Tag: News

News Processing on the iPad with Flipboard

There is too much goddamn information in this world – but what can we do about it?

First off, we could ignore it.  Take up reading  Sci-Fi novels or watching reality TV and just tune out the world.  Well, that doesn’t work for me.  I’m a little like that robot in Short Circuit, Johnny 5, who craves more input.  Johnny 5 can read an encyclopedia in a matter of minutes and begs for more, but I can’t.  I don’t want to be like God and know about every dang sparrow that falls from a tree, but I do want a rough idea of what’s going on around this old reality each day.

What I crave is a good steady flow of knowledge about this world and the cosmos.  I like learning new things, but I also need time to ponder fresh data and digest it.  Like most people I want to be up on current events, and not too out of touch with popular culture.  I’m not quite ready for the youngsters to be laughing at me for not knowing the current crop of glitterati of the moment, although I really don’t care, either about being laughed at or who is currently grabbing their 15 minutes of fame.

The trouble is we live in world overflowing with information.  If facts were water droplets there would be no land on this planet.

Keeping up with the news used to mean reading the newspaper or maybe a couple of magazines. Then came television which really made being nosey addictive.  Now with the world wide web we have access to countless newspapers, magazines, television stations, web sites, blogs all coming to us at once.  It’s a wise man who knows what he doesn’t want to know.

For some people getting their daily dose of reality is as simple as watching the NBC Nightly News 30 minutes a day.  But this is baby food news, predigested bites served from little jars and spoon fed to those who are still in the crawling stage of exploring reality.  The next step up for toddlers is the PBS NewsHour.  But then we run into the issue of facts per hour barrier.  How many people really want to spend more than a hour a day getting the news when most of it is repetitive and overly verbose.

What if you could read reports, study graphs and photos and see video clips at your own pace – tailored just your informational curiosity?  That’s what I’m trying to do with my iPad

A tablet computer can nicely format text for reading, show video clips in bright clarity, and display photos that look better than a slick magazine with the extra feature that you can zoom in on them for close study.  It’s outdoes the newspaper, magazine and competes well against the television and the web.

The trick is to get just the right words, videos and photos to view on the tablet.  And it’s a very hard trick.

Enter Flipboard for the iPad.  It does several things, but not perfectly – yet.

  • RSS feed reader
  • Twitter client
  • Facebook client
  • Digests many popular magazines, newspapers and websites

I already like taking in Facebook and Twitter content better on the iPad and Flipboard because Flipboard formats this web content to look like a elegantly laid out magazine.  It’s far more eye catching, but then Facebook is a homely looking website, so it’s not that hard to beat.

It’s also nicer to read RSS content on Flipboard than Google Reader, although there are some big limitations.  RSS feeds come through in two styles.  Some sites send the whole page, and others send just a teaser and a link back to the original web page.  They want you to come look at their ads.  Falling out of Flipboard into its browser mode is unpleasant.  I don’t like reading web pages on the tablet even with the magic of spreading and pinching pages to make them readable.  If I’m going to read the web I’d rather be sitting at my 22” desktop screen. 

However, many websites do send the full pages in their feeds and these look wonderful on the iPad because Flipboard makes their content look like it was published in an issue of National Geographic.

To make up for this limitation of RSS feeds Flipboard has contracted with publishers like Condé Nast to stream their content into Flipboard’s beautiful formatting.  These do come with original ads or even extra ads, but they look like they do in magazines, and not like web pages.  However, these pages are handled different from the RSS content.  Instead of scrolling up to read a long article, they are formatted into pages that you have to flip.  Here’s what Flipboard looks like:

After configuring Flipboard with my accounts at Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader I opened Flipboard and started flipping.  Fantastic first impression, and then I noticed, gee, there’s a lot of damn pages to read here.  Now that’s the essential key to using Flipboard, cutting down your input.

