washwords

In The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web – Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp examines the media Oversatura-plosion-ama that is the Interweb.

Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING, I’ve reproduced about ten percent of them below — just the headlines and ledes. If you have the stomach to scroll through them all to see what else I have to say about it, check out the sources as you scroll:

This scroll (go check it out; we’ll wait) went on and on … and … It didn’t even count the blogs that repeated the same story or the multiple versions of each one, or editions or…

Conserve paper? Conserve time! and brain cells!

I find I’m facing a similar conundrum with “social media tools.” For someone (me) who once considered going to library school, and has been a lifelong researcher/journalist and social scientist (especially the Read the rest of this entry »