At the beginning of this video, Martin Moore of News Standards Trust tells the story about how United Airlines’ stock lost a billion dollars after a series of improbable coincidences pushed a years-old story about United going bankrupt to the front of Google News. This perfectly illustrates a danger from reading unsorted news stories online.
To aid search engines and end users differentiate relevant news more precisely, the Media Standards Trust has partnered with the Associated Press to launch a new ‘microformat’ for metadata in news stories.
A recent press release from the Media Standards Trust states that the metadata will give information on:
- what the story is about
- where it was written
- who wrote it
- where it was published
- the news principles it adheres to (if any)
- any usage rights associated with it
I applaud this experiment, not only could it help determine the quality and relevance of your research but would allow for filtered search options.
For more information on this new microformat, visit Value Added News.
Another technology to aid searches also caught my interest this week, WolframAlpha, a ‘computational knowledge engine’ (via Wired magazine).
Now in Beta, WolframAlpha is described as the “first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”
WolframAlpha doesn’t just link to pages about a topic, it pulls data from various sources and recombines it on the fly. This technology will be huge for all kinds of research.
