"Trust Through Verification"
List of specifics that this app could do
(bold = most important ideas, italic = good ideas, regular = lesser, but still good ideas)
Show validity of information
Rate journalists, their writing, + their reliability/validity
Rate website's reliability/validity
Break the information bubble
Analyze data across websites
Show trends in information/topics (and address other info not being addressed)
Compare/Analyze websites together
Aggregate of a topic across multiple sources
Bring attention to other sides of the same topic
A tailorable experience
Suggest users articles and topics that they might be interested in
Make sense of the hundreds of news websites out there
Visualize information
Gain a well-rounded knowledge of topics
Make reading articles easier/better
Show related articles/supplemental information
Share thoughts on an article better
Add personal thoughts when sharing an article
See trends of what people are sharing
Bring more to the reading experience but not overwhelming
See what people are talking about on specific articles
Thoughts
In looking at everything that is out in the digital world, I realized, damn there's a lot of stuff that's already filling up the space. I did a lot of brainstorming (and a lot of running in circles) to figure out what specifically I wanted to do within the mass already out there. I met with good ol' Marty(in addition to you, Kidwell) to talk things through and get me back on track. I noticed while going through all of these ideas that validity and reliability came up multiple times and it made something Carolyn said when I had coffee with her pop into my mind.
She said that professional writers were frustrated with personal blog publishing platforms like Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr, etc, because it made writing harder for them. There are so many people out there publishing their thoughts and ideas and believe they're right, but there's a very big chance that they're not. Carolyn also mentioned that the day before Joe Paterno died, some random person at a news company tweeted that Paterno had died, when in fact he was still alive. The person who wrote the tweet wasn't anyone well-known in the journalist community, but because they tweeted the statement, Twitter exploded. But why? Why would Twitter explode over one comment one person makes who doesn't even necessarily look like they have the authority to make? Doesn't this example beg for a validity/reliability "meter", if you will? All of the people blogging about goings-on throughout the world can be just as unreliable, so shouldn't they have a validity/reliability "meter", too?
The digital world doesn't need yet another aggregator/RSS feed of news being published, or another damn sharing platform. More than ever, the internet needs help figuring out what specific content amid the hoards of other content is true and valid, and which journalists and media outlets are reliable and honest. So, I want to create an iPad app that helps users assess just that, the validity and reliability of journalists and media outlets. This would compare writers/media outlets/articles with one another and rate them on a list of qualifiers that help figure out their validity, with the added addition of users adding their own ratings and comments on them. All in search of the most reliable content in world overrun with uncited, unreliable, amateur journalists and media outlets.
shortlink: http://ianarthur.info/yd5x1f
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