Micah Sifry on the Navigating World Live Web

On October 21, 2009, I gave a talk to NPR Weekend Edition and Digital staff, during their staff retreat. The topic was "Navigating the World Live Web." My goal was to look at how we can tell new kinds of stories from the intentional and unintentional data streams being created by millions of users of the internet.

During the first part of the talk I explore how people "vote" with their attention around political candidates and themes, and look at tools for unearthing interesting trends in public attention, focusing on indicators like blog posts, "friending" on social network sites, and the like. I also look at tools for discerning trends in what people are searching for, as another way of discovering shifts in the public mood.

In the second part, I dig into the really live web, not just the recently indexed or searched web, and explore several tools for sifting tweets on Twitter to discover important trends.

I close by suggesting that a new kind of journalism is yet to be invented, one that would combine live programming (of the kind practiced, say, by NPR) with direct engagement of the millions of people "who used to be called the audience."

Category:

News & Politics

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• sifry
• liveweb
• twitter
• worldliveweb
• realtime
• real
• time
• web
• collective
• consciousness
• npr
• personal
• democracy
• forum
• news

[rodneygibbs]

I'm on the board of our local NPR station, where we're wrestling with these very issues. Thanks for posting.