Paul's Web Space 2.1

ONA08 Day Two - Tina Brown, Semantic Web

The main sessions of the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference were held September 12 (my birthday:) and September 13. First up was a keynote address by Tina Brown. Some may have wondered why Tina Brown – former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and author of a book on Princess Di – was speaking at an online news event, but she made it plain to see, offering an interesting take on what's missing in the online news space, and announcing her latest venture. This month she launched the Daily Beast, a news aggregation service that features content selected by 20 or so live editors, rather than utilizing automation to pick stories — offering content designed to appeal to "the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.” She was coy about details, but opened up a little more to Jeff Jarvis the night before. Not the most insightful talk, but it was interesting to hear the perspective of an old-school magazine type trying to navigate the waters of Web 2.0.

The first session I attended was a presentation by Marik Bide, project director of the Automated Content Access protocol (ACAP), a new European initiative that would provide the ability for news stories and other content to specify what uses are permitted. It's aimed particularly at search engines, but as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, seems to violate the basic tenets of the "link economy" that enable the Web to thrive. He was even harder on ACAP in his conference wrap-up, also directing criticism at ONA for emphasizing old-school news and its approach to the web rather than actively seeking our new types of news organizations and companies. Even though I work for an old-school newspaper, I've worked in the web and online space much longer, and I can see where he's coming from to a point. However, there were exceptions to his critique.

The next panel I attended, The Next New Metrics, tried to divine coming trends in audience measurement, beyond the page view. The most interesting presenter was Matt Cutler of Visible Measures, which specializes in measuring the consumption and distribution of Internet video; he stated emphatically that advertisers want more video – it consistently commands the highest CPMs and sells out inventory – so our charge is to create more video content, and presumably the money will follow.

Finally, I watched presentations of a couple interesting new developments in the Semantic Web space, first from Tom Tague of OpenCalais, a tool from Thompson/Reuters that enables automated tagging of content with rich semantic information — more semantic, but less of a "wow" application, at least yet, and available for free to all users. Then we heard from Tristan Harris of Apture, which gives publishers the ability to quickly link key concepts or details in their stories with a variety of multimedia and background information, all without leaving the page — less purely semantic, but with a more immediate payoff. This tool is available for free to bloggers and nonprofit publishers.

Labels: freeculture, journalism, metrics, ona08, semantic web, video

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/

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