The conversation around our Future of Context panel at SXSW could not have been better. The session was extraordinarily well-blogged and well-tweeted, and the discussion afterwards – on this site and elsewhere – has been wonderfully thought-provoking. In case you missed it, here’s a round-up:

Capturing the session

• Full audio of the session is available in excellent quality on the SXSW site.
• You can read or download the full archive of #futureofcontext tweets for real-time reactions and notes. (Thanks, @ChannelYush!)
• Elise Hu of the Texas Tribune wrote a fantastic summary of the session.
• Steve Myers of the Poynter Institute wrote the definitive liveblog of the session.

Takeaways

• Michelle McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center added some insights to the discussion.
• Jeremy Littau of Lehigh University takes the conversation in a provocative new direction, weaving it in with ideas about transmedia storytelling and gaming.
• Joey Baker of Meraki started a great thread about the idea of enabling users to follow topics.
• Stijn Debrouwere has laid out what might be the definitive depiction of a better classification system for news.
• Rex Hammock of Hammock, Inc., was especially taken with the possibilities suggested by software like Apture.

Aftermatter

• Jay Rosen wrote a spectacular list of 10 elements that went into the planning for the Future of Context session to make it successful.

The discussion continues here and over the #futureofcontext hashtag on Twitter.

That includes journalism utilizing gaming psychology in delivery. If we grant that we should be using Topics instead of stories as the atom of news, its easy to see how a gaming element can be introduced around how people follow topics.

An example
A person follows the Topic Barack Obama in 2005 to earn 5 points. When Obama announces presidential candidacy he’s worth 10, 20 when he gets the nomination and as president, perhaps 40. Or… make it a business: points are worth cents.
Either way, the system rewards users for being “in-the-know.” Users could also get points when the read the updates to a Topic, or assist in crowdsourcing, or post a popular comment, or share a topic.
It’s about incentive
As Howard Weaver pointed out , what’s missing from consuming news is incentive. People are incentivized to gift a virtual beer to their friends but not to participate with news. We need to replace the “hard news is eating your wheaties” metaphor with “news is just information – it’s a game to see how much you know about what you care about.” (Or something much more cleverly worded.)

This post adapted from my comment at jliattu.net .

Here’s the thing. We never give someone a pass on remarks. Any utterance, as opposed to any visual, is significant in some way, even if it is only a slip of the tongue or a mispronounced word. Both are revelatory.

I proffer this story as a way to begin a discussion of the different epistemological contexts visual and verbal provide. (I have another example for video–which raises in my opinion a different problem as “context”–but enough for now.)

With just a little more effort on behalf of the writer, it’s easy to specify real relationships in familiar triplets: critiques , contains an interview with , revolves around .

This information could be used to make search queries more intelligent, and to make sure topic pages are more than just link dumps that leave the reader figuring out how exactly the linked content relates to the topic at hand.

The New York Times already splits up its tags into four categories:

• (Des) = subject descriptor/heading
• (Per) = person
• (Geo) = geographic location
• (Org) = organization

Let’s take that system one step further and instead of just splitting up tags into different categories of tags, treat persons not like tags but like persons. Tags are just labels, persons have names, birth dates, profile pictures, things they’ve said (quotes), personal websites and so on. Ditto for organizations, locations and events.

I know of no CMS that supports this out of the box, which is understandable because being able to say “this sorta relates to that” is sufficient for most intents and purposes. It just doesn’t cut it for news websites, though.

I posted a longer set of thoughts on my blog, but I am going to post the main thoughts as follows since my goal here isn’t to steal Web traffic or move the discussion.

What I want to talk about is gaming and news context, because it was the big takeaway I got from this discussion. My mind was already starting to turn as I came to SXSW thanks to my use of Foursquare, but after sitting in on a great panel about transmedia storytelling I was over the edge. Harris mentioned game mechanics in the presentation of news, and Thompson riffed on that a bit by talking about ways we can let users “level up” (like Super Mario Bros …. appealing to my generation!) as they go through the news and context process.

Thompson later talked about the idea of a journalist on a “hero’s quest,” where they take a big idea topic and set about trying to solve it. My mind was already teeming at that point. He might have been thinking Lord of the Rings, but I was already going Legend of Zelda.

I’ve covered some of this before on my blog as it relates to Foursquare, and some of the ideas come from my colleague Bob Britten. But the essence is this: My generation, in particular, is conditioned toward gaming that is centered on collecting things. It’s a reason why Foursquare is genius. Badges and mayorships are trivial status symbols in the larger user network, but they mean something to the users. And it keeps us coming back. Farmville is kind of an idiotic game in terms of sheer gameplay, but there’s a reason why they passed 80 million users last month. It isn’t the desire to plant sugar beets. Imagine if newspapers in the U.S. had an audience of that size that was this loyal.

