Comments on: Hacks/Hackers as contact sport http://hackshackers.com/blog/2010/02/21/hackshackers-as-contact-sport/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hackshackers-as-contact-sport Journalism x Technology Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:01:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4-beta2-20538 By: burthermanhttp://hackshackers.com/blog/2010/02/21/hackshackers-as-contact-sport/#comment-4 burtherman Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:56:19 +0000 http://hackshackers.com/?p=77#comment-4 Indeed, I am looking at staging a larger workshop around the iPad and journalism, and getting people together from lots of different disciplines to reimagine the news reading experience. Indeed, I am looking at staging a larger workshop around the iPad and journalism, and getting people together from lots of different disciplines to reimagine the news reading experience.

]]> By: Saheli Dattahttp://hackshackers.com/blog/2010/02/21/hackshackers-as-contact-sport/#comment-3 Saheli Datta Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:22:50 +0000 http://hackshackers.com/?p=77#comment-3 BTW, thanks for putting together the site, and well done! BTW, thanks for putting together the site, and well done!

]]> By: Saheli Dattahttp://hackshackers.com/blog/2010/02/21/hackshackers-as-contact-sport/#comment-2 Saheli Datta Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:22:33 +0000 http://hackshackers.com/?p=77#comment-2 <i>some in the crowd pressed them about how to pay the creators who craft all that quality media that audiences want.</i><br><br>I was really surprised by this, actually. The vehemence of the anti-scraping questioners speaks to how much the people industry in the industry are hurting, and I guess it behooves the futuristic hackery crowd to take that pain seriously--somehow.<br><br>But I also feel, intuitively, that aggregation is simply not to blame, and I'm a little puzzled that the anger is still directed at this process. It seems pretty obvious--if your scraped headlines & nut grafs & thumbnails are engaging enough, readers will be drawn from the aggregation sites to your (hopefully ad-seeded) site. It also seemed like it was easy to miss how this is really the point of personalization--these sites are not generic aggregation machines, just giving people the most generically engaging (i.e. Paris Hilton) content. If they are truly personalized, they should get people content they want to click through to read in full.<br><br>So the real questions for me are two fold: a) how to make that personalization process truly rich and effective? and b) avoiding the echo chamber by making sure we engage with people's fullest selves, not just their click-id.<br><br>The first part is why I asked about an "OK Cupid" of news--something that has a lot of conversational style-data gathering, not just explicit widget-setup vs. implict behavior monitoring. The second question is where <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2008/12/ethan-zuckerman-on-balancing-the-protein-and-kit-kats-in-your-news/"Ethan Zuckerman's nutritional labeling</a> comes in. @willharperSF and @deifell had a little tweet conversation about this (@deifell called it the 'loop' effect) that I butted into: I think the food analogy in news is actually really good because a lot of people do want to eat better and in fact, feel better when they do eat "healthier." But we need tools to guide and motivate our dietary changes.<br><br><i>One thought that comes to mind from the panel is whether there would be a way to take the personalization technology from yourversion or lazyfeed and incorporate it directly inside a news site. What if news organizations themselves offered a more personalized experience and better user interface: Could that lead to news applications that readers would pay for, especially on a device like the iPad?</i><br><br>I think this "thought" is worth a workshop in itself! Great idea! some in the crowd pressed them about how to pay the creators who craft all that quality media that audiences want.

I was really surprised by this, actually. The vehemence of the anti-scraping questioners speaks to how much the people industry in the industry are hurting, and I guess it behooves the futuristic hackery crowd to take that pain seriously–somehow.

But I also feel, intuitively, that aggregation is simply not to blame, and I'm a little puzzled that the anger is still directed at this process. It seems pretty obvious–if your scraped headlines & nut grafs & thumbnails are engaging enough, readers will be drawn from the aggregation sites to your (hopefully ad-seeded) site. It also seemed like it was easy to miss how this is really the point of personalization–these sites are not generic aggregation machines, just giving people the most generically engaging (i.e. Paris Hilton) content. If they are truly personalized, they should get people content they want to click through to read in full.

So the real questions for me are two fold: a) how to make that personalization process truly rich and effective? and b) avoiding the echo chamber by making sure we engage with people's fullest selves, not just their click-id.

The first part is why I asked about an “OK Cupid” of news–something that has a lot of conversational style-data gathering, not just explicit widget-setup vs. implict behavior monitoring. The second question is where <a href=”http://www.niemanlab.org/2008/12/ethan-zuckerman-on-balancing-the-protein-and-kit-kats-in-your-news/”Ethan Zuckerman's nutritional labeling comes in. @willharperSF and @deifell had a little tweet conversation about this (@deifell called it the 'loop' effect) that I butted into: I think the food analogy in news is actually really good because a lot of people do want to eat better and in fact, feel better when they do eat “healthier.” But we need tools to guide and motivate our dietary changes.

One thought that comes to mind from the panel is whether there would be a way to take the personalization technology from yourversion or lazyfeed and incorporate it directly inside a news site. What if news organizations themselves offered a more personalized experience and better user interface: Could that lead to news applications that readers would pay for, especially on a device like the iPad?

I think this “thought” is worth a workshop in itself! Great idea!

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