Makes me think that increasingly the problems in this world aren't information investigation problems, but information management/digest/presentation problems.
Obama, for instance, said today that we'd never had an oil spill of this kind in the gulf before (but that 'it just takes one...'). I'm not blaming him. Nor am I necessarily blaming reporters for connecting this earlier.
But pretty much all of our modern problems can be solved much faster if the information is managed and presented to people more efficiently. I know, in that sense, I may be preachin' to the choir.
It just makes me think that a lot of these problems go away with better management, presentation (and ultimately understanding) of historical data.
Context is a killer. You would think with 24-hour news networks, the history of similar events would get reported so some context could be given for the current event. It hasn't happened. Heck, take a look at the time devoted to "cute girl kidnapped"-stories versus the deliberations of the Supreme Court. I wonder which one will affect my life more.
Given all the information, the killer app will be something that allows us to see the history and put an event in context. I think it will pay, just look at how people start clicking links at TV Tropes or Wikipedia and don't stop.
They were talking about this spill on NPR the week the spill came out. There are plenty of news outlets doing good journalism and it would seem that you yourself are not paying any attention to them. So stop blaming the media.
In any case, this disaster isn't over yet, and we don't have good enough figures to say with any certainty that this is smaller than the Ixtoc spill.
I was specifically referring to the 24-hour news networks, and NPR is not a 24-hour news service (heck, there is no local NPR station). So, I will continue to believe those networks don't provide history / context or for that matter, know what will have the largest effect on the listener.
It's not so much that the information isn't there, it is that it still isn't there in a way that you can get at the relevant data quickly enough.
Keyword searches are bad for stuff like this, they'll turn up tons of irrelevant information. The needles are there but they'll be buried in a haystack of lesser size than the original one, but still formidable enough to make sifting through it a non-trivial task.
It's so hard to learn about oil spills. You'd have to go to wikipedia or google and type in "oil spill". Then you need to engage in the arduous process of scrolling down:
How about this US Bureau of Land management report from 1982 which cites the size of the Ixtoc I spill as 3-5 million barrels (linked as a reference on the wiki entry):
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PI/PDFImages/ESPIS/3/3930.pdf
Or a NOAA incident report which provides duration and flow rate estimates for the spill which translate to the same total spill size estimates as other sources (3+ million barrels):
http://www.incidentnews.gov/incident/6250
Obama, for instance, said today that we'd never had an oil spill of this kind in the gulf before (but that 'it just takes one...'). I'm not blaming him. Nor am I necessarily blaming reporters for connecting this earlier.
But pretty much all of our modern problems can be solved much faster if the information is managed and presented to people more efficiently. I know, in that sense, I may be preachin' to the choir.
It just makes me think that a lot of these problems go away with better management, presentation (and ultimately understanding) of historical data.