Convergence culture: Online services such as BlogBridge allow users to organise and publish news from many sources, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
You can come at the future of newspapers from two different angles - as a reader and as a wannabe media baron. Being an existing newspaper owner is an entirely different perspective and carries with it a novel degree of anxiety. Newspapers feel threatened by the web. Does it make sense? For those who want to create their own daily newspaper or participate in new news projects, life's never been easier.
Go to Netvibes, Pageflakes or Webwag for a bit of self-indulgence. Better still, if you happen to be a sports nut and crave daily sports news the minute that you press the computer's "on" button, ESPN, the US TV sports channel, can help you.
These are all examples of start pages. A start page is an internet browser window personalised by users with their choice of newsfeeds or information sources. An application such as Netvibes, the leader in the field, allows users to aggregate, or pull together, video from any site that conveys video, text news from The Irish Timesor its competitors, and pictures from sources such as Flickr and Picassa, two sites that allow users to upload any number of personal photographs. Of course, much of this material is copyright, so reassembling information from other sites could be an infringement of that copyright.
As with all web innovations, the big players have moved in and you can now set up a Google start page, or a Yahoo or Windows Live version.
If your aspiration is to do more than serve yourself with personalised news source, the media baron within has a few options.
BlogBridge is a multipurpose information organiser that's also a publisher.
In fact, the "new" in today's web is that any information you seize from the web and organise can also be published, effortlessly. BlogBridge has been developed from open-source software by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Pito Salas, whose ambition is to create the perfect news discovery service.
BlogBridge allows its users to organise information from news sources and from blogs. If you are a blogger, you may also use BlogBridge to publish information to your blogs. Alternatively, you can use BlogBridge as a kind of magazine. A variety of subject experts curate news and blogs' information on the BlogBridge site, so that you can access the daily information gathering activity of an expert in wine, language (by the editor in chief of dictionaries for Oxford University Press), ecology, marketing and many more.
BlogBridge has a way to go, but its strength is that it gives users access to a wide variety of subjects and views, provides a means to organise them, and also works as a publishing tool.
Similar projects are Squidoo, which places more emphasis on enabling you to publish your own writings - and to bring an audience to you - and Top 10 Sources. An Irish site, Louder Voice, promises more in this area.
People from around the world participate in projects like BlogBridge and Squidoo, collaborating and building important-information sources. The problem is that they don't look much like newspapers and the majority of us are accustomed to reading a page with a masthead, headlines, sub-headlines and print.
Newsvine is trying to bridge that graphical gap between conventional news typography and layout. Say you really like an article you've read on the website of the Washington Post. You send it to Newsvine, where it appears as an abstract with your name attached. You could also of course send news from your own blog.
Launched less than a year ago, Newsvine is based in Seattle and is backed by former Disney and ESPN executives, but it is built every day by people who want to interact with the news.
Digg and Reddit are additional examples of user-driven news sites, but without the graphical sophistication. Side-by-side with projects like Newsvine is a growing number of citizen media newspapers.
Cien Papiersin Canada, Oh My Newsin Korea, and Paris-based Agora(it has an English language edition) are all examples of online newspapers written by non-professional journalists, but edited by experienced newspaper editors.
Why is there so much online activity around news? The obvious reason is that the online environment allows newcomers to produce news products at a very low cost.
The truth is that western economies revolve around news organisations not only because of their information content but also because companies use them to build awareness of products through advertising, PR and lobbying.
The new interest in news is evidence of how critical this channel of information is to society and the economy. A lot of people want in. Newspapers that generally feel under threat from the web should ironically see that their role is perceived by others as more not less powerful.
Next: The impact of games
Words in your ear
Blogs- the personal diaries and news sites that are now growing at the rate of 75,000 new blogs a day
Blog aggregators- software technology that pulls information from different blogs and presents it in new ways
Citizen media- online newspapers and magazines written by members of the general public
Start page- a web page that appears on your screen whenever you start your browser and which contains information from different sources that update in real time.
