mediajunk

There's a great interview in the Online Journalism Review with Krishna Bharat, chief boffin behind the Google News portal.

The article tackles the debate about whether Google News -- and the internet in general -- is a threat to journalism, or whether it is an expansion of that profession.

There are discussions about the limits of automation and the potential problems that arise when there is no human editor on hand to evaluate articles. Still, the piece makes you realise just how easy Bharat and his colleagues make it seem -- the truth is that collating news stories from around the world and serving them up them in a "democratic" manner to a global audience is no mean feat.

In many cases, the automated system has an advantage over people in performing this task. "We get 100,000 articles a day," Bharat explains. "A human editor couldn't read that many."

One of the most curious things about the article, for me, was that Bharat still thinks that personalisation is the holy grail of internet news.

I've never been convinced of this, and it hasn't really worked in the past when providers such as Yahoo! have tried it. Part of the fun of reading a newspaper is that an article might catch your eye in a section that you wouldn't normally read. This would be far less likely to happen with personalistion, where you would only ever be served up those items that fit into certain categories...

So, personally, I'm against personalisation!