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USA Edition | Today Is Friday, March 12, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Friday, March 12, 2010 |
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| Sycophant — A Definition | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | NOW Tackles Wall Street Conflicts Of Interest | |
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Online -- An Evolving World
Newsroom Magazine – Being an online publication is complicated in many ways not visible from the outside. We live in a virtual world driven by hardware we do not see that delivers our content to machines and people we never meet. What you see is delivered over networks neither under our control or known to us. Not even the browser you use to visit this and other sites is known to us, but we are required to work with a dozen or more browser types in hundreds of different versions.
Regular readers may not have noticed the evolution of this publication’s look and feel during the last six months. To the degree that’s true its also what we intended. We’re still not done, adjusting and tweaking, but for the moment our display code generation facilities appears to be substantially Internet 2.0 compliant.
Online Around The World Around The Clock
Regular readers may have noticed the ongoing changes in the look, feel and resources Newsroom Magazine has accumulated over the last year. For the technically inclined, we’ve produced a summary as well as some insight into how this publication will further refine the road to Internet 2.0 in 2009.
Some of the changes we’ve made are very visible — as, for example, Flash video support capable of delivering video streams recently installed at our Dublin, Ohio server facilities. If you’ve not seen the High Definition video produced by LimeLightHD, you’ll find stunning video from former BBC engineering and videographer, Tony Koorlander in the Video Workshop section. Tony’s extraordinary Bideford500 film as well as his fascinating case study about shooting a pilot episode at London’s legendary Round Church are both excellent resources for aspiring newsmen and videography students.
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Round Church Ambiance
Given the size and activity of our content, all the major search engines constantly analyze everything we publish. If a 2006 article is updated to correct an error, or to reflect subsequent changes, the web-bots that spend many hours a day sifting through our database immediately know about the change from which they update their links or keyword list based on the content of our headlines and lead paragraphs.
Denotative + Connotative Indexing
The problem is that previous technology could only search on denotative language, not ideas, themes, or personalities — among a seemingly infinite applications for tagging. Let’s say you write a Newsroom article about your family trip to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving. The article describes the packing, the name of other family members, and the route and Grandma’s delicious holiday dinner — all of which could then easily be located through traditional, keyword ( denotative ) search methods. [ grandma, packing, trip, etc. ]. Along the way your son marveled at seeing a panel truck with a big buck on the hood. While passing by Topeka, you decided to stop by Aunt Millie’s for a surprise visit and some of her famous Opera Fudge.
Anyone searching for deer hunting or candy making would not be led to your article because while both activities were tangentially referenced, neither term was used. Adding connotative tags such as [ deer, deer hunting, candy making, and Millie Espernozzle ] provides substantially more ways of locating materials for search engines as well as internal searching facilities.
Article tagging is part of the Web 2.0 initiative that will lead to significantly improved content searching capabilities. In the past, Newsroom Magazine was limited to grouping articles by title, date of publication and section. Our recent roll-out of article tagging, tag linking, tag cloud display, and tag browsing have opened entirely new ways of searching for what interests readers. In the future, the Internet will move beyond simple text driven keyword indexing way of a very exciting new feature with the mundane description tagging. Implementing this feature required changes in how we produce and compartmentalize content.
Only last month the Newsroom Magazine’s Internet 2.0 compliant tagging facilities were rolled out to make our content more easily and clearly indexed, searched, and browsed. This required a substantial re-write of Newsroom’s content navigation system. One of the most obvious is our new tag browsing system that makes it possible to index into a specific article by one of its tags. Once that article is displayed, the reader can click forward and reverse buttons to examine other articles with that same tag. Try searching for Espernozzle.
Online Is Everywhere
We also added a tag cloud to some pages with the most frequently used article tags. The more used a tag, the larger the letters. So whether by search engine link, or local, essentially all Newsroom Magazine content is tagged and ready to be explored in ways neither we, nor you might imagine.
And what about the tags listed at the bottom of full length articles? Find the one that comes closest to your interest and click on it. That will open the tag browsing page where you can examine every article so tagged.
