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Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

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Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

#21

Post by thefrostytruth »

This endeavor relies on a healthy ecosystem of news. This product is a recommendation system, a glorified web browser--not a newspaper. And it's insane to think that destroying the newspaper business is in these founders' best interest, if indeed they wish to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry." The arrogance and short-sightedness of the statement is thick.

I will never understand so many technical folks' glee in watching the decline of investigative reporting, media companies, publishing houses, and so on--especially when so many applications like this simply exploit the work of others, add a layer of abstraction on top. ("Exploit" being non-pejorative, simply descriptive.)

Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

#22

Post by icey »

redorb wrote: post #19

Any ideas what they are doing in their source of their homepage with G-analytics JS written 4 times in a row? Then also it seems 2 more times at the bottom; Is that A/B testing or are they pumping numbers>? (and surely pumping numbers this way wouldnt work)

It's most likely a result of bad programming. My guess is that the page is made up of a bunch of components using templates.

Instead of including the GA-JS in one master template, it's probably being included in one of the templates that gets rendered multiple times.

Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

#23

Post by felixmar »

jerf wrote: post #8

The thing about technological progress is that the replacement is never just "the old thing, only on computers". When people in the 90s wrote about the Internet and the Digital Library, quite a lot of them were envisioning something like Google Books, which is just a collection of books, only online! What actually happened was Wikipedia. (And a lot of other stuff, all of which further proves my point, but Wikipedia i…

Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming

Tim Berners-Lee mentioned "General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc." as the first area for intended uses of hypertext, see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html He also mentioned collaborative authoring. The innovation of Wikipedia is public editing which made sense when the general population came online.

Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

#25

Post by ghb »

Does anyone know if there are amateur news sites that do things like collect shit people just report like "oh shit, this guy just got hit by a car on Damen & Wolcott" or "Hey, guys, the regime is cracking down on our protest", or has Twitter somehow filled in that gap?

Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

#26

Post by chc »

credo wrote: post #13

>>and thus "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry". Language like this generally makes me more skeptical that they'll accomplish this It is one thing to blog or to aggregate "news", it is another to actually investigate and report the news. I don't know if they realize this, when they talk about delivering the "final blow to the newspaper industry" >>The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article…

Maybe 1.0.1 is already in the pipeline. They didn't say all the codes would go out today.

Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

#28

Post by code_duck »

billybob wrote: post #3

The future of news, as I see it: traditional media mostly dies, leaving a giant vacuum that part-time enthusiasts can't fill. People don't know what their local and regional government is up to because research is mostly boring, and who wants to do boring stuff for free? Corruption increases until investigative media outlets rise up to do full-time research and exposure. Frustrated citizens value this enough to pay f…

Your statements appear to be based on the idea that traditional media is telling us what "local and regional government is up to". While this is true in a sense, they leave out what our local and regional governments are actually up to. ESPECIALLY when it comes to actual corrupting influence and the effects. I see independent journalists as more willing to confront that.

Current media gives us certain facts and certain angles, but there is too much left unsaid, untouched, analyzed, due to their corporate policies and the nature of the establishment. The relationship between politics, industry, media corporations and the government has become much too overlapping and incestuous for my comfort.

Re: Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

#29

Post by donaldc »

lkozma wrote: post #7

I wonder if personalized news has that much appeal, really. Part of the success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with some group you identify with. Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the workplace the d…

Part of the success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with some group you identify with.

Perhaps, but most of the reason for the success of traditional tv, radio, and newspapers is that, until the last five years or so, there weren't really any viable alternatives. Only recently has content distribution become a non-issue; previously, it was a bottleneck.

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