The idea to build a community for the purpose of discussing links where identity was not the primary focus has been done before – for example, with the mobile app Potluck, whose team was later acquired by Facebook, had built a news-sharing service of its own, but it was not anonymous.
Omidyar's vision is to build a news organisation under the First Look banner that supports a new type of journalist: one who reports stories while walking the thin line between journalism and activism.
Mr. Eberle said he started Talon News as an offshoot two years ago in an effort to build a news agency that would appear more objective and whose purpose was to sell reports to outside subscribers.
Thompson, who had worked at the British Broadcasting Corporation BBCC) in London during World War II, pushed to build a news and public affairs department at KPFA.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Eberle, also known as Bobby, made no apologies for his efforts to build a news service with a conservative slant.
Despite knowing nothing about technology, he decided to build a news aggregator, one that would learn user preferences and adjust for them.
In February, L & M finally signed a deal with Microsoft -- not to take a stake in CyberCity but rather to help build a news and information Web site in return for a share of the revenue the site generates.
"If we could build a news mobile unit in a helicopter," Mr. Silva recalled in a 2002 interview for the Archive of American Television, "we could get over it all, get there first, avoid the traffic and get to all the stories before anybody in the competition".
That data is useful to website owners – who want to track how effectively their links work – but bit.ly also plans to build a news service on top of the information, mapping current events by understanding what people are linking to and clicking on right now.
This demonstration automatically builds a news navigator interface, illustrated in Figure 7, from a set of broadcast news shows.
