You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
By opening themselves up to immediate vivisection-by-search, news organizations invite the disconnection of their articles from their context and their source. And the more they encourage their content to be parsed in this way, the more they encourage readers to look at the work of their journalists as mere datapoints, isolated from a greater perspective. Like what ringtones are to music.A very interesting point. The web pretty much kills what was always the main source of differentiation between newspapers: Editorial voice, or, as Rushkoff puts it, a newspaper "tells a story through its selection of articles for a given day, their juxtaposition, and even their flow over time." The second quote, on open source is now posted as well. Update (11/10/09): Rex has posted another interesting insight in this Murdoch/Google debate. This one comes from Jason Calcanis and suggests that publishers "could use their robots.txt as a ransom note, selling it to the highest bidder -- Bing or Google." Interesting.