One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me. Nozzl Media today unveiled a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records like restaurant health inspections, building reports and public safety emergency responses. It's like a little robot reporter and the company plans on offering it as a mobile app in the future as well. Nozzl raises questions, though, about what constitutes news and whether or not human reporters are expendable in the news process. Sponsor Nozzl was founded by a team of ex-newspaper reporters and engineers. They got out when it was clear the newspaper industry was in trouble, but now they aim to give something back by bringing together the real-time, programmatic possibilities of the web with the reporting of the newspapers. Reporters have for decades written programming scripts that repeat database queries over and over again to extract public data for bulk analysis. The Nozzl team has taken that to the next level and combined it with new social media. The company put up a demo page for Portland, Oregon news that anyone can look at today. The public records streams are the big value-add and are fully customizable per newspaper. Visitors can then type live filter terms into the box at the bottom of the widget to zero in on topics of interest to them. That's the nozzle in Nozzl Media. User Experience is Hard For Robots Unfortunately, there are two big issues here. First, the flow of Tweets is overwhelming and undifferentiated. On the demonstration site you see almost nothing else unless you can think of something to filter for. If automated Twitter feeds hold value for local news, they will probably require some smart pre-proccessing before being presented to the reading public. There have always been people who like to listen to police radio scanners. Myself, I like to read restaurant health inspection reports, building permit applications and liquor license applications. If Nozzl had some categories I could choose between, that would be very helpful. The second, and more interesting, problem is that the public records that are extracted are exciting in theory but relatively unreadable in practice. The truth is, Nozzl didn't exactly tell me that there was an unconscious person reported at Nike HQ today - it told me with code from a form that there was an UNCONS/UNRESPONSIVE report at 1 SW Bowerman Drive, in Portland. A little Mad-Libs style transformation of forms into human-readable sentences and some pre-fetching of names associated with addresses could go a long way. Run the name associated with that address through a News search engine and tell me if its an entity that's been reported on in the past - if so then it's probably high-priority news to push live again. The company needs to put these machine-readable pages it displays into coherent English sentences, or find some other solution. Don't Forget the Humans Ambulances to Nike's Headquarters to help someone unconscious today? That sounds like it could be news. Even if the technology presented the information this clearly - it may take a human eye to pick this out of a list of automatically captured ambulance reports. Having a human available to pick up a phone, call Nike HQ and ask who was found unconscious there this afternoon would add another element of value to this data - but that's not what Nozzl is looking to do. The company is serving up raw data to news consumers. In the end, human reporters and raw robot feeds sound like a great combination. That appears to be what Nozzl is aiming to create by offering its widgets to established news organizations. The company says that a mobile application could be in its future, too. That's something I'm very excited about. Be it a widget or a mobile app, Nozzl's robot reporters need more polish before they are ready to win back the hearts of fast-leaving newspaper readers. As a picture of the future, though - Nozzl is very inspiring. Interested in what companies like Nozzl Media mean for the future of the web? Check out our profile of Nozzl and ten other case study companies in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Discuss

View original post here:
Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters

