Networked news describes a structure for consuming information. It means pulling in your news from a network of publishers—bloggers and traditional news outlets. It means pulling in your news from a network of readers—friends and experts and so on. And, crucially, networked news means breaking down the bits of content into their relevant constitutive pieces and reforming those pieces back into their own network. It means pulling in your news from a data-driven network of the people and the issues in the news—people like George W. Bush and Steve Jobs and Oprah and issues and memes from “republican” and “iraq war” and “campaign 2008″ to “iPhone” to “power of forgiveness.”
The concept of networked news grows out of the realization that the stories we care about exist between one author and another, between articles and blog posts, between newspapers and blogs. The story is a kind of thread that runs through time and in and out of the person-subjects and issue-topics of the news.
Networked news is not networked journalism, which is a structure for publishing information. See pressthink, buzzmachine, and newassignment.net for that parallel “genius” project to grow and diversify the number of sources from which we pull our news.
The first and second components of networked news are new but not unprecedented. Pulling in your news from a network of publishers is what we do when we subscribe to RSS feeds and read them in one place. It’s the river of news I read when I fire up Google Reader, which gives me news about the tech industry, about finance, and about politics. Techmeme, Memeorandum, Google News, and other memetrackers are other great examples of networking news from publishers. Newsmap, based on Google News, is the picture of this first component. Thoof and other news-focused web apps with similar recommendation engines also represent this publisher-based side of networked news.
Pulling in your news from a network of other readers is what Mario Romero is working on with his Google Reader Shared Items application for facebook. It’s also what Digg and others represent.
There are sites that represent both the first and second components of networked news. It’s what Newsvine, Topix, Daylife, and others represent. It’s what Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle and others represent. Though I haven’t actually toyed with the site yet (I’m still waiting on that invite, guys) it looks like Streamy sits at the current bleeding edge of the reader-based front of networked news.
The third component of networked news is, in some ways, the oldest, represented by simple searches to Google News or Technorati tags. It’s also the most difficult component—technically, socially, you name it. When I encourage Mario to let users browse his Google Reader Shared Items by tag, I’m encouraging him to let us readers of news pull in bits of content by issue and meme. When Streamy claims to have “filters”—which I called “substance- and source-based ways browse, and subscribe to, kinds of content, by keyword and original author, respectively”—it’s claiming to have taken a few steps into the this elusive third component of networked news.
One kind representation of this third component, in the form of how Exxon putatively buys scientific research, is graphic. The “story” is the whole visual network, while the actors are broken down and interconnected within it. The bits of content, in this case, come in the form of profiles on each actor pictured. People and foundations are linked up by bridges connecting them. Those bridges, exxonsecrets says, represent the money that Exxon funnels through the foundations to pay the people to conduct and promote bogus climate research. Users can create, manipulate, and save their own graphical network maps for all to see.
A swirl of excited ideas in my head, it’s all rather tough to articulate. But I’ll get to it soon enough, bit by bit.
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