Stopping by the Second Innovation Journalism conference, defined as journalism dedicated to the coverage of innovation. Here are some notes from last year. Heading to OSBC later, so can only share some notes...
Notes from a presentation by Johan Bostr?m, Reporter and Editor, G?teborgsposten on Innovation as a Keyword for News.
One problem with covering innovation is there is no keyword for monitoring it. When he met Tim Berners Lee in 1997, he said Meta data "is essential to unleash the full potential of the web." He didn't believe people who authored sites would categorize them, but with increasing anarchy we would need indexing. He didn't forsee Google, but did see the need for a meta data system. Most pages today have meta tags.
Innovation is a complex term, almost always used as "implementing something new," but copywriters and others use it differently. Shows poorly categorized content People will find their news sources, even if they are not properly labeled, but categorization will help grow the discipline. The thrust of his argument is that news sites should have a separate category, section and news feed for innovation.
Describes a hierarchical taxonomy, highlighting "04 003 009" which is wireless technology. Google thinks otherwise, offering a product search including Zoids and a Cricket Collection; and this result from the Bible 04:003:009 And thou shalt give the Levites unto Aaron and to his sons: they are wholly given unto him out of the children of Israel. IDG News Service uses 18 categories, but they are using a more complex multilevel system in response to their customers.
This presentation seemed slightly odd to me, not just because we have tagging and folksonomies. But innovation is one area that couldn't possibly conform to a top-down taxonomy. Change is the only constant and I know innovation when I see it.
Guy from Reuters: DMOZ is an initiative where the users classify, and they have an innovation category. They could use innovation as a category, but there is an established process that would be a barrier to getting it up. Does see demand for innovation as a category.
Marc Ferranti from IDG is dubious on using it as a story category. You can drill down from headlines to stories, can do searches (great if you know what you are looking for) and look by topic. Our editors told us that our categories were too broad. Ideally we want our writers to help define what the impact is of anything they cover, so innovation should be a topic for every story. Over time that might change with economics and globalization. As Estonian programmers (sic) move up the chain you will see more of a need for the US to be innovative and a demand for understanding the process of innovation. Talking about 65% of CIOs say that bringing innovative ideas to the table a is a significant, something that will only grow.
I had to ask about tagging (one suggestion for using the keyword innovation is this, or this, I suppose), which the panel hadn't heard of, but they expressed promise in organization being driven from the bottom up. Google already categorized innovation as a keyword for commercial purposes. More of open source practices will be included media ventures.
