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contextify

contextify.org. Media outlets around the world produce hundreds of thousands of stories every day. But the demands of the industry mean that they often lack the context that readers need to truly understand what's happening to the world around them.

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contextify

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  1. contextify.org

  2. Media outlets around the world produce hundreds of thousands of stories every day. But the demands of the industry mean that they often lack the context that readers need to truly understand what's happening to the world around them.

  3. “The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.” Carl Bernstein

  4. That's a shame, because context is important. We don't just need the where and the when and the who. We need to know why things are happening around us. We need to understand how. It's big picture. It’s long zoom. It's context.

  5. It’s not all bad, however It's not that context doesn't exist. The truth is that top quality journalism and high value information — the really engaging, deep stories that give you the background to the headlines — exist in abundance. The problem is simply that finding those stories is difficult

  6. Why? Money and attention. Most publishers point you to their "related articles" whether or not they are the most insightful or informative. For all the rhetoric about aggregating news and sending readers to the best material online, they don't do it.

  7. Linking at the New York Times 6.8 links per article Source: Jonathan Stray, Nieman Lab, June 2010http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/linking-by-the-numbers-how-news-organizations-are-using-links-or-not/

  8. Linking at the Guardian 2.4 links per article Source: Jonathan Stray, Nieman Lab, June 2010http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/linking-by-the-numbers-how-news-organizations-are-using-links-or-not/

  9. Linking at CNN 1.2 links per article Source: Jonathan Stray, Nieman Lab, June 2010http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/linking-by-the-numbers-how-news-organizations-are-using-links-or-not/

  10. Everybody thinks they’ve got the definitive version of the news. In fact, they’re nearly all repeating the same story.

  11. “Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, only 11 percent included at least some original reporting.” Nieman Lab, Feb 2010 http://is.gd/hN6zX

  12. “The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most striking features one finds in examining a day of news. Google News, for instance, offers consumers access to some 14,000 stories from its front page, yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same 24 news events.” Pew State of the News Media report, 2006

  13. We’re drowning in news, but finding context is harder than ever.

  14. So what do you do? “Related stories” are usually just driving traffic to unintelligent topic pages Google doesn’t provide a filter. Where else can you turn?

  15. Maybe you end up on Wikipedia. It’s certainly successful. Source: ComScore traffic figures http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia

  16. But Wikipedia pages aren’t stories. They’re encyclopedia entries that are often built by synthesizing and repackaging the best journalism. You’re still a link or two from what you need.

  17. Maybe you turn to your friends on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere.

  18. “If the news is important it will find me” Loic Le Meur, 2008 http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/03/my-social-map-i.html

  19. That’s great if you have lots of friends who are obsessed with the news, love to share it with everyone and know about everythingyou could ever be interested in. Most people aren’t like that.

  20. Average Facebook user has 130 friends Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics Average Twitter user has 126 followers Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/29/twitter-users-average-api-traffic And those numbers are skewed.

  21. Facebook “Whales” Users who are maxed out with 5,000 friends. Facebook hates them because they’re unprofitable system hogs. Research suggests more than 800 friends is seen as “too many” by most people. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2007/dec/18/facebookwhales800istooman

  22. Twitter power users Massive celebrityskew (Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber) As of November 2010, there are 281 users with more than a million followers “Nobody has a million followers” Anil Dash http://dashes.com/anil/2010/01/nobody-has-a-million-twitter-followers.html

  23. Social networks can help But it’s better if you know the right people Most of us don’t know the right people Which means Facebook and Twitter are better for discovering news or talking about it than they are at giving you context

  24. Still no context News sites point you in the right direction Google takes a broad slice of news Wikipedia can fill in some of the blanks Social networks can help with discovery

  25. But what if you could take a news story and find the the best original journalism the most compelling stories the smartest writingthe deepest insight on that subject?

  26. We want to built tools to help people gain a better understanding of why the news is happening. We want to direct them to the highest quality information there is on the web. We want to point them to things that they will enjoy reading and help them be as informed as possible.

