I was just thinking about this today because of the Germanwings crash. What if instead of a news article you were presented with a page which somehow led you through a knowledge graph of the topic based on questions or actions by the reader?
When news is just breaking there would obviously be lots of dead ends, but perhaps if people kept inputting the same sort of question it would get flagged and become more important as the story develops. For example in the case of the plane crash, after hearing the initial reports of the pilot being locked out my immediate thoughts were:
- What is the lock mechanism like? Can the door be opened with force?
- How is the lock controlled?
- How is the altitude for autopilot set? Is it easy to set 96 feet instead of 9600 feet?
- Is there any record of the copilot's vitals before the crash?
- Why wasn't there another person in the cabin while the pilot stepped out?
...and so on. Some of these were answered, but the only way to really get the information is to read (or listen to) the same kind of reports over and over, hoping for new information and trying not to mistake an over-eager rephrasing as new facts.
What would be great is if I could see a list of topics, select one, and then either highlight sections/tags to follow up on, submit a question, or follow a link to an existing question. The UX here would be a very interesting study I think.
Inform> Scream expletives at reporter
That's not a verb I recognize.
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The simplest way to do this would probably be to get a team of interns to trawl the net looking for what people are talking about after a story breaks (such as top voted Reddit comments), rephrasing them as necessary, and then turning them into tags which people reading the story can then subscribe to. Readers could select existing ones or see them fuzzy completed as they input their own questions. Hmmm.