NYT to Open API?

NYT is the New York Times and API, if you don't know the acronym, stands for application programming interface, or a series of tools that programmers can use to hook their own software into an already-existing pacakage. What makes this combination of six letters total is that it could spell a revolution in online media delivery. According to a story on ReadWriteWeb, if this rumor is true, it would make the entire online version of the paper a tool just waiting to be included in so-called mashups, or the Web applications that hook into existing services to provide something more than either party could deliver on its own:

In addition to the API, New York Times CTO Marc Frons told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site. Following that, the paper plans to offer developer keys to the API allowing programmers to more easily mash up the paper's structured content -- reviews, event listings, recipes, etc. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. "How far we don't know."

The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months.

For example, you might go to a site, click on two points on a map, and get every story that includes the names of both locations, or clicking on a city might bring up all restaurants that have had their recipes printed by the Times. In a way, this takes a stroll from the traditional job of newspapers. Papers did not focus on simply delivering facts, but arranging them in the context of telling a story. When the data is all open, do the stories become less important?

200,000 Computer Generated Books

The New York Times has an article about Philip M. Parker, a management professor who uses computers and programmers to cull information from the web and turn it into books. He's created - I don't want to use the word "write" - 200,000 of them that he sells through Amazon.com:

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

I've heard of the sausage factory approach before, but this is one high volume production line. The idea of having boilerplate language with specifics filled in to create a "new" document isn't new. But I wonder how much of the added content is really free of copyright restraints and available for legal use.

Dave? Goo Goo, Gah Gah, Dave

Stanford University researchers have written a program that "learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does helps to shed new light on how people learn to talk," according to Reuters. It supports the theory (which is different from coming close to proof) that babies listen to sounds and sort out how the language is put together.

"In the past, people have tried to argue it wasn't possible for any machine to learn these things, and so it had to be hard-wired (in humans)," [Stanford psychology professor James McClelland] said. "Those arguments, in my view, were not particularly well grounded."

I want to know when they have the computer start talking, based on what it learned. Will the first word be programmama?