UMBC ebiquity » NYT http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger EBB is the ebiquity research group\\\'s blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive computing, ad hoc networking, multiagent systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the semantic web. As the tides of technology ebb and flow, we hope the good ideas wash up on our beach and the bad ones drift back out to sea. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:50:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 New API to make the New York Times programmable http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/05/26/new-api-to-make-the-new-york-times-programmable/ http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/05/26/new-api-to-make-the-new-york-times-programmable/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 23:06:55 +0000 Tim Finin http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=1514 A post on mediabistro.com, New York Times Joining the Social Networking Fray, says that the New York Times will release an API that “will allow users to ‘mash-up’ the NYT’s data — think layers on Google Maps.” The post quotes Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, as saying that their goal is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data.”

This is good news. The newspaper business continues to lay off staff and offer buyouts as they predict declining revenues. These are talented and trained reporters, photo journalists and editors who do the hard work of discovering and writing the news. What they do can not be, and should not be, crowdsourced. The Times has the resources and experience to do this right. If they can show how to make up for some of the losses with innovations in their online presence, it will help the entire newspaper business by showing a way forward.

(Spotted on ReadWriteWeb)

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