You can thank Tim Berners-Lee for the information overload that is a constant presence in our everyday digital lives.
That would be the Sir Tim, who, well, invented the web.
It may not exactly be a little act of contrition but Berners-Lee and Martin Moore are working on a project that they believe will make it easier to find the types of stories you're looking for, instead of the several hundred or thousand of possibilities that you get on a big news days at a place like Google News.
They want to help refine news searches by employing more sophisticated tagging, way upstream. They call it “source tagging” and the James S and James L. Knight Foundation believe in it to the tune of a $350,000 grant.
The basic idea is that free text searches, and even conscientious post-publication tagging, don’t go nearly far enough to give a story that granular context which separates the wheat from the chaff.
Berners-Lee and Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate “source tagging” into routine journalistic workflow.
I don’t know how much time Tim and Martin have spent hanging around reporters on deadline, but I do wish them the best of luck.
Other grant winners, announced this afternoon in Las Vegas, include former wired.com contributor David Cohn, for a web-based “market” that solicits both investigative story ideas and funding. Cohn's idea is to accedt only micro-payments and to require lots of them before a project will be approved to avoid “personal crusades.”
Nice company you’re keeping now, Dave.
The full list of winners is here.
