Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at the City University of New York writes a very interesting article in today’s Media Guardian - The end of the story as we know it - in which he muses about conventional newspaper articles - print and digital - proving inadequate in covering the complex news happening today. This is especially true now when the story’s as big as the current financial crisis and the not-somuch-looming-as-already-here recession. This got me thinking that what he has to say is relevant beyond the sphere of conventional journalism, and touches on the what all organisations - whatever their sector - need to think about as part of their communications mix.

He refers to an essay by Meg Hourihan (of Pyra Labs that became Blogger) that argued the atomic unit of digital media is no longer the publication, section, page or article, but the blog post of which there may be millions. He explains that having to sift these isn’t enough to work as an organising principle for informing, and that we need “order atop” these countless atoms. The most important tool for creating this order atop is the link. “The link becomes as important as the brand in news”.

However, links by themselves are not enough, and we need a structure, a landscape - or as he puts it “magnetic poles” - to gather news around and to organise it. Newspapers traditionally use topics, but these are usually just lists of their own content and designed for Google’s SEO, not specifically to help or attract the audience. What’s needed is more than these topic pages that essentially act as an archive.

What would be attractive is a resource that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will be a new form of aggregator mash-up - bringing together articles, blogs, wiki’s in a way that treats topics as ongoing, cumulative processes of learning. These ideas remind me of some work we did a few years ago for the National Enterprise Workflow Project for the UK government, where we created “learning logs” (this was before Blogs became mainstream) that encouraged recording of learning, structured that information and provided tools to dig and search it, and ultimately lead to the creation of the Workflow Toolkit. Extending those ideas by mashing-up social web services such as blogs, twitter feeds, wiki’s and newsfeeds, but with a “human” topic curator could be a good start.

Jeff Jarvis suggests a few improbable names for such an interactive aggregating mash-up - Topic Table, Beat Bliki, or News Brain. I think I prefer our original name - Learning Logs, or maybe Learning Blogs - but I’m open to suggestions!

As you may know, earlier this month the Insiteability team headed to Brighton for the annual dConstruct Conference. What is ‘dConstruct’? As they put it, it’s “the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.” (How could we refuse?)

What stood out for me was the opening key-note, by New Yorker Steven Johnson, much of which focused on his 2004 book The Ghost Map.

Johnson took us back to London in 1854 and the city’s most deadly outbreak of cholera. This was a time when convention followed the “miasma theory”, that disease was spread through the sort of foul-smelling air that was common in London at the time.

The heroes of Johnson’s story are the local doctor, John Snow, and Vicar, Henry Whitehead. Snow challenged the thinking of the time by positing that cholera was in fact water-borne. Helped by Whitehead - a man well connected to the community around Soho hit by the outbreak (what Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point referred to as a connector) - Snow was able to map the incidence of cholera and tie it back to a particular water pump.

This mapping of disease to locality was, suggests, Johnson, one of the first occasions where data was effectively “mashed” with a geographic representation of the area affected. Looked at through the prism of Web 2.0 concepts, this looks rather trendy: different technologies and knowledge sources being shared together to give new ways of looking at the world - an emergent property that wouldn’t have been possible left to the individual elements.

If you’ve followed Insiteability’s own work in recent times you’ll know about some of our own innovative mash-ups, particularly those done with faith communities - see here how we’ve built a ‘virtual diocese’ for Westminster. What’s interesting about Steven Johnson’s work is the way his Internet company, Outside.In, now works on solutions to create the “hyper-local” web - a means by which the buzz of Internet traffic (newsfeeds, blogs, web pages) linked to particular localities can be picked up and displayed, emailed or otherwise used to alert registered users.

The key service here is Outside.In’s Radar - as the website puts it, something that gives a “whole new way of seeing the world around you”. Sounds good, and something we’re currently looking into to extend our own services.

How might this help people in the UK, especially our Third Sector clients? Imagine, for a start, you’re a community organiser, perhaps a volunteer worker in a particular neighbourhood, or maybe a social worker or even a priest. You’re keen to have your ear to the ground to know what people are talking about - perhaps at that very moment. Web tools like Radar can bring that to you. The Internet may well be great in making the world a smaller place, but sometimes you want to focus like a laser beam on the pulse of your local community.

Imagine being a local ‘connector’, working the social networks in your community, supported by the hyper-local web; just think of the power that might bring to you. What a wonderful world (wide web)!