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Media Web/Tech

Ironic Unintended Consequences

It wasn’t too long ago that leaders of some news organization could be heard complaining, loudly, that Google was “stealing” from publishers and that search engines and aggregators needed permission to post excerpts of news stories.

Flash forward to this week and the Wikileaks data on the war in Afghanistan. How are the Wikileaks data logs being shared with the public by news organizations? Via GoogleDocs Spreadsheet — at least that’s what The Guardian (note, it is British) did.

I’m 99% certain that Google did not envision data-driven journalism as a use case when it began developing its in-the-cloud competitor to Microsoft Excel. But when you think about it, what better way for public interest journalism to share its data?

By Kathy E. Gill

Digital evangelist, speaker, writer, educator. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles! @kegill

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