This is why I don’t buy the “I don’t have time for the news” excuse people give in surveys. If news execs take that at face value then they deserve their fate. The audience is telling them they’d rather plow their fake farm than read the news. And I don’t blame the audience for this, really. A contextless news environment is partially to blame.

So, gaming. I sat in on a few video gaming sessions at SXSWi and was struck by how attuned programmers are toward what it takes to keep the user’s attention. The session I attended on transmedia stories (“The 10-Minute Transmedia Experience”) was the one that broke down the walls in my mind. Transmedia, in a nutshell, incorporates a multiplatform searching game into an overall narrative that helps tell the story. They walked us through a neat example that started with a “trip down the rabbit hole” at a Web site the speakers had designed. From there we had clues to call a number, which took us to another Web site, then YouTube video, then had us search Google and email the answer to a problem to an email address set up by the storyteller. It was interesting trying to figure out the clues and solve the problems.

This is the kind of stuff they do in marketing, and the speakers cited promotions such as the campaign for The Dark Knight as an example. About 15 minutes in, Sanden Totten of Minnesota Public Radio asked the question I’d been queueing to ask: Has this been done in journalism? The speakers’ answer was no, but they thought it would work well. The hashtag discussion on Twitter blew up from there, and the journalism folks in the room caught fire (we exchanged cards afterward as well). Clearly the pot had been stirred.

Which brings me back to the excellent panel and discussion that happened today with Thompson, Harris, and Rosen. I’m not proposing that we make transmedia the centerpiece of any work toward context, but I think it could be a piece of this and certainly is a worthy area for experimentation.

The way I envision it is to create some sort of social gaming experience that fills in the gaps. Want to fill the audience in on why health care costs so much? Why not an audience scavenger hunt that takes them through insurance companies, doctors, service providers, employers who pay premiums, and such? Or why not a Farmville type of game run in a hospital where users have to try and actually bend the cost curve themselves lest they go bankrupt, a situation that allows them to experiment with different health care systems so they can see the cause and effect of the choices we make as a society (in terms of patient coverage, costs, profits, etc? If Mafia Wars on Facebook can take off, surely this could.

And how do they make these choices along the way? With blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding.

So that’s where I am, and I realize that was a long post with some halfway-developed ideas. This is really the first time I’ve put down some synthesized thoughts about what I’ve been pondering here in Austin. But the gist of what I’m trying to say here is that I’m getting the sense that journalism is thinking about the idea of “story” way too narrowly. The missing link here is context. Transmedia is made for this type of storytelling mode.

Allow users to build a profile of the news they care about. In the same way we choose twitter followers we could choose news topics. These would be broadly specific, e.g. Haiti Earthquake, War in Iraq, March Madness etc…

Each topic would remember the last time you logged in and quickly summarize the news since then. In addition, it would have a wikipedia-like entry (only through in a lot more graphics and interactivity) to summarize the entire event.

Naturally this is a gross simplification of the solution. The elegantly titled Read State Problemhasn’t been solved, and the level to which we can allow the community to edit would have to be determined.

I’m extremely excited by this site and the awareness that’s been generated around this concept. I’ve been working (read:mulling) on this very idea framed differently for several months now and just haven’t had the time to pull it all together into one post.

Voice wasn’t really addressed by anyone at the panel. Matt asked, where does Wikipedia fall down? And this is one area: by design, it lacks personal voice.

So much of contextual info is provided as footnotes, aftermatter, backstory. As such it lacks personality and ends up being easily ignored by the people who need it most.

The power of everyone’s favorite example, the This American Life “Pool of Money” piece, lies in the strong personal voice its storytelling uses.

How do we give the frame of a story the compelling personality of a great storyteller’s voice? We need to make the footnotes sing and dance. The idea of “object-oriented storytelling” is great, but we have to figure out how the storyteller’s voice survives the transformation into separate objects.

The answer is yes to both. Context comes before and after content. In this short post, I will argue that you need to have context prior to, and following your quest for content.

First, you have to set the context for which content will be harvested. It’s like putting the train on the rails before it can go in a straight line. You need to define the thematic elements relating to the domain you are interested in. This could be keywords, people to follow, hashtags, sources, etc. This context guides the content and frames it.