I’m leaving Facebook as it is, but I’m thinking of cutting out a lot of “friends.”  On Twitter, which was already minimally used, I cut out very active feeds.  Then I went to Google Reader and deleted RSS subscriptions to any feed that used the teaser method of providing content.  I only want complete articles sent to me.  I also deleted feeds that sent articles by the hundreds.

What I want is my own personalized digital magazine that I can flip through each day and keep up with what I’m interested in.  It’s going to take awhile to customize Flipboard to get things just the way I like things.  It will  take a few more revisions of the program too.

Flipboard opens on the Favorites section.  The first page has 9 photo squares that each equal a content source.  With the More feature you can add 12 more squares on the next page, each a new content source.

Through the More feature – content from professional publishers like Time, Wired, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Salon, Huffington Post, Elle, Rolling Stone, etc. can be added to the Favorites squares.  Flipboard can expand your magazine to cover endless varieties of news.  This canned list of content that Flipboard has arranged with publishers is ever growing.  They sort this content by twelve categories but that will probably expand too.   You can use these many sources to build new Favorites sections. These pages look like actual magazine pages with ads, and they might be direct copies from printed pages, or facsimiles.

What Flipboard is doing is trying to be the best RSS feed reader possible, but it’s going beyond the RSS feed with contractual agreements with magazines, newspapers and television shows to provide custom Flipboard feeds not based on the RSS standard.

Now this is all wonderful, and it does reduce the hurricane of data from the Internet into merely a fire hose of magazine pages, but it’s still too much.

What’s needed is artificial intelligence to monitor my reading tastes and further customize the content flow to just stuff I want to read.  I want Flipboard to be much more than what it is.  Which brings me to Instapaper – a web service that allows web readers to save content to read later.  Flipboard can be configured so if you tap an icon at the bottom of the page and select Read Later the article is saved at Instapaper so you can read it later.  But you have to read it at Instapaper web or quit Flipboard on the iPad and launch the Instapaper app.  What would be neat is if Flipboard saved the read later articles in it’s own app – so one of my Favorites squares would be Read Later.  And of course, Flipboard would need to create a browser add-on to mark pages like Instapaper.

Now, I have figured out how create a workaround for this.  I can just Tweet everything I see on the web that I want to read later.  But this isn’t exactly what I want.  What I want is for a Flipboard AI to know what I want to read and have it ready like the President’s assistants with his morning briefing of the news.

The whole key to all of this is reducing the flow of things to read.  Flipboard can’t do this – yet.  Maybe not ever.  It might take another app invention to do what I want.  What might be needed is a social network of very like minded readers.  Digg, Reddit and StubleUpon are much too broad.  Essentially I want a 30 minute briefing on reality each day, with the option to read one long article that might take 15-30 minutes more reading time if I have it.  I don’t want to spend 30 minutes a day trying to find the news that I want.

It might be possible to hook me up with the right 100 people who like to read the same exact content as I  do.  Then each of us would have to spend 5-10 minutes a day looking at Flipboard or the web and mark the best articles for our daily custom reading, which would be a cross tabulated to find the most popular for all of us to read.

Another way would be to allow readers to list specific topics they are interested in and the amount of words they want on these topics.  For example, I might say I want Cosmology articles that run from 500-1,500 words.  Anything shorter or longer is excluded.

Right now the iPad is another big time waster like TV and the web.  I know a lot of people who like to watch their TV shows and movies on their iPad.  The iPod made music listening very private, now tablet computers are making TV watching very private.  Apps like Flipboard could also manage my TV shows too – that’s another issue.

JWH – 8/16/11

The Power of Positive News

One of the things I hate about TV news shows is they generally focus on the bad in the world.  Watching the news makes me think the world is full of evil people running amok.  Watching the news makes me think the world is in constant crisis.  Most national news programs start out with the worse depressing stories and if we’re lucky they will give us a minute of something upbeat at the tail end of the show.  Maybe they have it backasswards.   Let’s start with the good stuff, and give a couple of minutes to the depressing stuff we need to solve at the end.

