Wilson Lau New Media

By Sylvia Chan, Wang Fei and Wilson Lau

For initial research of most topics, online information sources available on the Internet are both convenient and accessible. And when we mention “online information sources”, most of us will immediately associate them with “web page-based sources”. To this date, they are still considered the most important for journalists. However, the rapid development of Web 2.0 means that we have a much wide range of search tools (some of them go much beyond just searching tools, please see below) to choose from. Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati represent the next generation of search tools which enable us to search, create our individual bookmarking and storage systems, and most importantly, to share them with anyone (practically anywhere) with similar interests and concerns.

Here we will discuss a bit the more traditional online information sources and the advantages and disadvantage of some relatively newer search tools. Some comments from our classmates quoted here are worth a look.

Traditional online web page-based online information sources 

Although there are a lot of online sources, like Newsgroups and listservcs, journalists can make use of to get information, we would like to focus on web-page based sources, which is regarded as the most important for journalists by James Foust of Online Journalism. For example, journalists work on the beat on local current affairs should frequently check out this Hong Kong Government information centre website. Reporters who cover the trade and industry’s development should keep themselves updated on the latest trade developments with the site operated by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.

These sites meet the criteria as outlined in Foust’s book. They should be more reliable sources for official information from the government. When you look at the Hong Kong government’s information site, you will see the top-level domain after the final period in the government site’s URL address, you see “gov”, indicating it is a government-run website. For the site of the Trade Development Council, it is a bit tricky as it is “dot com”. Because TDC is a quasi-government orgsanisation and it does not want to be identified as one. (In some cases, like trade fairs, it competes with the private sector with unfair advantage.) These are well-designed sites, with constantly updated information, high-quality writing, often in multi-languages.

But beware of false sites of large companies, like HSBC, created by criminals. Some customers of the bank have been sent email messages with link to the bogus site. They were asked to log into the false site for internet banking services and surrendered all of their personal information as a result.

An example that is more relevant to journalists is the incident in April 2006 in which a business columnist with the South China Morning Post Jake Van Der Kamp had to apologise to the Civic Party. Mr Van Der Kamp is known for his Monitor column that picks apart government and officials’ statements and identifies the contradictions in them. A local organisation called the Lion Rock Institute sent a spoof email to local news organisations on April 1st last year with a link to a bogus site of the then newly formed Civic Party. Despite some hints in the spoof like “a 41-person Anti-trust and competition policy bureau”, Mr Van Der Kamp thought it was the real deal and wrote some comments on the statements referring to the content in the bogus site. SCMP published it. When he realised that he had fallen into a trap and picked up leads from what was meant to be a joke, he had to apologise to the Civic Party in his column a few days later. Mr Van Der Kamp made two mistakes: 1. he should have verified the information by calling up the Civic Party. 2. he should have made use of the online searching tools available to check if the hyperlink in the email message was genuine. More details are available in this blog post by one of the creators of the bogus Civic Party’s site.

Newer online search tools: tagging and Technorati 

Everyone would agree that “tagging” is great idea, which could enable some tiny companies like De.lic.ious as well as Flickr and Technorati could the market relying on nothing more than a personal computer and a broadband Internet connection. If we talk about tagging, we should mention the leading tag service de.lic.ious. It is a social bookmarking Web sites, it enable you save a web link, and associate it with labels, so any time anywhere, you can access your favorite URL’s from any computer. While in the past, we have to save useful bookmarks only in computer.  Using tagging service like delicious, you could not only save bookmarks but also categorize and share tags and URLs with other surfers.  It is quite helpful to research, cause usually, the traditional search engines, like Googles, simple searches yield far too many results to recall something specific. Using tags, the content that most users tagged will rise to the top of the list, there is some human thinking behind it. We know that automated search engines are constantly trying to think like people, but they are not human being. Del.icio.us developer said, tags are based on the user’s personal search experience, “the first few words that come to mind when you’re in a particular frame of mind,” which “tends to be how you’ll want to remember or discover the same thing or similar things in the future.” 

We are not limited to one single tag under one article or pictures, we could assigns more tags, and Flickr also allow others to add tags to your own pictures. It is a great idea, especially for journalist, we read lots of articles in the web to learn and generate inspiration for our stories in the future. Usually, I save these stories in my computer, and if sometimes I try to use it, I use key-word to search it in the document. Now, if I found any article interesting and useful, I could tag it with different key-words.   For example, I read a story about “Cyber-Bullying Is A Growing Menace To Kids”, and I could tag it with “Technology”; “insult”; “cyber” “cyber-bullying”; “school”; “education”; “kids”; “software” etc. The advantage is in case one day I can’t remember whether I bookmarked it under “technology” or “kids”; so I add all those words as tags and in the future I will find it straightaway by viewing my page of tags and clicking on any one of them.  With tagging, actually ordinary people do not have to know what is systematic taxonomy. They can establish their own “category system.” Just like David said in his book <Everything is Miscellaneous>: “when knowledge was imprisoned on paper, it had to be stored in one place, under one address, with the help of internet and “Tags”, users could put one document in different “piles” at the same time. You could find this article in news websites or Google or someone’s blogs.  Actually, tags are creating more straightforward classifications of Web documents or links, many new term or new words appeared, for example, one of the most popular tags created on the bookmarking service is “to_read,” a tag attached to links of pages users want to remember to read.