Then, after you receive the content, you need to enrich it with taxonomical context. That’s also referred to as semantic extraction. And I will argue that one needs to develop that taxonomy first, and then let the machine automatically tag the content against the taxonomy.

I’m pleased that you are discussing this important topic, as I’ve also been involved in applying it since mid-2008. At Eqentia, we have been surrounding content with context across various subject areas which we call “vertical news environment”. We pick a big issue or complex topic (e.g. “The Future of News”), build a taxonomy around it, harvest the right content for it, and contextually tag it accordingly.

In the current fast and furious environment of real-time news streams where each one of us is also a content-emitting machine, content will need to become more and contextual.

For the consumers of news, the right content within the right context offers a jackpot of insights and productivity.

Like “truth,” “news” is a plural noun.

I remember reading about an old press baron who insisted on asking editors, “Are there any news?” until finally one replied, “No, sir, not a single damned new.”

The grammar doesn’t matter much, but it’s important to remember that news indeed is many things, not one.

News is a river, flowing past us in the direction of time, constantly changing. As Native American lore reminds us, “No man can step into the same river twice.”

News is likewise a process, a complex set of relationships between events and personalities that makes better sense when understood in context. What happened before? What is happening elsewhere at the same time? What are the related effects? What will happen over there if this happens here? Why?

Furthermore, what once was the pronouncement of news has become a conversation about it. Discussions of what events mean or what issues are legitimate are no long subsidiary to the process of determining news; they are an integral part of it.

In my salad days journalists relied on one tool to handle it all – the constantly changing river of news as well as the intricate web of process and relationships. Our tool was the story, a finite prose narrative anchored to one spot in time – all the news we could gather and report by midnight, more or less. Compared to the alternatives of the day, it was a rich and powerful source of information.

Compared to the alternatives today, it’s not.

While narrative prose will always play a central role in human communication, the future of public service journalism does not reside with “the story.” Serving news audiences today demands the ability to deliver information that is, as Matt Thompson says, “both timelier and more timeless.”

Jeff Jarvis is postulating that the new “building block of journalism” is the topic, meaning a blog or site “that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering.” That seems sufficiently broad to embrace much of what we need to be doing. Matt is taking a deeper and more nuanced view of the same questions and comes to some well-supported, sweeping conclusions. Like this:

“I think we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism. We’ve spoken for years about the radical evolution that must take place, but I think our ideas are only now matching our ambitions. In recent years, our craft has gotten quicker and glitzier and slightly more in touch, but all our progress has been incremental. Now, the paradigm shift is finally at hand …”

In a popular book in 2000, Malcolm Gladwell introduced us to the notion of the “tipping point” – which he described as “the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” – and that’s where I see the metamorphosis of news and journalism today.

To be honest, the basic direction of news in a digital, networked world has been apparent for more than a decade, but until recently its unstoppable momentum wasn’t obvious enough to command attention.

After the graphical browser appeared and opened the world wide web to a global audience in the mid-1990s, many predicated its inevitable ascendancy. But in March 2000 the “dot com bubble” burst in a spectacular display of business failure, allowing many old-school journalism decision makers to breath a sign of relief and exhale a string of I-told-you-sos. As a result, the steady Darwinian progress of online companies continued somewhat under the radar while traditional media companies not only survived, but prospered. Newspapers, for example, showed year-over-year revenue growth well into 2006 and operated at elevated profit margins well beyond that.

Unsurprisingly, that all conspired to lull traditional news organizations into more complacency than now seems healthy. (To be fair, there was less the big organizations could have done than today’s critics acknowledge, but little good will come from rehashing those tired arguments). Today this sea change in audience and delivery tools is coupled with an epochal economic meltdown, and the result is an environment traditional news organizations will find painful in the best case.

So be it. The need for honest public service journalism – the kind that speaks the truth to power, puts tools in the hands of citizens, builds community – is more urgent than ever. As the events accelerate, our need for reliable, independent information grows. When your competitor has access to deep information resources, you need even more. Databases, open archival records, real-time reporting, deeply grounded analysis, and unfettered debate will combine to deliver a richer experience than any single story or disembodied report. Platforms (mobile, web-based, e-ink) and media (text, video, voice) will matter only as options for the audience to sort out.

Kevin Kelly’s brilliant New Rules for the New Economy outlined in 1998 how an economy based on bits rather than atoms – on abundance, not scarcity – would change the rules. Now he’s boiled it down either further: Where Attention Flows, Money Follows.

Luckily for us, many of the ways in which you can keep attention flowing are right up our alley. We can explore more about that soon.