Online publishers are struggling to move from a traditional business to consumer
model to an online community model based on social networks.
The Scanmine technology is addressing the following challenges facing the
online media industry.
Providing a community news service
Increased demand for productivity in the media industry hurts the coverage of areas like local news and narrow,
vertical news topics. This leaves the traditional media organizations vulnarable as social networks
and popular bloggers moves in to fill the void.
Providing an all-inclusive news service
Most online publications are still focusing solely on their own content, failing to provide a
one stop shop all inclusive news service in fear of loosing the reader to other
publications. This void will be filled by news aggregators.
Providing a personalized news service
The reader wants a personalized news service. A business to consumer model where publishers decides
what you should read fails to provide such a service.
Providing news in social networks
Social networks thrive on updated, relevant and personalized news.
However, relevant information should not be limited to the news from within the community itself.
Scanmine has the technology to help acheive these goals.
Helping online publishers increase productivity and service
The Scanmine research project has focused on automating online publishing based on
large scale news aggregation.
The production cycle
Input to the production process is an initial collection of sources, publishing policies and
layout and design (based on templates). Output is online newspapers, completely automated.
Automated Publish Policies
Human evaluation and intelligance cannot be replaced by automated processes, but the Scanmine technology
serves as a tool in creating a sustainable and highly scalable and efficient revenue model for online publishing.
Reducing time spent on churnalism
By providing intelligence and automated publish policies, the time spent
on "churnalism" (trivial production of news content based on news aggregation from external sources,
press releases and wire stories) can be reduced. This frees up time for journalists to spend on high
quality investigative journalism. Consequently, the Scanmine technology is both a productivity
enhancement tool and way to provide a more comprehensive news service.
News Aggregators
News aggregators, like Google News, provide a one stop shop service for news, but stops short of
providing an all-included news service for more specific topics and communities.
Although more news is out there, as the coverage
from an increasing number of sources deepends, quality, integrity and
other issues obscures the ability to provide a reliable news service. Furthermore, trying to
adapt the news flow to individual preferences increases the complexity and
work load faced by online publishers.
As an example, while Google News in Norway collects news from a few hundred news sources,
Scanmine aggregates news from more than 20.000, covering all areas of society
(government, industries, special interest groups, etc.) down to individual bloggers, schools, etc.
Controlling the content
As third party content usually are protected by copyright laws, the technology also includes
various mechanisms for reducing and controlling the publication of third party content in
line with the fair use act in the U.S. and similar provisions in other countries, thus allowing a global
adaptable approach to online publishing.
