TierneyLab: Science Explains Tabloids
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Do people prefer positive or negative gossip? The best answer to that question, which I asked in the last post, came from RA: &#8220;Honestly, I like to hear negative gossip about people I donât know or donât like. I like to hear positive gossip about people I know and like.&#8221; Besides being admirably succinct, that [...].
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News sites may be tempted by an advertising scheme that lets them profit from ads linked to selected words within an article. But publishers who value a separation of editorial and advertising content should steer clear. By Adam L. Penenberg.
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Plus: Was Einstein a plagiarist? [News.com Extra]
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After spending a day with the old keyword page, and getting bored with it, I came up with a new way to look at news, something I've not tried before, that might be fun and/or useful http://nytimesriver.com/keywords.html  Since it's likely to change again soon, here's a screen shot. How it works. Every hour, as usual, it does the nytimesriver scan. Every story is linked to in the database undern all the keywords it references. Then the report, in HTML, is prepared, with the keywords in the left column, and links to all the stories in the right colum. The list is sorted by number of references, the keywords with the most references appear at the top of the list.  So today, baseball is the top item, with 15 references. The teams, the Cleveland Indians and Colorado Rockies, rank high. For some reason (heh) the Boston Red Sox don't appear, even though they're still in it, and the Yankees, even though they've been eliminated (yay!) are near the top at position 10.  It's another leaderboard! (Oh shit.) The stories age, and are removed after 24 hours. After all this is news, not olds.  If you have comments, post them under the screen shot, linked above. PS: Note that since the list just started up today, the initial stories, even though some are already 24 hours old, will remain in the queue until tomorrow morning at this time. So the list will be artificially fat today, it'll thin down tomorrow.
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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Looking at the steam coming off the mail in my inbox this week, I definitely need a place to lay low for a while. One reader kindly recommended Geek Cruises, where I could work on my tan and my Perl programming skills at the same time. He also thought it would help my love life but I'm not so sure. The brochures are full of guys with goatees and laptops -- not exactly my idea of The Love Boat.
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Also: Science tattoos making the Web rounds. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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Comment is free: Naomi Klein: Finance journalists have attacked my book, but I remain devoted to their papers. After all, they supplied the facts I used.
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Comment is free: Nick Davies:  An industry whose task should be to filter out falsehood has become a conduit for propaganda and second hand news
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Recently, there's been a bit of a brouhaha in the news about a Miss Teen USA 2007 contestant stumbling over what should have been a simple geography/education question (watch the video in all its schadenfreude glory).  This kind of slow news day reporting is not terribly interesting in and of itself, but it got me thinking about Mike Tyson.
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Consider the New World of Information - stuff that, unlike the paper days of the past, doesn't always physically exist. You've got notes, scrawlings and snippets, Web graphics, photos and sounds. Stuff needs to be cut, pasted, highlighted, annotated, crossed out, dragged away. And, as Ross Perot used to say (or maybe it was Dana Carvey impersonating him), don't forget the graphs and charts.
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Blue-eyed rumors and speculation can hold insights, too.
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(Gene Emery is a columnist who covers science and  technology. His Internet address is GEmery(at)Cox.net. Any  opinions in the column are his alone.)
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Changes at The Journal: movable deadlines and a new taste for models.
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By Cristina Rouvalis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  Feb. 18--The camera does lie.   Or at least it compresses the truth, slimming down the  I-wish-I-looked-thinner masses.
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Max Clifford is one of the greatest manipulators of tabloid media.
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A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.