Remember this post, A Question for (Cuil) Bing Wolfram Squared, from June 3rd? Well, it’s two months later and now Wolfram Alpha’s curated knowledge engine knows the answer to how much water is in the Indian Ocean; but Bing, Cuil, and Squared still do not.
On the other hand, WA still doesn’t know these answers, so where is the Generalized Solution?
Just sayin’ ;-)
Open Mind | A Flight of Fancy
Both of these accounts are successful. 15,000+ followers is nothing to sneeze at. But @NiemanLab on the right is definitely more successful. These accounts are tweeting pretty similar types of information – news and useful information for journalists and media types. Yet @NiemanLab seems to be garnering more influence for its efforts. @Poynter has tweeted more than three times as much as @NiemanLab, but it has 10,000 fewer followers, and it’s on 1,000 fewer lists. Why might this be?
These are all old ideas, quite frankly. Journalists have talked about them for years now. Others have pitched them to their bosses until they’re blue in the face. And still others have launched elements of these ideas as niche products, subsets or prototypes. But this is the first time that a local media group — especially in the TV space — has wrapped these ideas together and aggressively launched them with an investment to back it up.
It makes little sense for me to tell a good pitch from Illinois or Texas that they can't put their pitch up until we find a handful of other pitches in their region. So, as of last week, the sub-domains at Spot.Us have been removed. Trying to convince people in a specific region to use the site -- while stopping others from using it because they aren't in the right region -- is not the best use of our time or energy.
Despite advance claims of secret documents coming soon, it still felt like this bombshell arrived almost out of nowhere Sunday afternoon...
This year, without a doubt, the innovations clustered around the process of journalism - not just the finished product.
