“You can access information about a location, but it’s still at your desk. The real revolution will come when this information can be accessed completely and easily from a mobile device, while you’re at that location.”

“The next big thing is to organize, tag, and link information to a specific location. Think of the last time you were at a national park. It’s a very good possibility that the only information you had about the park fit on a tri-fold paper that you picked up at the visitor’s station. In the information age, how is this acceptable?”

“Instead, imagine visiting the park where hundreds of visitors have linked information to specific locations. You have the architect of the visitor’s center who tells you the history of the building. As you move around the park you access information provided by geologists, geographers, botanists, biologists, environmental scientists, conservationists, hiking enthusiasts, bikers, etc. etc. etc. The information is useful because it’s relevant to the location. And it becomes manageable in the same way that the 10s of millions of pictures on flickr have become manageable, through tagging.”

• “…we exceeded 9 million unique visitors, which is a 141% increase in monthly visitors in a single quarter.”
• “…the majority of our page views now are no longer just in real-time keyword or blog search, as would have been the case just six months ago, but also in our tagged media pages.”

“…more fundamental shifts need to happen for newspaper companies to remain essential sources of information for their communities. One of those important shifts is: Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.
Conditioned by decades of an established style of journalism, newspaper journalists tend to see their primary role thusly:

• Collect information
• Write a newspaper story

The problem here is that, for many types of news and information, newspaper stories don’t cut it anymore.”

He would prefer to see more structured information: giving the reader the facts of a situation, along with links to comparable data that is collected for all stories. For instance, if an article speaks to a local fire, you can link to information about “… date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive — with the details of previous fires.”

Adrian has an intriguing point of view on many of these issues, and while extreme in some cases, it would be a powerful way to harness the power of the web to expand journalisms core mission.

Update: Techdirt adds their take:

“While some journalists may protest this attempt to “chunkify” their stories, there’s nothing in this process that needs to take anything away from their traditional journalism. The story is still filed and is still important. What the additional data (or the classification/categorization of that data) does is open up a goldmine of additional information and services a newspaper can provide.”

Here is the latest example for Google. They have a huge image database, and would like to make it more searchable by tagging each image. This is a huge task. Computers may not be up to the job, and it would be unreasonable to pay people to tag millions of photos. So they just launched Google Image Labeler.

It is a GAME where you are paired with an anonymous partner. Each of you are shown an image, and have a set time limit to try to tag it. If you both agree on a tag, you get points.

For Google, they simply need to crunch the data, calculating how many similar tags a photo received. The random pairing of you and a partner means you can’t play the sytem and try to tag things incorrectly. Brilliant.

Update: Search Engine Watch has further details, explaining that the game was licensed from Luis von Ahn. It also does a comparison with Flickr.

“…tags are crap. I tried to get analysts to do it, and it didn’t work (good luck with reporters). The reasons are that “your taxonomy isn’t my taxonomy” and it requires a discipline that most people don’t naturally have.”

And a link to the original post that Jeff cites: David Weinberger’s Future of News. Among the gems in this piece:

“Already, he says, journalism is becoming a matter of filling in forms and then letting computers build the story.”

And…

“Rabble says that more journalists work as PR people than journalists.”