In the context of professional journalism, this amounts to asking what unanswered questions are most pressing to the community served by a newsroom. One could devise systems of asking the audience (like Quora and StackExchange) or analyze search logs (ala Demand Media.) That newsrooms don’t frequently do these things is, I think, an artifact of industrial history — and an unfilled niche in the current ecosystem. Search engines know where the gaps between supply and demand lie, but they’re not in the business of researching new answers. Newsrooms can produce the supply, but they don’t have an understanding of the demand. Today, these two sides of the industry do not work together to close this loop. Some symbiotic hybrid of Google and The Associated Press might be an uncannily good system for answering civic questions.

"Man-machine symbiosis isn’t just about knowledge retrieval, it’s also about knowledge creation. Our computers have no intelligence without us, but they accelerate our collective intelligence at a speed that has never been seen before."

"Education can become about designing the day around discovery of information, connections to real world challenges, discussions digging into our experiences with the world."

Creating a reliable and persistent data store is a major hurdle to cross for personalized education.

Very cool story about Bob Graham's notebooks for tracking daily information.

"The future is connected in a way we could not conceive of a generation ago, in a way that our great-great-grandparents would consider unremarkable. We’re returning to an old place, but with new tools, and that combination will change everything, whether or not we see it coming, whether or not we want it to come."

A corollary to Rosen's 2006 idea of "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." Great read.

Technology, cloud storage, and what it can do for education. First, we need to change ourselves a bit.

Daniel Bachhuber's ideas for integration many collaborative elements into the CUNY Journalism School classroom.

Good observations about the difference between UX design and information architecture.

A great WordPress plugin for publicly displaying the revisions of a post. Very cool idea.

"We’re masters of the attentive float. We get in and out of the water easily and are very happy to find our friends waiting on the beach, offering a towel and a shard of poetry washed ashore from the deep pool of our distracted wanderings."

"History never repeats, but it does rhyme.  We share everything now; we worry that we overshare.  Now it’s time to take our sharing to the next level.  We need a social2.0, something that reflects what we’ve learned in the past half-dozen years."

"People tend to compress their stories of discovery into a Eureka moment. In truth, most great ideas a “slow hunches”."

Really interesting move from The Guardian toward allowing other publishers to reuse their content.

"The fallacy is that you're searching for a theory in a pile of data, rather than forming a theory and running an experiment to support or disprove it."

A great description of the role search must play for a successful news organization.

Interesting service for creating a linkroll of images, video, documents, and pages that are worthy of saving.

New York's new "School of One" presents an interesting model for individualized education and learning.

One of the many reasons why we need free, publicly linkable books online. The example from Kottke.org is a illustrative as well.

Nieman covers why a truly semantic web may render some forms of news writing irrelevant and unnecessary.

Chris Messina looks back on an instance in which his online network failed him.

Scott Karp's vision of what he terms "the Content Graph." If this is a vision for journalism's future we're in trouble.

Clay Shirky discusses his reading habits and sources of news and knowledge.

"Published scientific communications are the collective memory of scientists. If we cannot access it quickly and efficiently, we are effectively brain damaged."

Seed Magazine interviews pioneers of open and accessible science data. Interesting insights into the systems currently being created.

"We’re at the dawn of a new journalistic landscape where everybody adds to the conversation, and where journalists will no longer be exclusively broadcasters, but facilitators as well."

Cody Brown's proposed commencement speech for NYU.

Matt Pearson's idea for canonical identifiers for everything on the web. The idea: have one identifier that works for all services.

Interview between Nora Young and Clay Shirky about many aspects of the web and information.

Great, short video about the potential and critiques of the semantic web.

A Duke University professor turned the grading for a recent course over to the students and claims that work was better and more productive.

Talking points from a speech given by John Hagel about a pull society.

Interesting feature on the various ways people are tracking the data of their personal lives. Could provide for a very efficient future.

Greg Linch's ideas about computational thinking and how it is relevant to journalism.

"The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself."

A call for collaborative learning in the 21st-Century university. A much needed change if universities are to stay relevant.

"More often than not, information architects are tasked with bringing out the best in an existing pile of content they have no control over. But in the news industry, we can reinvent both how our content should be stored/codified to bring out its potential and what that content should look like in the first place if it is to have any future at all."

"Most people don’t make things. Never have. Never will. It’s not necessarily a point of pride for those of us that do, but more a question of people’s innate desires."

A good explanation from Patrick Rhone about why he curates the web with his various blogs.

A very solid piece constructing how news organizations ought to be in the information business and the types of mindsets and tools that thinking requires.

A quick summary of an interesting initiative to build a search engine for OpenCourseWare content.

A Yale student rethinks how Yale's education model is adapting and changing for a more open and technological world.

A new study is complicating our ideas about how people consume information on the web. Perhaps they are not ideological hermits like previously conceived.

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, argues against the notion that the internet replaces the need for memorizing information. Also discussed is a purely collaborative pedagogy and the role for current technologies in a liberal education.

"And therein lies the great virtue of tags: they are just about the simplest possible way of saying something, and don’t imply or require any particular inferential framework."

A quick summary of some of the key points from the 2010 K-12 Horizon Project Advisory Board.

"Another thread that didn't get picked up was the idea that KM should become invisible - just part of the fabric of the business.  This idea has been around a while, and is probably part of any transformative discipline: Once the business has been transformed, where do the change agents go?"

"I care about your take and your interpretation of the stuff you’re linking to: why should I read that post, do you have anything to add, what are the most important points from your perspective?"

Solid argument for why copyright laws need to return to their more lenient roots.

Dave Winer reflects on some of what Facebook announced at F8.

"Each story could function as part of a web of knowledge around a certain topic, but it doesn’t." - A call to arms for more effective methods of adding metadata to articles and knowledge in a system.