Week 2 of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab is done and I caught two lectures: Christian Heilmann and John Resig. (Ironically, I missed the one I've been looking forward to, the one by Jesse James Garrett. But that's a different story.)
Anyways, I got feedback from Phillip Smith that the blog post should be more of a "thinking out loud" rumination and I think I'd like to make my posts move to show the evolution of my idea, the Wikified News Dashboard (WiND).
These were the last items I thought I'd focus on for WiND (based on my last post):
- Needs to give quick information about the news - At the very least, the page will answer What, Who, When, How, and Why right off the bat
- Easier contributions - I temporarily placed a contribution area above the fold, although I think this will be tweaked in future iterations
- REPRank - I think this can be a master's thesis, as the signals to define what makes a story relevant or credible needs some research. It needs an algorithm to take into account many items like contributor authority, quality of submissions, social media signals. This algorithm should be fast and high quality.
- Breaking news - I just realized that I haven't firmed up how a breaking news would evolve to become a Rich Event Page (REP). This process should be easy, even for tech luddites.
- Less cluttered interface - One of the things I picked up from this week's lectures is the involvement of better interfaces using Javascript and jQuery. I think I can de-clutter the current version and rely on jQuery tricks to tighten the interaction.
Here's the updated idea:
- De-cluttered
- Bigger contribute area, still under development
- Define use cases for easy creation of the REP
- Making the Key People section like a social graph
Tags: Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab
