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."

"And a week or so later, when you try to remember what you said at this party, that really terrific thing, you rack your brain, but can’t quite come up with it. That’s Twitter.

The blog, on the other hand, is slow, reliably reference-able, and findable. It’s like a speech, prepared in advance, with the text distributed. Some will hear the speech on the day it’s delivered, but others will be able to reference its text across the years."

Interesting thoughts on processing and managing the stream.

"He became increasingly consumed with what he calls “forever knowledge,” or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it."

One smart take on the whole citation discussion.

Totally fascinating article fro Kevin Kelly about the future of books.

A screen is not just a screen. It's the content that matters. What's important is that some of that content is only available on certain types of screens.

What journalism looks like in North Korea. Fascinating read about how information slips and moves through the margins.

"Wonderful possibilities await—if you believe that the person next to you isn’t a distractable dolt but instead someone with unmet potential. There’s the real argument, my friends. And you are my friends, for remember that I’m the one who respects you."

"If everyone has everyone’s attention the value of attention is nullified." This is why we should save, invest, and be conscientious of the attention we give things.

Three problems that need solving in modern education.

Dave Cohn's post from the January edition of Carnival of Journalism.

"One veteran editor described news judgment to me as “tribal,” i.e. publication dependent and essentially arbitrary — which is of course at odds with theories of “objective” reporting."

Jon Udell writes about principles people apply when working well together online. Filled with links to related posts as well.

"Does this all sound familiar? It’s like a blog network of the academia breed. If it really takes off and becomes successful, monetize the university blogs and do a rev-share, in which you can start to pay some of those people within the university who continue to provide unique content, which brings in more readers, which brings in more money, etc."

Daniel Bachhuber's thoughts on universities and journalistic activity. For the Carnival of Journalism.

"The most beautiful thing about being a Twitter consumer to me is that just reading Twitter is now a new source of information and entertainment – even without clicking on the links. It is, in and of itself, news. And entertainment. When I’m stuck between meetings, at an airport, waiting for a movie to start – I pull out my mobile device and start flicking through the stream."

"Hypothesis: It doesn’t make the world any worse to add more information to it, since we can’t be/feel more overloaded than we already do."

"Want to keep your users? Just make it easy for them to leave."

"So, why don’t you have your own policy? Why can’t you be as trustworthy on the Web as you are walking into any store off the street? The reason is that you have no status on the Web itself beyond the minima implied by the term “user.” Whatever status you experience is what’s granted by site owners. You are the client. Your position is submissive. The dominant party is in charge, and there are a billion-plus of those."

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

"Journalism without effect does not deserve the special place in democracy that it tries to claim."

Some thoughts from Dave Winer on what Twitter's vision should be and how they can approach being the news system of the future.

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 quick summary and look at ongoing Gov 2.0 projects.

Astounding video about the use of data in news.

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

Daniel Bachhuber writes his first article for Nieman Journalism Lab. Interesting bit about TimesOpen.

"Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down."

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.

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."

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

"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.

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

Computers are having various effects on our brains and neurological activity. It's still early, but watching how these effects strengthen (or not) will be interesting.

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.

"Since the big bang, every quantum event—every atom randomly deciding to go along one path or another, every photon deciding to be spat out by an atom not spat out—has injected information into the universe. A fantastically enormous amount of information."