NYT reporting:
It’s been nearly half a century since the days of The Kingdom and the Power, and as the Times has sped from a daily to an hourly to a minute-by-minute miracle, the divides that have distinguished the paper from the people it serves have been steadily dissolving. The storytelling apparatus housed at 620 8th Avenue still has walls around it, definitely, but those walls are becoming increasingly transparent. And the latest evidence of that is beta620, the long-awaited website the Times just launched for the purpose of showcasing — and, significantly, soliciting feedback about — experimental projects for NYTimes.com.
“It’s all about spurring innovation — coming up with ideas that no one has thought of before, and having a place for them,” says Marc Frons, the Times’ CTO for digital operations. And not just innovation, but “continuous innovation.” The hope is that, in highlighting experiments as they evolve — and in providing a shared space for shaping their evolution — beta620 will be a place where developers, designers, readers, journalists, and pretty much anyone with an interest in the Times can engage in an ongoing conversation about its future. And about, specifically, the tools that will shape that future.
“We want to make it a very participatory site,” Frons told me, “as well as a showcase for our new toys.”
Some of those toys include: TimesInstant, an app that uses the Times’ Article Search API to produce search returns, Google-style, as users type; the Community Hub, a dashboard featuring stats on users’ Times-based comment history; The Buzz, a graphical overlay that visualizes articles’ social media stats; Longitude, an app that uses Linked Open Data to produce an interactive, geographically-oriented map of the day’s news; and the Smart Search Bar, a within-the-homepage search functionality that provides semantically-aware returns. (There’s also, less significantly but just as awesomely, an HTML5-based crossword web app.)
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-kingdom-and-the-tower-nyt-launches-beta620-a-user-friendly-testing-ground-for-new-projects
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