Vice-President, Comtech Services, Inc.
http://www.comtech-serv.com-->
Last fall, Walter Bender, Senior Scientist and Director of the
MIT Media Lab, presented his ideas on the future of information
publishing to the IEEE Professional Communication Society
conference in Boston. He pointed out that the purpose of
information publishing should be to help people think, to
organize the content so that it has meaning to the user of that
information. The context of the information is the real value
added of our profession.
The problem, Bender pointed out, with publishing today is its
general nature. Reuters New Services, for example, claims to
write the news for everyone. That's fine if all readers were
the same. With computer-assisted publishing, we have the
ability to localize content for the individual, the ANY one
rather than the EVERY one.
Bender's work at the MIT Media Lab is focused on learning how
the computer can serve as a computational tool for information
rather than just a tool to post articles on the Internet. He
described the ZWRAP project, which offers a new structure for
news editing. Experts annotate the text of an article and add
their ideas about the content. The computer generates a rich
context for the article using the metadata provided by the
annotations. Thus, the services around the information product,
supported by the technology, become just as valuable as the
information product itself.
Bender described the project in place at the Melrose Mirror.
The Mirror is an online news service generated weekly by senior
citizens of Melrose, MA. The citizens have become the authors
of the stories. The publish button has been replaced by the
send button from the citizen to the editor. The consumer
becomes the producer of information. The division between author
and reader is blurred.
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