Comments on: Zooming the news: Is Seadragon a new news interface?

By: Seeing the picture » Blog Archive » Choosing Cereal with Seadragon

Seeing the picture » Blog Archive » Choosing Cereal with Seadragon — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:37:20 +0000

[...] I’ve dragged my feet until now, but with the attention that Seadragon has gotten in recent articles, here it is [...]

By: links for 2010-03-09

links for 2010-03-09 — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:05:49 +0000

[...] Zooming the news: Is Seadragon a new news interface? » Nieman Journalism Lab Kevin: Joshua Benton has a great blog post on new possibilities in terms of news site interfaces. There has been very little interface innovation in terms of news sites. Most of the work for the last five years on news sites have been about social functionality. I strongly agree with Benton's last point: "The main problem with contemporary news navigation is discovery, not depth." (tags: news journalism design discovery interface) [...]

By: Martin Langeveld

Martin Langeveld — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:56:12 +0000

Aseem’s link reminds me of the wall-sized 3D browsing interface that Nick Negroponte imagined (if I recall it correctly) in one of his books in the 80s. Given the computing power of the day, nobody could imagine search engines that would return instantaneous results from all over the Web, but once those came along, we got brute force search instead of this kind of interface that can let you explore a topic and then adjacent topics, like browsing the stacks in a library.

I don’t see this quite as useful for news (where you don’t know what you might want to read today) as for general exploration of topics you’re interested in.

By: LaurentMT

LaurentMT — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:17:42 +0000

Hi,

As you wrote, we need some new tools mixing search and discovery since existing search engines don’t take into account the discovery process.
I don’t think zoom will be the complete solution but I really trust it could be a good and important component of a solution.

Here’s a video of a very simple prototype (just scratching the subject) realized to determine cons and pros of zoom in discovery process : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPy8S8DI4LI&feature=player_embedded
You can test this prototype online here : http://www.tactineo.com/labs/xperiments/indoeuropean/IndoEuropeanTree.html

I encourage you to test this prototype and static version of data (on wikipedia). I’ll be really interested by all your feedbacks.

Best regards
Laurent

By: Andrew Gordon

Andrew Gordon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:56:06 +0000

I think it’s incredibly cool and for 5-10 minutes I enjoyed fiddling with different pictures and the link that Aseem commented above. But I don’t see something like the example of having all the old newspapers in one image being more practical than, say, searching with Google-like technology through an archive.

So I have to agree that there’s more need for getting people to the news and making money off these people rather than for shiny technology to distract them with. That said, it is very shiny and I hope there are uses for it that I haven’t thought of.

By: Aseem Kishore

Aseem Kishore — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:36:35 +0000

Great food for thought! But can zoom not also be used to facilitate discovery? http://seadragon.com/snapdragon/ is a simple example of this.

Disclosure is that I work on the Seadragon team. :) Thanks for the feedback!

By: Daniel Gasienica

Daniel Gasienica — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:13:59 +0000

Joshua,

I agree, the future will probably not exactly look like the manifestation of Seadragon et al. today. However, we can learn a lot from their core philosophies:
– The User Never Waits
– The User Is Never Lost

The first step would be to do away with the limits on the size of images, e.g. photos, we can publish online these days. The technology is already here, now it’s all about putting the pieces together and spreading the word:
http://gasi.ch/blog/inline-multiscale-image-replacement/

Cheers,
Daniel

Creator of OpenZoom and former intern at Seadragon & Zoomorama.