Online Journalism Blog: ‘Wolfram Alpha for journalists’
Paul Bradshaw takes a look at new seach engine (or computational knowledge engine) Wolfram Alpha, with a journalist’s hat on.
Bradshaw finds, for example: “From a journalistic perspective, [some of its] features are a time-saver if you don’t fancy browsing through almanacs and biographies for the same facts. But that’s it. And it’s not clear where the information is coming from or how accurate it is (Karen Blakeman, whose review is worth reading, told me it gets some things wrong, ‘even chemical structures’) – that’s the advantage of Google or Wikipedia: you can evaluate the credibility of the source relatively intuitively; Wolfram, however, presents itself as the source, and where links are given in ‘Source Information’ these are often just to homepages.”
Similar posts:
- Hitwise: ‘Guardian receives more traffic from Twitter than competitors’
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- SplinterNet: How to get to the top of Google News
- MediaShift: Why news organisations should use ‘linked data’
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – online writing tools from Wolfram Alpha
