Exploratory Ideas for Newsware User Interfaces

Beyond Navigation to Meaning

Andrew Dillon, chair of the School of Information at the University of Texas, argues that navigation of information is different than navigation in physical space, and that creating navigation is essentially about creating meaning. A road sign points us in a direction, but labels and links try to describe what we'll see when we get there.
When we present navigation elements such as Connections, what meaning do they have for the visitor? Can we modify these to be less like road signs and more like ideas?

Grouping sources together is a useful step in seeing the news from different viewpoints. Now, how can we go further? How can we help visitors understand how criteria like political bias, tone, and length differentiate one source from others?

In 1971 Herbert Simon observed that, "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
As our visitors' attention becomes more and more precious, how can we maximize the information they receive?
In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that our brains can now consume faster, less linear, more dense media—especially video—compared to just a couple decades ago. Just compare Walter Cronkite to Bloomberg TV.
We can compile news media taking cues from television and film narrative and editing. We could, for example, edit together video newscast headlines as we would text headlines, segueing through different viewpoints and letting the visitor select from the stream. We can re-invent how people watch the news.

On wireless networks, mobile operators still control access to content and features. We can enable them to create new products, services, and revenue streams with their partners by considering them distributors and resellers of newsware, extending the network by sharing the power to create news products...

Scenario: The API Buyer wants to understand the API's possibilities, and try before she buys. The end user wants to creates custom feeds and pages.
So, give them an interface that lets them build their own feeds and pages on the fly, similar to Yahoo Pipes...

Ultimately, the process for arriving at a design will matter more than any one design. And the ultimate process is evolution. Evolution creates progress by introducing random mutations and letting the environment determine which mutations are most successful. We can algorithmically generate many designs to find genuinely new variations (remember n-gen?).
The Wisdom of Crowds tells us that decisions made by groups are often better than decisions made by any single member of the group.
Putting these two ideas together, we can algorithmically generate many new designs and then let our audience act as the environment by creating a market in which our audience determines which design is fittest...