Digital news as a pointillist picture - or a pointless picture?

Thinking about what is coming out of Iran, a thought occurred to me - what we saw was not a "river of news" but a huge number of individual points that have to be actively put together to get a picture of what is going on.

This is a new way of getting news - the role of the reporter of the news is not to seek the story, but to sort out the data and find the correct patterns in it to build the picture.

In that respect it reminded me of pointillism, a technique of painting where you use many coloured dots to build a picture - up close its just dots, but as you stand away, the many dots make the picture clear (as in the Paul Signac painting above from the Musee D'Orsay)

Issue is, that unlike the painting, the the emerging picture is not clear at first, and requires the picture to be put together on the fly.

However, the tools to do this are still in embryo form. Real Time search is just the beginning, filtering and pattern assembly will the real challenges.

Update - article in a similar vein from BoinBoing with a superfiltered stream - great minds eh

Update 2 - interesting article from the Economist on how US and UK twitterers rendered the election hashtags near useless by their abuse of it to "show solidarity" and made it not so much pointillist as pointless:

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.

And thus a new type of spam is born, "whuffiespam" where the aim is to jump on to a good cause and get social capital by being visibly (and risibly) more caring than thou. 'Nuff said....