Alumni Magazine - Summer 2008 - (Page 63) ing and asking questions, and I think only good things can come out of that.” Google News also contains an option for users to personalize the news they see by subject. The latest feature allows people quoted in the news to post additional comments. He emphasized that the intent is not to replace journalists or produce content but “to be the intermediary that brings people to the content efficiently and effectively.” “The first people to put information in the public space and make it accessible were journalists,” Bharat says. “We are taking what they have always been doing and simply reorganizing it.” AllVoices.com is the opposite of Google News in many respects. Sanjay Sood, chief architect of the site and one of several guest speakers who delivered a presentation under the rubric “Ubiquitous Journalism,” describes a system that closely matches Bobick’s introductory comment about a story that can “put itself together or add some of its own components.” It works like this: An item is posted to the site either by AllVoices.com itself or anyone with Internet access. The post can be nearly anything uploadable, including blogs, videos, news stories, firsthand accounts, unedited comments, images or even a cell phone message. Sood used the Journalism “impacts society and consumers and is also changing very quickly with technology. We wanted to begin educating ourselves so that whatever happens down the road, we are ready to deal with it and adapt to it.” — Irfan Essa example of the collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis last August. It first appeared on AllVoices.com as a cell phone picture taken seconds after the disaster by an eyewitness in a nearby office tower. The system searches the Web for everything related to the post’s subject and aggregates them on a page, adding more information as it becomes available while inviting comments and additional contributions, particularly from firsthand observers. The result is a smorgasbord of information-source links offering a range of perspectives by both professionals and so-called “citizen journalists.” “Our model is to provide a scaffolding for citizen journalists,” Sood explains. “We feel that this is a really powerful tool for people to have their voices heard, and that’s what we want to do.” In the near future, “we’re going to be providing all sorts of ways for people to customize and sort the data in ways that they find the most useful,” he adds. Social Networking and Blogs hether it’s the news-customization option of Google News or the intrinsic user involvement at sites such as AllVoices.com, computational technologies are Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Summer 2008 W 63 http://AllVoices.com http://AllVoices.com http://AllVoices.com
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