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COMMENTARY | Noah Brier

Computers + Humans = Better News

December 8, 2008 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 3 COMMENTS

This news is a couple days old now, but TechMeme announced that they are adding a human editor. As they explained, "Any competent developer who tries to automate the selection of news headlines will inevitably discover that this approach always comes up a bit short. Automation does indeed bring a lot to the table -- humans can't possibly discover and organize news as fast as computers can. But too often the lack of real intelligence leads to really unintelligent results."

It'll be interesting to watch how these sites evolve over the next year or two. More and more of what's going on around the web at the moment seems to be about combining the intelligence of humans with the power of algorithms for a better result that either could get at alone.

(As a side note, there's also a really interesting point about news bias in the post: "I'd like to note here that Techmeme isn't fair because life isn't fair, and Techmeme will always be biased because humans have built Techmeme. And because news judgement, by definition, is bias.")

Tags: news, technology


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COMMENTS

1marc arribas

its kinda like advanced chess, where a human and a computer are teamed together against another pair. similar to this situation, the computer brings tactical strength and depth of play, but the human counterpart can add creativity, as well as efficiency by quickly ruling out moving trees that are disadvantageous.

December 9, 2008

2Max Kalehoff

I led a session at Web 2.0 on this very premise -- but it was tied to advertising. I summarized on the Clickable blog.

December 9, 2008

3stephanie gerson

finally! i was getting kinda tired with the what's-better-algorithms-or-humans debate that was plaguing things from selection of news headlines to web search. we have a spectrum of possibilities: purely algorithmic on one extreme, purely human/social on the other, and combinations thereof in between. so the question of what's-better-algorithms-or-humans becomes for which purposes to use which possibilities along the spectrum? a much more interesting question, imho.

December 9, 2008