The Jason Salas Experience

I've always maintained that the future of news media, in a forthcoming world where data will be truly semantic, is going to be centered around the concept of being able to easily discover similar coverage of a common news event from disparate sources.  This would be in a variety of media and accessible across a range of platforms.  Think about it for a second.  Web 3.0 applications are going to be able to execute contextually-accurate search queries, returning recordsets that mean what users want them to mean, without ambiguity.  

Couple that back-end with a mobile client's ability to perform such queries by having handset capture a snapshot of a headline, an image, an audio clip or video of someone else's coverage of a news event and then process it, and you've got yourself a phenomenal way to experience getting the news.  Kind of like how Shazam on the iPhone takes-in audio as input, and I commented on the LR post thusly. 

Here's the canonical scenario: you're sitting in the park, reading The NewYork Times.  Perusing the sportspage, you take interest in the headline "Raiders defeat Bengals in Super Bowl".  You whip out your iPhone, take a snapshot of the headline - and only the headline - which invokes a database query.  A few seconds later the data sent back to you would be a date-sensitive gallery of hypertextual links from trusted news sources (i.e., ESPN, the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Yahoo! Sports, etc.) the blogosphere, Twitter feeds, podcasts, video clips, images, wiki articles, and other types of media about the big game.  

The same game, all on the same page.  Without needing to root through RSS feeds, perform repetitive Google searches, or test the full limits of your bookmarks.  Think of it as Google News with Techmeme grouping with a Shazam user interface, with guaranteed results.

In short, you're better informed because you've discovered other people's angles on the same story.  For news junkies, this would be unbeatable.