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Semantic improvements for news coverage that should be in the html 5 spec

With all of the recent political news stories I thought it would be useful to filter out the wheat from the chaff, and what better way to do that than by introducing new tags to refine the semantics of the news?   Surely these are as important as H1, Strong and EM tags for news stories.

I propose that all news stories use the following tags:

  • Factual
  • Conceptual
  • Expert Prediction
  • Expert Speculation
  • Implicit Prediction
  • ImplicitAnalysis

For example, the following paragraph

The unemployment rate hit 9.3 last month as factories laid off 40,000 workers.   This news is expected to hurt incumbents in the mid term elections.   Economist Rollo Tomasi of the University of North Dakota predicted that unemployment would stabilize at 9.4% before falling to 7.2 next year.  He also said that weak seasonal demand is to blame for the slump.

There is only one bit of real news (defined as an event)  in the above paragraph, namely that factories laid off 40,000 workers last month.  Here is how the story would actually look if it were properly marked up with the new tags

<conceptual>The unemployment rate hit 9.3 last month</conceptual> <factual>as factories laid off 40,000 workers</factual>.   <ImplicitPrediction><ImplicitAnalysis>This news is expected to hurt incumbents in the mid term elections.</ImplicitAnalysis></ImplicitPrediction>   <ExpertPrediction>Economist Rollo Tomasi of the University of North Dakota predicted that unemployment would stabilize at 9.4% before falling to 7.2 next year.</ExpertPrediction>  <ExpertSpeculation>He also said that weak seasonal demand is to blame for the slump.</ExpertSpeculation>

With these tags we could filter out all of the non-news (predictions, speculations, analysis) or fine tune the level of detail to our heart’s desire.

What tags have I missed?  Thoughts anyone?  Please leave feedback in the comments below.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Free Ideas / Future Features / Future Media / History & Theory— 2 comments
03
Nov 10

Written By Steve French

 

The Five Whys meet the Five Whats

HoodedPeople like to use the Five Whys of Toyota to diagnose problems (in deductive fashion).  I  use the 5 Whats to explain what I do for a living, Stronico, and my music.  Which version you get depends on what I think your subject matter expertise happens to be.  For my consulting company the 5 Whats are:

Question: What do you do?:

  • Audience: Technically unsophisticated:
    Answer: I build websites
  • Audience: Of average tech savvy (an iPhone or Android owner, but no more):
    Answer: I’m a computer programmer
  • Audience: Technically Savvy – able to set up WordPress and remove viruses from a friends computer:
    Answer: I do the backend programming and database development for websites
  • Audience: Technically sophisticated, but not similar to me, e.g. graphic designers and pure DBAs
    Answer: I’m a .Net developer, specializing in backend programming and database development for websites
  • Audience: Technically sophisticated, and similar, e.g. another .Net developer or PHP developer and the like:
    Answer: I do ASP.net/C# and Sql Server, mostly for the backend of sites

When I describe Stronico it goes like this: Continue reading →

History & Theory / Marketing— No comments
07
Jun 10

Written By Steve French

 

How much deep thinking is the right amount?

Meta PortraitureEarlier today I began writing a blog post about the artisan style of entrepreneurship and I began wondering: what is the right amount of meta thinking to do in a given day? Stronico has yet to emerge from beta and I have not earned a reputation as a visionary (yet).  Who really cares what I think about a given meta topic?   By looking at my web stats and links to the site it does seem that no one cares about my meta thoughts but they do love the posts on QuickBooks and how to solve Silverlight problems.

Therefore from this point forward I resolve to do no more than one meta post per week; all other blog posts will be practical information on solving business and technical problems.  Deep thinking will return once the first million is made.
Creative Commons License photo credit: mescon

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

History & Theory— No comments
28
May 10

Written By Steve French

 

A workable secret society web application – Brain Trust

These are a few of my favourite things

I wrote about my desire to form a secret society several months ago and so far have found no suitable web application to help me do that. IMind seems to be the closest complete solution but it seems too jumbled to accomplish much (I’m judging them purely from their website, I have not tried the product.)  Recently I came across BrainTrustHQ.com and I think it supply the collaboration tools needed for a workable secret society.  I’ve signed up for their free version and I’ll let everyone know how it goes.

Creative Commons License photo credit: conorwithonen

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Free Ideas / History & Theory— 11 comments
24
May 10

Written By Steve French

 

Why you should never complain about anything – with anecdotal proof!

Stop complainingMy new commandment: Never complain about anything.  Ever.  If you feel the need to complain to pressure someone else to make something happen, then be honest and call it manipulation.

I realized this while at a client meeting; we were talking about problems with a botched sales program and the staff had a litany of complaints about the program (ed. note: it was created by a separate vendor years ago, and the fault lies with the now-departed project manager who designed something inappropriate.  It does a masterful job of integrating legacy systems from different vendors, languages, platforms, a mainframe and Europeans are involved somehow,  but the user interface is wanting.  But I digress…).  Then I remembered hearing the same litany of complaints a year ago.   Unlike last year,  I offered suggestions on how to make small improvements to the program. Everyone proceeded to ignore me and continued complaining.  At the end of the meeting everyone felt a lot better once they had talked about their problems.  No one made any plans to actually fix the problems. Continue reading →

Aspie / Biz / History & Theory / Misc / Productivity / Sentiment— 1 comment
01
Apr 10

Written By Steve French

 

Stalin on the road to Barbarossa

I just finished reading L.A. Noir by John Buntin, a history of the Los Angeles Police Department, and was struck by the similarity of Stalin’s reaction to the German invasion of 1941 and the Police Chief Thomas Parker’s reaction to Watts riots in the 1960s.

First some history – in 1941 Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa – an invasion of the Soviet Union.  At first the Germans took far more territory than expected.  One of the primary reasons for the success, if not the primary reason, is that during the first days of the invasion Stalin refused to believe the invasion was happening and did not mobilize the Red Army.  Once he realized that the Germans were actually invading he seemingly had a nervous breakdown and did nothing at all.  As Stalin micromanaged the Soviet Union to the finest detail, his paralysis meant that Red Army did nothing while the Germans rolled across the border.  It took a matter of weeks before he was able to start issuing even halfway decent military orders again. Continue reading →

History & Theory— No comments
15
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 




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