SuperNews: Multiple feeds for multiple views

The IBM intranet hosts a range of news " feeds, " or distribution services, from internal and external sources. To read the news of the day, users need to visit a number of Web sites, each with a different categorization, navigational structure, and layout. Transfer of technology from the MIT Media Laboratory to IBM enabled the design of SuperNews, a prototype application that aimed to improve IBM employees' experience in reading the news. SuperNews merged heterogeneous news feeds and presented a consistent interface to users. Users could choose to read news on the Web, in e-mail, or as engaging visualizations. Using text processing technology, SuperNews discovered meta-information in articles and created new ways to browse the news collection. SuperNews also allowed users to publish their own columns, as well as annotate and recommend articles to their colleagues. Starting with a range of uncoordinated feeds, SuperNews transformed the solitary reading of news into an engaging and visually appealing community experience. H ow do individuals at IBM grasp what is happening in this company of more than 300000 em-ployees? How does one keep track of industry news, or the way the media portrays IBM? In the first years of the IBM intranet, employees needed to visit many Web sites with different navigation styles and cat-egorization schemes to get the " big picture. " External and internal news, official reports, and opinions on one topic were spread across the intranet and difficult to find or compare. Until recently, one reason for such a heterogeneous environment was the lack of standards. Content providers on the IBM intranet used proprietary data formats and their own tools, without observing a common news article format or a standard meta-tagging schema. Since Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1 has emerged as the industry standard for content encoding , providers can begin to agree on a common vocabulary to describe the structure and content of news articles. The lack of collaboration among content providers has further prolonged the disparate IBM news sites. Coordination among content providers to standardize formats and tools is difficult because most operate in a production environment. Their priority is to generate accurate and timely content, not to introduce changes that might disrupt critical daily operations. Long-term improvements easily become second priority. Each content provider on the IBM intranet has also traditionally targeted a specific audience and delivery mechanism. Until recently, news was not considered a reusable …