A promising new search engine (updated)

A promising new search engine (updated)
I can still recall the day I first logged on to Google, then just the latest of a host of search engines. This morning I heard a news item about a new search engine: Cuil. After a very quick inspection, I'm impressed. It's fast and it's pretty—you get graphics as well as links. I'd welcome your comments about it and how well it meets your needs. Update, July 30: David...

I can still recall the day I first logged on to Google, then just the latest of a host of search engines. This morning I heard a news item about a new search engine: Cuil.

After a very quick inspection, I'm impressed. It's fast and it's pretty—you get graphics as well as links. I'd welcome your comments about it and how well it meets your needs.

Update, July 30: David Olive, a columnist for The Star in Toronto, is not impressed.

Way more news sites, way less news
Via The Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith offers some cogent comments: Way more news sites, way less news. Excerpt: Every year, a report is published called "The State of the News Media." It is researched and written by a think tank called Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it deals solely with the U.S. media. This think tank was created by the journalism school at Columbia University; it is...

Via The Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith offers some cogent comments: Way more news sites, way less news. Excerpt:

Every year, a report is published called "The State of the News Media." It is researched and written by a think tank called Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it deals solely with the U.S. media.

This think tank was created by the journalism school at Columbia University; it is now funded by a private foundation based in Washington. The report is a summary of a comprehensive study of the kinds of news being disseminated by all American media sources, mainstream and marginal.

Its primary preoccupation, of course, recently at least, has been the effect on the news of the Internet and of "citizen" (that is to say, amateur) participation in the creation of America's informational landscape.

It always attempts to answer some big questions, particularly whether newsgathering is more reflective of reality when run by democratic principles or by elitist ones.

This year's report summarizes its conclusions as a few major trends. Perhaps the most depressing of them is the fact that despite the massive proliferation of news-headline websites and "citizen" news sites (that is to say, blogs), there is no more actual news being found and reported.

In fact, there may even be less.

The simple explanation for this is that most websites simply repackage news found and written by the conventional media. In other words, reporters who are trained and paid to do the often dry work of gathering facts and interviewing people, or the dangerous work of visiting wars or disasters, provide the news stories, and the news sites gather them up and the bloggers comment on them.

But because of the commercial nature of news sites, the stories are often filtered by popularity. There is more and more technology available to enable editors to gather reader votes on the appeal of stories and to sort stories by their popularity.

This leads to a narrowing of the number of stories that are posted: The most popular ones get the most play.

Read the whole article, and follow the links.

Writers Wanted: You can't do it all yourself
"Where can I find someone to write and edit my blog posts?" a colleague asked me this morning. That's a smart question. You can't do it all yourself. You can, but there's probably not enough time to service clients, make...

A US newspaper abandons print
Via Isthmus/The Daily Page: The end of an era in Madison, Wisconsin. Excerpt: Good luck, Cap Times. You'll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool. The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed. One thing's for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years...

Via Isthmus/The Daily Page: The end of an era in Madison, Wisconsin. Excerpt:

Good luck, Cap Times. You'll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool.

The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed.

One thing's for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years will be gone. Online publishing is a fundamentally different proposition for both journalists and readers. Experts consider it a classic disruptive technology that reorders daily life for just about everyone it touches and destroys what was thought to be a durable economic model for the eclipsed technology.

Newspapers won't die off as quickly as slide rules did when calculators were introduced, but the changes under way are so epochal you'd be foolish to believe anyone who speaks confidently of what publishing will be like in 10 years.

"Nobody knows anything," as veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously said of the secrets to successful movie-making. The newspaper business is even more in the dark as to how it will make its next buck.

Meanwhile, via the Editor & Publisher website: Steep Decline at NYT while WSJ gains. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine also comments on the Madison metamorphosis.

A lot of journalists are becoming webwriters, but they don't necessarily like the idea, according to this post by Amy Gahran on Poynter.org. And a lot of webwriters, whether they know it or not, are becoming journalists.

Webwriters, meet your great-grandfather
A fascinating article in The New York Times: The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web. Excerpt: On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels...

A fascinating article in The New York Times: The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web. Excerpt:

On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files.

He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough.

“The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

For more about Paul Otlet, visit Wikipedia.

But I still insist that the true father of the internet was none other than Mark Twain.