In Flickr, under the tag of “interestingness”, you will see an amazing set of images that are indeed interesting, you could say it is the tastes of the crowd, or you could say it proves the wisdom of the crowd. Actually, the major important idea behind the Del.icio.us is “sharing”, Why “tagging” are powerful because it is a way not only help you to search your own memory but also sharing others memory, discovering content tagged by others. It is an efficient way of research, which means you could find more, related content filed under those same tags. For example, when the public transport strike began in New York, photos began accumulating under the tag “transitstrike” and “nyc”, from this example, you could see how people using the idea of tagging to share. Tags made it easy for us to see what other people were collecting, writing or photographing. And it also could connect people of common interests. For example, there is a dating service called <consummating.com> which let users tag themselves, in this website, the popular one-word autobiographies include “redhead”, and “pierced”, “wine”. And also, in social networking site <43Things.com>, users create accounts and then share lists of goals and hopes. One of the most popular goals in a tag is “save money” and “learn to play the guitar”. Using the idea of tagging, people with common interests gathered together, and also, it is good for advertisers to targets its advertising.  So if we look at the future of the tagging, we maybe could share more things, not only photos and articles but products like books etc; and you also could use tag to find our own stuff in our computer, tag to group our files instead of just searching for matches by file name, or in the text. For example, gmail allows users to add tags to emails; basically it allows you to add, filter or search for anything in email via tags. It could speed up the process of finding what you’re looking for.And finally, maybe we could create more new tagging ways, for example, BBC Radio allowed listeners to “tag” songs using their phones.   

Disadvantages of Tagging 

One of the disadvantages of the search function of technorati is that, the search results are limited. The search results are limited to blog posts, and the contents of the blogs have various quality. The information found may not be relevant. As Peter said in his blog post, he could hardly find a relevant blog in technorati and delicious.  Another thing is that, the authority of the information found through technorati or del.icio.us is sometimes in question. Journalists can’t rely on search results of technorati or del.icio.us to get accurate information. Yet, the tools are good for journalists to find people’s general ideas about an issue. As Nick said, the search results are not good for academic research. Sky also said technorarti is not very useful when for searching on an esoteric subject.

On the other hand, many of our classmates said that google provide more useful search results. As Ardian said, Google did a great job in prioritizing the outcomes. The websites on the first page are more authoritative and trustworthy.

Tagging also brings about the problem of the tyranny of majority. If the majority is naming a tag with a certain keyword, people with other thoughts about the meaning of the keyword may not find the information on his mind. This may make some people misunderstand. As Nick said in his blog, the search results are not satisfactory as not much information found through technorati is related to what is on his mind.

While tagging does create social communities, the communities created has certain deficiency. Tagging is a new technology, and the users tend to be the younger generation. Actually, tagging requires the participation of lots of people with different backgrounds to maximize its benefits, so the benefits of the social communities created via tagging may be limited now.

Also, there is a problem that personal value precedes network value, for example, when tagging, people just use tags related to the information they need to find. They do not use tags which also represent other information in a certain blog post or article. For example, for a person interested in star ferry pier, if he finds an article with information about star ferry pier, the queen’s pier, and the
murray house, he would just use the tag star ferry pier and neglect queen’s pier and
murray house. Other people interested in those subjects may not benefit. Like kumar said, the problem raises a question about how one creates and runs the system that will ultimately determine its quality and foundations in the long run.

The search results of del.icio.us are dominated by English information. This may be due to the fact that more tagging has more Western users. This may lead to a lack of variety.

And some other problems. As Ann mentioned, the links in technorati are not filtered. People may click a link and find something that does not exist. Peter also said the use of tags to attract hits by spammers.  

“My search on Google with the same key words “hong kong AND languages” gave me an overwhelmingly large number of results, but the information on the first a few pages seemed to be more useful to my project than that on Technorati,” Christina said in her assessment. “Contrary to Technorati results, Google results seemed to be more relevant and authoritative.”Helen said in her post for her research on Chinese medicine, Google search is more effective than those offered by del.icio.us and Technorati. ” … when I google “Chinese medicine inHong Kong”, it provided a bunch of websites reflecting the key words, which are definitely meet my demand. Seeing this, I come to a conclusion that Google is a more advanced searching engine, compared with Del.icio.us and Techonorai, which can narrow down the searching scale with more specific key words. The more information in details you can provide, the more content results you may acquire.”

Janice said in her post that she found it easier to evaluate the reliability of the sources from a search by Google than those from del.icio.us or technorati.