  27. How? We plan to build an engine that can analyze articles on the web to find the highest quality stories with the most context. First, our spiders will go out into the web and read the news. Then we'll analyze everything we find to understand what it's about. And after that we'll apply a series of filters to try and work out if it's good.

  28. and we’ll do it the way users need it, not publishers.

  29. data in the stories themselves explicit and implicit keywords data hidden in stories metadata and semantic analysis the open web authority and link patterns social networks popularity, social ranking, zeitgeist our own users activity and interestingness

  30. In the early days we may need some manual curation to get the algorithms working optimally but we believe that by cross referencing all of these data points we'll be able to take any story and offer readers a way to drill down to discover the most informative stories about the same subject.

  31. three steps1. news aggregator2. in-browser 3. platform

  32. news aggregator NORTH KOREA North Korea Issues Warning as Artillery Fire Rattles Island New York Times, USA FIJI Doctor examining 3 teenage boys rescued after 50 days at sea CNN, USA AFGHANISTAN UK blamed for success of Taliban impostor Sydney Morning Herald, Australia North Korea: riling up the world for six decades. CBC, November 23 2010 For North Korea, Timing Is Everything, Global Post, November 26 2010 The Ghosts of Cheju, Newsweek, June 18 2000 MORE CONTEXT ABOUT NORTH KOREA Boozy teens’ midnight trip goes 1300km astray Stuff, November 26 2010 Joy in Tokelau over missing teenagers, Radio New Zealand, November 26 2010 The Epic Rescue of Andrea Doria, Newsweek, June 18 2000 MORE CONTEXT ABOUT AMAZING RESCUES UK-based Taliban spend months fighting Nato in Afghanistan. Guardian, November 25 2010 For North Korea, Timing Is Everything, Global Post, November 26 2010 The Ghosts of Cheju, Newsweek, June 18 2000 MORE CONTEXT ABOUT AFGHAN POLITICS

  33. in-browser tools a website where users can enter a URL a browser tool so users can Contextify any page a Facebook application for links from friends

  34. Obama sends U.S. warship to Yellow Sea in show of strength as two Koreas teeter on the brink of all-out war This story about North Korea in the Daily Mail is rated ~TODAY~South Korea Reassesses Defenses After Attack, New York Times ~ANALYSIS~ For North Korea, Timing Is Everything, Global Post, November 26 2010 ~BACKGROUND~ Kim Wan Mae is 95 years old, but she hasn't forgotten a tragic episode in her past--and South Korea's. Newsweek, June 2000 Sgt. Berry F. Rhoden was handed a card before being shot in the back. The legend on the card said: "You are about to die the most horrible kind of death. VFW magazine, February 2003 The little that is known about Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s leader, conjures up a caricature of a diminutive playboy, a comic picture at odds with his brutal regime. BBC, January 2009 Want more recommendations? Recommended North Korea sources 38North.org BBC Asia Times Online More about North Korea from Wikipedia Google Youtube

  35. platform a system for publishers to submit articles to us tools for companies to easily incorporate Contextify results on their own pages API access for developers to query our database on the go

  36. there are revenue opportunities, starting with: possibilities for Contextify contextual advertising — AdSense $1.2bn sponsorships + partnerships charges for heavy API use — Twitter etc possibilities for publishers increased visibility/ad opportunities traffic to paywalled material

  37. Competition Google News Newser Rewriting news, $2.5m Zemanta Focused on bloggers, $5.3m Apture Publisher-centric, $4.6m Daylife Smart topic pages, $12.3m OneSpot Personalisation, $4.9m

  38. but they’re not doing it all. So how do we get there? smart, knowledgeable advisers small, agile, experienced team estimated first year staff + costs = $450,000 competing for $400,000 from Knight News Challenge

  39. 1 month fully operational prototype 3 months beta testing aggregator 6 months beta testing tools 12 months platform release

  40. Contextify will have revolutionised the way people understand the news Contextify will generate revenue for itself and publishers After that? The sky’s the limit

  41. contextify.org

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