The first definitive story from the New York Times on the Judith Miller/ Valerie Plame/ Scooter Libby situation is the perfect illustration of Annotated New York Times. Being such an NYT freak, I thought I would constantly be reading it all of the time, but I almost never look at it.
Briefly, the Annotated NYT is a virtual weblog that tracks stories from the NYT and blog posts that reference those stories, allowing you to easily consume the original story and the written reactions to it in one interface.
Here’s how Blogrunner describes what they do in general:
- BlogRunner tracks breaking news stories and blog conversations as they propagate across the web
- BlogRunner groups related weblog posts for easy navigation through the blogosphere
- BlogRunner integrates mainstream media articles with blog commentary to form conversations that provide feedback on the mainstream media
The reason I find that I rarely read the Annotated NYT is that I don’t care what people think all that much. The meta-conversation isn’t as interesting to me as the original text itself.
But the Judith Miller story is different for me– the way that people are reacting to the explanations and history of her jailing and things that led up to it are interesting to me. And I believe this reaction will further affect how the story pans out in the end. The "chatter" about the story can almost serve as something of a prediction market (more on them later).
The Annotated NYT is way more effective than multiple searches on Technorati or Feedster because it agreggates with a smite more focus. I’m not exactly sure how they get it done from a technical point of view, but I’m guessing it has to do with searching for tags, keywords, and links that reference the story itself. I am going to look further into it.