Mark Zuckerberg once upon a time extolled facebook and told us about this thing called a “social graph.” Bernard Lunn has just talked about an “innovation graph.”
What about a “news graph”? Hubs and spokes—call them nodes and bridges.
Nodes are the people who are the subjects of the news. Like Karl Rove or Paris Hilton or Chuck Prince. Maybe nodes can also be groups of people acting as a single agent. Like the 100th Congress or the Supreme Court or maybe even something really big like Disney Corp.
Bridges are the news issues connecting the people to whom they are relevant. Here, the bridges have substance apart from mere connection. It would be like a social graph having connections indicating different kinds of friendship—a solid line for a great friend maybe, and a dashd line for a business acquaintance. Think of bridges like tags, just like those you might in delicious. You find a piece of news, which comes in the form of a newspaper article or a blog post, for example, and you assign issue-tags to it. Then, in turn, you assign that article or post to the people-nodes whom it discusses. The issue-tags flow through the article to the people-nodes to which the article or post is assigned; the pieces of news fall out of this picture of the news graph.
When people-nodes have issue-tags thus associated with them, we can indicate when certain people-nodes share certain issue-tags. If we represent those shared characteristics with bridges that connect the people-nodes, we’re graphing the people in the news and the substantive issues that bind them all up into the story of the world at some slice in time.
Just note once more how the pieces of the new—the bits of content, as I call them—fall away and liberate the news and the people and issues it comprises from the narrow confines created by the printing press and furthered by HTML. (Check out Jarvis’s more than mildly inspiring post.) This kind of news graph would, at long last, make the bits of content contigent on the people and the issues they discuss. It’s the elegant organization for news.
This is, by the way, the third component of networked news. This is the data-driven network of the people and the issues in the news.
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