A thought occurred to me late last night. I was doing some research for an article I'm writing, and like all other good internet users, I went to Google.com to start. My particular article was on ways to protect your laptop but I struggled on Google.com to find a relevant website I could use as a springboard for the rest of the story. I then turned to my second favorite source for any type of research, digg.com. With in a few minutes I had some really specific articles that I was able to draw from for my own story and I've been working on the first draft ever since.
Then the innovation kicked in. What if we developed a tool or set of protocols to help journalists, especially citizen journalists, do better and more thorough research online through the use of user submitted community news websites and social bookmarking pages? Digg, Furl, Newsvine, del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, I could go on for a while, but there is a plethora of useful article, information, how-tos, and other stories (the majority of which never make it to the front pages of the previously named websites) that remain hidden from most of the public because of their lack of popularity.
I envision this tool as more of a Lexus Nexus type resource where through a specific Boolean search string the user is presented with a list of relevant results. Obviously instead of searching every major journal, magazine, newspaper, and other legitimate print source our tool would instead rely on the power of searching "crowd sourced" material which can still just as interesting, truthful, and useful. I also see such a tool being useful to more professional news organizations, especially in terms of searching more tech and detail related stories, as well as to users who frequently visit such sites.
Does something like this currently exist to anyone's knowledge? Would you find such a tool useful for either your own browsing or for researching an article, paper, or other work? Please comment if you think this is a good idea. Thanks.
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