From the perspective of news consumers, the real point of the news isn’t merely to discover what’s happening. Rather, it is about discerning what it all might mean — especially, to you! In an age of infomation overload, the challenge for news professionals is not so much to provide more news content. Rather, it is to support relevance, insight, and (ultimately) meaning.
This is why, lately, I’ve been intrigued by Silobreaker. This Europe-based news aggregator site demonstrates how “Semantic Web” technology can help make news more relevant — and thus, more compelling and useful. This is pretty important because, since relevance has inherent value, it can be the basis of business models…
If you’re not familiar with the Semantic Web, it’s essentially a set of technologies that help computers interpret meaning more like how humans do it. This can make various computer technologies (especially search) far more efficient and effective. It makes it easier for computers to get to the point in ways that people understand and value.
As this Semantic Web tutorial explains: “The Semantic Web is not about links between Web pages. It describes relationships between things (like A is a part of B, and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price).”
…Apply that logic to news, and you approach what most news consumers try to do, with varying degrees of success, in their own heads. News consumers constantly try to create meaning by “connecting the dots” between a dizzying array of often-conflicting stories from a multitude of venues. They do this in order to form opinions and make decisions — which from their perspective is the whole point of news.
I’ll tell you up front: Silobreaker is pretty geeky. Its user interface can be confusing and frustrating. It’s often not easy for a layperson to understand what the site is saying, or why. That said, it’s still well worth exploring — mainly because of its search tools. These visually portray the potential relevance of current news topics. And that can prove valuable to working journalists — as well as to analysts and regular people.
For instance, I’m interested in air pollution from coal power plants. I have asthma, and there’s a big coal power plant just two miles from my home, so there’s much personal relevance here. I start my Silobreaker exploration of this topic by conducting a “360-degree search” for stories that connect air pollution, coal, and the U.S. This provides a fairly conventional news aggregator-style overview of air pollution-related news, superficially not too different from what you’d get from Google News.
But for more insight into what’s happening in this field, I glance at the right-hand sidebar. In the top chart there, “article volume,” I see that starting in late Sept. coverage of this intersection of topics spiked suddenly and sharply, and has remained generally high since. This clues me in that this field has heated up. That’s useful context if I haven’t been monitoring this field regularly.
Scrolling down further in the right sidebar, I see a box for “network search.” I double-click that box to display a large diagram showing how the issues I named, plus many others selected by Silobreaker as relevant, currently relate to each other in detail.
The network view allows me to literally see how issues connect. The value of this is the serendipity potential. I can filter this search to focus on news from the last month only, and double-click the “air pollution” node to make it the focus of the diagram. The resulting diagram shows me how topics, companies, organizations, and places currently relate to each other in this complex field. More importantly, clicking on a blue dot on any connecting line tells me why Silobreaker thinks those issues are connected (articles, blog posts, etc.)
I find the network search especially fascinating — even though, to be honest, I’m not quite clear on how it works or what it’s telling me. But I do know that it has helped me to better understand interrelationships and how they evolve — something that’s hard to get at just by reading conventional news stories. So it’s well worth spending a few minutes clicking on topics and playing with the sliders in Silobreaker’s network view. Allow the diagram to rearrange itself around your selections. See if you spot interesting relationships you hadn’t noticed before.
Silobreaker offers other visually interesting tools worth exploring. Each offers some advantages and frustrations. Expect clunkiness and confusion, but also some Aha! moments. Think of this site as an early prototype for a news business based on relevance. Where could we go from here?
