Dave Winer: Something nice this time

… at the intersection of media, technology, business and the web

Search

Media

Posted by Mathew @ 11:20 am on October 19 2007 | |

As anyone who has read this blog for awhile probably knows, I have been hard on Dave Winer occasionally (and I think with good reason, but I don’t want to get into that right now).

The fact remains, however, that Dave is a pretty smart guy when it comes to things like RSS — let’s not get into whether he “invented” it or not — and he also thinks outside the box when it comes to things like how newspapers and other media present their content, and that is something I’m interested in as well. So I think it’s only fair that I point out when I think he’s doing something interesting.

The thing in this case is his New York Times keyword index. It’s a simple thing, in a lot of ways, since it just scans the newspaper’s index and comes up with the number of times a certain word is used, then ranks them from top to bottom — but it also has a couple of additional features, including the fact that it displays the headline of a story when you hover over the number.

That’s a nice touch. And it’s an interesting companion to Dave’s “river of news” NYT feed (something I tried to recreate with my Twitter feed of Globe and Mail headlines).

I don’t understand why the Times — or other newspapers, for that matter — don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.

I think plenty of readers would be interested in alternative ways of finding stories, just as they now use features such as the “most read” and “most emailed” lists the Times and other papers have. Why not add even more ways of slicing and dicing the news?

Post it | Related links |

Mathew posted this article under Media, Social networks, Web2.0 on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 11:20 am. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, and you can also view Technorati Linkbacks or check for other responses using YackTrack.

Discussion

Comments are disallowed for this post.

Viewing 1 Comment

Alexander van Elsas 10 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Hi Mathew, in relation to this, I like the concept of a river of information that you can plug into if need. I saw a few posts related to this the past few days, so it seems to trigger thoughts all over the web. Doc Searl wrote about it, as did Dave, but also Anna Zelenka wrote a nice article on how the concept of a river flowing stops the idea of us having to deal with an information overload.There are so many ways in which we can discover new information and it seems we are not using half of them effectively yet. link.

reply edit flag record video comment

http://vanelsas.wordpress.com