hard, I don’t think. And I promise to start using the tags in 3pointD if you do.
I first spotted Holovaty’s ideas at Journalism.co.uk, where it’s revealed that Holovaty is also the guy behind “the prize-winning ChicagoCrime.org Google Maps mashup, and the Washington Post’s archive of congressional voting patterns. So maybe Holovaty himself will do it. Even if he doesn’t, I’m glad he put the idea out there. To me, it just may hint at the future of Web-based news.
Feeds
I’d also suggest localizing TV news. CNN almost does this with Google Earth, where they had a knowledgeable reporter use GE to show war or flooding from above. But put a GPS unit on the remote camera itself and pipe the data through the video feed and you can now auto-sync the GE view to the camera’s. Now that would be cool.
Bad idea. It will do to news what Babel does to foreign languages.