The Future Of Journalism – Geofeedia or Overview?

 #Blog2012, Books, Computational Journalism, Geospatial Analysis / Mapping, Java, Knowledge Discovery, Real-Time Journalism, Ruby, Twitter Streaming API  1 Response »
May 142012
 

If you’ve been following my tweet stream, you saw me tweet this:

At $1450 a month for five seats, I think the service is overpriced. Moreover, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube or Yahoo/Flickr could easily build this into their web sites and deliver it for free, essentially by-passing two middlemen – Geofeedia and the news organization subscribing to Geofeedia. And a clever RSS / Yahoo! Pipes hacker could build something like this for use in a newsroom. For that matter, if you limit yourself to Twitter you can do most of this with Twitter / Advanced Search.

I must admit that I love the idea and think this could evolve into something game-changing. I wrote about the potential for this back in January 2010!

The Twitter Streaming API — How It Works and Why It’s A Big Deal

To get an idea what this could become, check out Knowledge Discovery from Data Streams by Joao Gama.

Moving on, I don’t know how I’ve managed to be a tech blogger writing about computational journalism without discovering Overview until last week, but it happened. Twitter serendipity at work – I was watching my Interactions page and saw a tweet of mine retweeted by @overviewproject. The Overview project is led by Jonathan Stray. You can see the entire team here.

Overview is open source, lives on Github and appears to be a mix of Ruby and Java. I’m currently testing it out for potential inclusion in one of my computational journalism appliances. It’s a browser / desktop application, so most likely it will end up in the successor to Data Journalism Developer Studio  2012LX. If you want to work with it yourself, the instructions are here.

So which of the two represents the future of journalism? Both, of course! With the proper underlying database and real-time knowledge discovery algorithms, Geofeedia could be a game-changer. But in the long run, as a for-profit service, I think they’ll either get acquired or duplicated by the big players..The Overview project, on the other hand, is an open source project. It’s well-funded by the Knight Foundation and Associated Press, and the team is led by one of the well-known names in computational journalism. Overview is certainly going to be part of my future.

 

RubyConf 2007 Notes

 Ruby  No Responses »
Nov 052007
 
  1. OK, let’s talk about this “werewolf” thing first and get it over with. http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/11/is-werewolf-killing-conference-hackfest.html I almost got to witness a Werewolf game in its entirety last night, but it was two hours late getting started because they were video recording it, and I didn’t think I’d be able to stay up and alert for the whole thing, so I bailed out before it started rather than risk interrupting the flow. My opinion is that it’s a fascinating game and all that but, well, so is hacking. I fully intend to learn the game, although I don’t really think I have the patience/stamina for that sort of thing. Meanwhile, I think Charlie is right — it is impacting the hacker spirit. And I also think Patrick Mueller is right — the Reject Conf should have had a wider audience. Then again, I’m not sure I have the stamina and patience to stay up all night and hack either. :-)
  2. On to more substantive matters. One theme I heard a number of times was that today’s tools are vastly better than what we old-timers (45 years and counting in my case) had available. Well … first of all, the tools weren’t all that bad, when you come right down to it. The hardware may have been limited, but somehow the work got done, and quite frankly, I don’t think today’s tools are any more productive than what I had to work with when I started in this game. There just are more programmers than there were back then, so more code gets produced. Bottom line: would I trade my Athlon 64 X2 for an IBM 7090? Hell no! But could I give up Ruby and go back to macro assembly language? I probably wouldn’t want to, but if Ruby didn’t exist, I could be as productive in macro assembler as I am in any other language.
  3. I hope the amount of technical detail in my presentation (http://rubyforge.org/docman/view.php/977/2705/Slides.pdf) didn’t obscure my messages, which are that Ruby is only “sort of slow”, not catastrophically slow, and that we need to be thinking about the future and not clinging to misguided notions like “Premature optimization is the root of all evil” and, what’s worse, “Hardware is cheaper than programmers”. I’ve got a machine many orders of magnitude faster than the IBM 7090, but I also expect to solve problems the same order of magnitude larger on it.