How will ARM-based Windows 8 tablets mitigate the heavy payloads of traditional desktop apps? A new report suggests desktop application support will be limited but still present, contradicting an earlier statement by Windows lead Steven Sinofsky.

Wired Top Stories

Personalized algorithms and social networking sites are great for helping people navigate a lot of things online — music, movies, restaurant recommendations and the like have benefited greatly from high tech curation. But according to serial entrepreneur Dmitry Shapiro, when it comes to getting the news, these technologies create a problem: We start to live in an echo chamber, where our existing interests are reinforced as being of utmost importance, and our existing beliefs are reflected back to us.

Uberpaper founder Dmitry Shapiro

“In a world full of algorithms, we can get a skewed sense of the world when it comes to news,” Shapiro, the tech executive known for founding Veoh and most recently for serving as the CTO of MySpace Music, said in a phone conversation Thursday. “News is an extremely important part of how we experience the world around us. If news has been overly processed by personalization algorithms that essentially pander to us, we can start to believe that the world is a certain way, when it really isn’t that way at all.”

News that’s purposefully impersonal

That problem is exactly what Shapiro’s latest project Uberpaper was built to combat. Uberpaper, which launched to the public this week, pulls all the news from Yahoo News’ API and presents it in a way that manages to be both clean and image-rich: Imagine Flipboard meets Pinterest, but all in a liquid user interface design that works in any web browser. The only social elements to the site come in the form of a simple “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” button that users are meant to use to show how well-reported or relevant a story was, as well as the ability to comment.

Users can choose to view Uberpaper in 10 different languages, and sort the news according to topics such as World, US, Business, Technology, Sports, Politics, and so on — just like an old fashioned newspaper. In fact, the experience of finding out what’s happening in the world by reading a traditional physical paper is a big thing Uberpaper is trying to replicate. Shapiro put it this way:

“With technology, I think we threw the baby out with bathwater when it came to newspapers. Online news sites today show their content very much like search does — it’s kind of database-y, and formatted in a very linear way. We wanted to bring back the aesthetic of a newspaper, and the serendipity that comes with scanning the news that way.”

Uberpaper screenshot (click to enlarge)

Keeping social in its place

However, Shapiro is quick to point out that he is personally a big fan of social media sites, telling me, “I love Facebook and Twitter, and I’m on those sites all day long. They’re wonderful places to share news, and I don’t think Uberpaper is competitive in any way to them.” Rather, he says, Uberpaper is meant to be a place where people can find fresh news to ultimately go back and share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter — to bring something new to the table, rather than re-sharing stuff that’s already been discovered.

For now, Uberpaper only pulls in news through Yahoo News’ API, which was chosen because it has a very broad base of news sources and topics. More news sources will be folded into Uberpaper in the future, but the expansion process will be very well-considered, Shapiro said. “We’re going to be really cautious as we add additionally sources. We very much want to make sure that we’re not slanting the news in partisan ways, or toward any kind of topic, really — it should be broad and generic.”

Uberpaper was built by the same team led by Shapiro that built Anybeat, the social network that encourages people to use pseudonyms that launched this past autumn. Anybeat, which has million in funding, is still in operation, but right now it and Uberpaper are being run as separate products. Uberpaper doesn’t make any revenue right now, but down the line advertising could be brought in to run alongside the news.

A long shot that’s worth taking

In all, I think Uberpaper is great: Simple, straightforward, and clean, while perpetually brimming with new content. It’s certainly coming out in a tough space — many people already feel like they have more than enough sources of news — but I could see Uberpaper becoming a much-frequented bookmark for news junkies. And in my opinion, any service that’s aiming to put an end to the echo chamber is fighting the good fight.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

There’s been a lot written already about how a student-run news website at Penn State issued an erroneous news report over the weekend saying legendary football coach Joe Paterno had died, with some critics of the event focusing on how a desire for the “glory” of being first can corrupt young journalists — especially those in the fast-moving, Wild West-type environment of the web, presumably. But there is more to this case than meets the eye: although Associated Press spent some time congratulating itself for not making the same mistake, the Penn State website behaved a lot better than some other traditional news outlets in this case, both before and after the mistake was discovered.

