Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard just coined a new term, ““Holovaty’s Law”, that I really like. Well, I believe he coined it because Google turns up no results for “Holovaty’s Law”.
The post linked as Holovaty’s Law, by the way, is a classic. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in news and journalism at all, you need to.
Let me take the concept and run a little further with it. And thanks to Benton, the law already has it’s first corollary!
- Theorem: Holovaty’s (First) Law of Online News
- Adding structure to information makes it more valuable
- 1st Corollary
- Adding structure to comments generates interesting data
Thoughts? Refinements? Other corollaries?
It seems like there’s a dearth of math geeks interested in journalism. Searches for “law of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online journalism”, and “law of online journalism” all turn up nothing.
Could you clarify on how you define “structured data”?
October 27th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Scratch that, I read the blog post you linked to. Check out Freebase. I think are sets of structured data which can be built from content, but difficulty isn’t in determining what those data sets are but rather how they should be displayed.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Notes from a Teacher - Monday squibs (illness edition) says:
[...] Holovaty’s Law of Online News. Joshua Benton’s original article dealt with comments and gave us the first corollary to Holovaty’s Law, which Albert Sun provides, along with the theorem. [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Another idea (and potential corollary): adding structured data about how the news was reported increases the transparency of the media organization. This structured data could include story notes, sources, etc.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
This is great, I can’t wait for the next part.
November 21st, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Second corollary? The value of structured information is realized mostly in the future, not the present. (More here. From back in the day!)
April 28th, 2009 at 2:26 am