CRAIG SILVERMAN

Like people who can’t help asking for health advice from any doctor they meet, journalists who recognize me as the Regret the Error guy usually have two questions on their mind. I view these queries as a reward for spending six years researching, tracking and reporting on press errors and accuracy. First, they want to know the worst media mistake ever (define your criteria, and I can give you an answer); second, they want to know how to prevent factual errors.

The latter is a question I love to get, but the answer is anything but straightforward. That’s why I’m excited to start this every-other-Friday column for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, and why I don’t worry about running out of material.

That doesn’t mean I can do it on my own. I hope all of you will add comments that share tips and advice for achieving accuracy in business reporting. I hope to combine my knowledge of accuracy and error prevention with the specific expertise of business journalists. It’s going to be a team effort.

I’ll kick things off by sharing three core pieces of an error-prevention strategy ...

The above is an excerpt from the first edition of the new twice-monthly column I am writing for the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism. I'll be sharing tips and advice to help business reporters avoid mistakes.

Lately, I’ve been exploring the idea of where the web will go next, and as a result, have been talking to many folks. Spivack has been in the web’s trenches for a very long time, and has always had a fairly unique view of the Internet. He and I started talking about the future of the Internet and how it relates to society in general. The conversation that followed centered on Spivack’s core argument that 21st century will be about the Now.

Spivack argued that prior to the 20th century, society was generally preoccupied with the past, studying history and reflecting on the past. In the 20th century, we became obsessed with the future, reflected in the furious pace of inventions and social obsession with science fiction through the decades. However, the 21st century so far is about the present.

An interesting argument that makes a lot of sense. Of course, my Now quickly becomes my immediate past and then it's my yesterday and my years ago... I guess I'm saying that a focus on Now also has to include an understanding that it's nature is fleeting.

The good news about Now, though, is that it's a direct window to Then and a prelude to Next.

Connoisseur of scaled rounded rectangles, bubbles, and triangles, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful talks data visualization in recently posted TED talk (below). He explains how information design can help us get through information glut on the Web and how simple charts can show patterns that we never would have seen otherwise. He uses his own works and collaborations as evidence.

Hit the link above to watch the video. I interviewed McCandless in a recent column for Columbia Journalism Review.

“Even though the information from Twitter is not particularly reliable—and things are being retweeted so it’s kind of messy—the basic idea is if you crowdsource the information and put it on one map you can really see the clusters of incidents,” Valuch said. “So even though one particular tweet is not that important, if you have similar reports from the media … you can see where the incidents are clustering.”

The Ushahidi platform enables users to tag reports as “not verified” if they didn’t come from a reliable source. The Ushahidi Haiti team discovered that by mapping the unverified reports, they were able to see if different sources were reporting similar things in similar areas. It was verification by aggregation. They would also attempt to verify tweets by seeing if they were retweeted by trusted sources, checking if the originating Twitter account was followed by people in Haiti, and looking to see if the user had enabled location data in their tweets.

... Valuch admitted the process wasn’t perfect; but it showcases some of the techniques that can be used in crowdsourced verification. It’s interesting to note how the team used a mass of unverified reports in order to achieve accuracy. Ushahidi is a map-driven project, so it chose to cluster the unverified reports in order to look for patterns, but there are other ways of collecting, analyzing, and presenting this information. The challenge is to find a way to quickly and accurately sort and evaluate a mass of incoming reports according to your preferences. This is a core element of distributed verification, which I called “the best way to engineer trust in today’s information environment” in a previous column about WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan documents.

This is where SwiftRiver comes in. I got in touch with Jon Gosier, a co-founder of SwiftRiver and the CEO of African software consultancy Appfrica, to talk about the project.

From my latest column for Columbia Journalism Review. SwiftRiver is due to launch its public beta today. Looking forward to trying it out.