Jeff Sonderman at The Poynter Institute has a good rundown of how the events unfolded on Saturday evening, beginning with a report from the student site — a relatively new, web-only outlet called Onward State — both on its website and on Twitter, to the effect that Paterno had passed away at the age of 85. The news site said in a follow-up tweet that the report had come from anonymous sources, and that it was based on an email that was sent to members of the Penn State football team. This report was repeated on a local radio station, and then picked up by both CBS Sports and The Huffington Post (as well as Poynter itself, SB Nation and many other news sites).

Getting it first vs. getting it right — not mutually exclusive

Within about an hour of the initial tweet from Onward State, a spokesman for the Paterno family had denied the report, and two of the football coach’s sons had also denied the news on their own personal Twitter accounts. Onward State quickly apologized for the error, the managing editor of the site resigned his position, and the news editor wrote a long blog post about how false news report was “one of the worst moments of my entire life.” In his own post on the events, managing editor Devon Edwards said:

In this day and age, getting it first often conflicts with getting it right, but our intention was never to fall into that chasm.

In another Poynter post on the incident, Craig Silverman talked with the Associated Press, who said that they managed to avoid repeating the erroneous report — as they did similar erroneous reports after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last year — because of an approach that stresses accuracy over speed. As one editor put it: “At every juncture we have a trigger point that says… are we going to make the decision to tell millions of people this?” As a result, AP refrained from publishing until it was able to reach the family, and then posted a tweet saying the report was untrue.

News as a process requires different skills, and one is transparency

But despite the finger-wagging in some circles, Onward State isn’t just some traffic-juicing website that posted a fake news report without considering the impact, or a loose collection of bloggers with no editorial oversight: as ProPublica notes, while it is still new — and originally began as a simple community website for students — Onward State has editors and a process for verifying news reports, albeit one that failed in this particular case. But it put the report to a test, and discussed it among the senior editors, just as any other news outlet would do.

As it turned out, the email sent to football players was apparently a hoax. Should the site have tried harder to verify the report before publishing it as confirmed? Obviously it should have, as the site’s editors have acknowledged. But I would argue that the process Onward State went through before publishing wasn’t that different from the approach taken by Associated Press — and it was a lot better than the approach taken by either CBS Sports or The Huffington Post, both of whom ran the news without credit, and then only attributed it to Onward State after it turned out to be false.

I’ve argued before that the news occurs in different ways now than it used to; it’s no longer a packaged product that newspapers and TV stations create, but a process that involves Twitter reports and blog posts and video clips and all kinds of chaos. I think King Kaufman of The Bleacher Report made some great points in his blog post on the Paterno incident, when he pointed out some of the key things news entities of all kinds have to do in such cases — and one of the main ones is to be transparent about where news reports are coming from, and to be quick to verify or question them, in public (veteran journalist Carl Lavin also has a great perspective on the incident).

Based on that standard, I don’t think Onward State has much to feel bad about — yes, they rushed the news and got it wrong, due to a hoax. That’s a good lesson to learn. And perhaps the death of much-loved football coach isn’t the best choice for practicing “news as a process.” But they admitted their error quickly, and they didn’t just apologize (or correct the mistake on page 42 of their print edition) but explained in detail how it happened. That’s a lot more than we get from some traditional news sources, including the AP.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Yan Arief Purwanto

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Continue reading TouchTV comes to LG Smart TV, iPads: catch news clips at home, on the go

TouchTV comes to LG Smart TV, iPads: catch news clips at home, on the go originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  TouchTV (App Store)  | Email this | Comments
Engadget

Welcome to the holiday edition of Vulcan’s View — enjoy these images of volcanoes as seen from space — and at least one of them is snow-covered if you’re not having a white Christmas (if that be your holiday of choice).

Wired Top Stories