Idea Lab

Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a poorly-kept secret: I hang out with Web developers all day. And by their nature, Web developers tend to be Web savvy, and Web natives. Which means they are already using and hacking and rebuilding the next big thing online before most of us have ever laid our eyes on it. Like this one: Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a service where programmers can ask and answer questions. That's all. Not too complicated when you describe it that way. But hidden in that description is a valuable system of voting and rating, where users earn points (call it Karma...

• November 14, 2008
• 4 comments

A Call for Quality Comments

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few days ago I was snooping around Digg when I noticed a popular submission titled The Difference Between Digg and Reddit. I clicked, eager to learn, and was presented with an image juxtaposing two very distinct flavors of user-submitted comments surrounding the breaking news of Tony Snow's death. The first comments shown at Digg offered generic words of respect that you might expect to hear about a public figure that passed away. The top comment at Reddit, however, was a bit more candid to say the least. The discussion that followed ranged from folks saying "maybe I should join...

• July 18, 2008
• 4 comments

Polymeme Diversifies the Echo Chamber

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The iPhone is released. The world stops. While surfing around on the Internet today, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming that the only news worth talking about is the release of Apple's 3G iPhone. Of course, there are plenty of other notable and interesting conversations taking place online (among them: the ethics of for-profit fundraisers, a Danish island's march toward energy independence, and how English is "evolving into a language we may not even understand") but most of us don't know how to find those conversations as we navigate through our personal echo chamber of bookmarked websites, subscribed RSS...

• July 11, 2008
• 2 comments

Journalists and Technologists: An Uneasy Courtship

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first Computation + Journalism Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at Georgia Tech, is over. It's been widely covered in the blogosphere -- you'll find some of the most thoughtful reflections here and here and here and here. As I said before the panel I moderated (on "Advances in Newsgathering"), the event was truly remarkable. More than 200 people -- a mix of academics and professionals, editors and reporters, journalists and Web developers (including the two Knight Challenge journalist-programmer scholarship winners) -- came together to talk about the ways technology is changing journalism and what journalism needs to do to...

• February 25, 2008
• 4 comments