Presenting Caerdroia

I have added Caerdroia to my blogroll. As you can see I don’t have a huge number of blogs there. It’s mostly reserved for the blogs I find the most interesting and thought-provoking. Caerdroia is at least a daily stop for me and it should be for you.

Jeff Medcalf of Caerdroia has just published an interesting post on information gathering in the blogosphere. He does get one detail wrong, in my opinion:

Information gathering is the process of actually finding information, while information filtering is the process of determining which bits of information that you have collected are meaningful, rather than trivial. Information is all around us, but most of it is not meaningful except in very specific contexts. For example, if a city council passes a resolution against US involvement in Upper Slobonia, that is certainly information. However, it’s meaningless in and of itself (though it may be meaningful if virtually every city council in the country does so, as it would be an indicator of public opinion).

The major media actually does not do a great job at these functions, mostly due to laziness as far as I can tell.

I don’t think it’s laziness or short-sightedness or even having too small a staff to do the job properly. I think it’s something more basic than that, something intrinsic. We all tend to do the things we like to do and the things we’re interested in better. Why should journalists be any different than the rest of us?

That’s why science journalism and economics journalism, for example, are so terrible. J-school grads typically just aren’t interested in these things. So they get short shrift. What are professional journalists interested in? Why, themselves for one thing. That’s why coverage of the media is typically pretty good. If not obsessive. And they’re typically interested in politics. But they’re interested in a damn-the-unforeseen-secondary-effects sort of way that you’d expect from someone who’d rather report on and analyze what someone else is doing than get their hands dirty themselves.

I think that journalism is one of those things that, as G. K. Chesterton said, are too important to be left to professionals. That’s what’s great about the blogosphere. There are so many of us and our interests and expertise are so various. If you’re clever enough to find it you can find excellent coverage of nearly any subject in the blogosphere. Because we’re not professionals.

In his post Jeff goes on to talk about a tool for aggregating the information in the blogosphere. It reminded me somewhat of Tim Berners-Lee’s dream for the World Wide Web—the Semantic Web:

The common thread to the Semantic Web is that there’s lots of information out there—financial information, weather information, corporate information—on databases, spreadsheets, and websites that you can read but you can’t manipulate. The key thing is that this data exists, but the computers don’t know what it is and how it interrelates. You can’t write programs to use it.

But when there’s a web of interesting global semantic data, then you’ll be able to combine the data you know about with other data that you don’t know about. Our lives will be enriched by this data, which we didn’t have access to before, and we’ll be able to write programs that will actually help because they’ll be able to understand the data out there rather than just presenting it to us on the screen.

I have a few questions for Jeff on his idea, though. How does it differ from something like Technorati? Or some of the blog indices that have died on the vine over the years?