BBC News Wiki Proxy – Integrating Wikipedia, Blogs and the News

Thanks to Synesthesia for pointing me to this very creative integration of old media, wikis, and blogs to provide more context to the news.

Here is what Julian wrote:

“New media activist Stef Magdalinski has produced a great example of the way new technologies allow people to interact with broadcasters in different ways – the News Online wikiproxy. The site proxies BBC News online and does the following things to pages retrieved through it:

• retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out “Capitalised Phrases” and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it’s turned into a hyperlink. This way you can see in-context links to definitions of terms or background information on topics discussed.

• uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story – this way from the same page as the story you can see who else is talking about the story

Julian links to an example in a report on UK politics. I looked at the example and found this a great integration of old and new media. But I could not find links to any blogs as referred to in the second bullet. Perhaps there were simply none for this story.