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.
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