Singing the Blews
Jinfo Blog

28th March 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Corporate information professionals can be forgiven for feeling sometimes that their position in their organisation is uniquely vulnerable. So it’s doubtful whether there’s much consolation to be gained from the fact that people in the IT department are probably feeling pretty much the same. Information technology consultant Gartner believes http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=625810 that emerging technologies will make it easier to build and use analytical applications to support business intelligence – marginalising the role of the IT department as a result. By contrast, the impact of such developments on the information side is presumably much less; these are number crunching applications which it would not be cost-effective for warm-bodied researchers to carry out anyway. But assessment and analysis of narrative text is a form of value that information professionals can still add and machines can’t replicate, isn’t it? Well – no. Last summer, Reuters announced http://web.vivavip.com/forum/LiveWire/read.php?i=36 that it had taken delivery of a new linguistics application from Corpora PLC that could process not only the facts but also the sentiments behind news stories. Automated algorithmic trading was the application that Reuters had in mind – but that’s only the start. Now Microsoft has disclosed that it is working on a project called Blews – http://research.microsoft.com/projects/blews/blews.aspx. The aim is to visualise information about which news stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, as well as indicating the level of ‘emotional charge’ in the discussion of the topic. Even if Blews turns out to be only crudely effective, business information professionals might still reasonably wonder whether it really is worth continuing the struggle to convince their employers that they do actually have something of value to add. But before we curl up and die, perhaps we should take our lead from the mainstream media reaction to some of the challenges they’re facing. According to The State of the News Media 2008, a report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (part of the respected Pew Research Center), established media are responding to challenges such as declining advertising revenue in the face of a plethora of new content sources by actively embracing the technological developments that permit the phenomenon known as citizen journalism. Rather than adopting a defensive stance, the report says http://digbig.com/4wqkn, news media are treating the trend towards citizen journalism as a healthy one, in which professional journalists call on citizens more frequently to inform their reporting. ‘The journalism of the future increasingly appears to be a hybrid that takes advantage of the technology rather than fights it,’ the report says. Is there a lesson here for the way we information professionals deal with the perceived threats that direct delivery of content to users’ desktops, allied to all-pervasive automation, pose to our roles?

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