The future of news is snuggled in your pocket.
The number of people reading news on mobile devices is surging, finally fulfilling the future that has been predicted for smartphones over the past few years. Last night, Hacks Hackers Boston held a discussion on the topic “Start the Presses: News sites of the future, told by the people building them.”
The panel, which drew around 100 people, was held at The Boston Globe headquarters and discussed where news sites were headed, specifically looking at content management systems (CMSs), such as Drupal and WordPress.
Take 15 million books and 4 billion words, use a simple interface to search for a few words or phrases, and presto – you have Google’s Ngram Viewer.
Ngram creates charts that show how often words or phrases have occurred in books since 1800. It can be used to trace to rise and decline of certain words, giving clues to researchers. Or it can be used for simple fun – (Red Sox, Yankees).
Come learn about Google’s cool new tool: Ngram at the next Hacks/Hackers Boston Meetup on Wednesday, February 9, 2011 7 p.m. at Google’s Cambridge offices at 5 Cambridge Center, 3rd floor in Kendall Square (news when it opened!)
The Google Books Ngram Viewer lets people track how phrases in books have waxed and waned throughout the centuries. Building on top of the 15 million books that libraries and publishers have given to Google for scanning, it provides a simple and quick visual interface for illustrating trends in usage.