Scott Lockhart used to tell his co-workers in the real estate industry that there was a lot of valuable information to be found by reading blogs. They, like all of us, would try blog search engines and end up frustrated with spam, abandoned blogs and low-quality content. So Lockhart quit his job and built an application he thought could solve that problem by unearthing just the most high-quality blog content concerning a wide variety of niche topics. In doing so, he stumbled onto one of the most important issues in the future of the web - the tension between controlled user experience and chaotic freedom. Sponsor That sounds crazy, but Lockhart's now three-person Atlanta company has actually done a remarkably good job of unearthing good content in a compelling user experience. Regator offers users a curated collection of high-quality sources on more than 500 topics, everything from martial arts to ceramics, aviation, cheerleading, law and Antarctica. Of course there are tech and business channels, too. Regator just got its $2 premium iPhone app into the iTunes store and it's the best "channel clicker" for niche content we've seen yet. There's something a little bit odd about having the borders of your internet limited by someone else, but the Regator user experience is excellent otherwise. It's well designed and fun to use. User experience is key to making the web...usable. I've wished for years that more people got excited about sharing OPML files, bundled collections of dynamic RSS feeds, but that just hasn't happened. Curation, bundles of content, discovery - these are functions of a prolific web that a new crop of services is trying to tackle with good design and tough decisions about openness versus...something else. Regator is an interesting entry into this place of tension and possibility. The new premium iPhone app offers subscription to the selected blogs you like, video viewing, recommendations of related posts and issue tracking by keyword search. You can view the most recent posts from sources, or the most popular posts with other Regator users. But is this just a pretty looking walled-garden? Regator brings to mind an admittedly paranoid but important blog post that consultant Chris Messina wrote this week called The Death of The URL . "I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL...As a user experience designer, [the responsibility lies with] my discipline and peers to provide the right kind of ideas and leadership. If we get the design right, we can empower while clarifying; we can reduce complexity while enhancing functionality; we can expand freedom while not overwhelming with choice. Surely these are the things that good, thoughtful user experience design can achieve! "If I were forced to choose between all the messiness of free will over the 'comfortability' of a contrived existence, I'd choose the red pill, time and time again. And I hope you would too. From WebTV to the tightly controlled iPhone app platform, though - these interfaces can be very compelling to use. One of the risks of a controlled platform, perhaps secondary to the inherent loss of freedom, is that whoever is in control might not do a good job of picking out what shows up. Editorial control risks conflicts of interest and a lack of broad editorial knowledge compared to what topic experts know. It's not an easy role to play. Kimberly Turner is the editor of Regator's selection of blogs. She's a former magazine writer and she works with volunteer reporters and editors who suggest top blogs in niches when they have free time. Turner doesn't believe that Regator is guilty of the sins that Messina calls other companies out for. Whether you're finding sites through Google's algorithm, the community votes at Digg or your friends on Twitter "we all use some service or site to help us find what we're looking for," Turner says "and those are all 'curated' in some way." "Regator's human-powered curation is simply less likely to yield poor quality content than some others'," Turner contends. Thousands of blogs are included on Regator already and Turner says new features like related posts and searches help users "explore and wander into fresh territory rather than getting stuck in a rut and going to the same small subset of blogs repeatedly." So far there are 20 blogs in the wine category for example, just 1 in the beauty/nails subcategory, 4 hockey blogs, 22 law blogs, 3 blogs about cheerleading and 7 about Emergency Medical Services. The service adds new sources based on user suggestions and other discovery methods. Turner says, "once a blog has established itself as a well-written and trustworthy source, we want to make sure it is included." The fact is, though, that if a blog Regator turns you on to then links to another related blog that's not included in the Regator index - you as a user cannot subscribe to it. If the company offered a "suggest" button next to its "share" button in the Regator browser, that could be helpful. Does that sound reasonable? It's not as free-form and dynamic as other services. Collected.info , a new service for sharing and subscribing to other peoples' collections of feeds, is a particularly interesting recent entrant into this market from perhaps the other end of the spectrum. Both services take a little time to get your reading list set up well, but Regator delivers high-quality content from the start. I like Regator and am already using the new iPhone app to discover interesting new content while on the go. A service that gives me access to fresh, high-quality content about ceramics, anthropology and museums with just a few clicks? Sign me up! Still, there's something about the sources available being limited by someone else's choice. It's an interesting tension that may never be resolved - but is the basis for some very interesting software in the meantime. The Regator crew is right to identify as a problem the way people new to this social web struggle to find the best content. They offer a compelling solution to the problem. Time will tell which solutions catch on and what the consequences will be. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank one of the companies that makes it possible for us to bring ReadWriteWeb to you. Groupsite is a long-developed, feature-rich, self-serve, professional grade social networking and collaboration service. If you've got a group of people you want to facilitate online conversation between - you should check out Groupsite. We really appreciate Groupsite's support here at ReadWriteWeb. Discuss

Read more:
An iPhone Remote for Reading the Blogosphere: Check Out Regator's New App

Twitter turned on its long-awaited Geolocation API today, meaning that users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week's release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kroner of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible. Sponsor Exposing location data is an opt-in feature for users, but 3rd party app developers are being told to "encourage your users to enable it by sending them to their settings page." Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it." With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data. These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks. Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see. "Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location. How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered. These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind. Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include... Imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Most Twitter search engines index not just the 140 characters in a message, but the text in links being shared as well. If you think people like being the Foursquare mayor of a popular coffee shop, imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today? News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on. Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics of the week? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm. Cop Watcher Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed. Inventory Forecast If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it. Politics & Marketing People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on. Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time. Flu Trends+ Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool ? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area? Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset. What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data? Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com. Discuss

Here is the original post:
What Twitter's New Geolocation Makes Possible