:: Future of Journalism

OpenCalais - Semantic News Web

Calais is a software which makes digital information accessible, interoperable and valuable by using semantic web technology. With their solution it is possible to incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application. Huffington Post and CNET for example are using OpenCalais to repurpose content.⁽¹⁾

How can it be used? - Like Associated Content⁽³⁾ you can use OpenCalais to improve ad placement, streamline content operations and assign the right story to the right writer.

⁽¹⁾ Further information: http://opencalais.com

⁽²⁾ Watch how it works: "How does Calais work"

⁽³⁾ Just surf around: http://www.associatedcontent.com

For whom? - User Centered Design

Design is not l'art pour l'art. Design is a planning process. As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention (Wikipedia on Design).

Yes, many companies develop products for markets which do not exist. It's not that these markets are simply not ready for the innovation to take off. It's because there is NO need for the product or the service so far. In that scenario companies have to create the need before they can sell to anyone.

User centered design or UCD is a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of the end user are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process (Wikipedia on UCD).While intuition is nice and probably many designers and creatives claim to design by intuition, user-centered design requires much more testing and optimization of the end user experience. The process therefore typically starts with intensive gathering of user requirements before the process of designing starts.

Even how users can participate varies and defines the approach taken. In cooperative or participatory design users and designers are involved equally. Contextual design refers to the actual context in which design will be used. Anyway all approaches refer to ISO standard Human-centered design processes for interactive systems (ISO 13407 Model, 1999)

Core Business Logic vs. Scale

Tom Krazit, CNET, was in talks with Hal Varian, chief economist of Google about one of Microsoft's latest papers on search. Steve Ballmer has said that it needs "scale" to compete in the search market against Google, saying that larger amounts of traffic and data allow it to improve the quality of its search experience.

Varian: "On this data issue, people keep talking about how more data gives you a bigger advantage. But when you look at data, there's a small statistical point that the accuracy with which you can measure things as they go up is the square root of the sample size. So there's a kind of natural diminishing returns to scale just because of statistics: you have to have four times as big a sample to get twice as good an estimate."

If Google does business variations, it tests it on 0.5-1% of their user base. In Varian's eyes therefore it is NOT scale but the "recipes" which counts. He refers to 10 years of continuous improvement on the algorithm.

Let me summarize it: you will succeed in product development if you meet the needs by designing your core business logic around what matters from a user point of view (user centered design). It's not primarily a matter of scale.

Original article published August 14, 2009 4:00 AM PDT: CNET - Google's Varian: Search scale is bogus

Test Driven Design

Test-driven design (TDD) is an evolutionary approach to software development which combines test-first development where you write a test before you write just enough production code to fulfill that test and refactoring. TDD eliminates tentative traits, it teaches programmers to communicate, and it encourages team members to seek out criticism. It's about specification not validation of code.
Kent Beck popularized TDD in eXtreme Programming

Literature /References:

- Scott W. Ambler, www.agiledata.org: Introduction to Test Driven Design
- Kent Beck: Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace
- Kent Beck: Test Driven Development: By Example

Y Combinator - Seed funding

If you are an early stage startup and seeking for guidance through the hard times of getting your ideas to company, Mountain View, California based Y Combinator might be your first address. They do seed funding. If you're lucky they pay your expenses while you're getting started.

In their own words, they prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. That's why the mostly invest in software and web services. They care about how smart you are, about the quality of your ideas than on formal issues or age.