An interesting response to my post saying that local is about people.
Today, however, the news is still fundamentally organized around its content, its tiny bits of content, its data, whether those be newspaper articles, blog posts, podcasts, or webpages. That organization–in which people and issues are contingent upon the bits of content that discuss them–is a relic of paper and, just as important, html. The article has taken the story hostage. . . .
A newspaper article will get broken into pieces, like legos that interlock: “little objects,” as Scoble once called them. Those objects will be stored individually, deployable individually, graphable individually. Individually, but not alone. They will live in cells among millions of others cells, part of semantic hive buzzing with the fervor of the world’s news. Or at least the world’s news according the internet.
By slicing up the data, by breaking up the data, we can put it back together. Only we can put it back together however we like, as individuals and as a collective–confident in our ability to tell whatever story may yet be lurking in the interstices of modern journalism. Blogs created an army of journalists. The web needs an application that will arm a legion of editors, each driven largely by their own individual tastes for consuming news but cooking up social feast of intelligent information.
