RSSInformation building blocks
Put together on October 20, 2009 11:48 am by Dimitris
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- Image by luc legay via Flickr
While code is compiling I thought I’d do some maintenance work here and (after upgrading to Wordpress v2.8.4) I stumbled upon a draft post which I had started ages ago but never finished. It was inspired by an article by Jeff Jarvis whom I deeply respect as a blogger. The article was about how the hyperlink and the topic are becoming the new most important building blocks in news. (Ironically, I haven’t kept the particular link…) Considering information in general, the idea is of considerable relevance now that a lot of information spreads via one sentence (its title) and an accompanying link – whether in the Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed news feeds.
Perhaps then information can be thought of to be a bit like language and its components where you have a large piece of text, split into paragraphs, sentences, words and finally their roots. Similarly, a blog post or a news article – or even a podcast or a video since they too can nowadays be ‘converted’ to text – can be broken down to its constituents going from larger to smaller parts.
So, for example, in the same way that a word can be broken down to 2-3 parts that indicate different things (e.g. un-forget-able) and in the same way that a blog post has paragraphs with distinct information in them maybe information in general can also be broken down to its constituents – the main building blocks it’s made up of: its topics and its subtopics, the facts building up to an argument, a list of arguments towards a thesis, etc.
Take a closer look at the next article you’ll read – can you break it down to its constituents? These components may be concentrated in the first sentence from each paragraph taken verbatim (works well in some news sites) – or a title/summary of the paragraph written explicitly to contain its core idea. Some blog posts in particular – especially if they are really short – may be ’summarised’ to a single sentence or two.
I think the main idea of an article’s paragraph can be summarised with minimal loss of content using a simple sentence (hence the invention of titles). So if you could collapse e.g. a 5-paragraph post in 5 relatively simple sentences – that’s a huge step towards limiting information overload.
The question remains however how you can go from the expanded idea to its summary (e.g. from a paragraph to a sentence) but let’s leave this for another post.
tags: analysis |
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[...] my previous post I wrote about how information can be broken down to its components. Following that, these [...]