One topic I wished the news would promote more is science.  Overall our society is fairly ignorant of how reality works.  Look how many people want to shape politics from knowledge gained from ancient religious texts and next life fantasies.  The stars of our society are jocks, actors and musicians.  Are ball handling, pretending and singing really the highest aspirations we want to put forth as ambitions our society needs?  We really need to raise the bar on challenging professions.

Watch this video of the 18 year old winner of the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, Erika DeBenedictis.  I have to wonder how it would change society if instead of showcasing the Oscars every year we present the Intel Science Talent Search instead.  We will always have a surplus of kids wanting to be professional athletes, movie stars and platinum record makers, so why promote their success so heavily.  Why not promote the successes of the kinds of people we need more of in this world.

Who are Erika’s teachers?  How did her parents encourage her?  What men and women inspired Erika?  What did she do for herself?  Some people are doing stuff very right – so why aren’t they getting more attention.  Her video on YouTube had 95 hits when I found it.  Here’s what 1,361,495 people were watching that day instead:

So why does this exceptional teenage girl that’s calculating optimal orbits for spacecraft get practically no attention, while stupid videos wildly succeed.  Television focuses on either evil or stupidity.  How can anyone find inspiration?  Does that mean ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN and other news content providers merely aim their content to what their audiences want?  This really makes me wonder what the average intelligence is in our country.

We actually want two things.  We want to produce more smart kids like Erika DeBenedictis, but we also want to educate everyone to understand how reality works.  This video, “Science Struggles in Schools” shows how hard it is to teach science, but it also showcases how fun science can be to students.

Natalie Angier wrote The Canon about the failure of science education while giving her readers a sweeping overview of the major sciences.   Her Introduction essentially explains what has happened to science education and public support for it.  I can’t quote it all, but follow the link and read it, but here’s one observation that we have to deal with:

Childhood, then, is the one time of life when all members of an age cohort are expected to appreciate science. Once junior high school begins, so too does the great winnowing, the relentless tweezing away of feather, fur, fun, the hilarity of the digestive tract, until science becomes the forbidding province of a small priesthood and a poorly dressed one at that. A delight in "Grossology" gives way to a dread of grossness. In this country, adolescent science lovers tend to be fewer in number than they are in tedious nicknames: they are geeks, nerds, eggheads, pointy-heads, brainiacs, lab rats, the recently coined aspies (for Asperger’s syndrome); and, hell, why not "peeps" (pocket protectors) or "dogs" (duct tape on glasses) or "losers" (last ones selected for every sport)? Nonscience teenagers, on the other hand, are known as "teenagers," except among themselves, in which case, regardless of gender, they go by an elaboration on "guys" as in "you guys," "hey, guys" or "hey, you guys." The you-guys generally have no trouble distinguishing themselves from geeks bearing beakers; but should any questions arise, a teenager will hasten to assert his or her unequivocal guyness, as I learned while walking behind two girls recently who looked to be about sixteen years old.

Girl A asked Girl B what her mother did for a living.

"Oh, she works in Bethesda, at the NIH," said Girl B, referring to the National Institutes of Health. "She’s a scientist."

"Huh," said Girl A. I waited for her to add something like "Wow, that’s awesome!" or "Sweet!" or "Kewl!" or "Schnitzel with noodles!" and maybe ask what sort of science this extraordinary mother studied. Instead, after a moment or two, Girl A said, "I hate science."

"Yeah, well, you can’t, like, pick your parents," said Girl B, giving her beige hair a quick, contemptuous flip. "Anyway, what are you guys doing this weekend?"

Which I guess is why the Erika DeBenedictis video only had 95 hits and why millions of kids will watch stupid kids doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing.  How do we change that?  If the news media focused on the positive instead of the negative would that change things?  If the nightly news opened with stories about people doing wonderful work instead of idiots crashing trains because they were texting, would that make a difference?

What is the potential power of positive news?  What professions should be the rock stars of our society?

JWH -  3/27/10