Amy Webb of Webbmedia took the Journalism Interactive conference through five emerging technology trends for academia.
Gestural technology came first: a Wacom device that digitised drawing done on paper, Livescribe pens that played back the audio recorded alongside interview notes and ran OCR over the handwriting, the New York Times magic mirror, and the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment. Her advice to the professors in the room was to get students treating every surface as a potential storytelling tool.
Refined search was second. Google returned far too many results, so metadata mattered: students needed to learn to write the keywords that let readers find their work. She demonstrated Helioid, which colour-coded results, Greplin, which searched a person’s own Gmail, Twitter and Facebook data, and Knodes, then in closed beta. Many news organisations had simply given up on search, she said, when they could be offering readers several search options with structured results.
Social proximity networks followed: Sonar and NerdNearby surfaced nearby people connected to you. Then holistic content experiences built across platforms rather than retold on each, from the New York Public Library’s Biblion project to Al Gore’s Our Choice as an iPad book.
Face and iris recognition closed the session, via Face.com and its API. Photographs could be tagged by matching Facebook profiles, police in Rio de Janeiro were preparing to wear scanning cameras for the 2014 World Cup, and candidates’ expressions in televised debates could be tracked against key moments. “These are wonderful reporting tools,” Webb said, “but we have to be responsible about their use.”